McGraw-Hill Group

Overview

The New York-based McGraw-Hill covers book and magazine publishing, minor broadcasting interests and financial data services (notably Standard & Poors). Revenue in 2000 was around US$4 billion. The group is currently headed by a descendant of one of the founders.

Holdings

• An indication of McGraw-Hill holdings is here.
• Its corporate site is here.

History

McGraw-Hill dates from 1909, with the merger of technical and trade publications developed by James McGraw (for example the American Journal of Railway Appliances) and John Hill (Engineering News and Power). McGraw-Hill acquired the Newton Falls Paper Company in 1920, established a presence in the UK and launched other specialist publications such as Bus Transportation.

BusinessWeek - competing with Dow Jones' Barrons and Time's Fortune - was first published in 1929 and was notably successful from the late thirties until the business magazine wave of the late 1960s.

McGraw-Hill instead concentrated on its educational and professional publishing interests, particularly secondary and tertiary textbooks and the Platt petroleum industry newsletters, which originated in 1909 as National Petroleum News, a "voice for independent oil men against Big Oil". (In 2001 Platt bought the oil sector newsletter and data services interests of the Pearson-controlled FT group.)

In 1947 it bought the Gregg group - notable for publications about shorthand.

In 1966 the group acquired Standard & Poor's (S&P), competing with Dun & Bradstreet. S&P dates from the 1941 merger of Standard Statistics with the Poor company founded by pioneering investment analyst Henry Varnum Poor (1812-1905).

In 1970 McGraw-Hill absorbed Ryerson Press, a Canadian publisher dating from 1829. Two years later, under threat of takeover (figures such as Robert Maxwell periodically sniffed around), it bought television stations in San Diego, Bakersfield, Indianapolis and Denver. It survived a further messy takeover attempt by American Express in 1979.

In 1989, in partnership with Eastman Kodak and Tribune subsidiary R R Donnelly, McGraw-Hill developed a custom textbook publishing system - Primis Custom Publishing - for the US college market, gaining a market share of around 20% in competition with Thomson and Pearson units.

Studies

The major study, albeit very dated and 'authorised', is Roger Burlingame's Endless frontiers: the story of McGraw-Hill (New York, McGraw-Hill 1959).

For the early history of Standard & Poors see Alfred Chandler's supple Henry Varnum Poor, Business Editor, Analyst and Reformer (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1956) and Richard Sylla's crisp 2001 A Historical Primer on the Business of Credit Ratings (PDF).

For more recent times see Globalisation: News media, images of nations and the flow of international capital with special reference to the role of ratings agencies (PDF) by Michael Kunczik.

Appleton is profiled in Grant Overton's authorised Portrait of a Publisher: Appleton and the First Hundred Years of the House of Appleton, 1825-1925 (New York: Appleton 1925) and Gerard Wolfe's The House of Appleton: The History of a Publishing House and Its Relationship to the Cultural, Social, and Political Events That Helped Shape the Destiny of New York City (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press 1981).