As you walk by the corner of East 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, it's hard to miss Manhattan's temple to retail tech. The Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) store stands out amid the older, more traditional stores in the area -- both for its giant glass cube and what happens when you descend into it. So, is it so hard to believe that Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) move into the space could be successful?

At the turn of the century, the notion of Apple stores was mocked, with BusinessWeek proclaiming in May 2001, "Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work." Of course, it turns out BusinessWeek is what doesn't work, as evidenced by its recent acquisition by Bloomberg.

A subscription to BusinessWeek will cost you $46 for $46 issues -- an 80% savings off the newsstand price!

Or you could just buy the company and have done with it. McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) is exploring a sale of the beleaguered icon, but the magazine's huge operating losses could mean it will fetch just $1, according to some experts.

The reason? With annual losses estimated at anywhere from $10 million to $75 million, acquiring the business would cost huge sums of money for at least a few years -- even if a miraculous turnaround can be engineered. Time Inc., Forbes and Conde Nast are reportedly not seen as suitors.

With circulation declining in large part due to the huge amount of free content available on the internet, some magazine publishers are adopting what seems like a counter-intuitive approach to competing: raising prices.

Magazines like Time, Newsweek, Business Week and even the upmarket New Yorker have long relied on low subscription prices to attract large numbers of subscribers, which in turn attracts advertisers. But the New York Times reports that The Economist has raised its price substantially of late and is still continuing to buck the trend of declining circulation. That has other publishers taking notice, and many are planning to increase their subscription and newsstand rates, after years of falling prices.

Through the third week in January, advertising pages at BusinessWeek are down 31%. At Entertainment Weekly, they are off 36%. Through their February issues, GQ and Gourmet's ad pages are off over 30%.

Today, the news came out that The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) is close to selling part of its building. It has already taken money from Carlos Slim, some of which comes with a 14% interest rate. The Times is now nearly out of options. It won't sell The Boston Globe which some experts believe is losing $1 million a week. That leaves the option of raising money by dumping assets out of the question.

The third largest newspaper chain in the US, McClatchy (NYSE:MNI) which has insisted it would be OK, now trades below $1.

Most of this has been written about before, but the numbers from print media that have come in during the last three days show that an industry which was in decline is in such a rapid decline that scores of newspapers and magazines will close over the next two or three months. Even a year ago, this was unimaginable.

The print media is something that most business people cannot imagine. It is an industry in trouble which cannot be fixed. Intelligence and hard work has no effect. The end of many of the world's greatest print brands are is in sight.

The bleeding was supposed to be slow enough so that there were be time to work on solutions.That opportunity is now well in the past.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.

Forbes laid off almost 20 people to save money. It is putting its online newsroom and print writers together. Yesterday, McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MGP), the publisher of BusinessWeek, cut several hundred people. US News, which used to have a strong business and personal finance section, is going from weekly to monthly to save money. There are rumors in the market that SmartMoney, a joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst, is losing money.

The horrible thing about all of this and the layoffs at business sections of newspapers, is that the reporters who work the business and financial beats are writing their own obituaries. As they chronicle the demise of print media, the slowing of Internet advertising, and deepening recession, they have to go to work every day hoping that they will not find a pink slips on their desks.

What happens to these people?. They will not find jobs in the traditional media, but there is a model in the newspaper industry that may given them some hope. In many cities where dailies are struggling to survive and layoffs are plentiful, out-of-work writers are banding together to start websites to compete with the local press. Setting up these websites is cheap. The reporters already know their subjects as well as anyone else. They only need very modest ad revenue to do relatively well.

Business reporters may go the same route. Look for a lot of new, smaller financial websites to open staffed by laid off writers and watch them give the traditional press a run for its money

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7wallst.com.

Back in August of 1979, BusinessWeek ran a cover story proclaiming The Death of Equities, suggesting that the stock market was dead, and only a fool or old, out-of-touch person would invest there.

Needless to say, that article could not have been more wrong, and the bull market that began three years later was the longest in history.

Now, the good folks at BusinessWeek are back nearly 30 years later to declare that "the treat of a free fall is growing" for the housing market. There are some similarities. Like stocks in 1979, real estate has been a poor performer of late and it's hard to find anyone, except realtors of course, who is bullish.

But the question is whether sentiment has shifted too far to the negative side, versus the optimist of a few years ago. As Benjamin Graham wrote, the secret to successful investing is to be "greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy."

The BusinessWeek article is well-researched and has some valid points. But to the contrarian, it's hard to think of a better buy signal based on BusinessWeek's less than stellar track record with Chicken Little headlines.

Gannett (NYSE:GCI) announced it May revenue results. Nothing in them was surprising.

According to the country's largest newspaper company, "Publishing advertising revenues in May were 14.3 percent lower." Classified ad revenue fell even more, almost 20%. Auto, real estate, and jobs marketing have begun to leave newspapers and financial trouble within those industries has cut their ad budgets to the bone.

The most disturbing piece of new is the report was that at USA Today, advertising revenue was 18.4 percent lower on paid ad pages of 260 versus 324 last year.

USA Today is part newspaper, part daily magazine. It uses color and graphics in a way that is closer to Time, Newsweek, or BusinessWeek than to a typical daily paper. It is also a national product, not local like other papers.

If the country's largest paper, and one of only two papers distributed widely in the USA is in such trouble, it may be a sign that the print ad downturn is moving quickly from newspapers to magazines. Some weekly publications like BusinessWeek are seeing double digit ad drops.

Newspapers may not be the last part of the print publication industry to fall apart.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

If you have read BusinessWeek's latest story on the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) saga, then you cannot really know what to believe!

According to the story, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) remains highly interested in re-entering talks to acquire Yahoo!, and it also says those talks may already be in progress.

Then it says Microsoft may want the whole company, but also might just be interested in the search element.

To this the magazine adds that if none of this works, Yahoo! might go ahead and work out a deal to give Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) a non-exclusive right to either sell its search results or include it in its auctions -- or none of the above.

Some investors shy away from small stocks, thinking they are too volatile and risky. But BusinessWeek takes a look at such stocks and finds some that could offer a lot of potential for growth.

It can be hard to find small companies that have great growth potential. Since most Wall Street analysts ignore smaller companies, it is often tough for investors to find the research that they need in their selection process, so they have to rely on their own research in order to find that perfect small cap stock.

One thing to look for when examining small cap stocks is a long and established track record. The downside to this approach is that these stocks are not going to be the next "big thing" and bring you huge profits in the short run. These stocks are the ones that typically serve a niche market, and perform that service successfully. While these will not make you rich overnight, they are fairly reliable companies you can look to for nice and steady returns. If you are the type of investor who likes to buy and hold, these are the small cap stocks for you.

Most of us would be thrilled to invest in a stock that doubles our money, but it certainly isn't easy to find these stocks. According to data provider Capital IQ, in the last year only 1.4% of 6,700 stocks trading on the U.S. exchanges were able to double their price.

BusinessWeek started hunting some of these potentially great stocks by asking fund managers to choose those firms expected to provide 100% returns in the next few years. Of course, the resulting list is by no means a sure thing, since major factors such as the ongoing credit crisis and challenging market conditions could affect results in unpredictable ways.

But let's look at some of the strategies used when picking high-potential stocks.

Mary Lisanti, portfolio manager at the Adams Harkness Small Cap Growth Fund, focuses on young companies in the small-cap segment. She points to stocks like Rubicon Technology (NASDAQ: RBCN) and Titan Machinery Inc. (NASDAQ: TITN), saying that investors can have a big advantage when they recognize potential before the market does.

Roben Farzad argues in a column in the latest issue of BusinessWeek that disgraced/banned-from-the-industry-for-life former internet stock analyst Henry Blodget has redeemed himself, writing that, "I now admire Henry Blodget -- for his audacious reincarnation as a tech and media blogger and author. I find his work indispensably frank, stuff you see all too rarely from an ex-insider."

I'm here to tell you that I don't think he's redeemed himself. I'm more inclined to agree with Jim Cramer, who described Blodget as "a disgrace to the business and a creep." In his terrible book, Henry Blodget wrote little about his own wrongdoing, except to say this:

If missing the top had been my only mistake, I would have survived . . . I also made a more serious mistake, however, which was to write a lot of emotional unprofessional emails, especially during the heat of the crash. Later, amid the wreckage, when the press, public, and regulators began calling for blood, my emails did me in . . . I was accused by New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer of having made remarks in emails that were "inconsistent" with my research (popular translation: "privately trashing stocks he was public recommending"). Along with others, I agreed to pay a humongous fine and be barred from the industry.

MAJOR PAPERS:

• The active ingredient in Baxter International Inc's (NYSE: BAX) generic version of the anticlotting drug heparin, under investigation for four deaths and hundreds of bad reactions, was made in China, the Wall Street Journal reported.
• Structured investment vehicles that provide short term debt to fund the purchases of municipal bonds and student loans are under increasing pressure, according to the Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street". Citigroup Incorporated (NYSE: C), JP Morgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM) and Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (NYSE: MER) are among the banks that could be affected.

OTHER PAPERS:

• The New York Times reported that Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ) has settled with The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) and McGraw Hill Companies Incorporated's (NYSE: MHP) BusinessWeek journalists related to a spying scandal that stemmed from obtaining telephone records. The involved parties did not disclose the amount of the settlement.

WEB SITES:

• Mike Zafirovski, CEO of Nortel Networks Corporation (NYSE: NT), said the company would examine possible opportunities to be taken over "when they arise." Mr. Zafirovski did not comment on rumors of a Motorola Inc (NYSE: MOT) merger, Reuters reported.

BusinessWeek interviewed former Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) CEO Sandy Weill about a range of topics regarding Citi's performance and prospects as well as its efforts to raise capital. He defends the complex business structure he created and declines to reveal how much he invested in its latest round.

After reading the interview, I get the impression that he still wields tremendous power over Citigroup and that it could be stuck with its current corporate strategy until Weill departs from the scene. His defense of the current corporate strategy is not compelling, at least not to me. Arguing against breaking up Citi, he says, "One of the advantages of the company is that it is in 100-plus different countries and has diversity in income streams."

He continued by defending the merits of this diversification. "Since the merger of Citi and Travelers in 1998, we've had a big corporate business and we've had a big consumer business. We've watched times when the consumer business did poorly and the corporate business did very well. Now, we're watching a time where the global consumer business has done well, whereas the U.S. consumer business has had to add to loan loss reserves. Over time, they balance out."

MAJOR PAPERS:

• Following Chrysler's lead to cut costs in relation to slowing sales, Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) may cut its 2008 spending by 15%, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
• The Writers Guild of America, battling with Hollywood film and TV producers, is expected to call for a strike, reported the Wall Street Journal.
• Siemens AG (NYSE: SI) CEO Peter Loscher is getting ready to implement aggressive earnings targets for the company's senior managers, as well as thousands of job cuts, reported the Financial Times (subscription required).

OTHER PAPERS:

• According to two people familiar with the talks, the latest round of negotiations to buy Trump Entertainment Resorts (NASDAQ: TRMP) have fallen apart, reported the New Jersey Star-Ledger.
• From BusinessWeek's "Inside Wall Street" column:
  
• Investors may now be looking at AT&T (NYSE: T) as a "high-quality stock for the long haul," says Justin Hellman of Value Line.
• While many investors may be looking at Clinical Data's (NASDAQ: CLDA) possible blockbuster antidepressant drug and genetic test, they are banking on the company's Chairman Randal Kirk, who controls 40% of the stock.
• MoneyGram International (NYSE: MGI) may be looking for buyers, and John Bendall, CEO of Hermitage Capital, thinks it is worth $30 a share.
  

MAJOR PAPERS:

• The office of the Massachusetts secretary of state is investigating whether Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC) improperly traded mortgage-backed securities for its own account with two hedge funds that failed this past summer, without notifying in advance the funds independent directors, reported the Wall Street Journal.
• The Schork Report's Stephen Schork sees an oil correction coming and predicted oil in the $65-$68 range, according to the Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" column.

OTHER PAPERS:

• Insurer Aetna (NYSE: AET) has instituted a tighter reimbursement policy for Amgen's (NASDAQ: AMGN) anemia drugs, creating a setback for Amgen, reported the Los Angeles Times.
• A consortium led by Icelandic investor Baugur is interested in making an offer for Saks (NYSE: SKS), reported the New York Post, but Saks will not consider a sale until the credit market improves.
• From BusinessWeek's "Inside Wall Street" section:
  
• BusinessWeek suggested that US Airways' (NYSE: LCC) poor performance compared to it's competitors makes it an attractive target to be bought.
• Rami Rosen of investment firm Oscar growth believes pacts like Radware's (NASDAQ: RDWR) venture with International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) will help to drive growth.
• BusinessWeek hailed Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) performance, saying it is one of the few internet companies that has beaten Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).