McGraw-Hill cuts 550 jobs

NEW YORK: McGraw-Hill Cos., hit by declines in its education, financial services and media properties, says it has cut 550 jobs.

The New York company publishes textbooks and owns BusinessWeek magazine and the credit-ratings agency Standard & Poor's.

McGraw-Hill says the deepest cutbacks were in the education unit, which lost 340 positions, followed by information and media with 125 and financial services with 85.

The recession has cut across a broad swath of the company's businesses. McGraw-Hill reported a 22 percent drop in first quarter profit in April.

This week the company signaled that it may seek a buyer for BusinessWeek, which is facing an industrywide crises brought on by the shift of advertisers to the Internet on top of a severe recession.