Why Jane Jumped: Forensics on the End Of Friedman at HC
Was the CEO ready to go? Murdoch told her she was
MORE
Pub Crawl
At 11 a.m. last Wednesday morning, Jane Friedman presided over a meeting with her publishers and some marketing people on the 15th floor of the HarperCollins building in midtown. The meeting was about digital outreach, and offered an occasion to discuss ideas for how the News Corp.-owned publishing house could use computers to sell more books. This meeting, a regular thing, was held once every two or three weeks as part of an initiative called Publishing+ that Ms. Friedman started a few years ago. Last Wednesday’s meeting was devoted to discussing a podcast for BlogTalkRadio.com, as well as an original video that the publicity department had managed to place on a bunch of blogs to promote a recently published memoir about life in a polygamist cult.
Ms. Friedman, a chatty, 62-year-old blonde whom News Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, installed as the CEO of HarperCollins in 1997, was engaged and attentive throughout the meeting. She did not behave like a person who knew that her job had been offered to someone else—someone sitting in that very room—two days earlier.
That same morning Ms. Friedman received a phone call from someone at News Corp. asking her to please come see Mr. Murdoch at 4:30 in his office six blocks away. According to one of Ms. Friedman's colleagues, who spoke to her recently, the caller did not explain what Mr. Murdoch wanted to talk to her about. And so Ms. Friedman, fresh off a triumphant turn at Book Expo America the weekend prior, and with strong fourth-quarter results expected at the end of the month, went to the News Corp. building and took the elevator to Mr. Murdoch’s office. When she arrived, he told her that he had given her job to her deputy, a talented young businessman named Brian Murray who, like her, had been with HarperCollins since 1997.
By midnight that night, the entire publishing world knew that Ms. Friedman was out, and her spokeswoman issued a statement announcing that she had decided to retire and would do so immediately.
A week has passed now, and an official story has of course been established: that Ms. Friedman had accomplished everything she wanted to, and had been thinking about resigning anyway. A rumor about her departure that surfaced on Gawker.com shortly after her meeting with Mr. Murdoch had simply moved her to pull the trigger sooner.
There are questions now about what really happened, and the official story does not seem to add up. How long had Ms. Friedman known she was being replaced? Had she really submitted her resignation, or did Mr. Murdoch fire her? If he did, then why?
MORE THAN ANYTHING, HarperCollins staff are mystified by the circumstances under which Ms. Friedman made her exit, and they want to know if the Gawker tip that supposedly set everything in motion came from someone at News Corp.
Indeed, if this was not the hostile transfer of power that it appears to have been, then why was the transition carried out so quickly and unceremoniously? After all, Jack Romanos was allowed to remain CEO of Simon & Schuster for months after he announced last September his intention to retire from his post—he even got a going-away party! And Peter Olson, who until recently was head of Random House, remained CEO for weeks after The New York Times broke the news of his imminent resignation last month.
“Jane or Rupert or [News Corp. COO] Peter Chernin would have to tell us what really went down between them last Wednesday afternoon and what led to it,” as one executive at HarperCollins put it. “I wish I knew. We’d all be helped emotionally if we had a better sense of why this happened.”
News Corp. is saying nothing, though, and Erin Crum, the corporate spokeswoman at HarperCollins, has offered no information beyond what appeared in the short press release that was issued once the Gawker rumor—initially dismissed by insiders in the highest echelons of HarperCollins as so much fake gossip—was confirmed late last Wednesday.
Ms. Friedman has also declined to explain what took place—presumably because she’s negotiating a severance package and is barred from talking—and to the frustration of her staff, she did not go into details when she said her goodbyes at the weekly marketing meeting held last Thursday morning.
Over a hundred people attended that meeting. Some of them had to stand up along the walls because there were not enough chairs. When Ms. Friedman walked in, she received a standing ovation, and some people cried.
When there was quiet, Ms. Friedman said that 10 years at the top had been enough—something she had heard once from Alberto Vitale, who served as the chairman of Random House for a decade before retiring in 1998. Ms. Friedman sounded like she was speaking through tears; she apologized for this and explained that she had caught cold. For two minutes, she gave her assurance that the company was in good hands. Then she left the conference room as her staff gave another standing ovation and her successor, Mr. Murray, prepared to address the room.
THOSE WHO WORKED most closely with Ms. Friedman were perhaps more stunned than anyone that her tenure at HarperCollins was over. Next Page >
The fact pattern of this story is as old as the Bible and probably older: Raider/Invader (in this case corporate)conquers/purchases nation/company, deploys scorched Earth tactics and spinelessly refuses to address the inhumanity of those tactics. Come on! The book publishing business has a long and recognized history of many executives (e.g: Ms. Friedman) with more refined and insightful, yet effective, approach to business. Rupert Murdoch has no such characteristics. Read the writing on the wall; the guy takes no prisoners and does not care about how or against whom he applies his weapons of mass media destruction.
Why has no one mentioned the fact that Jane Friedman was a publicity hound, that she had no real knowledge of the publishing process, that she stole everyone's ideas and took credit for them, that she lied, schemed, defamed and destroyed --- all while feigning being sweet and effete. She was a fraud and Murdoch should have fired her years ago. The only question is, what took him so long? The PR spin sold her as a wildly innovative executive. All false. She stole people's ideas and then fired them.She was a ruthless bully and had no talent.
jane friedman left Knopf. She showed her true poison belly when she said that now that she was at HC, she'd have to pay authors what they were really worth. Har, har, she laughed. By that alone, she enraged many.
Her reference revealed that Knopf's attitude during her very long time there was that they, as such a cult-chad joint, spent years duping authors out of fair advances. Some authors were apparently so dying to be published by Knopf that jane and sonny and sonny's handmaidens and fanboys could low ball advances. Such an honorable cheery idea. Maybe it's not so odd that what goes around comes around so very, very often in publishing.
Jane Freidman being hired and being canned are only a couple commas on near the last page of a tragic book about the decline and destruction of American publishing.
Today, as many agents say, Knopf is no long Knopf, Sonny publishes more dreck than could have ever been imagined. Larry Kirschbaum former top guy at T-Warner is neutered into being an agent in a sea of agents. No corporate head of Bertalsmann is currently an all around mensch. Harper Collins, and Simon and Schuster are predictable, and no longer vital as innovators.
Sad to say, Jane and all the rest are aged relics. And not in any way the best of what once was. Watch the lawsuits fly from S & S toward authors who have 'not delivered'... see how paltry the advances they are suing over. Simon and Schuster alone might as well advertise that these are desperate times for their coffers.
Alberto Vitale was pressed out when the Newhouse Brothers sold. The new owners had no burning desire to keep him as many believed his methods were out of touch, antiquated. There's the real neverending story. Freidman's story is no different in timbre. It's not such a mystery. Though Rupert is older than a mummy and as wrinkled as a prune, he has an eye for what is next year, rather than what is two decades too late.