Publishers

The Washington Post named Katharine Weymouth its publisher Thursday, restoring a member of the Graham family to the position after a seven-year hiatus. The newspaper also said it would offer voluntary buyouts to employees next month, the third such round since 2003 and the latest sign of contraction in the newspaper industry. Weymouth, 41, vice president of advertising since 2005, is the granddaughter of Katharine Graham, publisher during the Post's famed investigation of the Watergate scandal.

Los Angeles Times Publisher David D. Hiller resigned Monday after a 21-month tenure that encompassed the departures of two Times editors and plans for the sharpest staff and production cuts in the newspaper's history amid a continuing slide in advertising revenue. Tribune Co. -- which owns The Times and other media assets, including the Chicago Tribune and KTLA-TV Channel 5, as well as the Chicago Cubs baseball team -- named no successor to Hiller.

Publisher Prosper Assouline is sniffing a $250 book. He has hoisted the enormous tome "Masks" by Thierry Despont from the table in front of him, swung it open and inserted his nose. He looks a bit like a bookworm with an extreme case of myopia. But he is not reading. Although Assouline is a man who sells books, he is not one who traffics in words. He sells style. And he believes wholeheartedly that one can -- and should -- judge a book by its cover.

The newly appointed publisher of the Orange County Register won't be taking the newspaper's top spot because she lied about her college diploma on her resume, the newspaper said Wednesday. Marti Buscaglia, publisher of the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune, was named to the position two weeks ago. On Wednesday, current Register Publisher N. Christian Anderson III announced that the deal was off.

NEW YORK -- John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman stayed in its psychiatric ward. Victims of 9/11 were treated in its emergency room. And the hospital went Hollywood in 1945 when the movie "The Lost Weekend" was filmed there. Now the 271-year-old Bellevue Hospital is producing literature -- and not just the medical kind.

The nation's weary and worried book critics, who have endured cutbacks in newspapers around the country, are getting a pat on the back from the industry they cover. The Assn. of American Publishers announced Wednesday that it will give its annual AAP Honors prize, for "significant achievements in promoting American books and authors," to the National Book Critics Circle.

Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz will resign after News Corp.'s acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. is complete, the companies said. Crovitz, who is also executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its consumer media group, will write a column for the Journal after he departs. He will be replaced by Robert Thomson, currently editor of the Times of London, a News Corp. newspaper. Dow Jones General Counsel Joseph Stern, a board member, also will leave.

A federal judge sentenced former Chicago Sun-Times Publisher David Radler to 29 months in prison for taking millions of dollars in unauthorized payments from the tabloid's parent company. Radler received a reduced sentence in exchange for pleading guilty and cooperating with the investigation of a fraud scheme at Hollinger International Inc.

The original scribes of the Bible may have been inspired by God. Their modern-day successors? They find inspiration in vacuum cleaners, polka-dot bedspreads and a slick, hot-pink Juicy Couture purse. This all may sound a bit irreverent. But consider it from the Bible publisher's point of view: How do you sell a really old book that 91% of households already have? You can't update the content, or get the author on Oprah. But you can make the look sizzle.

Time Warner Inc. is selling its book publishing division to the French conglomerate Lagardere for $537.5 million, the companies said Monday. Time Warner Book Group is the fifth-largest U.S. book publisher, with a stable of writers that includes Nelson DeMille and James Patterson. Its major imprints include Warner Books and Little, Brown. The deal would make Lagardere's book-publishing unit the third-largest worldwide.