paidContent - More on BusinessWeek: Potential Buyers and What Would They Do With It; TVGuide Sale a Guide

This story was written by Rafat Ali.

So who would buy BusinessWeek in this environment, and under what conditions? For one, the number of strategic and interested buyers is low, and the names we have thrown out before include Bloomberg and Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS). But that’s if we only look at options for BW as the print brand with lots of legacy issues. The topline revenues at BW are in the $125 million and above range, as I understand it. Online contributes about a quarter to that.

One top level source at a rival mag I spoke to said that “no one with full intelligence would buy the whole magazine as is.” For the print, the path is clear: the changes and decline in the revenues and circulation is secular, NOT cyclical. Another source told me the TVGuide magazine sale would be a good ballpark; the magazine sold for $1, with the assumption of libilities by the PE buyer. That’s harsh.

Which means that there would be some hard decisions to make, both from McGraw-Hill as the sale process goes on, and for the eventual buyer, if they find any. This could involve bringing down the frequency of the weekly mag, for one, or if someone’s brave enough, ditch the print altogether, and focus on the website and data business. The data side is interesting, but complicated: MGH also owns S&P and CapitalIQ (the latter is a division of former, technically), two of the main sources of data for BusinessWeek, the website and the mag, and those aren’t likely to be on the market anytime soon. This may also mean that MGH may not be able to cut off the BW ties completely, and the buyer may not want to as well. It has a small events and training programs business as well, but not enough to move the needle for a buyer.

One of the buyer could be AOL (NYSE: TWX), if the print part gets cut out completely: AOL, as it is spinning out from Time Warner, has upped its focus on original content and blogging. On the finance vertical, it has focused on adding vertical sites like DailyFinance and BloggingStocks, for which it has hired a number of traditional journalists in the last year or so. It also own Relegence, the real-time alerting system which was initially focused on the B2B/finance markets, though now the tech is only used for internal purposes. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Finance may also have a look in, if they can dealwith the other internal issues.

By the same token, an online only brand may also attract other buyers like Reuters Media, which has been boosting its online presence by adding commentary and blogs. Unlikely that Reuters would consider buying the print mag, but certainly had the data assets to plug in if needed. Same with Bloomberg. For Dow Jones, my thought has been that a weekend Journal could be integrated with a weekly print mag, but then again, the question is: what does WSJ gain by doing it? It has the audience it needs and BW isn’t accretive enough, either on revenue or audience side.

It is not as if BW’s online site has been stellar either. It has been solid, but neither here nor there, despite the redesign. The site has been flat in traffic over the last year, and two redesigns in two years don’t inspire much confidence. Compare that to competitors: Fortune has no pretenses and has given up online (with parent Time Inc focusing on CNNMoney.com instead) and Forbes.com is still hustling, among the leaders at least in terms of traffic and revenues (though the trouble at Forbes the company is a whole different ballgame and topic).

As for reinventing BW, some good ideas that BW’s own Stephen Baker has collected, here (in response to a tweet question by Jeff Jarvis). One suggestion: “change the name from BusinessWeek to BusinessSecond.” Which points to another branding issue with BW—whether it decided to keep the print or not—and it may just have to do that, rebrand as BW and deemphasize BusinessWeek.

Related

• McGraw-Hill Puts BusinessWeek On Block; Altman's Evercore Is Banker
• BusinessWeek's Redesigned Site Launches; What Was That About A Sale?