The NYT’s Julie Bosman follows up last night’s breaking story with more details on the impending shutdown of ReganBooks a little more than a month after its creator, Judith Regan, was fired. Aside from the five staffers named yesterday who will move back to HarperCollins‘ New York headquarters, the publisher also laid off 10 employees in ReganBooks’ LA offices. The 10 employees were notified yesterday that they would be laid off, said Michael Morrison, the president and group publisher of HarperMorrow, a division of HarperCollins, in a telephone interview with Bosman. “From Day 1, we knew we could not be continuing with that name. We didn’t want to, nor could we.” Morrison added that none of the ReganBooks authors had yet been notified of the imprint’s closing – but they sure know now.
Regan also issued a statement about her namesake imprint’s closing, saying she was “blessed to have the opportunity to work with hundreds of fascinating authors over the years and honored to have published them under my name.” Such magnanimous words were a far cry from comments made about Newsweek’s OJ Simpson article on her namesake Sirius satellite radio show, as Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici reported. When Regan’s producer, Howie Green, slipped up and said the chapter recounted “how [Simpson] would have committed the crime,” Regan snapped at him. “No, it was how he committed the crime. Even today the mistakes the media made have been repeated by you, my producer, because it is so inundated, so insidious.”