Judith Regan and the Soul of the Publishing Industry
Posted on December 19, 2006
Sara Nelson, the editor of Publishers Weekly weighs in on the ongoing Judith Regan/HarperCollins drama in which Regan was summarily fired right before the News Corp. holiday party. The order to fire Regan came straight from Rupert Murdoch and --depending on what story you believe -- was a result of Regan's anti-Semitic comments made to a HarperCollins attorney (doubtful and she denies it) or because of the aborted O.J. Simpson book, which was a financial disaster (much more likely reason).
[T]here is also schadenfreude and a tone of self-righteousness, a kind of group we-told-you-so that is almost biblical: at long last, the outsider, the sinner, has been punished for her sins. She went too far-what was the last straw? O.J., Mickey Mantle, her alleged anti-Semitic remarks?-and she was finally stopped. The rest of us are cleansed.The book publishing business has a soul? That's news to us.It's an understandable reaction and one for which, it must be said, PW is partly responsible. And yet, I can't help feeling that for all of our smugness, we may be in for a teaching moment of the be-careful-what-you-wish for variety. Regan and her eponymous imprint, after all, did serve an important, counterintuitive function: she published profitable junk that the rest of us would rather not touch. It served us all well to have Judith Regan and her questionable taste to react against;the truth is we needed her, if only to make ourselves feel better about our choices.
*****
Still, the common wisdom is that Regan simply had to go, that she had become a public embarrassment to her company and to all of publishing. While that's certainly true, I'm deeply skeptical about the suggestion that firing Regan means the book business has, at long last, re-found its soul. It's a business, after all, and if publishing to the lowest common denominator is what makes companies profitable, then that's the kind of publishing we're going to continue, at least sometimes, to do.