Business

TEMPORARY POSITION

BUSINESSWEEK, the McGraw-Hill flagship magazine that was rattled by pre-Christmas layoffs in the editorial department, has pushed another 20 people with contracts closer to the door.

Last Friday, Executive Editor John Byrne on a conference call told the contract workers they were being reassigned to a contract with Kelly Services.

In the past, they drew their paychecks from parent company McGraw-Hill and were assigned to work on a short-to-long-term basis for BusinessWeek.

Though technically the moves, which involve both editorial and production workers, do not involve firings, that hasn’t stopped folks at the magazine from being jittery.

“People are pretty upset,” said one insider. “They go from working for McGraw-Hill, which had some cachet, to working for a temp agency.”

Many of the newly reassigned fear the change will make it a lot easier to fire them under the new arrangement.

Some of the BusinessWeek online writers, however, were spared and converted into full-time BW employees.

A BW spokeswoman insisted there is no need for alarm.

“This was a business decision,” she said. “It will help manage the administration of their pay.”

She insisted there was no change in their hourly pay rate, their hours or their eligibility for overtime.

BusinessWeek’s ad pages tumbled 18.2 percent to 2,234.71 in 2007, and the outlook for the start of 2008 is muted.

Net worth

The BW roll-up is only the latest jolt to the financial press this week.

Worth magazine was flipped by CurtCo Media to Sadlow Media, and, as a result, Executive Editor Doug McWhirter is out of a job.

“We expect to name a new editor shortly,” said Sadlow Media founder Adam Sadlow of his latest acquisition.

He said he plans to keep most of the 12 employees of Worth who work in New York, but will transfer uch of the back-office duties to Sadlow’s headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla.

McWhirter could not be reached for comment.

With the addition of Worth, Sadlow Media is now a three-magazine company that also includes the quarterly NewBeauty magazine and Luxe, a high-end housing magazine aimed at architects.

Sadlow says he plans to relaunch Worth, but wants to keep it a tightly focused, 100,000-circulation magazine.

Circ was greatly scaled back after CurtCo CEO Bill Curtis bought the financially ailing title from the previous owners four years ago.

It no longer reports its pages to the Publishers Information Bureau, but it was believed to have slipped into the red last year, which likely prompted the sale by CurtCo, which is known for having little appetite for sustaining losses.

“It wasn’t a core property for us,” Curtis said.

Standout

Meredith Corp. appears to be on one of the most startling newsstand surges in publishing history with some of its oldest and largest magazines – not usually known as newsstand powerhouses.

Better Homes & Gardens saw its single-copy sales surge an eye-popping 71.5 percent to 379,667. It total circulation was up a more modest 0.8 percent, to 7,687,535.

Fitness magazine posted a 39.2 percent jump in single-copy sales, while total circ rose 3.2 percent to 1,602,723.

Ladies Home Journal, another of the big old-time service magazines, also roared ahead on the newsstands by 37.5 percent to 386,600, even while its total circulation slipped 6.2 percent to 3,911,188.

Meredith spokesman Patrick Taylor said that part of the single-copy increase is because the company’s magazine division, which is led by Jack Griffin, has been pumping cop ies into Sam’s Club, Costco and Dollar Tree.

However, the company plans to phase out the program over the next few months.

“Newsstand is not a big part of our business,” said Taylor.

Pap probe

The West Coast was still buzzing over word that the FBI was investigating the relationship between celebrity magazines and the paparazzi, but there have been few developments so far this week.

The only new tidbit to emerge was that Special Agent Dennis Webster, who has been contacting ex-employees of In Touch to question them about “the paparazzi and In Touch,” was also the same agent who worked the alleged cyber hacking case involving Us Weekly a year and a half ago.

Nobody can tell if Webster’s information gathering is tied to the original case or is part of a whole new investiga tion.

Webster still has not returned calls for comment, but his specialty is said to be cyber sleuthing, not white- collar fraud.

Many were speculating last week that the In Touch case involved under-the-table payouts from photo agencies to assignment editors at the magazine, something the magazine has denied taking part in.

People study

Meanwhile, out in the 30-person West Coast bureau of People magazine, representatives from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. have been sighted.

That normally strikes fear into the hearts of anyone, but People Managing Editor Larry Hackett, who confirmed McKinsey’s presence in the offices, said that cutbacks and downsizings are not in the air.

“This is not in any way, shape or form about cutting back,” he said. “This was to help them cope and improve with the huge increase in workload over the past five years.”

He said the workload in the West Coast office has expanded dramatically over the past five years as Web reporting has become a routine part of reporters’ jobs.

keith.kelly@nypost.com