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.

The dysfunctional state of the mainstream magazine industry is apparently not enough to dissuade the purveyors of the Girls Gone Wild video franchise from flashing the newsstand. According to Nate Ives of Advertising Age, Girls Gone Wild magazine will soon hit the streets with $9.99 worth of exuberant exhibitionism. Should Playboy (NYSE: PLA) worry?

I'm not particularly savvy on the magazine business, but I think I have the profit model here figured out. Girls Gone Wild haunts the spring break spots, enticing drunken college girls to bare their breasts and more for the camera, and hawks the videos on late night television.

Now, thousands of parents each year are suckered into buying those high school Who's Who books for the pleasure of proving to their relatives that their sons are not losers after all. Is it so hard to believe that the same parent wouldn't pony up a sawbuck for a picture of their daughter at her youthful peak of ripeness? I can imagine the magazine being proudly passed around at the family reunion, after the macaroni salad, before the softball game. "Gosh, is that really Nellie Sue?" says Aunt Jean. "That must have hurt," opines cousin Delores. "Let me borrow that for a minute," says young cousin Carl. "I'll bring it right back."

Yeah, parental pride is sure to lead to the success of the Girls Gone Wild magazine. For many parents, it will be a choice between that or her mug shot for the family Christmas card.

If anything could be blamed for the just-announced shuttering of Blueprint magazine, it could be the current issue's cover, in which a pink (!!) tree is out-sparkled only by the sequined frothiness of the bleached blonde holding a gigantic bauble alongside. Inside we see 20-something editor-in-chief Sarah Humphreys, who writes, "... if Blueprint's taught me anything, it's that there's plenty of room for spiced sugar bomboloni at the Thanksgiving table."

Umm. OK, Sarah. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO) strayed a little too far from the company's audience of blue-bloods and those who aspire to craft like them with Blueprint, a magazine unfortunately titled (evoking architecture of the blue-collar sort, not "where to find candles made of pink glitter"). It was meant to target the young single urbanite; but what newly-married aspirational New Englander wants a magazine full of recycled Martha Stewart Living projects, mixed with lipstick and gilded fashion advice? Evidently, not many.



The "brand" will be re-envisioned as a way to extend the audience of Martha Stewart Weddings past her nuptials, with occasional "special interest format" magazines (think Martha Stewart Baby), and the Bluelines blog will continue. The January/February 2008 magazine (probably already on the way to newsstands) will be the final standalone issue.

If you like following the seedier side of finance, New York's "Money Issue" is worth checking out. With the headline "Dirty Money: Shady Business, in Three Parts," this features some of the best long-form financial reporting I've seen all year. We get Joe Hagan's piece on the "biggest insider-trading ring since Boesky," David France's piece on The New York Times reporter who lost his job trying to save a kid from his "career" in porn, and an interview with two drug kingpins.

For the full table of contents for the issue, check out the magazine's website.

As long as we're on the topic, I'd like to take a moment to bemoan the decline of this kind of journalism. With newspaper budgets being squeezed by declining ad revenue, few news organizations are able to devote the resources to support investigative or even just detailed reporting.

So support New York's effort -- maybe it will inspire others.

McGraw-Hill Companies' (NYSE: MHP) BusinessWeek, suffering under the same surfeit of advertising bedeviling the rest of the magazine industry, is going in for an extreme makeover, according to Leon Lazaroff of Bloomberg. Look for more feature articles and less lifestyle coverage. Cosmetic changes will include typography, logo and graphics. Weight is not an issue, as it's already Kate Moss-thin.

The move comes in response to a 20% decline in ad sales in the first half of 2007, compared to the same duration in 2006. In contrast, the affiliated web site, BusinessWeek.com, continues to expand its ad revenue. The magazine slots in MHP's information & Media sector, which brought in $223.1 million in revenue in the second quarter of this year, with $14.7 million in operating profit for a margin of 5.9%.

McGraw-Hill will announce its third-quarter earnings next Thursday, which would be an excellent time for it to roll out the vamped-up version of BusinessWeek.

Every time Donald Trump gets a mention in the media, I find a new reason to hate him. A report in today's New York Times that The Donald is licensing his name to a "magazine devoted to ways to spend a great deal of money." Perhaps Mr. Trump should launch another magazine devoted to his true specialty: "How to be a self-promoting blowhard." Here's a nice quote from The Times:

And will Mr. Trump's picture grace the first cover, due out in November?

"Only if they want to sell a lot of magazines," Mr. Trump said in a telephone interview yesterday (actually, the publisher and Mr. Trump said, that decision has not been made yet).

That must be why The Apprentice, which has seen its ratings tank with each new season, is embarking on a special "Celebrity Edition" in a desperate attempt to revive the series.

Or maybe Mr. Trump could explain why his equally-flailing Trump Entertainment Resorts (NASDAQ: TRMP) couldn't seem to find a buyer.

Donald Trump is nothing but a celebrity anymore, and even that appears to be winding down as a result of overexposure and obnoxiousness.

Rosie O'Donnell must be smiling right about now.

PlanetOut (NASDAQ: LGBT)'s short history as a public company has been nothing short of a miserable failure. After going public at $10 per share in late 2004, the company's stock will, barring bad news, hit a new 52-week high sometime around October 1. The problem is that that will only be because of a 1-10 reverse split announced today. The stock is currently trading at $1.42.

PlanetOut is a media company focused exclusively on the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered market, with such notable properties as The Advocate, Out, Gay.com, and RSVP Vacations. The company took on far too much debt to build its empire, and shareholders recently found themselves badly diluted when the company had to raise money through a private placement with investors including a hedge fund controlled by Bill Gates.

But don't worry too much. The company's insiders have still gotten rich, even if they've wiped out somewhere around $150 million of shareholder value. The insider transactions (very few lately... mostly when the stock was trading over $8 per share) tell the story.

Given the demographic trends that should be so favorable for an LGBT media company, there's only really one explanation for such weak performance: mismanagement. The company's CEO, Karen Magee, said as much on a recent conference call. And no, she won't be returning any of the money she's made.

But everything will be OK. Even if they can't make the company profitable, PlanetOut's management can slice the pie in different ways to raise the share price. What PlanetOut needs is not a stock-split. It needs new management.

Business 2.0 is reportedly being closed. Nope, not sold. Not being put out for more intensive outside interest review. Just closed.

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) has decided that October's issue will be Business 2.0's last, and the editor and nine others will be transferred to Fortune magazine. Time even apparently turned down an offer from Mansueto Ventures, the owner of rival magazine Fast Company, to buy the operation.

Maybe the offers were not high enough. The sad thing is that Business 2.0 was a magazine and a web site that had great proactive tech and trending articles for small and mid-sized businesses. When you read about the death of printing, there are starting to be many more casualties outside of some newspapers that aren't worth their weight. This is a sad one to see get the axe.

Jon C. Ogg produces the Special Situation Investing Newsletter for 24/7 Wall St., LLC and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

Since relocating to New York about a year ago, one of the more surprising realities I can't get over is the sheer ubiquity of celebrities -- they're simply everywhere! Walk through any subway train -- from an Inwood-bound A train to a Z train headed for JFK -- and you'll find those stars and starlets shining down on you. Lindsay! Britney! Paris! Lindsay! Brangelina! TomKat! Lindsay! All gloss and glory, beaming at you from the pages of the ever-present In Touch Weekly.

Power lunchers, design majors, single moms, goth queens -- even your own friends and families -- they're all reading these magazines. And don't think it's just women -- fellas are just more sly about it, brandishing blurbs about A-Rod's latest effort while sneaking peeks at Page Six.

Hey, I'm not making this up -- the Audit Bureau of Circulations confirms this celebrity fetish. Figures released yesterday show the gossip glossies are flying off the checkout stands.

OK! Weekly, put out by Britain's private Northern & Shell -- which also publishes some of London's sauciest fishwraps -- saw circulation bound 54% higher during the first half of the year, selling 809,000 copies per issue. Also reporting jumps in circulation were US Weekly (did you know it was founded by The New York Times (NYSE: NYT)? Thanks, Wikipedia!), In Touch Weekly and Life&Style, the latter two both owned by Germany's Bauer Publishing, Europe's largest private publisher. Alas, BloggingStocks' distant Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) relative, People, slipped 2%, though it remains proudly at the top of the heap, with more than 3.7 million copies of each issue sold.

Time, another corporate cousin, saw its genre-leading circulation drop by 700,000 -- apparently owing to its excision of promotional tie-ins that weren't pulling their weight and a redirection away from waiting room subscriptions. Circulation for newsweekly challengers and financial magazines stood pat, with the curious exception of the enigmatic London weekly, The Economist, which posted a 15.5% jump!

So what's on the uptick? Stoic, faceless financial analysis and paparazzi pap! Wrap your head around that.

Magazine sales in general held steady year over year, which is more than the Audit Bureau can say for the newspaper industry, unfortunately. Predictably, among the few major papers to post higher sales in the most recent newspapers report were the tabloid New York Daily News and its rival, The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NYSE: NWS), the new guardian of The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps fearing Jessica Simpson pinups in Rupert's new plaything (Item!), fans of the Journal's gravitas are flocking to The Economist's stuffy pastures.

Paper is King! Long live the wood products! Ah yes, that is the single most dependable mantra upon which my home state of Wisconsin is built. First there was the early fur trade that brought eager French entrepreneurs into the region. Then, there were profitable but short-lived mining opportunities that helped bring in the railroads. As land was cleared and transportation options increased, we became farmers and dairy providers extraordinaire. But perhaps most important of all have been our trees. Remember Chicago, we built you not once but a second time also after you burned the first efforts to the ground!

So what has this got to do with investing? Well, if you don't even feel a connection, perhaps you'd like to read further. There's a lot of activity swirling around the wood products sector and it's not all bad. For instance, did you know that recent polls have concluded that the decline in newspaper readership has stalled? Yes it's true, but the pollsters would like you to interpret that as meaning that internet (blog) readership is therefore in decline. I'm sure it makes no difference that the polls I viewed were conducted by agencies who mostly serve the televised news services (chuckle, chuckle, snort, snort). Perhaps one day they'll get wise and realize that newspapers are the apples, blogs are the oranges and televised newscasts are more like tasteless avocados, which are of little use until made into guacamole. For further input on the subject of newspaper journalism and it's future, please read the excellent article by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Newspapers aren't suffering as badly as some would have you believe. I'll write more on this later.

This past week we received news that Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) is planning to cease Life Magazine publication. Then shortly after that we got word that we'd see the demise of Child Magazine. On both counts I'll plead, I'll believe it when I see it, or when I don't see it as the case may be. I'd give you even money on the possibility that both declarations of publication cessation are threats made towards advertising space clients as much as they're announcements to an affected readership. If I'm wrong, then you had better buy shares in the PC notebook manufacturers because they'll be selling a whole lot of them as our magazines drop out of existence one by one. Just remember that I don't think anyone ever got mugged on a subway for a magazine, and you may need to take you laptop along on your next visit to the doctor's or dentist's waiting room.

Every Wednesday, I'll be providing you with my list of the four best stories from BusinessWeek's website in the past week. After you read my list, be sure to leave a comment if I left out a story that you liked. Here's this week's selection:

A Year of Legacies -- This column contrasts the work of economist John Kenneth Galbraith with the work of Milton Friedman. It also compares the integrity and willingness to abide by values, however different they were, to the flawed legacy of disgraced former Enron CEO Ken Lay. This is an interesting piece that will leave the reader thinking.

PR's Best and Worst of 2006 -- Phil Mintz takes a look at some of the best and worst PR moves of 2006, from corporate espionage at Hewlett-Packard to environmentalism at the world's biggest retailer.

Cuba Without Castro: A look Ahead -- With Fidel Castro seriously ill, BusinessWeek looks at what Cuba might look like ruled by someone other than Fidel Castro for the first time since 1959.

Beyond the Bookshelves -- This one really has nothing to do with business, but is a must-read for all of us bookworms who dream of one day having our own personal library. Take a look at that one that you can spin and watch it turn into a television!

Early indications for Time Inc., the magazine division of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), would seem to say that the fourth quarter is not going to be a barn burner. The Publisher's Information Bureau has announced figures for October 2006.

Time Inc.'s large weeklies did not do much during the month. For the year to date, People's ad revenue is up only 3.8% to $702.9 million on an ad page decrease of 1.8% for the period to 3,023. The numbers at Sports Illustrated were slightly worse. Ad revenue fell .1% to $505.6 million. Ad pages dropped 1.9% to 1,664. At the flagship, Time magazine showed an ad revenue increase of 4.9% to $512.2 million on a page increase of 2% to 1,793.

The magazines at the next level down did not do terribly well. Entertainment Weekly's ad revenue dropped 2.9% for the first ten months of the year to $189.8 million on an ad page fall-off of 7.3% to 1,347. Fortune's ad revenue is down 2.3% to $244.6 million on a drop of 4.3% in ad pages to 2,343. In Style's ad revenue rose 5.5% to $332.5 million. Ad pages fell .1% to 2,826.

For all magazines measured by PIB, the first ten months of revenue rose 4.1% and pages were up .4%. Not much to write home about for Time Inc. or the industry.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

There were weekend reports out of The Sunday Telegraph stating that private equity firms are working to make a buyout offer for Time Warner's (TWX) British magazine unit called IPC.

The Telegraph article even states: A senior executive at one private equity group in the UK said yesterday: "There is a lot of attention being paid to IPC. People are seriously running the numbers."

The price tag for the IPC unit is said to be near $1.5 billion Pounds, or roughly $2.9 billion U.S. dollars.

IPC has such magazines such as Marie Claire, In Style, Loaded, Nuts, NME and Wallpaper. While this unit was not one of the ones officially put up for sale, Time Warner has already shown its plans for restructuring and focusing on core operations that will result in the sale of 18 magazines in the US.

The private equity groups that are said to be the most likely are Blackstone, Permira, Cinven, Carlyle and CVC. Back on September 20, there was an article in the New York Post stating that some 28 parties were interested in Time Warner's magazines unit.

One interesting angle of the private equity group bidding is that this may set the bar higher for the sale of Time Warner's non-core magazine operations in the US that it has already put in motion.

This potential UK sale of IPC could even have some indirect implications for its AOL U.K. unit, although that may be taking this situation one step further than the intent of the news over the weekend.