• by Erik Sass , January 6, 2009

There were more layoffs at the publisher of BusinessWeek magazine in the fourth quarter, as McGraw-Hill cut 375 additional positions, raising the total number of cuts to over 1,000 in 2008. This is more bad news for the magazine--which, like other business publications, suffered big drops in ad pages even before the current economic downturn.

McGraw-Hill has a number of divisions, including the Information and Media Unit, which publishes BusinessWeek. Only 70 of the 375 cuts came at this unit, although it's unclear how many of them specifically affected BusinessWeek. However, it's safe to assume that it felt the ax, as executives trimmed less profitable parts of the business more aggressively.

2008 was a rough year for business publications, and 2009 isn't looking much better.

Through mid-November, BusinessWeek's ad pages were down 18% compared to 2007, to 1,623. In the same period, Forbes was down 17% to 2,426, Entrepreneur is down 7.7% to 1,074, Kiplinger's Personal Finance was down 14.5% to 425 and Smart Money was down 29.6% to 503.

On the positive side, Fast Company was up 24% to 618, Fortune was up a modest 1.8% to 2,186, and Inc. and Money were basically flat with 1% declines.