CEO of BusinessWeek parent paid nearly $20 million in 2006

Harold “Terry” McGraw, the chief executive officer of McGraw-Hill Cos., which is the parent of BusinessWeek magazine, was paid nearly $20 million in compensation in 2006, according to the proxy statement filed Tuesday.

The amount, which is down from the $24 million that the Wall Street Journal calculated he received in 2005, is of interest to the business journalists who work at the company because some of them lost their jobs last year in a restructuring at the magazine.

McGraw’s salary was $1.24 million, and his bonus was $1.94 million. Both figures are up slightly from the $1.17 million in salary and $1.83 million in bonus from 2005.

McGraw’s 2007 salary will increase to $1.3 million, according to the proxy.

He also received $2.3 million in stock awards and $13.3 million in stock options in 2006. His other compensation included $228,000 in personal use of company aircraft and $26,821 in personal use of company vehicles. (By comparison, Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino spent more than $173,000 on personal use of company cars.)

At the end of last year, McGraw owned more than 1.6 million shares in the company worth more than $112 million.

In late 2005, there were layoffs at BusinessWeek associated with the closing of some of its international editions. And in September, a dozen staff members were told that they no longer had jobs, including labor reporter Aaron Bernstein.

It should be noted that former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss defended McGraw last year for staying out of the magazine’s affairs.

Disclosure: I worked for BusinessWeek in 1993-94 and wrote a book about Home Depot for its book publishing operations.