Jon Katz works as a media critic and a writer of mysteries. Katz began as a journalist, working for a number of major metropolitan newspapers before becoming executive producer of the CBS Morning News in 1983. But, as he said in an Amazon.com interview, the show started to fail so he quit and began writing. In the following months he wrote his first novel, Sign Off. The book was published in 1981.

An indictment of the shallow and greedy corporate culture of the 1970s and 1980s, Sign Off tells the story of Peter Herbert, himself the producer of a morning news program for the fictional USB network. When the network is taken over by a ruthless real-estate tycoon, Peter is forced to cut the jobs of his long-time co-workers, only to be downsized in turn. Unwilling to sink passively into oblivion, Peter orchestrates a clever sabotage campaign against his...