At the time she was fired, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman was expected to post "strong fourth-quarter results... at the end of the month," according to the Observer. That only deepens the mystery as to why Friedman was fired — if not over bad numbers, then why? It does look like the book executive was pushed. She reportedly did not look distressed at an 11 am Wednesday meeting, just before News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch told her she would be replaced by her deputy Brian Murray. She supposedly had no clue as to the purpose of her meeting with Murdoch, the sort of blindsiding one would expect in a firing. And Friedman's replacement, Murray, started acting tense when he got the news of his promotion two days prior, according to the Observer's sources — hardly the behavior expected of someone replacing a voluntarily-departing executive. The weekend prior, Friedman had been in high spirits at a HarperCollins party. So many things don't add up:

The truth about HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman's abrupt departure from her job has now been established, sort of. While it's obvious that News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch fired her—not least because heir-in-waiting Brian Murray was offered Friedman's job two days before she knew anything about it—no one who's willing to speak knows why the unscrupulous Aussie cut loose a woman who, by all accounts, had done extremely well for the company and was widely admired by her publishing cohorts. And so the normally dry old book industry is consumed with soap opera-ish emotion and intrigue: Agent Robert Gottlieb calls the decision "a dreadful mistake...What can be in the minds of these people, losing somebody that valuable, is simply beyond my comprehension," while a HarperCollins exec says that they'd "all be helped emotionally if we had a better sense of why this happened." Bring in the trauma counselors!

Everyone seems nearly as confused in the aftermath of Jane Friedman's departure from atop HarperCollins as they were in the frantic hours before the official confirmation. But it looks increasingly like the CEO was elbowed aside. Friedman's deputy and successor, Brian Murray, has disclosed he was summoned to a meeting with Rupert Murdoch Wednesday and unexpectedly offered her job. But Friedman didn't discuss her departure with Murdoch until two days later, on Wednesday, according to a Times source "familiar with her situation." If true, that would signal Murdoch wanted her out. Perhaps the HarperCollins pipeline looked weak; Leon Neyfakh at the Observer raised the possibility of "a terrible fourth quarter." Still, there are all sorts of conflicting signals.

Looking for a decent excuse to advance his long-simmering feud with Rupert Murdoch and to do a weird Australian/pirate accent, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann seized upon the words of a former News Corp. insider, who claimed in one of our posts this morning that Murdoch fired Jane Friedman from HarperCollins because she canned powerhouse publisher Judith Regan in late 2006, and also because she squashed Regan's OJ Simpson book project. The source also claimed, tangentially and outlandishly, that Fox News chief Roger Ailes will soon be fired as well for his own role in the Simpson book fiasco. Predictably, this amused Olbermann to no end. For the crime of going to bat for the OJ book, Olbermann named Murdoch today's "worst person in the world," an honor previously bestowed to Fox News screamer Bill O'Reilly. He then did a killer Murdoch imitation that will surely put to rest those allegations that he's totally crazy. Clip after the jump.

The news that Harper Collins' CEO of ten years, Jane Friedman, is stepping down—just days after announcing at Book Expo America that she "loves" her job—has been met with surprise from both industry watchers and colleagues, and has triggered speculation that she was ruthlessly cut loose by her boss, News Corp. overlord Rupert Murdoch, due to disappointing company performance. The official line is that she resigned, of course, and the House of Rupe has since announced that Brian Murray, Friedman's No. 2, will take over as CEO effective immediately. No doubt the real story will emerge in the next few days.

Jane Friedman's departure as HarperCollins CEO, first reported by Gawker, has been officially confirmed by the book publisher. Her replacement by Brian Murray, 21 years her junior, comes less than a month after a similar generational shift at Bertelsmann AG's Random House, where unsentimental German engineer Markus Dohle, 39, replaced book-loving lawyer Peter Olson, 58. The young book executives hope to fix slowing growth and to better exploit the explosion in online digital media. But it's not clear whether broad technology trends had much to do with the departure of Friedman, who got her start as a Knopf dictaphone typist four decades ago, went on to become a pioneer in audio books and online marketing and who led a unique and ambitious push to digitize HaperCollins' collection. As a surprised fellow executives groped for answers about the change last night, some speculated it might even have its roots in late 2006, when Friedman, with the backing of Roger Ailes, squelched the a high-profile book overseen by HarperCollins executive Judith Regan by alleged killer OJ Simpson, then pushed Regan out of the company in the wake of Regan's remarks about Jews. As one former News Corp. insider put it:

See the updated original post for more.

We're hearing a wild rumor that Jane Friedman was just fired from her perch atop News Corp.'s HarperCollins. If true, this would sure lend a hefty dose of irony to the publishing executive's quote in the Observer today, gleaned from an industry party on the Twentieth Century Fox lot Saturday: "I love being CEO of HarperCollins!" Anyone hearing anything? UPDATE: The Observer quotes a source confirming Friedman's departure, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting the exit as fact. Two strange things about these reports:

Lawyers for EchoStar claim News Corp.'s satellite TV company DirecTV hired hacker Christopher Tarnovsky to steal and sell security codes for its competing Dish Network, eventually costing EchoStar $900 million in lost revenue. Tarnovsky testified in court yesterday and admitted he wrote such a program and that he took money from News Corp. publishing unit HarperCollins for ten years. He said his first payment was "$20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada," reports Reuters. Tarnovsky and DirecTV claim the hacker was only "reverse engineering" the Dish technology — a perfectly legitimate practice in the electronics industry. Though not one typically funded through secret international payments from unrelated corporate subsidiaries. (Photo by geraintwn)

HarperCollins Publishers decided that the book biz is too hard these days so it's going to try and get everyone else to do its job for it. Its books don't sell? That's the bookstores' problem; HarperCollins' new division will take no returns, or at least that's the goal. Writers need to eat while writing? That's what crippling credit card debt is for, losers; the new unit will pay "low or no advances," according to the Times, preferring to only fork out cash when it has made whatever it defines as a profit on a book. Here, the executive in charge of the new division explains how all this benefits you, the struggling writer. Just kidding, here's how he says it makes sense for his company:

Oh nooooo....Wham! songstress George Michael just signed a deal to write his memoirs! With News Corp publishing house HarperCollins no less, which makes his bitchtastic anti-Rupert Murdoch rant last year a little suspect. Groan. The thing about memoirs is, George, they work better when the public doesn't know in advance just about everything that will be in them. "People aren't stupid, they're beginning to notice that the truth is more interesting than the stories the press come up with," his manager said today. That persnickety press, always making up crazy allegations of Larry Craig-inspiring restroom romps and pea-brained drug busts.

Yesterday, a German magazine reported an unsourced rumor that media giant Bertelsmann AG will takeover Harper Collins for the bargain price of $1 billion. CNN picked up the story as did Forbes, but Reuters reported that a News Corp source had told them Rupert Murdoch's company "is not in discussions with Europe's biggest media company Bertelsmann AG BERT.UL or any other party on the sale of its book publisher HarperCollins." A Bertelsmann spokesperson said "I will not comment on that," when we called today. Bertelsmann was also rumored to be ditching their stake in magazine subsidiary Gruner + Jahr, but the company denied that today—they also announced they won't be buying the remaining shares of European broadcast company RTL that they don't already own. Know more? Let us know!

"The media went on a rampage, blaming me for the whole O.J. book debacle. They came out, guns blazing, and tried to kill me. I felt like Faye Dunaway's character in the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde. Bullets flying in every direction," former publisher Judith Regan writes in her hotly-anticipated Harper's Bazaar profile of herself. You know, the one where she talks about having sung 'My Way!' It's on newsstands now, and it is all about how she "took the blows." In fact, this phrase comes up several times. In one instance she writes that something happened "after a month of taking the blows without protection." Shots! Blows! Attempts on Judith's very life! What is fact here and what's hyperbole? Does Judith Regan believe in distinguishing between the two?

Judith Regan's not an anti-semite: She's an Italophobe! As the full 70-page text of her $100 million lawsuit against HarperCollins and News Corp. reveals, Judy herself is the victim of a "smear campaign." Remember those awful claims that Ms. Regan, upon her post-If I Did It dismissal, made mention of a "Jewish cabal" and "Of all people...the Jews should know about telling the big lie." Why were such malicious falsehoods spread about a lady who's, at worst, only the second most repellent nouveau Judy to have funded fornication with 9/11 charity monies? You guessed it: because of the NewsCorp conspiracy to elect Rudy Giuliani president at all costs!

Quick quick! If you respond to this ad in the next two-and-a-half minutes, you might be the lucky one chosen! The task? Hitting the streets to round up food carts for Thursday night's book launch of Michael Franzini's "One Hundred Young Americans," out a couple of weeks ago from HarperCollins, our favorite company that is currently being sued for $100-mil by Judith Regan.

From the mailbag: "at Milberg Weiss, Judith Regan has just filed a defamation lawsuit against Harper Collins, NewsCorp. and Jane Friedman." Looks like Judith is making good on the promise she made back in January, getting it in under the wire before the statute of limitations ran out. Brace for crazy!

Remember how deposed Regan Books tyrant Judith Regan used to torment her company's human resources department by mocking their tragicomic emails? Now that she's gone, their evil flourishes unchecked. Their latest bit of sadness follows.

The "scandal" that erupted over striking similarities between Jessica "Jerry's wife" Seinfeld's new Oprah-endorsed bestselling cookbook and Missy Chase Lapine's more modestly published take on the same topic—sneaking pureed veggies into kid-friendly foods—is grinding to an anticlimactic close, but Galleycat's Ron Hogan won't let it go. Today, he tries to find out whether the fact that Missy's book was submitted twice to Jessica's publisher might have resulted in plagiarism and learns that: guess what? Editors don't hang onto proposals they've rejected! They send them back to agents or throw them away, they don't keep them all in some giant walk-in storage facility. DUH. Here's the real shocker: that Spiegel & Grau's Julie Grau didn't have anything better to do than respond to Ron's email within "minutes." [Mediabistro]

9/11 wasn't so bad, according to newly Nobel-anointed novelist Doris Lessing. "Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she told Spanish daily El Pais. Also: "I always hated Tony Blair," and "I hate Iran, I hate the Iranian government, it's a cruel and evil government. Look what happened to its president in New York, they called him evil and cruel in Columbia University. Marvelous! They should have said more to him! Nobody criticizes him, because of oil." We want to be like this as an old lady: just walking around talking shit and whapping people with our cane. But between this and the Jessica Seinfeld plagiarism scandal, the HarperCollins publicity department is having kind of a bad week.

A tipster writes: