Random House has more layoffs

Random House has more layoffs

NEW YORK — Spokesmen for two newly formed divisions of Random House Inc. said there have been layoffs as the publishing giant continued its consolidation announced last December.

The Crown Publishing Group, where authors include President-elect Barack Obama, and the Knopf Doubleday Group, which publishes Toni Morrison and Anne Rice among others, separately announced on Wednesday a wave of promotions and personnel changes and confirmed that some employees had been cut.

Spokesmen Paul Bogaards of Knopf and David Drake of Crown each said there had been a small number of layoffs across various departments, after reductions at Random House announced last fall and at the end of last year, not long after the publisher merged its divisions from five into three. Random House has also frozen pensions for current employees and eliminated them for future hires.

Neither Bogaards nor Drake would offer specific numbers on how many had been let go, although both said no further cuts were planned.

Several publishers have announced layoffs and/or wage freezes in the past two months, including Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.

Free expression award for Krug

CHICAGO — The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression announced today that Judith F. Krug, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), will receive the William J. Brennan Jr. Award.

Krug is only the fifth recipient of the award since it was first given in 1993.

She will receive formal recognition in Chicago on July 12 at the Freedom to Read Foundation’s 40th Anniversary Gala, which will be held in the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Located in Charlottesville, Va., the Thomas Jefferson Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution dedicated to protecting free expression in all its forms. The Center pursues that mission through education, research and intervention on behalf of the First Amendment freedoms of free speech and free press.

The William J. Brennan Jr. Award recognizes a person or group for demonstrating a commitment to the principles of free expression followed by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice. This year, the center honors Krug’s remarkable commitment to the marriage of open books and open minds.

Krug, director of OIF since 1967, as well as the director of the office’s Freedom to Read Foundation since 1969, has fought would-be censors over everything from Huckleberry Finn to the Internet. She has tirelessly worked to protect and promote the library as a First Amendment institution.