Business Week Magazine

Business Week magazine said Thursday that it was conducting an internal investigation to determine whether unusual trading in certain stocks during the past several weeks was based on a leak of what would appear in the weekly magazine's "Inside Wall Street" column.

A federal jury in Los Angeles on Wednesday took just over an hour to decide that an Anaheim stockbroker and a Torrance printer engaged in securities fraud when they traded stocks based on information culled from advance copies of Business Week magazine. In the civil trial--the first stemming from a series of nationwide insider trading cases involving the magazine's "Inside Wall Street" column--the eight-person jury found that stockbroker Brian J. Callahan conspired with printer William N.

In a major victory for the press, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday that a lower court judge erred in sealing documents in a corporate lawsuit and then barring BusinessWeek magazine from publishing details from the materials. The ruling, which BusinessWeek attorney Kenneth Vedder said includes language of "landmark stature and significance," could slow the efforts of judges and corporations to seal documents in civil cases such as this one.

When Richard Rodner, associate dean of the UCLA Anderson School, sat down at his desk early Friday morning, it was hard not to cringe at the report before him. It was BusinessWeek magazine's new rankings of America's business schools, and UCLA--for many years in or very close to the top 10--had fallen to a lowly No. 16. "We're frankly stunned," Rodner would say later in the day. Across town, Randolph Westerfield, dean of rival USC's Marshall School of Business, was all smiles.

Until recently, the legal wrangling between Bankers Trust Co. and Procter & Gamble Co. was probably not a candidate for Court TV. Without sex, drugs, homemade bombs or bloody gloves, this civil lawsuit seemed destined to be little more than a blip on the public record. Then a federal judge in Cincinnati declared that the record wasn't public. And he ordered BusinessWeek magazine not to publish an investigative story about the case.

A stock trading scandal involving a column in Business Week magazine widened Friday as a broker in the Anaheim office of Prudential-Bache Securities was fired and brokers from two other firms were implicated. Brian J. Callahan, 28, a 3 1/2-year employee at Prudential-Bache who also wrote a personal investing summary in the Orange County Register, was fired after allegations that he received advance information of tips that would appear in the magazine's "Inside Wall Street" column.

For the first time, the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management has cracked the list of the top 50 business schools in the nation, according to a Business Week survey. The rankings are based on surveys of corporate recruiters and 1998 graduates from 61 top U.S. schools. Students had to rank their schools' teaching quality, program content and career placement. Recruiters assessed the students' skills and then ranked schools on overall quality and reputation.

Giancarlo Parretti, chief executive of Los Angeles movie producer Cannon Group, late Monday denounced a Business Week article about him and an associate as "irresponsible" and "riddled with false statements and damaging innuendoes." In a Cannon news release issued Monday, Parretti said the article made "untrue and baseless accusations of money laundering," against him and Cannon Chairman Florio Fiorini.

The first two men to stand trial in the nationwide Business Week insider trading scandal took the stand Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, both claiming they were unaware that what they had done was illegal. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged in a civil insider-trading lawsuit that Brian J. Callahan, a former broker in the Anaheim office of Prudential-Bache Securities, and William N.

Business Week cut 39 jobs, suspended its small-business supplement and scaled back its conference and online businesses as it contends with a downturn in advertising spending, a spokesman said. News of layoffs in the media industry has become an almost weekly certainty as media companies try to deal with the sharp downturn in advertising. Several publications have folded in recent months including George, Brill's Content, Mademoiselle and the Industry Standard. McGraw-Hill Inc.'