We knew that it was a bad time for McGraw-Hill to go looking for a buyer for BusinessWeek (which they confirmed today)—the ad sales are down well over 30%l, print is dying, Portfolio's death demonstrated the limitations of the business magazine market—but the fact that the company may sell off BW for $1 is pretty striking. It's doubtful that Bloomberg or anyone else already in the financial news business would want to buy BW, because it would probably be easier and far more cost-efficient to build an online-focused reporting service from the ground up, or invest in the one you already have. So it would take a buyer who wants to jump into the business mega-magazine business in 2009. In other words:

"There is no logical buyer," said one source.

Keith Kelly says the magazine lost $17 million in the first quarter of this year. Bid now!

McGraw-Hill has hired Evercore (the same financiers who bought AMI, home of the National Enquirer, for $850 million ten years ago) to find them a buyer for BusinessWeek, according to Bloomberg.

BusinessWeek was founded in 1929 and has almost 190 editorial staff, according to its Web site. It has about 4.8 million readers weekly in 140 countries. The weekly magazine's 30 percent decline in second-quarter ad sales, to $43.9 million, compared with a 22 percent drop industrywide, according to Publishers Information Bureau data.

Since Conde Nast folded Portfolio, we're back to the classic "Big Three" business magazines. Which some people suspect is too many! So any buyer of BusinessWeek would be gambling that the old girl still has enough cachet to steamroll at least one of its two main competitors, Fortune and Forbes, and would also be gambling that it could take on Forbes.com, which is a dicey proposition. These are the best of times and the worst of times to be a business magazine. But the "worst" part is about making money, unfortunately.
Email us if you have any inside info on buyers.
[Bloomberg]

Portfolio's response to the crisis: meetings.

“We’ve had more meetings,” said the magazine’s editor, Joanne Lipman. “And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.”

Fortune's response: get lucky.

Two weeks after Lehman Brothers went under, a blown-up picture of Henry Paulson’s face, looking not so smug, was plastered across the cover of the biweekly Fortune with the cover line: “Paulson to the Rescue.” On Oct. 23, an image of former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg in sunglasses took the cover, weeks after AIG went down...

“We had those sticks in the fire already, which was great,” said Andy Serwer, the managing editor of Fortune. “That was something in the works for a while and it fell into place perfectly.”

Forbes' response: Look really hard at whatever you have on the cover; think deeply; concoct a tenuous explanation that could theoretically connect said cover and the current crisis.

And Forbes, a biweekly, is now at newsstands with a cover portrait of a man in a hard hat, which is a tie-in to their annual feature on the 200 Best Small Companies.

“If you look at the cover—it combines the elements of the best small-business review and a look at the economy and looks where we’re going,” said Bill Baldwin, Forbes’ editor.

We understand. We're lazy too. [NYO]