Book deals: Times ‘Page One’ star to go long on morning shows; Politico cues up e-titles

Joe Pompeo
·Media Reporter

New York Times television reporter Brian Stelter took a page from the media properties he covers with a coy social-media roll-out of his own. In notices since last Friday on his Facebook page and Twitter account, Stelter teased a big announcement he'd be making Monday morning.

As it turns out, Stelter is neither quitting the paper of record nor getting hitched to girlfriend Nicole Lapin of CNBC. But he is poised to capitalize on the buzz attached to his starring role in Andrew Rossi's new documentary about the Times.

Stelter, who is one of the Times personalities Rossi focuses on in the film "Page One," has inked a deal with Hachette subsidiary Grand Central for a book about the morning news.

"Tentatively titled 'The Top Of The Morning,' it's going to be about 'Today,' 'Good Morning America' and the other morning shows that collectively set the nation's breakfast table every day," Stelter wrote on his personal Tumblr blog.

Grand Central, meanwhile, described the title to Publisher's Weekly as "a candid look at the surreal lives of the surrogate families that we invite into our homes each morning--and why the shows matter so much to the fragmenting television business."

The release is scheduled for 2013, but Stelter is already crowd-sourcing the material and has given the book a Tumblr of its own to document the research and reporting process.

In other publishing news, Politico will dive head first into its 2012 election coverage with a series of ebooks about the presidential campaign to be published by Random House this fall. The 20,000- to 30,000-word digital titles will be written by Politico's chief White House correspondent Mike Allen and veteran political scribe Evan Thomas. Former Newsweek captain Jon Meacham, who has settled into a career at Random House, will edit them.

"Our audience, their preference would certainly be not to wait until the end of the election," Politico executive editor Jim VandeHei told the New York Times. "And we're going to test how viable this is."

As The Cutline reported back in March, news organizations are turning to ebooks as a cheap and easy way to bolster the market for paid long-form content while creating another revenue stream to help offset declines in print advertising.

While Politico has partnered with a major publishing house, other outlets are cranking out ebooks on their own. The New York Times, for instance, published its first ebook, a 133,000-word collection of WikiLeaks reportage, earlier this year, and is in the process of finalizing the topic for its sophomore such effort. Time, ProPublica, Foreign Policy and others also have jumped on the bandwagon.