Good reporting from PublishersLunch:
Is Huffington Puffing?
Ariana Huffington continues to play out her big “scoop” on Judith Miller, and has upgraded the Huffington Post’s standard of proof: Yesterday’s third-hand report (”sources tell me that Judy Miller is telling friends”) has been emphatically refined to definitive second or third-hand confirmation. To wit: “Miller has absolutely, positively been telling friends that she has a $1.2 million book deal. Period. The end.”Yesterday we made the mistake of assuming that Huffington’s “update” on a conversation with Simon & Schuster president Carolyn Reidy was complete and accurate–when it was apparently presented to serve Huffington’s ends, and give the incorrect impression that Reidy was parsing words carefully in her denial.
Reidy tells Lunch: “What I said (but she didn’t put on her site) was that there was no proposal, no discussions about a book, no discussion about money, no p&l created, no offer made, no signed deal. I was trying to be as definitive as possible in telling her her information was 100% wrong (which I also said).”
Reidy “added that we assumed she might want to write a book, and since Alice Mayhew had been her editor, I assumed Alice would be interested in it, but that there had been no discussions at all about it [that Reidy knows of or was involved in] and certainly no money offered.”
Huffington is back at the parsing game today, using an e-mail from Miller’s agent Amanda Urban–”As far as I know, Judy has not written a book proposal, and certainly I have nothing on submission to S&S or any other publisher”–to suggest that this isn’t a real denial since such a project might not be formally submitted or presented as a written proposal.
