Former Informa finance director Anthony Foye and former Taylor & Francis CEO David Smith have joined forces to form the Critical Information Group, “with the aim of acquiring business media companies worth up to 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion).” Smith and Foye said they would concentrate on B2B media businesses in Britain and overseas, with a focus on publishing and events. CIG raised 1.56 million pounds from nine British institutional investors (each will hold 5.3 percent of the company) in Thursday’s initial public offering, with a further 1.45 million invested by CIG’s directors.Reuters In other publishing venture news, Kassia Kroszer, […]
Archives for June 2009
People and Awards
Trena Keating, who was an agent at Endeavor since last September (and editor-in-chief at Dutton prior to that) has established her own agency, Keating Literary. Peter Beren has been appointed acquisitions scout for Running Press, reporting to publisher Christopher Navratil. He will be looking for “high profile and breakout properties.” Globe Pequot Press president and publisher since 2006 Scott Watrous has resigned, PW reports. COO Jim Joseph has taken over on an interim basis. Todd Berman will join Random House Publisher Services in July 6 as director, client development. He was at Harvard Business Press, most recently as director of […]
More Questions for Ben Mezrich; More Answers from Chris Anderson
Brad Stone of the NYT read the galley for Ben Mezrich’s July release THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES, about the founding of Facebook, “in two sittings.” While “Doubleday has classified the book as nonfiction, but it has a novelistic gloss that tries to compensate for the absence of comprehensive reporting.” (The paper notes that “Mezrich appears to have had access to only one primary source in Facebook’s complex founding story: Eduardo Saverin, one of the Harvard friends of Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of the site.) Doubleday publicist Todd Doughty apparently agrees, saying “this is not reportage. It is big juicy fun.” Mezrich’s […]
That Book that Governor Mark Sanford Might Have Been Writing
Early on during South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s disappearance his office assured reporters he was off working on a book. At a news conference Wednesday Sanford admitted to an extramarital affair (the cause of his leaving the country) and said he would resign his post as head of the Republican Governors Association. The NYT notes “the governor had been considered a rising star among conservatives, but this bizarre turn of events has changed his prospects, at least for the time being. At the end of the news conference, a reporter asked whether he would resign from his post as governor. […]
Free Indeed; Anderson's New Book Lifts Numerous Passages from Wikipedia
The Virginia Quarterly Review convincingly reproduces a number of incidences in Chris Anderson’s new book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price that reproduce nearly verbatim portions of a number of Wikipedia articles. Anderson admits fault via e-mail, saying “all those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources.” He intended to “do a write-through” of “source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia),” and says that “obviously in my rush at the end I missed a […]
People: BN.com Names New Executive, and More
Jamie Iannone will serve as evp, shopping for Barnes & Noble.com & Barnes & Noble Digital, “responsible for meeting the buying needs, and shaping the shopping decisions, of visitors to Barnes & Noble.com. He reports to BN.com president William Lynch. Iannone was at eBay, where most recently he was vp of global search. Mary Faria is joining Simon & Schuster as director of mass merchandise/dsrm, children’s sales, reporting to Mary Marotta. Faria has held various sales positions at Harper Collins, Abrams and Little Brown. Also at S&S Children’s, Katherine Devendorf has been promoted to associate managing editor. Random House UK […]