This week we were surprised to hear the potential asking price for BusinessWeek: $1.00. At that price you could find it somewhere on the value menu of most fast food restaurants. In some ways this feels worse than just shuttering what was once the largest ad supported title in the country…it’s more like a slap in the face than a fond farewell.

BusinessWeek is faulted for coming out with a weekly by one source that says “They can’t compete as a weekly anymore because financial information is so time sensitive.” But we think this might have been said by someone who’s never read an issue of BusinessWeek. Ok, ok, neither have we. But we regularly go to the site for a wealth of information, and well, it’s certainly worth a dollar, particularly the Innovation section. Check it out while you still can for insights on how businesses and brands are growing and changing, as well as basics and updates on investing, starting a company, and real time updates of stock performances.

BusinessWeek isn’t going out of business yet, but it’s unclear what the future holds for the brand. With the shuttering of titles likely to continue, is there anything we can do? Audiences are shifting habits and getting their messages online. But does this shift in habits mean they have to kill the messenger? Right now people don’t seem to mind, but eventually when all the messengers are dead, what happens to the message?

So we’ll say it, in 30 years, there will be no newspapers or magazines, probably sooner. But people will still want content. Lest it become a tale of newstander beware, it’s time to proactively figure out how to protect these brands. It’s not that the content is irrelevant, just that the medium may be. In other words, people don’t buy magazines because they want paper, they buy them because they want content. The source still matters though and we’re wagering that people would trust information from BusinessWeek over JoeQBlog.

We’d love to see BusinessWeek tap into its brand strength and find a way through this. Perhaps there’s an issue with the name…is “Business” too vague? Is “Week” too long? Maybe they need to develop subbrands that can speak to everything they offer. Afterall, who would expect such a great Innovation section based on the name BusinessWeek? We know that people won’t be holding paper-based magazines soon and we also know that people will always want content they can trust. With that in mind, let’s hope BusinessWeek takes some insights from its own innovation section and finds a way to stick around a while longer.

A recent issue of Wired magazine (a favorite at the I Open Lab) was dedicated to the New New Economy and on the cover they spell out the laws for success in this “New Squared” economy, including more start ups, fewer giants, and infinite opportunity.  While this is certainly on trend with popular thinking, and nicely plugs the Editor-in-Chief’s book (The Long Tail by Chris Anderson), it ironically takes a narrow view of the industry it uses as a key example, the American auto industry.

The fall from grace of the big three auto makers is a shot in the gut for the American economy and has led to pontifications about the poor decisions made for decades and the dangers of becoming to big for your own good.  While dismantling the big three’s performance issues, the article makes several references to the growing dominance of Japanese rivals, timing issues like introducing hybrids priced $10,000 to $20,000 more than the competition, and a pervasive NIH (Not Invented Here) mentality.  These are all good points, but they don’t stem from the big three just being, well, too big.

Surely being successful can’t be the cause of ultimately being unsuccessful.  Wired calls large companies like Wal-Mart, AT&T, and the big three “dinosaurs,” who are finally marching into the tar pits.  The issue with these companies isn’t size though.  Afterall, a lot of small dinosaurs went extinct too.  The issue is a mindset that resulted in a corporate trouncing by smarter, braver, and yes, even bigger competitors.  While praising the performance of Toyota and Honda, Wired fails to acknowledge that these companies are HUGE themselves.  If being so big is the cause of failure and the age of giants is over, why are Toyota and Honda doing so well?  For that matter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others?  Sure, we’re all in a larger playing field with more players, but the biggest players are still winning.

An opportunity that automakers in the US missed is tapping into their own long tail, to borrow the term from Wired.  With being a large company comes having large workforces and the bigger the workforce, the better the brain power.  A firm with 3000 employees can almost always come up with bigger and better ideas than a firm with 3 employees.  In this age of open sourcing and a belief in the power of crowds, it would behoove the big three, and any other “dinosaur,” to tap into their own long tail to develop new products, ways of doing business, and making breakthroughs happen.

While unfortunately a lot of these big companies made decisions that ultimately led to their demise, we’re sticking with the theory that when it comes to business, bigger is better.