By MOTOKO RICH
Published: February 10, 2009
The ax continued to fall in the New York publishing world on Tuesday, as HarperCollins Publishers announced a restructuring and layoffs that claimed the jobs of two of its top executives.
The industry had been expecting some news from HarperCollins, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, as it was one of the few major publishing houses not to have announced layoffs during the current punishing retail downturn. Random House, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan, which operates divisions including Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, have all announced job losses in recent months.
And so the shoe finally dropped at HarperCollins: the company said it was closing down its Collins division, the publisher of blockbusters like “The Dangerous Book for Boys” and “Deceptively Delicious,” a cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld. In a memo to the staff, Michael Morrison, president and publisher of the general books division for the United States and Canada, said that Steve Ross, the president and publisher of Collins, was leaving the company.