More than a year after Collins publisher Steve Ross and his boss at HarperCollins met with representatives from The Wall Street Journal to discuss the possibility of a partnership, the ink is finally dry. The first book The Journal will publish through Collins, The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street As We Know It: What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time—And How to Survive It by Dave Kansas, will be out early next year.

Last November, about a month before Rupert Murdoch formally took over The Journal, The Observer reported that the News Corp. chairman was preparing (okay, "mulling") to initiate a little synergy between his new paper and his old publishing house. At that point, The Journal was publishing all its books with Random House's Crown division, which Mr. Ross used to run. The contract was about to expire though, and it only made sense that Mr. Murdoch would want to move it over to HarperCollins.  read more »

"You're lucky I don't have a chalkboard," said Steve Ross, receiving nervous laughter from the well-dressed crowd of authors and editors at a celebration Wednesday evening of the first full list published by the Collins Publishing Group, the recently reorganized division of HarperCollins of which Mr. Ross is the president and publisher.

Mr. Ross, who is known to be garrulous when it comes to talking about his work, started the story of Collins at the beginning—which is to say, with the invention of the printing press in 1493. Some time later, he reached the end of the story, and turned his attention to the gravity of our moment. He said something about how the world had reached the dawn of a new day, and made a joke about growth. At one point he brought up The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, the first book William Collins published when he founded the house in 1819, which inspired someone to shout from the back of the room, "Was it a bestseller?"  read more »

Steve Ross, president and publisher of the Collins division at HarperCollins, is at the Ziegfeld right now, a couple of blocks from the company tower, seeing the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light with his entire staff. Mr. Ross said in an e-mail that it was a morale-boosting event—a Friday tradition, in fact, that he started when he was president of Crown.  read more »

Last summer, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman gathered her executive staff in a conference room on the 11th floor of the book publisher’s office and introduced a smiley, excitable fellow who had just been hired to make some big changes at the company.  read more »

Adam Bellow, the conservative editor and author known for publishing books like The Bell Curve, David Brock's The Real Anita Hill, and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, has left Doubleday for a senior position at Collins, the once quite invisible reference imprint of HarperCollins that has, in recent months, been taking aggressive steps towards recasting itself as a major player in non-fiction narrative.  read more »

Collins, a division of HarperCollins once known mostly for publishing reference books and how-to guides, announced two new editorial hires today: Bill Strachan and Serena Jones, both of whom specialize in narrative nonfiction.

Mr. Strachan was most recently a senior-level editor at the Avalon Publishing Group, a job he lost when Avalon was folded into the Perseus Books Group this past spring. Before that, he was at Hyperion, where he edited, among other things, a heap of history books and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

Ms. Jones, meanwhile, moves to Collins from an associate editorship at Simon & Schuster, where according to Collins publisher Bruce Nichols, she worked with legendary politics editor Alice Mayhew.

Not long ago, literary agents shopping big narrative non-fiction wouldn’t have thought to submit to Collins. That changed this year, with the arrival of new president Steve Ross—who previously ran Crown at Random House—and Mr. Nichols, who had been an editor at Simon & Schuster’s Free Press for 15 years.

Mr. Ross, who had had enormous success at Crown during the ten years he spent at its helm, and Mr. Nichols, who had proved himself a master with books on politics, history, and current affairs, were charged with expanding Collins’ general non-fiction list, and in so doing, broadly recasting the shop in a new image.  read more »

The theme of the movie is sort of, You never know what can happen in life. Here were a group of schlemiels, the Cosmos, who were suddenly playing with the greatest soccer player in the world. The best of them, Shep Messing, accepted this sudden change with awe and humor.

This World Cup has launched Hirshey (an editor at HarperCollins; he did my last book) as a writer. hen again maybe Dillon just wanted to get up close to the Gisele Bundchen doppelganger who was whispering in my ear as I scribbled my name on her program. Or perhaps he had overheard her opening line to me -- "I've heard so much about you, I always wanted to meet you." I'm just glad Dillon had moved on before the Brazilian bombshell uttered her next line: "My mother was Pelé's longtime assistant. I wasn't born when you were doing your book with him."

Whether the Cosmos accomplished the mission is open to debate. Certainly, they planted the flag of soccer in the soil of the grassroots movement that today has 18 million American kids playing the sport in the United States.

And then, a few questions later, while discussing land prices, he turns the coin over to the other side. “I’m very concerned about the affordability of New York. Everybody can’t afford $1,200-a-square-foot apartments. If you take the land cost and the construction costs—and it’s not much cheaper in the boroughs—it is very hard to build affordable housing—and I’m not talking affordable according to the fed level, I’m talking about for working people. What’s that going to do for New York City?”

That’s in 2010 dollars, right?

The article offers a suggestion on how to buy influence with a Bloomberg administration that prides itself on being impenetrable to lobbyists. A number of developers, in particular, seem to find it wise to give to the mayor's favorite charity, the Mayor's Fund To Advance New York City:

The story expands on a theme the Times explored in November with a story about Dan Doctoroff's old friend, developer Steve Ross. You can see similar things happening around fundraising for the Republican National Convention.