With days to go before the bidding closes, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw claims that 93 bidders have emerged to buy BusinessWeek, which would suggest widespread interest in keeping the once hugely profitable business title alive as an ongoing publishing enterprise.

McGraw cited the number in an interview yesterday on Bloomberg TV. "Everybody’s involved,” he is reported as saying. “There’s a lot of interest.”

But the number of actual interested parties appears to be far smaller, perhaps just a handful, and tops in the running are Bruce Wasserstein, the Wall Street tyro who bought New York magazine several years ago, and Platinum Equity Partners, according to the New York Post's Keith Kelly.

Platinum, a Beverly Hills private equity firm, bought the San Diego Union-Tribune in March of this year and has made an offer to buy the Boston Globe from The New York Times Co.

How many other serious bidders there are remains a mystery. A number of potential buyers have dropped out, including Time Inc., parent of Fortune, the longtime BusinessWeek rival; David Bradley, who owns the Atlantic Monthly and the National Journal; and Mansueto Ventures, which bought Inc. and Fast Company several years ago.

The first round of bids are due Sept. 15.

The issue all bidders must ponder is how and whether the weekly business title can be turned around, and at what cost.

According to some reports, the magazine is expected to lose $35 million to $40 million this year alone, and its losses can only mount as the ad recession lingers on.

In the first half of the year, its ad pages were down 36.8 percent from the year-earlier period, while the business category as a whole was down 33.4 percent for the six-month period.

In any case, the prospects of BusinessWeek continuing in its present form as a weekly publication in print would appear slim, at least in the eyes of media planners and buyers.

The results of a Media Life survey, published yesterday, show pretty low expectations for the title among people who plan and buy media. Just 27 percent of respondents believed a buyer would come along with deep enough pockets to keep publishing the title in its print form.

The remaining two thirds believed either that a buyer would come forth but would merge the magazine with an existing title or scrap it for its assets, or that no buyers would meet McGraw-Hill's terms and that it would simply fold the title.