Perhaps not much of a surprise to those in the know, but Bloomberg announced this morning that it is buying the beleaguered Business Week property for somewhere between $2 and $5 million dollars, or the price of a nice apartment on the Upper East Side. Business Week is a media asset owned by McGraw Hill that was valued at roughly $1 billion in 2000. It’s been on life support for the last few years as it tried, unsuccessfully, to reinvent itself as a premium provider of business news in a world increasingly dominated by online niche players and a shrinking consumer appetite for print publications. Bloomberg, who makes it’s money from the sale of terminals that provide essential financial data to the financial community and traders, has seen its sales suffer a bit recently and lacks a consumer-facing brand. According to reports this morning, it has long coveted a more “flashy” journalistic style and access to a broader community of business professionals who aren’t Bloomberg customers but who do consume business news on a regular basis.

What will be interesting to watch is how Bloomberg, known for its careful eye on the bottom line, turns an asset which is reportedly losing $800k a week into something that contributes to the Bloomberg profit-making machine. Given that they are two very different businesses, today, it is unlikely that many redundant costs can be eliminated right off the bat, although most certainly there will be cuts soon to stop the bleeding. One very strong possibility is that Bloomberg doesn’t have any grand ambition to rebuild the brand back to its billion-dollar status since it makes money in other places and views Business Week as a low cost channel to a primo executive audience. It might decide that making money will come from serving up an integrated package of content to an executive audience – financial news, business news, analysis and “flashy” editorial commentary, along with conferences and the other things that Business Week has experience doing and that has revenue potential. In that scenario, the B/BW combo sort of becomes a Dow Jones competitor with an added twist – an installed base of customers that today already rings a $6 billion cash register.

In any case, how the business model emerges could be instructive to anyone in the media biz. What’s clear is that the old ways of doing business in the media world are as out of place as the teletype machines that once delivered the news.