It's wabbit season!

There's only good news for Playboy (PLA) when someone expresses an interest in buying it. Shares of the ailing men's lifestyle company shot higher on Thursday when word got out that Iconix is interested in acquiring it. Iconix owns and licenses brands to manufacturers and counts Candie's and London Fog among its holdings. A deal isn't a sure thing, but Playboy now has something it hasn't in a while: hope.

Iconix has been looking to acquire more brands. And Playboy has been looking for a knight in shining armor (and with a hefty war chest in tow) since at least June, when Scott Flanders took the helm. But it looked like acquisition bait well before then, thanks to a rough financial situation.

Gannett (NASDAQ: GCI) said it would cut almost 10% of its staff. This is hardly a surprise. Newspaper ad revenue has been running down over 15% this year and that trend is expected to continue. At some papers, classified ads -- mostly real estate, employment, and autos -- are off well above 30%. The internet has eroded readership. Most of these people will not ever return as newspaper subscribers. Gannett and all its peers trade at multi-year lows.

The advertising sales problem is beginning to spread to magazines. Between the internet and the recession, the magazine business is getting pinched and pinched hard. Ad pages at many business magazines and newsweeklies are down 15% to 20% this year. In some cases, the drop is closer to 30%. As a reaction, the largest magazine publisher in the U.S., Time, Inc., a unit of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) will cut as many as 600 people. According to The New York Times, "No magazines are scheduled to close, but some are likely to be severely cut back."

Magazines will have to do something that newspapers have not be able to. They need to move their content to the internet in a way that will pull large numbers of readers so that advertising volumes are big enough to make up for the erosion of print dollars. Since there are a huge number of content sites on the web, there is plenty of competition.

The print magazine business is dying and dying faster than many analysts thought it would. Its only life boat is the internet. A life boat only holds so many people.

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

We all know the Gannett (NYSE: GCI) company. It is a newspaper publisher that puts out the excellent USA Today, among others. As excellent as the USA Today might be, Gannett's stock is anything but. Gannett's Q3 earnings came in at $0.76 per share. The market was looking for a penny more. In addition, publishing ad revenue fell 18% while broadcast revenue posted an anemic gain of approximately 4%.

Gannett is positioned only for further financial pressure. The newspaper industry has had a tough time of it for years, trying to adjust to a digital age. Content on print just isn't seen in the same light as it was many years ago. Trying to get readers of newspapers to migrate to online counterparts can be very difficult. Once you're on the internet, there are a whole host of portals through which content can be filtered and accessed. Even if you were a devoted reader of USA Today before coming online, it is entirely possible that you'd ditch the brand for some other source of news, whether it be Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) or Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL. Sure, you might still find content at those sites from Gannett, but it nevertheless is a whole new competitive ballgame. And let's face it, the new generation of web-savvy youth consider print antiquated and perhaps even useless, harsh as that is to say.

Competition for ads is only going to become more intense. I'd imagine that revenues will most likely continue to be challenged for Gannett as advertisers pull back in the face of the economic storm. The 52-week high on the stock is $42.50. The 52-week low is $8.49. Friday's closing price was $9.47. No, it isn't a buy. And what's that yield I see? Are you kidding me? Almost 17%! In this case, the high yield is telling you to run far, far away from the shares. If I wanted exposure to print, I'd much rather go with a company that has a portfolio which includes better assets, such as News Corp. (NYSE: NWS). Print will always be with us. I enjoy print. But its growth prospects are questionable until new models are realized.

Disclosure: I don't own any company mentioned; positions can change at any time.

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.

It's been a crazy ride for the print industry since Johannes Gutenberg invented modern printing in the 1400s.

So, it should be no surprise that many of the top companies in the industry have been around for a long time. R.R. Donnelley & Sons (NYSE:RRD), for example, was founded in 1864. Or take Banta Corp. (NYSE:BN). This company got its start in 1901.

Well, today, R.R. Donnelley agreed to shell out $1.3 billion for Banta. Last year, Banta generated about $1.54 billion in revenues. Banta also focuses on things like books and supply chain management.

But isn't the print industry dying because of the onslaught of the Internet? Maybe there is a reduction in media print. Yet, the fact remains that companies still print a lot of materials. In fact, with new regulations – such as Sarbanes-Oxley – there should be more demand for print. Also, industrialization in countries like China and India should be a catalyst.

Basically, R. R. Donnelly realized that it needs to consolidate the industry – cutting costs and adding new products.

And Wall Street agrees. While big deals like this tend to depress the stock price of the buyer, R. R. Donnelly's stock has held steady.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.