McGraw-Hill throwing in the towel on BusinessWeek?

Apparently the only thing worse than trying to sell a weekly business magazine in this depressed media economy is trying to operate one.

For weeks, rumors have been brewing that McGraw-Hill Cos. was exploring a sale of BusinessWeek, its 80-year-old flagship title. Now those rumors have been seemingly confirmed in a report by Bloomberg, which says the publisher has hired Roger Altman's Evercore Partners to handle the sale.

It's no mystery why McGraw-Hill would want to be rid of BusinessWeek. Weekly print magazines have been hit especially hard by the downturn in ad spending that began last year, and BusinessWeek has taken one of the hardest hits of all. Its ad pages were down 30 percent year-over-year in the second quarter, and it's been estimated to have lost more than $20 million last year.