Wall Street Journal may switch publishing houses

Leon Neyfakh of The New York Observer writes Wednesday that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch may switch The Wall Street Journal‘s arrangement with a Random House division to publish its books to his own HarperCollins once a contract expires.

Neyfakh wrote, “Since March 2004, The Journal has maintained an exclusive partnership with the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House with which the paper collaborates on Journal-themed reference guides, crossword puzzle collections and some of the nonfiction books written by its reporters. To date, they’ve collaborated on at least 12 books, among them The Wall Street Journal Guide to the Business of Life, The Wall Street Journal Complete Identity Theft Guidebook and The Price of Admission, by The Journal’s former Boston deputy bureau chief Daniel Golden.

“But Crown’s contract with The Journal is set to run out this spring, and according to publishing insiders, it is unlikely that Rupert Murdoch—who will formally take over Dow Jones, The Journal’s parent company, next month—will want to preserve the affiliation. Instead, they say, he will probably seek to realign the paper’s books operation with HarperCollins, the publishing house he has owned since 1989.

“And he may have just the person to make it happen. Steve Ross, who ran Crown when it inked its 2004 deal with The Journal and supervised the partnership, is now a top executive at HarperCollins, putting him in the perfect position to seal the deal.”

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