Ad Age on "Why Forbes, Fortune Really Hope BusinessWeek Fetches More Than TV Guide Did:"

For all the challenges in the credit market, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars BusinessWeek is said to be losing, its competitors had better hope it can fetch a lot more than a lone greenback. Both Forbes and Fortune are profitable, but a token dollar transaction for their competitor would represent a vote of very little confidence in the future of their category.

That's because, despite specific circumstances that helped BusinessWeek slide into the red, they're all facing pretty much the same questions: If ad-page sales don't regain their old momentum, how well can they make digital compensate? Can they continue to meet the needs, and capture the dollars, of their particular advertisers, who are changing pretty rapidly themselves? What will be their story after the recession ends?

"Offline those brands have an opportunity to be around for some time, but I think they'll be smaller and smaller offline, while online they can be bigger and bigger," said Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller last Thursday, following the news last week that he was leaving after nine years.

"Any business title that is not drawing most of its revenue from digital within, say, three years will most likely not be in business," he added later. "Even with a recovery, I simply do not see huge ad revenues coming back to print."

As a follow up to our diatribe yesterday on BusinessWeek consider this typically snarky comment from AdAge:

"Why the persistent drop for the business bibles? Business-to-business advertisers have found many more efficient, targeted ways to reach their customers. Brand campaigns remain an important component of their marketing, but they've also gotten much better at maintaining databases of the crucial decision makers who buy their products or services, focusing on preserving their loyalty and contacting them more or less directly than through a major magazine ad buy."

If you are in print - newspapers or magazines - this comment should really bug you. The author, Nat Ives, is wrong about the potential for print publications to generate response for non-branding campaigns but he is expressing a sentiment which is common in the advertising world. In other words, the advertisers you covet think he is right about magazines being a branding advertising medium. Further proof, that if print publications don't start proving response to their customers using any number of rudimentary tracking mechanisms (800#s, text addresses, unique urls), no one will.