HarperCollins and Wall Street Journal Join Forces

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 11/10/2008 8:04:00 AM

In a move that had been expected since HarperCollins's parent company bought the Wall Street Journal's corporate parent Dow Jones, the two companies are entering into a three-year publishing partnership to develop books written by the WSJ’s editors and reporters. The program will be overseen by Steve Ross, group president of the Collins Group; and Alan Murray, deputy managing editor at the WSJ, in conjunction with the publishers and editorial teams from the Collins, Collins Business, Collins Living and Collins Design imprints.

Dow Jones v-p of communications Robert Christie said HarperCollins is the WSJ’s only formal, nonexclusive publishing partnership, although the newspaper still has books in the pipeline under a now-expired deal with Crown (it ended March 31).

HarperCollins president and CEO Brian Murray said that through the partnership, the two companies will build a branded list of guides written by WSJ editors, as well as narrative works written by WSJ reporters. The first guidebook to be published under the agreement will be The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street As We Know It: What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time—And How to Survive It by Dave Kansas. It will be published by Collins Business in January 2009. Following that, Collins Business will publish The Wall Street Journal Guide to Management in early 2010. Aside from those two books, no publication schedule has been set yet.