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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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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Does the world need another gadget site? Yes, say two of the gadget world’s biggest stars, who are launching gdgt.com today. The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang and able to cobble together funding. But they’re still taking on a very crowded field.

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The Web is full of armchair ad critics, particularly when it comes to spots from Apple and Microsoft. And the usual consensus from the chattering classes: Apple ads goooood. Microsoft ads baaaaaad.

But Microsoft’s latest campaign, which features documentary-like tales of youngish people priced out by Apple, may actually be working. At least when it comes to youngish people’s perceptions of the two brands.

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Everyone who wondered why Randy Falco and Ron Grant were still running AOL finally got an answer today: Time Warner was lining up their replacement. Google sales chief Tim Armstrong becomes chairman and CEO of the troubled Web property, effective immediately.

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Time Inc. is cutting something like 600 employees, but for the past few weeks it has been doing so in small steps: 10 here, 30 there. That will change today when up to 250 people at Time Warner’s magazine unit are expected to get pink-slipped. Leaving the company along with them, executives from Cooking Light and Southern Progress.

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