When a news release hit my inbox early this morning saying the publisher of BusinessWeek, Geoffrey A. Dodge, was joining Salesforce.com as SVP of media sales, I was surprised. But then I quickly realized that, if I lived in NY, I would have probably heard about this last Thursday, because I see the news broke in the NY Post and Silicon Alley Insider then. And it turns out it was probably not such a big surprise at that time to those in magazine circles, since he’d been passed over for the job as president of BusinessWeek some months ago.

Busweekvsforbes

I think the bigger story here, however, is the pain being felt by BusinessWeek these days, as it lags category leader Forbes by a long shot in ad sales, and has been much slower in integrating its print and online properties. Forbes wrote the book there, and is doing the best of the major biz pubs, by a good margin. Reason: they “got” the Internet early on.

For the lowdown on the status of business publications these days, read this nice analysis from Media Life that came out with the Dodge news. I show one chart from that story here (Copyright 2007, MediaLife Magazine.)

Bizpubssales