BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.

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Here’s the counterpoint to Publicis’s mildly optimistic take on the ad market yesterday: Rival ad-holding company Interpublic Group’s report, which is mildly pessimistic. But the takeaway is the same: If things get better, anyone who’s not Google won’t see much real sign of it until next year.

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McGraw Hill isn’t quite done with BusinessWeek–it isn’t supposed to formally hand off the magazine to Bloomberg until later this year–but it is just about there. Today the company told investors just how much it will net from the sale of the 80-year-old title: $9.3 million, or $5.9 million after taxes.

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What’s one of the biggest names in magazine publishing worth? These days, maybe $5 million.

That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek. Next question: How many of the magazine’s employees stay on once the deal closes later this year? BusinessWeek publisher Keith Fox can’t make any assurances. But he does call the deal “exciting.”

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How do you sell a business magazine that lost $43 million last year? Convince buyers that they could fire 20 percent of the staff without missing a beat.

That’s part of the pitch Evercore Partners has been making to investors on behalf of McGraw-Hill, which wants to dump BusinessWeek. Look out, copy editors!

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Earlier this year, a top BusinessWeek editor assured me that McGraw-Hill wouldn’t part with the publication–because even if it was losing money it was still a trophy asset for the publisher. But perhaps my source didn’t comprehend how much money his employer was actually losing.

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Every year, media moguls gather at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference to listen to each other gab, parade around in casual wear and occasionally make deals. And for the last several years, the New York Times has provided excellent on-the-ground coverage, usually via Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Not this year.

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Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will announce this morning that their two companies are linking up for a trial of an “authentication” effort. That means a handful of cable subscribers will get online access to Time Warner TV shows that have been previously kept off the Web. The idea is to protect cable subscription revenues by giving pay TV subscribers–but only subscribers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV. It’s a simple idea, but making it a reality will be very, very complicated.

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The Steve Jobs health story takes yet another twist, this time a happier one: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Apple CEO underwent a liver transplant earlier this spring, and is recovering from the operation. Jobs, who stepped away from day-to-day management of his company in January, is still expected to return to work later this month.

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