• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 10, 2015

Just weeks after it struck a deal to sell the Financial Times to Japanese publisher Nikkei, Pearson is moving to offload the rest of its media publishing business by selling its half stake in The Economist Group.

FT, reported the news over the weekend, citing people familiar with the negotiations.

Pearson has not officially confirmed that it is selling its stake in The Economist, and the deal must also gain the approval of a board of four trustees, who oversee the Economist Group to ensure the editorial independence of its various publications.

The sale price for Pearson’s stake in the magazine publisher is reportedly £400 million, or around $620 million.

In addition to the flagship magazine, the Economist Group also owns the Economist Intelligence Unit, which provides business information, and political news magazine CQ Roll Call.

If the deal goes through, Pearson will sell its stake in The Economist to a number of mostly European buyers, including the De Rothschild family and Exor, which manages investments for Italy’s Agnelli family, which also controls carmaker Fiat. (Fiat, in turn, owns a stake in the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s biggest newspaper).

The De Rothschild family and Fiat already own substantial stakes in The Economist Group, but neither will attain a majority stake through their new purchases. The rest of The Economist Group is owned by a number of smaller private shareholders, including the Cadbury family (of chocolate fame) and former staff members, among others.

Pearson previously stated that it would sell off its news publishing businesses to focus on its core education publishing and testing business. FT reports that at one point Hearst was in the running to buy Pearson’s stake in The Economist, but talks broke down.

Last year, the Economist Group reported profits of $93 million on revenues of $515 million. Advertising revenues contributed $95 million, while subscriptions and circulation revenue (including subs to the Economist Intelligence Unit) contributed $259 million of the total.

The bulk of these came from the flagship magazine, which like other print publications has come under pressure from declining ad revenues in recent years.

Pearson’s half share of this represented just a small portion of its total global revenues of $8.2 billion. The vast majority of its revenues -- $6.15 billion -- came from its school and higher education publishing divisions, with 60% of this generated by its North American operations.

Pearson is not the first big publisher to dump its media business to focus on educational publishing and testing. The Washington Post Company made a similar move in 2013 with the sale of its flagship newspaper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, allowing the rest of the company (renamed Graham Holdings) to focus on its Kaplan educational testing business, as well as cable TV.