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McGraw-Hill Companies' (NYSE: MHP) BusinessWeek, suffering under the same surfeit of advertising bedeviling the rest of the magazine industry, is going in for an extreme makeover, according to Leon Lazaroff of Bloomberg. Look for more feature articles and less lifestyle coverage. Cosmetic changes will include typography, logo and graphics. Weight is not an issue, as it's already Kate Moss-thin.
The move comes in response to a 20% decline in ad sales in the first half of 2007, compared to the same duration in 2006. In contrast, the affiliated web site, BusinessWeek.com, continues to expand its ad revenue. The magazine slots in MHP's information & Media sector, which brought in $223.1 million in revenue in the second quarter of this year, with $14.7 million in operating profit for a margin of 5.9%.
McGraw-Hill will announce its third-quarter earnings next Thursday, which would be an excellent time for it to roll out the vamped-up version of BusinessWeek.
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Filed under: Scandals, McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP), Politics
Today should be an interesting day for the "independent" ratings agencies. McGraw Hill's (NYSE: MHP) Standard & Poor's and Moody's Corp. (NYSE: MCO) will be speaking on Capitol Hilll today and tomorrow [subscription required].Critics have become more vocal that the late summer downgrades on mortgage and derivative securities came too late. It goes without saying that the analysis the bond rating agencies were issuing seemed as if none had questioned the numbers given to them without finding the real exposure. The results were so good that S&P canned its ratings agency head. Moody's also made changes, but this was too little too late. If you have been keeping up with this, you'd know shares of both were hit and recently reached new 52-week lows.
Bond rating agencies have been in the soup before over their coverage of great companies like Enron and WorldCom. The difference is, this time they were not just duped by management being hellbent on fraud; this time they just didn't do their job.
But ... congress doesn't even know what it is looking for here, other than getting some air time and making it look like it wants to investigate. The ratings agencies definitely botched it here, but it's likely that nothing of major consequence will happen to them for it.
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