Three days ago, we at Businessweek got the kind of news we had long expected and dreaded: The magazine has been put up for sale by corporate parent McGraw-Hill. BusinessWeek was born in the tumult of 1929 and rose to be the most successful and influential business magazine for many decades. Its downward slide began in 2001 with the dot-com bust, continued during the economic turnaround as Web advertising became more attractive to corporations than print advertising, and accelerated with the coming of the Great Recession. There may be a way to fix BusinessWeek, but it will involve radical surgery.

In my view, this failure of BusinessWeek as a business is yet another sign of a trend that is profoundly disturbing to journalists and should be profoundly disturbing to others. The Internet, that marvelous invention, has killed the traditional business models that supported serious, in-depth journalism. Hopefully, eventually, new models will emerge that will support this very important but also very expensive work. In the meantime, democracy and the integrity of the economic system are threatened. Look at all the crap that the world's businesspeople got away with during the past few years, at a time when we had a fairly aggressive financial press. Now imagine the shenanigans they'll be able to pull in the future if financial journalism is reduced to quick news bits that feed the market frenzy.

While citizen journalism can help, it can't replace real journalism, which is the search for truth by professionals.

BusinessWeek's fate, apparently, will be known by early in the fourth quarter. Hopefully, whether its sold or not, something radically smart will be done to transform the magazine. Beleaguered as it is, BusinessWeek can still be turned around--and, if so, it could light a path for the rest of the journalism crowd to follow.

Here are some tactical changes suggested by my colleague, Steve Baker. http://thenumerati.net/