BusinessWeek up for sale

McGraw-Hill has hired investment banker Evercore Partners Inc. to sell BusinessWeek magazine, writes Serena Saitto and Greg Bensinger of Bloomberg News, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

Saitto and Bensinger write, “The person declined to be identified because the information isn’t public. Spokesmen for McGraw-Hill and Evercore, which are both based in New York, declined to comment.

“McGraw-Hill, also the owner of the Standard & Poor’s ratings company, is said to be seeking a buyer for BusinessWeek as the recession and competition from the Internet cut into publishers’ advertising sales. The weekly magazine was founded in 1929 and has almost 190 editorial staff, according to its Web site. It has about 4.8 million readers weekly in 140 countries.

“’Magazines are vulnerable to the same decline in advertising revenue that has been hitting the newspaper industry,’ said Tom Corbett, a Morningstar Inc. analyst in Chicago. ‘Because of that, the environment for sales of magazine properties is going to be pretty challenged.’

“BusinessWeek posted a 30 percent decline in second-quarter ad sales to $43.9 million, compared with a 22 percent drop industrywide, according to Publishers Information Bureau data.”

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