A tipster tells us that of the 550, "340 people laid off mostly in the school textbook publishing division (40 in NY, including entire copyediting department - closing Los Angeles office completely)."

McGraw-Hill buried the layoffs at the verrrry bottom of a press release that led with the headline, "The McGraw-Hill Companies Creates Achievement-Focused PreK-12 Education Group to Help Students Develop 21st Century Skills." That restructuring=layoffs.

The job cuts amount to about 3% of McGraw-Hills work force.
[Headquarters pic via]

John Wiley & Sons will publish the book in May. The timely book had already received 22,000 preorders during its time at McGraw-Hill. What we want to know: Did Ritholtz get to keep his advance from McGraw-Hill on top of his new deal from Wiley? If so, he can consider that his personal stimulus package.

Clusterstock reports that Ritholtz got a sizeable advance, and McGraw-Hill had received 22,000 preorders. The publisher claimed that editors couldn't agree with Ritholtz on how to footnote his sources — a ridiculous-sounding quibble, since Ritholtz says most of his sources are either articles posted online or books available on Amazon.com. It's McGraw-Hill's loss: Ritholtz writes that his contract with McGraw-Hill granted him final edit. If he can keep his advance and take the book elsewhere, it's just another price the company is paying for letting S&P run wild rubberstamping Wall Street's toxic bonds.

Most news outlets make a big deal about protecting their copyrighted content, but the "fair use" clause generally lets other outlets off the hook. Unless your little blog is making money off the link without sharing the loot, or posting content in full without the link, most are happy to take whatever views or buzz comes their way without much fuss. You won't catch the traffic-giant New York Times turning down free links. "Links may be created to The New York Times on the Web homepage, any area or articles that you can locate in a search of our Web site," reads its user agreement, which is just as grammatically confusing as it sounds. But very open-Internetish!

So why is BusinessWeek so picky? Accessing a "deep link" takes a reader to pages several layers within a site—they carry far less advertising space than the site's homepage, which is where they'd rather greet you. This kind of myopia makes it okay to link to Google's version of a BusinessWeek piece (giving the traffic to the search engine), but not to the BW article page itself. Courts have generally ruled that so long as you make it clear who the owner is, no URL is more valuable than another. But hey, they're a big scary magazine! Do as they say. At least, until they realize their business model is retarded.