That’s the spin that Variety put on the hiring of Lisa Sharkey at HarperCollins yesterday, observing that the former head of Al Roker’s production company was brought into E. 53rd St. to “min[e] pop culture and the world of celebrity—Regan’s forte before she was ousted after the O.J. Simpson If I Did It project.” In the very next graf, though, reporter Michael Learmonth concedes that Sharkey “won’t have her own imprint, as Regan did, but she will head a staff of editors tasked with developing projects for several general-interest imprints of News Corp.’s publishing arm.” Also, she appears to have been appointed HarperCollins’ ambassador to the television world, charged with getting the company’s books and authors onto more shows.
Structural differences aside, though, the one-sentence description of her job—”to peruse the headlines with the eye of a morning show producer, finding stories with cultural significance that can be quickly turned into trade books”—certainly sounds like Regan’s formula for success, doesn’t it?