Monday, July 13, 2009

BusinessWeek Becomes the Latest Casualty of 'Not Going Online Earlier'

BusinessWeek parent-company McGraw-Hill has hired Evercore Partners Inc to sell the magazine, reports Bloomberg.

Founded in 1929, BusinessWeek has an editorial staff around 200 and reaches 4.8 million readers in 140 countries each week. But the magazine's business is wilting. Six months into 2009, ad revenues are down 33% from the same period in 2008 -- from $116 million to $77 million. And it's not like 2008 was a banner year -- ad pages then were down 16% from 2007.

BusinessWeek.com won't bail out the print edition soon, either. Even with its large edit staff, the Web site's traffic can't match TheStreet.com's, and that pub only turned in $30 million in digital revenue in 2008.

McGraw-Hill might have trouble moving the mag. From peak to trough, the M&A market is down 61%, and the WSJ's Deal Journal says not even bankers are optimistic we've hit a bottom: