When to crop?

An intersting question came up at work yesterday. I coworker wanted to know when is the best time to crop an image to a specific size? Should they rezise the image first, then crop it, or crop it, and then resize the image?

For example. He has a request from a magazine, for images sized at 9x11. Since he's shooting digitally, the aspect ratio of his photos can't be resized to 9x11 without cropping. So, will he loose more info if he crops the high res image to the proper ratio, then resizes them to 9x11 than he would if he were to resize the high res image as close to 9x11 first, then crop?

Would one way save more of the digital info than the other?

The way I do it (which might be the lazy way) is in PS I have preset sizes using the marquee tool that would crop my D2h images to a 5x7, 4x6, 8x10, 11x14, whatever else aspect ratio. After doing all my adjustments, I'll save the file, crop it to whatever ratio, save that as filename-8x10 (or whatever size) and save it. When I go get it printed I let the lab upsize the image if it needs to be.

Whether or not that would change how much data is in the file vs upsizing then cropping, I have no clue

I increase the PPI (thus improving print quality) and getting the size down to as close as possible to what I want. Then I crop.

Ronnoco