Here's something you probably already knew.

National business magazines are deader than Mr. Pinstripe Suit.

Actually I added the word "national" to the sentence above. The New York Times failed to. Because local business newspapers are doing just fine thank you very much. The Times, as usual, has about half the story.

National magazines are out of favor because (ironically) they never created a real business proposition for the advertiser. Look at the ads. They're all corporate self-congratulation. Where's the business in that? It doesn't exist.

Beyond that Forbes, Fortune and Business Week mainly existed to tout stocks and stock touters. The collapse of the dot-bomb meant bad news for both, and in fact the Dow Jones has yet to match its pre-bust high. (The NASDAQ remains at about 40% of that high.) Fast Company, Red Herring and their ilk had an even weaker business case -- they pre-touted what vulture capitalists pushed.

But like I said, this is just half the story.

The other half of the story is the local business press. This is where I started my career, in 1978. In fact I started with the very first local business paper, the Houston Business Journal.

One of my earliest career memories, in fact, is of Rance Crain visiting my business journalism class in 1978, touting the launch of his Crain's Chicago Business, and my getting him to admit he'd gotten the idea from the old HBJ. It was a trick question on my part because my plan all that year was to head back there and get a job -- which I did.

And these papers are doing quite well, thank you. Most have been consolidated under American City Business Journals , now owned by Advance Publications (a.k.a. the Newhouse family), which controls 41 of them.

Why are they so successful? Two words -- real estate.

Local business papers are filled with ads from brokers, full-page splashes from developers and details on sales. These are niches the Web (for some reason) has yet to touch (although it should be easy). My old job in Houston disappeared when that real estate market crashed in 1981, but when I called for work I was immediately offered a gig in Atlanta, which had just begun its boom.

There's a great story here. And an important lesson.

All journalism depends on advertising. No advertising, no journalism. It's a very simple business.

You didn't buy that malarkey about a profession, did you?