The WSJ, citing “a person familiar with the situation,” now puts December job reductions throughout Harcourt Houghton Mifflin parent company Education Media & Publishing Group at “some 700 people.” The company has “firing staff, outsourcing functions, buying fewer new books, and phasing out some textbooks for the past year” to keep up with its enormous debt load. Recent articles on questions raised by credit ratings agencies have questioned whether the company is anywhere near compliance with a required leverage ratio (a comparison of debt to ebitda) of nine–but now the Journal adds that the company’s loans stipulate that ratio “must […]