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Three stalwarts of the business magazine industry – Forbes, BusinessWeek and Fortune – found themselves in an unusual predicament during these past few months. They had business stories of huge scope and importance to cover, but not enough advertising sales to support their own business as usual.

It has been reported that Fortune’s advertising pages declined nearly 39 percent in the first half of 2009, BusinessWeek’s pages are off 37 percent, and Forbes is down 29 percent. Now BusinessWeek is up for sale.

Essentially, the business magazines are facing the same Internet pressure that’s damaging magazines in other categories and daily newspapers. Information is steadily migrating online, despite the commonly voiced opinion that we all prefer to hold a publication in our hands rather than look at a screen.

The Atlantic magazine made an attempt to describe a more successful model for business reporting in these times. For example, it asked, why does The Economist magazine continue to do well?

“If one were to try use the Economist model to save BusinessWeek – or any of the business magazines,” said the Atlantic article, “the main thing would be to shift the emphasis of the heart of the magazine from personality-driven features on business happenings to snappy explanations of the week in business, with opinion.

“Today, BW gets the news out of the way in the first few pages to focus on thoroughly reported features that its talented writing staff have been slaving over for weeks. But if (Atlantic contributing editor Michael) Hirschorn is right, the magazine model that is working today puts a premium on bringing insight to today’s news, not on hunting for long, rich stories of tomorrow.”

One way or another, we hope these magazines can survive in print form. They do for the nation what the Business Record tries to do for Central Iowa.