Publishing

Some ideas that seem so simple unleash waves of creativity that expand in exquisitely complex ways. One such musical brainstorm is to offer a new body of work as notated sheet music, as Los Angeles songwriter Beck Hansen has done. His new work, "Song Reader," consists of 20 new pieces that the artist hasn't recorded. Rather, he teamed with the book publisher McSweeney's to unveil the songs in notated form. It is designed as a folio, and the hope is that the individually illustrated songbooks included within will inspire other musicians to interpret the written music and then share it. It was, describes writer Jody Rosen in the liner notes, "an experiment in ventriloquism": Provide the melodic and lyrical dialogue, but leave the aesthetic voice to strangers, who would head to parlors both real and virtual to perform the results.

A newspaper in White Plains, N.Y., stirred up local gun owners - as well as an angry debate on the Web - by publishing an interactive map showing the names and addresses of people with permits to own handguns. To the newspaper, it was a public service intended to inform a community rattled by the recent school massacre in Newtown, Conn., about the presence and prevalence of firearms. To gun owners, as well as many conservative pundits, it was an invasion of privacy that exposed law-abiding citizens to potential harassment and crime.

The Times on Tuesday released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse. The files, which have been redacted of victims' names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened from 1947 to 2005 that have not been released publicly.

My old friend Michael Ruhlman has come up with a terrific holiday gift not only for cookbook readers but for cookbook writers. Always out in front of the technological curve, Ruhlman and his photographer wife, Donna Turner Ruhlman, have just released a mini-cookbook for the iPad called “The Book of Schmaltz: A Love Song to a Forgotten Fat” (perfect timing, no? There are still four days of Hanukkah left). It's gorgeous. If for some reason you never thought frying chicken fat could be made beautiful, you really need to check this out. Especially on the iPad, the colors just glow.

Before sitting down for tea in Echo Park, the poet reaches for her iPhone. "I have to turn this thing off," she explains, silencing the ringer. "It's getting too noisy these days. " As a publisher, educator and author of seven books of poems, Eloise Klein Healy is a stalwart of the Los Angeles literary scene. Her phone has been buzzing more than usual in recent weeks as she prepares to take on a new title. On Friday, Healy will be named L.A.'s first poet laureate. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa decided earlier this year that his city, like others, should have a namesake poet.

Fyodor Khitruk Animated Soviet version of 'Winnie the Pooh' Fyodor Khitruk, 95, a prominent Russian animator and director who created the Soviet Union's cartoon version of A.A. Milne's classic Winnie the Pooh stories, died Monday in Moscow, according to the Russian Animated Film Assn. The cause of death was not specified. Khitruk was best known for his work aimed at children, such as "Vinni-Pukh," as Winnie the Pooh is known in Russia. The cartoon series was produced between 1969 and 1972 and continues to air on television.

Rupert Murdoch has pulled the plug on News Corp.'s high-profile experiment to create a digital national newspaper. The demise of the Daily, announced Monday by News Corp., illustrates the challenges the media baron faces as he attempts to transform his global publishing empire for the Internet age. The Daily was introduced nearly two years ago as the first news application for Apple Inc.'s iPad and was designed to dazzle a generation of young...

News Corp.'s soon-to-be publishing company will carry the name News Corp., while the company's television and movie properties will make up a separate global company called the Fox Group. Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate is in the process of dividing itself into two separately traded companies. It plans to spin off its publishing assets, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Times of London and HarperCollins book publishing, into one entity with the more lucrative entertainment properties making up the other.

Phoebe Hearst Cooke, who was a granddaughter of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst and used one of the nation's biggest fortunes to support a variety of philanthropic causes, has died. She was 85. Cooke, who had pneumonia, died Sunday in a Templeton, Calif., hospital, according to a statement from the Hearst Corp., the media company she served as a director for 36 years. Her twin brother, George Randolph Hearst Jr., who was a former publisher of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, died in June after a stroke.

HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster are in preliminary merger talks, according to the Wall Street Journal. Why not? Everybody's doing it. A merger between two of the other big six publishers was announced Oct. 29. Random House and Penguin plan to merge, after passing all regulatory hurdles. The deal is rumored to be for $2 billion to $3 billion; when you think about it, that's a pretty big range, not to mention an enormous chunk of change for an industry that is commonly thought to be teetering on the edge of oblivion.