Steve Ross

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 Miramax movie Once In a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos opens tomorrow. I found it enthralling and farcical. It deals with a great failed effort, to get soccer going in the United States, back in the 70s, when Warner boss Steve Ross brought Beckenbauer, Chinaglia and—yes—Pele to New York. Kissinger was needed to get Pele here. Kissinger sat down for the film; Pele didn't.

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.

The guy who covered the Cosmos for the Daily News, soccer rebbe David Hirshey, also shows up in the film, and makes the same point in his article about the movie on the ESPN site: "I realized my love of soccer was an easy pass to a life I would have never otherwise known. "

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."

Following my lifelong policy of always being gracious to 19-year-old, thong-wearing daughters of old friends, I said, "I remember your mother," as memories of 1977 began dancing in my head like a Pelé stepover. There will never be another Cosmos. Big names may come over here eventually -- Beckham, Ronaldo, Zidane -- but they'll all be past their prime, and they'll be doing it for the money. We had guys who were at their peak -- Beckenbauer, myself, [Johan] Neeskens -- and we were on a mission."

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 they did one other thing that may be even more enduring: They made me into a movie star.

Hurry over to the Time Warner Center. There are just four condos left, and they are going for $3,300 a square foot—“Which is really cheap compared with the prices at 15 Central Park West,” Related CEO Steve Ross said at a lunch Thrusday sponsored by the New York University Real Estate Institute. Overall, the apartments at Time Warner, which his company built, went for $2,500 a square foot on average, he said.

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?”

The solution? A program that he said the Real Estate Board of New York is discussing with City Hall under which the city would buy or contribute land, union wages would be reduced, and developers would get low-interest financing. With those breaks, he said developers could afford to build something to rent at $30 a square foot—or a measely $1,800 for a modest 600 square foot one-bedroom.

That’s in 2010 dollars, right?  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

The Economic Development Corporation says tomorrow’s hearing on $3.345 billion in triple tax-free Liberty Bonds for rebuilding the World Trade Center is still on for tomorrow morning—despite hefty speculation that the city will somehow convince developer Larry Silverstein to relinquish his claim on at least some of the 10 million square feet of office space—and get someone else (the impeccably well-connected Steve Ross, perhaps?) to build condos. The EDC, which runs the Industrial Development Agency, which distributes the bonds, has also put the issue on January’s agenda, suggesting that the question will not be answered any time soon. Good Jobs New York has posted Silverstein’s application online. -Matthew Schuerman  read more »

Don't mistake this Daily News Sunday piece for a feel-good story about corporate charity.

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:

"[S]ome donors have business links to the city - raising eyebrows among good-government groups, since the mayor has called for strict curbs on donations from city contractors to candidates in the campaign-finance program."

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.  read more »

We'd suggest that a useful place to find more people looking to endear themselves to the mayor and Doctoroff would be here, a list of the donors to NYC2012.

The Victorian artworks found on Forbes@Christies.com are certainly beautiful to behold, but there's  read more »

Recently, I finally finished the 15th draft of Nobody's Fault , the novel I've been working on for o  read more »