Award-Winning Wall Street Journal Reporters John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith To Publish Book Detailing Enron's Demise
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 2002--HarperCollins Publishers today announced that it has acquired world rights to publish INFECTIOUS GREED: The Fall of Enron by award-winning Wall Street Journal staffers John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith. The book, scheduled for publication in 2003 under the HarperBusiness imprint, will explore the company's fall into bankruptcy.
"No other authors can offer such an authentic and direct perspective on the Enron story," notes Cathy Hemming, Publisher and President of the HarperCollins General Books Group. "From the SEC to Enron's board of directors, Emshwiller and Smith are widely acknowledged as the authors of the key Wall Street Journal articles that revealed the company's secret debt. Readers will witness first-hand every nugget of the story just as it unfolded and follow Emshwiller, Smith, and their Wall Street Journal colleagues as they uncovered Enron's monumental lies."
Emshwiller, a senior national correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who has covered white-collar crime for over a decade, and Rebecca Smith, the Journal's national energy reporter, began closely collaborating in August 2001 when they investigated Jeff Skilling's surprising resignation as Enron's CEO after only six months in that role. What seemed like a routine assignment soon ignited a full-fledged series of investigative pieces uncovering the dark chambers of Enron's web of corrupt partnerships. These history-making pieces of journalism received numerous accolades including the Scripps Howard Foundation Award and the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business, financial, and economic journalism.
And now, Emshwiller and Smith delve even deeper with INFECTIOUS GREED. From the psychology of key players like Skilling and his predecessor Ken Lay to the unsavory culture of arrogance that perpetuated the company's rapid growth and lightning downfall; from the corrupting influences of corporate America's intermingling with the nation's top political figures to the utter failures of Wall Street's overall corporate assessment systems, these authors, unlike the Enron leaders they interviewed, withhold nothing.
"Just like the rest of America, we never expected a company as enormous as Enron to, as one analyst put it, 'have a conspiracy to mask,'" said Smith. "If ever there was a business story everyone can learn from, it's the demise of an organization that seemed so indestructible."
"What unfolded over the course of writing these stories revealed how far corporate image had strayed from corporate truth," said Emshwiller. "INFECTIOUS GREED will give everyone a sense of what it was really like for us to finally get to the truth within the Enron house of mirrors."
Dave Conti, Executive Editor of HarperBusiness, negotiated the deal with agent Geri Thoma of Elaine Markson Literary Agency. INFECTIOUS GREED is Emshwiller's second book with HarperCollins. His first was Scam Dogs and Mo-Mo Mamas, a chronicle of Internet stock-trading mania in the late 1990s. This is Smith's first book. Her Enron collaboration with Emshwiller brought Smith a second career Gerald Loeb Award. Both authors continue to work for the Wall Street Journal.
HarperCollins is one of the leading English-language publishers in the world and is a subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE:NWS, NWS.A; ASX: NCP, NCPDP). Headquartered in New York, the company has publishing groups in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. Its publishing groups include the HarperCollins General Books Group, HarperCollins Children's Books Group, Zondervan, HarperCollins UK, HarperCollins Canada, HarperCollins Australia/New Zealand and HarperCollins India. The HarperCollins General Books Group is made up of four operating divisions: HarperTrade, Morrow/Avon, HarperInformation and HarperSanFrancisco. You can visit HarperCollins Publishers on the Internet at harpercollins.com.
CONTACT:
HarperBusiness
Lisa Berkowitz, 212/207-7682
lisa.berkowitz@harpercollins.com
SOURCE: HarperCollins
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