As the captain of Warner Books, a publishing arm in the infomedia octopus that is Time Warner, Laurence J. Kirshbaum recently rejoiced in the “perfect synergy” that produced a spinoff recording of the best-selling book “The Bridges of Madison County.”
Kirshbaum could also marvel at the synergy that went into Time Warner’s packaging of Madonna’s “Sex”: as a book, a compact disc and a videocassette.
That’s how synergy works in the big media/entertainment companies like Time Warner, a corporate megalith made up not only of a movie studio (Warner Bros.) and publishing houses (Warner Books, Little, Brown) but also Atlantic Records, the former Luce magazines (Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, et al.), and the Book-of-the-Month Club.
In some of the biggest companies, the search for synergy seems to be a driving force: so that one division can cross-pollinate, repackage, tie in and boost the products of the others, whether books, movies, videocassettes or records.
In the view of author Mark Crispin Miller (“Boxed-In: The Culture of TV”), however, the only thing perfect about synergy is the semantic license it gives CEOs at Time Warner, Paramount Communications, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and other conglomerates to make deals that enrich the parent company while subverting the public interest.
“We’re talking about monopoly,” declares Miller, rejecting the popular take on synergy as a necessary and benevolent form of economic consolidation and manipulation.
To Miller and other critics, corporate synergy has ominous and sinister connotations, especially in the increasingly homogeneous and incestuous realm of publishing. In their eyes, it has become a diversionary euphemism to disguise and rationalize corporate collusion, sweetheart deals, conflicts of interest, and, in the worst cases, the suppression of books that somehow offend sensibilities in executive suites and boardrooms.
L.J. Davis, an investigative journalist and author (“Bad Money”), puts it this way: “A guy who’s doing something solely to make money has got to find a valid reason for doing so. He’s got to explain things to the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the press, to his employees. Starting in the 1960s, synergy has served that purpose.”
And, as Miller insists, the consequences of synergy are “more dire in publishing because that’s the industry that has traditionally been the least commercial.”
But, he says, with the alliances between movie companies and publishing houses (Warner Bros. and Little, Brown, for instance, or Paramount and Simon & Schuster, or 20th Century Fox and HarperCollins), “publishing has become just as commercial as television and films. There’s really no distinction between them anymore.”
These partnerships alarm authors, especially those whose books are most likely to be submerged and vanish in all the merging of publishing and entertainment interests.
“The reason people invest in publishing houses is to make money,” says Erica Jong, a novelist (“Any Woman’s Blues”) and until recently president of the Authors Guild, an organization that protects writers’ interests. “You can call that synergy or you can call it fixing the press. We’re looking at it as a cynical attempt to control information.”
Jong’s remarks came in an article in the May 31 issue of Nation magazine. Titled “Murdered Ink,” the story by contributing editor Jon Wiener documented the cancellation of a half-dozen books by conglomerate publishers. Among them were two biographies critical of Walt Disney: Robert Sam Anson’s “The Rules of Magic,” snuffed by Simon & Schuster, and Marc Eliot’s “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” which received the same treatment from Bantam.
A `paper tiger’
The allegation that corporate synergy due to both publishers’ links to Disney was responsible for these casualties was tartly dismissed as a “paper tiger” by Stuart Applebaum, senior vice president for Bantam Doubleday Dell, the publishing triumvirate owned by Bertelsmann, a German conglomerate.
“I don’t see any evidence that ideas are being stifled,” says Applebaum, pointing out that the Eliot and Anson books were picked up by other publishers. Nor does he see any evidence that conglomerate ownership of publishing houses “is keeping unknown novelists or unheralded non-fiction writers from being published. More books are being published these days than ever before, probably more than most booksellers and consumers can handle.”
Even though an estimated 40,000 books will be published in the U.S. this year, author Miller insists that the crucial issue is not quantity but quality. Rather than making information more widely accessible and diverse, the synergization (or Hollywoodization) of publishing and media corporations, he contends, is actually bringing about an “ever-narrower diet for people,” because of the obsession in conglomerate boardrooms for ever-larger blockbusters, whether in the form of books, films or television shows.
People may go even hungrier, Miller adds, once Paramount Communications-which was considerably fattened last week by its purchase of Macmillan publishing for $553 million-is itself swallowed up by either QVC or Viacom, depending on the outcome of their escalating takeover duel.
(The incestuous possibilities grow even larger. Paramount already owns Simon & Schuster. Meanwhile, QVC has a $500 million commitment from the Newhouse empire, which includes giant book publisher Random House.)
“If people are ignorant, if their entire diet is a certain kind of cultural junk food, they really can’t function in the world as citizens,” Miller says.
As the publisher-packager-synegizer of Robert James Waller (“The Bridges of Madison County”), Alexandra Ripley (“Scarlett”) and Madonna, Kirshbaum claims that readers, as well as viewers, can only benefit from the “Chinese banquet” offered by Time Warner, whose bountiful media menu will grow even larger if its partnership with Tribune Broadcasting in a fifth television network is successful.
(As the Tribune’s participation in the deal indicates, the forces of synergy aren’t concentrated on the East and West Coasts. In Chicago, Tribune Co. has assembled a substantial nucleus of properties, including newspapers, television and radio stations, a cable channel and the Chicago Cubs, as well as recent acquisitions such as Contemporary Books and Compton’s Multimedia Publishing Group.)
Onto the expressway
Reverting to a more popular metaphor to describe these alliances, Kirshbaum says: “It’s simply an attempt by publishers to move out of the narrow road that we’re on and onto a broader, multimedia highway. The author with an idea or a project can benefit from new-age technologies. They’re in the driver’s seat, and we’re just simply trying to broaden their exposure.”
One new-age concept that Kirshbaum devised to broaden exposure may represent the ultimate in publishing synergy. He called it “MegaMediaMarketing,” and, in a letter to booksellers, he pointed out that “as part of Time Warner Inc., (Warner Books) possesses the resources and capabilities to reach more book buyers than ever before,” a sales manifesto that seemed to imply not only advertising but also editorial support in sister publications such as Time, People or Entertainment Weekly.
The most conspicuous example of Kirshbaum’s MultiMediaMarketing was the campaign by Warner “orchestration experts” for “The Wild West,” a Time-Life/Warner Books history that was excerpted in Life magazine, like “Scarlett” before it, and offered as a Book-of-the-Month selection, syndicated as a mini-series by Warner Bros. Television, and marketed as a videocassette by Time-Life Video & Television.
Not officially part of MegaMediaMarketing was the Time cover story on Scott Turow, which coincided (as a Newsweek story so mischievously noted) with the release of the Warner Bros. film of his novel “Presumed Innocent,” which was also published in paperback by Warner Books, which would also publish his next novel, “The Burden of Proof.”
No matter how suspect, the synergy in this case was purely coincidental, Kirshbaum maintains.
“In fact, the editorial side and the business side are very much separate,” he says, offering as evidence the lampooning review of Waller’s second novel, “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend,” in the Nov. 1 issue of Time. “I saw the editor in the hall and said, `Boy, you guys are sure doing your job of maintaining editorial integrity.’ “
Unlike Time Warner, S.I. Newhouse has yet to add a movie studio to his holdings, but they do include some of the nation’s biggest, slickest magazines (Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker) and its most prominent publishing companies (Random House, Knopf, Crown, Vintage). His corporate household also has the most prominent husband-wife team in publishing: Harold Evans, chief of Random House, and Tina Brown, editor of The New Yorker, formerly of Vanity Fair.
An `unhealthy’ alliance
One former Newhouse editor, who asked not to be quoted by name, called this marriage of corporate and personal interests “desperately unhealthy,” and claimed that publicists and editors in the publishing houses routinely confer with “Tina and Gray” (Graydon Carter, who succeeded Brown as editor of Vanity Fair) about stories on their authors.
Although such allegations are categorically denied by Newhouse officials, there seems to be occasional evidence in the magazines’ pages of synergy at work, most recently in the May issue of Vanity Fair, which featured a profile of novelist Gita Mehta, who’s the wife of Sonny Mehta, Knopf’s editor in chief.
And early in her tenure at The New Yorker, Brown was accused by novelist John le Carre of savaging a biography that flattered Rupert Murdoch, who had fired Evans as editor of the Times of London a decade earlier.
Evans calls any suspicions of collusion between the publishing houses and the magazines “nonsense, invented stupidity, a higher form of paranoia expressed by people who haven’t had any real experience in the way the world works.”
“What these paranoid theorists don’t take into sufficient account,” Evans says, “is that the editor of a magazine or a book company is driven by a determination, an ambition, to make a success of his or her own business, without any concessions to wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, friendships-anything which might get in the way goes by the board.”
Evans does say that synergy has its “dark side” at companies where an “enormously powerful owner doesn’t see why he shouldn’t intrude on the editorial process, to use all his properties for a single purpose in which he has a major commercial interest.”
It’s just such deliberate violations of the public interest, in the name of synergy, that worry Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine.
“As fewer and fewer people control more and more instruments of the media, print and electronic,” Lapham says, “it all seems to come down to the same small man at the end of the same long table in the same conference room.”
Whether that man is Rupert Murdoch, S.I. Newhouse, Martin Davis of Paramount, Barry Diller of QVC, Sumner Redstone of Viacom, Gerald Levin of Time Warner or Lew Wasserman of MCA, the Japanese-owned godzilla whose empire includes Putnam books and Universal Studios, the concentration of media power in so few hands indicates one thing to Lapham: monopoly.
“And nobody’s objecting,” he says. “Not a peep out of anybody about anti-trust. That’s because everybody’s involved, not least of all the newspapers, which have always been the main sources of dissent.”
The relative silence may not be due to the absence of dissent so much as the confusion and uncertainty over what constitutes a monopoly, according to Martin Garbus, a New York lawyer specializing in publishing cases. Once the battle between Viacom and QVC for Paramount is resolved, he says, it could well lead to a “new definition of monopolies, if Congress and the Senate become concerned.”
Though surrounded and presumably threatened with extinction by wealthy and rapacious conglomerates, the editors of New York’s independent publishing companies, such as Farrar Straus & Giroux and W.W. Norton, don’t seem alarmed about their prospects for survival.
Roger Straus, whose company is the hardcover publisher of Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag and Scott Turow, dismisses synergy as an “annoying pimple on the nose of progress.”
Norton’s president, Donald Lamm, maintains that staying “medium-sized and agile” gives his company plenty of “room to maneuver,” unlike so many of the behemoths in the tar pits of Manhattan publishing. “The amazing thing is that there’s so little communication among the various divisions, so little cooperation and coordination.”
That may well be the salvation of independent publishers, as Warner Books’ Kirshbaum indirectly concedes. “Even with the conglomeratization, it’s still mass chaos out there in terms of the marketplace,” he says.
“As we like to say, there’s no captain of the channels. There’s just a bunch of people out there in leaky rowboats, trying to stay afloat.”
