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Workstation: Have a Great Vacation (if It’s Approved)

June 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Maybe this isn’t really a fear, but a fantasy — that I’m too valuable for the company to get along without me for even a week. Well, clearly that’s not the case, because I’ve always been allowed to go.

Other people’s vacations can make me anxious, too, because I often have to fill in when they’re away. Come to think of it, I have to fill in for a colleague next week. So, as peak vacation season begins, it’s time to worry at least a little about those left behind.

Employees should try to practice good pre-vacation hygiene — by doing as much of their work in advance as possible, and making sure that their replacements have the tools and knowledge to hold down the fort.

But, ultimately, it’s up to supervisors to set vacation policies that are fair and cause the least amount of disruption. That’s the view of Jay Jamrog, senior vice president of research for i4cp (short for Institute for Corporate Productivity), a research firm based in Seattle.

Did you just find out today that a co-worker will be gone this week and you need to take over for her? That’s poor planning. Too many managers wait until the last minute to start approving vacations because they have other things on their minds, Mr. Jamrog said.

Vacations should be agreed upon far in advance as part of a team effort, he said. That way, managers can find out as early as possible if too many people want to take the same weeks off — a particular danger during the holidays and the summer — and seek a solution.

Suppose that four people in the same small department want to take off the first two weeks in August, he said. It’s the manager’s job to decide that two of them will have to take the last two weeks of August instead — and “hopefully this would have been done in January,” Mr. Jamrog said.

In many industries, certain times of the year are off limits for vacations. The tax preparer who asks to take the first two weeks of April off will be laughed out of the office. When scheduling vacations, “protect your business interests, but in an equitable manner,” said Richard I. Greenberg, a lawyer for Jackson Lewis, a law firm that specializes in employment issues. If you have to turn down someone’s request for a particular vacation week, try to give that person first choice another time, he said.

An employee’s perception that a vacation policy is unfair can lead to a sense of distrust and a lack of commitment, he warned. It’s a feeling that can fester, and possibly even add fodder to a discrimination suit, he said.

Vacation policies should be consistent and clearly communicated, said Margaret Fiester, operations manager for the H.R. Knowledge Center at the Society for Human Resource Management. Sometimes it may be best to set up a bidding system in which employees submit vacation requests by a certain deadline, so that managers can accurately project staffing levels, she added.

Deciding vacations on the basis of seniority is one way to try to be fair, but that can also be hard on a new employee who must forgo a summer vacation with school-age children, or a homesick worker who can’t travel to see his family for the holidays. Still, a vacation policy based on seniority has the advantage of being clear. If a policy is unclear, and managers appear to be granting time off inconsistently, it can create the impression that they are playing favorites, Mr. Jamrog said.

It’s also a manager’s job to ensure that employees are properly trained to fill in for vacationing colleagues, he said. Present a vacation as a way for workers to develop new skills, and reward them for stepping in, he advised. “You can’t feel like you’re punishing your employees because someone is taking time off,” he said.

MORE than once, I’ve seen workers excel in their fill-in roles and receive promotions because they had proved they could handle more responsibility. So try to view a colleague’s vacation as an opportunity, rather than an occasion for worry or resentment. Managers can go a long way toward furthering this view by allowing time for training.

And if you’ve been lucky enough to go to the beach, or to a European capital, be sure to express gratitude to the people who filled in for you. Because probably not too long from now, they will be off on their own vacations, and you will be the employee who is left behind.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/jobs/have-a-great-vacation-if-its-approved.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Actors Today Don’t Just Read for the Part. Reading IS the Part.

June 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Zackman had classical training through the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, has worked in regional theaters for the last two decades and has had a sprinkling of appearances on television shows like “Law and Order.” Those performances, however, have brought neither fame nor fortune.

Instead, like a growing number of actors, she has found steady employment as a reader in the booming world of audiobooks.

In recent years, Ms. Zackman has recorded more than 200 titles, and she says she can now count on steady work of two books a month, earning $1,000 to $3,000 a book. The income helps her make the payments on her one-bedroom Manhattan apartment while giving her the freedom to travel around the country and perform.

Once a small backwater of the publishing industry, in part because of the cumbersome nature of tapes, audiobooks are now flourishing. Sales have been rising by double digits annually in recent years. A recent survey by industry groups showed that audiobook revenue climbed 22 percent in 2012 compared with 2011.

Much of the growth can be attributed to the business’s digital transformation — from how books are recorded (increasingly at studios in the actors’ homes) to how they are sold (through subscription or individually on the Internet) and consumed (downloaded to mobile devices).

That development is good for publishers and authors, of course. But it has also created a burgeoning employment opportunity for actors pursuing stardom on the stage and screen, allowing them to pay their bills doing something other than waiting on tables.

Ms. Zackman says the demand for her work is tied in part to her dedication to her craft, and she does extensive research before each book, with the aim of infusing intonation and emotion into each character’s voice. She also gives credit to Audible.com, a company in Newark that is pushing the digital revolution in audiobooks, and which has become her main employer.

“I get to have a whole flourishing life as an actress because they have given me an opportunity to practice and to be employed,” she said.

Audible, the biggest producer and seller of audiobooks, says it produced some 10,000 recorded works last year — either directly or through a service it provides that allows authors to contract directly with actors. Each book amounts to an average of two or three days in the studio, but can be more, for the person voicing the book.

Donald R. Katz, the founder and chief executive of Audible, which was bought by Amazon.com in 2008, said that his company employed 2,000 actors to read books last year, and he speculated that he was probably the largest single employer of actors in the New York area.

The actors’ guild says there is no way to calculate such a number but it confirms that not only is audio narration work suddenly plentiful, but that it is also lucrative enough to allow many of its members to survive on it.

As with other forms of acting, compensation varies according to fame. An unknown actor might earn a few thousand dollars for a book, while stars like Nicole Kidman, who recently narrated Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” for Audible, can be paid in the hundreds of thousands.

Still, Michelle Lee Cobb, president of the Audio Publishers Association, said “there are hundreds of actors who make their living reading books and we are seeing more and more people trying.”

The field is so promising that drama schools, including prestigious institutions like Juilliard and Yale, have started offering audio narration workshops.

Courtney Blackwell Burton, director of career services at Juilliard, said: “It is very exciting because it is a new source of income and work that really uses their training. We are really pushing this idea of entrepreneurship, and with narration you can even have your own studio in your home.”

Since the workshops started in 2008, eight Juilliard actors have recorded 62 books for Audible, she said.

Katherine Kellgren has led narration classes at various acting schools. She said she was excited that audio narration, which is different from other forms of acting, is finally getting recognition as a craft.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/business/media/actors-today-dont-just-read-for-the-part-reading-is-the-part.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Corner Office: Paul Venables: Paul Venables, on Asking for the Toughest Jobs

June 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Q. Were you in leadership roles early on?

A. My first job managing people was when I was 16, and I was given the keys to Carvel Store No. 1587 in Stratford, Conn. I was managing people who would come back on college break to work at the ice cream shop. They were older than me, and that was tricky. I learned a lot.

But I’ve always been a guy with a lot of opinions. And with opinions often comes conviction, and you see a better way to do things. So you become vocal and you get comfortable standing up in front of people or talking to people or swaying a room to move in a certain direction.

I should point out that I’m one of seven children, and it was a zoo at my house and therefore you had to work to be heard. Not only did you have to be crafty, smart and loud, but you also had to be on your toes to convince other people to do what you wanted, especially since I was on the younger end. Learning to navigate in that household, I developed some communication skills.

Q. I’ve been struck by the number of C.E.O.’s I’ve interviewed who come from large families.

A. I’m sixth out of seven, so I had five other teachers in the house. I learned certain things from my parents, but each kid had different interests, different styles, and I would learn and almost pick and choose from them — “That looks effective,” or “That’s smart.”

Q. How did you break into the industry?

A. I went to Madison Avenue to get a job, any job, in advertising. So I pounded the pavement, and at the time, you had to take typing tests at all the big agencies. I failed them all. Then I took a job at a small agency. They didn’t require typing tests, and the job I took was as the receptionist. Talk about learning people skills. You interact with absolutely everybody in the building — all the clients, all the people, all the vendors. I picked people’s brains about what they did and how they thought, and it was just a really helpful starting point.

The weird thing is right from that first job, I knew that someday I wanted my own agency. Every job I had after that, I gleaned the information I wanted, thinking: “I’m going to do that. I’m not going to do that.”

Q. Give me an example.

A. A big part of the job is motivating creative people with varied backgrounds and interests. What generally doesn’t work, or only works for a short time, is the fear-based motivation, the overt competition. Competition is healthy at some level, but when it’s presented as “Two parties are going to dance and we’re going to pick who wins,” I believe creativity is suffocated. You may get results once or twice because you lit a fire and people performed. But as an ongoing way to cultivate creativity, I think you have to make people feel like you believe in them. It’s as simple as that.

Q. What else about your culture?

A. We give out a lot of awards. We give a spousal award to the spouse or significant other who we think has put up with us monopolizing an employee’s time or sending them on a lot of travel. We’ll give them something like a weekend away and massages up in the wine country.

We also have an award where we literally give a golden commode — we call it the golden toilet award — to somebody in the trenches who is making things happen and is calm under pressure and takes care of things with dignity.

We also have an old-timers award. We’re coming up on 12 years now, but when we were six years old, we realized we had some people who had been here for five years. That’s pretty good, especially in advertising, where time is a bit like dog years. So we came up with the idea to give people this big glass beer stein boot with the five-year old-timer award emblazoned on it. It comes with a thousand-dollar bar tab at a pub around the corner, and they can spend it however they want. We suspected this would happen, but they often invite the newbies out and so you get this mixing of generations. There’s a great cross-pollination of people and values and ideas. I think we’re up to 38 old-timers by now.

Q. How has your leadership style evolved?

A. I was so focused on starting a company that I was maniacal about every little thing we did. In the last five years, I really focused on the fact that the secret to this thing is the culture. If I get the culture right, it will attract the right people, and they’re going to do the right kind of work.

The culture is not all foosball and Pizza Fridays. We have both and we enjoy both. But culture is about people knowing you’re there to support them, not looking over their shoulder waiting for them to fail, and that you’re there to help when they hit tough times. They can be very honest, come into your office and sit down and say, “I screwed up — help me out,” as opposed to trying to hide it.

I also want to make sure that managers know that their job is to get the people who work for them to be asking to work for them. So they can’t do that old trick of managing up to me and the partners, and being a complete jackal to the people below. They know I’m asking people constantly: “Hey, are they giving you timely feedback? Are they helpful? Are they courteous? Do they have basic human decency?” These things are important.

Q. What career advice would you give to new college grads?

A. The advertising-specific one is ask for the headaches. Find something your boss is doing that he hates doing — it’s difficult, painful, time-consuming — and say, “I’ll take that,” and make it great. Too many people ask for the choice assignments. Do the dishes really well and you’ll be a very valuable person.

The broader advice is that the only things you can control in your life are your attitude and your effort. You can’t control all the craziness of the people around you, the circumstances, the situations, the failures and successes. Give it your all and have a positive attitude. It goes a long way in the world. That’s underappreciated, I think.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/business/paul-venables-on-asking-for-the-toughest-jobs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Cleric Arrested in $26 Million Plot, Leaving New Blot on Vatican Bank

June 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Claiming to have foiled a caper worthy of Hollywood, or at least Cinecittà, the Italian police on Friday arrested a prelate and two others on corruption charges, saying that the priest plotted last summer to help wealthy friends sneak the money, the equivalent of about $26 million, into Italy while evading financial controls.

Along with the prelate, a financial broker and a military police agent deployed to the Italian Secret Service were arrested after an investigation that developed out of a broader three-year inquiry into the Vatican Bank. The case is the latest black mark on the bank, which under Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to shake its image as a secretive tax and money laundering haven and bring itself into compliance with European norms so it can use the euro.

Rome prosecutors say the three men hired a private plane last July with the intention of bringing the cash into Italy from Locarno, Switzerland. The money was to be carried by the Secret Service agent, Giovanni Maria Zito, who would not be required to declare it at the border. But the scheme fell through, the prosecutors said, as the three began bickering and, eventually, lost their nerve. Cellphones used by the three in arranging the money transfer were later burned, prosecutors said.

The European Union and the United States have served notice in recent years that they will no longer tolerate the wall of secrecy in tax havens like Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands. As a result, major account holders have been growing increasingly nervous.

Nello Rossi, the Rome prosecutor who led the investigation, said that discussions picked up on wiretaps seemed to indicate that the 20 million euros in Switzerland was tied to the D’Amico family, Salerno shipping magnates.

Even before his arrest on Friday, the prelate, Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, was known to the authorities. An employee of Deutsche Bank before entering the priesthood, and until recently an accountant in a top Vatican financial office that oversees the Catholic Church’s real estate holdings, Monsignor Scarano was under investigation by magistrates in Salerno on accusations that he illegally moved $730,000 in cash from his account in the Vatican Bank to Italian banks, his lawyer said.

Monsignor Scarano’s lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client would contest the charges. “I am certain he will want to speak to prosecutors to clarify his position,” Mr. Sica said. He added that Monsignor Scarano had had no previous dealings with the police or with judicial investigations.

In a statement on Friday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that Monsignor Scarano had been suspended from his position at the Vatican “more than a month ago, ever since his superiors were informed that he was under investigation.”

He added that the Holy See “has not yet received any requests from the competent Italian authorities, but confirms its willingness for full collaboration,” and that the Vatican’s internal financial watchdog was following the matter and would take, “if necessary, the appropriate measures in its competency.”

Only priests, members of religious orders, Catholic institutions, employees of the State of Vatican City and diplomats accredited to the Holy See are allowed to keep accounts at the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion. But rumors have long swirled that accounts were being used as fronts for other interests, including organized crime and Italian politicians.

In the Salerno case, prosecutors accuse Monsignor Scarano of having illegally moved 560,000 euros, equivalent to $730,000, from his account in the Vatican Bank. Mr. Sica said that the monsignor had told prosecutors that the money came from a “generous donor” and was intended to finance a hospice for terminally ill patients in Salerno.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified Roberto Calvi. He was a banker with close ties to the Vatican who was found dead in 1982, not a Vatican employee whose daughter was involved in a famous kidnapping case.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/world/europe/cleric-and-2-others-arrested-in-vatican-bank-investigation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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F.D.A. Approves a Drug for Hot Flashes

June 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The first nonhormonal drug to treat hot flashes won approval from the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, offering a new alternative to menopausal women.

The move was surprising because an advisory committee to the F.D.A. voted 10 to 4 in March against approval.

The treatment, which will be called Brisdelle, was developed by Noven Pharmaceuticals and consists of a low dose of paroxetine, which is used at higher doses in the antidepressant Paxil.

Approved treatments for menopausal hot flashes until now have all contained the hormone estrogen, sometimes in combination with progestin. But hormone use has decreased sharply since a study in 2002 suggested that the combination of estrogen and progestin could increase the risk of cardiovascular problems and cancer.

“There are a significant number of women who suffer from hot flashes associated with menopause and who cannot or do not want to use hormonal treatments,” Dr. Hylton V. Joffe, director of the F.D.A’s division of bone, reproductive and urologic products, said in a statement.

While the F.D.A. does not have to follow the recommendations of its advisory panels, it is highly unusual for it to approve a drug that receives a strong negative vote. Committee members who voted against it said while there was a need for a nonhormonal therapy, Noven’s candidate was only minimally effective.

The agency did not explain why it went against the panel’s recommendation, saying only that it viewed Brisdelle as a useful treatment that had met its goals in clinical trials.

Women in the clinical trials for Brisdelle started out with a median of about 10 hot flash episodes a day. After 12 weeks, those who took the drug had a median of nearly six fewer episodes a day, compared with a reduction of four or five episodes a day for those receiving the placebo.

While the difference was statistically significant, many members of the advisory committee said such a difference would not be meaningful to women.

Noven, which is based in Miami and is a subsidiary of Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical of Japan, said Brisdelle would be available in November. It did not say how much the drug would cost.

Dr. Joel Lippman, chief medical officer of Noven, said in a statement that 24 million women in the United States had moderate to severe hot flashes and that two-thirds of them were not currently treating them.

Brisdelle’s label has a strong warning that the drug can increase suicidal thoughts or behavior, language similar to that on the labels of other drugs containing paroxetine. Other warnings include an increased risk of bleeding, and possible reduction in the effectiveness of the breast cancer drug tamoxifen if both drugs are used together.

The advisory panel in March gave an even stronger no vote to another proposed nonhormonal treatment for hot flashes, an extended-release version of the neurology drug gabapentin. In that case, the F.D.A. went along with the panel, rejecting the drug, according to an announcement by its developer, Depomed.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/business/fda-approves-a-drug-for-hot-flashes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Consumer Sentiment Ended June Near a Six-Year High

June 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Consumer sentiment improved, ending this month close to a six-year high set in May, as optimism among higher-income families rose to its strongest level in six years, a survey released on Friday showed.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s final reading on the overall index on Americans’ consumer sentiment was 84.1 points, slightly below the 84.5 in May. The new figure was higher than the preliminary reading of 82.7.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the final June reading of 82.8.

“Consumers believe the recovery has achieved an upward momentum that will not be easily reversed,” Richard Curtin, survey director, said in a statement.

He added that the recent drop in stock prices and the jump in mortgage rates had not caused a deterioration in consumers’ view on the economy.

“To be sure, few high- or low-income consumers expect the economy to post robust gains or think the unemployment rate will drastically shrink during the year ahead,” Mr. Curtin said.

Consumer sentiment is considered by some economists as a predictor on consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the United States economy.

Also on Friday, the Institute for Supply Management-Chicago said its index on Midwest business activity posted a steeper-than-expected drop in June to 51.6. A reading below 50 points suggests business contraction.

“It’s not firmly in expansion territory where businesses are ready to hire and invest,” said Tim Quinlan, an economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, N.C.

In the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s data, there was a divergence in outlook between higher-income families and lower-income ones.

Higher-income households showed increased optimism about their incomes and wealth, while lower-income ones reported less optimism. Families in the top third of incomes were the most optimistic since the June 2007 survey.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/business/economy/consumer-sentiment-ended-june-near-a-six-year-high.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Horse-Butchering Plan Gains as U.S. Agrees to Inspect

June 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A plant in New Mexico that plans to slaughter horses to produce meat for human consumption moved a step closer to operation on Friday when the Agriculture Department said it would provide legally required inspection services.

Courtney Rowe, a spokeswoman for the department, said it was likely to grant inspection services to two more plants “in the coming days.” The department did not name them but has said it has applications from facilities in Iowa and Missouri.

Although the plant, owned by the Valley Meat Company in Roswell, N.M., still has hurdles to overcome in the state, it is on track to become the first operation in the nation permitted to process horses into meat since Congress effectively banned the practice seven years ago.

Ms. Rowe said the department had determined that the company met all of the requirements of the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

The Obama administration has asked Congress to reinstate a ban on horse slaughtering in the United States. The House and Senate appropriations committees have approved similar amendments that would deny government financing for horse slaughter.

But “until Congress acts, the department must continue to comply with current law,” Ms. Rowe added.

In a statement, Valley Meat said it was “encouraged that after well over a year of delay that the process has finally reached completion.”

It said it planned to hire as many as 100 employees to work in the plant.

Opponents of horse slaughter said the federal government had options that would have allowed it to withhold inspection. They said that it had agreed to provide inspection services in an effort to put an end to a lawsuit filed by Valley Meat.

“This looks like a strange obedience to a Hail Mary lawsuit filed by the company,” said Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States.

Valley Meat said, however, that it would continue to press the lawsuit. “Given the unjustifiable failures of U.S.D.A. to comply with the law for a period extending well over 14 months, Valley Meat intends to continue to pursue the case,” the company said.

Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Gary K. King, the state’s attorney general, have opposed horse slaughtering, in part because of animal welfare issues but also because of potential hazards to humans. Horses are routinely injected with veterinary drugs by owners who never expect them to be eaten.

The Humane Society maintains a list of more than 100 drugs administered to horses, some of which carry labels stating they are not to be used in horses intended for human consumption. Bruce A. Wagman, a lawyer for Front Range Equine Rescue, a group opposing horse slaughter, said those drugs also posed an environmental hazard that the Agriculture Department was ignoring.

“The offal and waste byproducts produced by horse slaughter is put into lagoons where those drugs and other contaminants can leach out into streams and ground water,” Mr. Wagman said.

Phil Sisneros, a spokesman for Mr. King, New Mexico’s attorney general, said Valley Meat still faced hurdles to resuming operations there. (The plant was shut in 2007, after Congress effectively banned horse slaughtering). In a recent opinion, Mr. King said drugs administered to horses could constitute illegal contamination under New Mexico law.

“As I understand it, their attorney has said they have a testing process ready to go, and that’s a good thing,” Mr. Sisneros said. “We’re not going to just take their word for it, so there will be some sort of independent testing that has to be done.”

He said the environmental crime unit in the attorney general’s office would monitor Valley Meat, along with the state’s environment department, which has dealt with the company in the past.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/business/horse-butchering-plan-gains-as-us-agrees-to-inspect.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Publisher Drops Book Deal With TV Chef Paula Deen

June 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

But on Friday, its publisher, Random House, said it would not publish the cookbook, and would cancel a five-book contract it signed with Ms. Deen last year.

The book deal was one of the last remaining lucrative business relationships for the embattled celebrity chef. Its cancellation came on a day when Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney announced that they would stop selling products, including cookbooks, branded with her name.

Since last week, the Food Network, Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, Caesars Entertainment, QVC and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk have decided to suspend or sever ties with Ms. Deen after her admission in a legal deposition that she had used racist language in the past and allowed racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes in one of her restaurants. Ms. Deen was deposed on video as part of a discrimination lawsuit filed last year by a former employee.

Her frantic efforts to stanch the flow of negative opinion by defending herself on the “Today” show and posting apologetic videos on YouTube have rallied many of her admirers. They have threatened boycotts of Walmart, created a “We Support Paula Deen” Facebook page that has well over half a million “likes,” and started a campaign to flood the Food Network offices with empty butter wrappers, a symbol of Ms. Deen’s indulgent cooking style.

But these efforts have not, apparently, made a difference to Ms. Deen’s corporate partners.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, said in a statement Friday afternoon, “After careful consideration, Ballantine Books has made the difficult decision to cancel the publication of ‘Paula Deen’s New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up.’ “

The book, co-written by Melissa Clark, a dining columnist for The New York Times, was to feature lighter fare than the fat- and sugar-laden recipes Ms. Deen has promoted in previous books and on her television shows.

A person with knowledge of Random House’s decision to cancel the contract said, “When Walmart, Target and J. C. Penney all announced they are discontinuing their Paula Deen business, including books, it is awfully tough to stay the course of a publication. It was a business decision.”

Ms. Deen has published 14 cookbooks, starting in 1998 with “The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook.” Together, they have sold more than eight million copies.

But many of the sales outlets that normally sell thousands of Ms. Deen’s books — like Walmart, Target, Kmart and QVC — would have refused to carry the new one.

Random House would not disclose the amount Ms. Deen was to be paid, but a person with knowledge of the contract said it involved millions of dollars. It is unclear whether Ms. Deen will have to return any of it, or whether a clause in the contract would allow the publisher to cancel the pact because of Ms. Deen’s behavior.

“That’s why God invented lawyers,” said Mr. Applebaum.

On Thursday, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it was suspending its use of Ms. Deen as a spokeswoman for the drug. The company, which has the top-selling portfolio of diabetes medications in the United States, has reached out vigorously to black Americans in its marketing and medical sponsorships.

Ms. Deen began a multiplatform campaign to promote the drug on the same day last year she revealed she had Type 2 diabetes. That set off public criticism that she had misserved her audience. She had received the diagnosis two years earlier, yet had continued to promote recipes high in sugar and fat.

Didra Brown Taylor, the executive director of the Beautyshop Project, a national diabetes screening initiative that offers free blood tests in hair salons in low-income neighborhoods, said that Ms. Deen’s conflict of interest was noted by program participants at the time, and that the current crisis had confirmed many in their beliefs that Ms. Deen might be more opportunistic than honest.

“She was cooking food that a diabetic would not eat,” Ms. Taylor said. “And to profit from that and then to profit from a diabetes drug, that’s hypocrisy.”

She said African-Americans were unlikely to forget Ms. Deen’s more recent admission that she used racial epithets. “It’s more than a rumor,” Ms. Taylor said. “She can’t say that she didn’t say it.”

Leslie Kaufman contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/business/media/publisher-drops-book-deal-with-tv-chef-paula-deen.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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No One’s Seen It, but Netflix Renews It

June 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The company announced on Thursday that it had ordered a second season, two full weeks before subscribers get to see the first season. Such an early pickup is a rarity in television.

“It is unusual,” Cindy Holland, the company’s vice president for original content, acknowledged on Friday, but it was motivated by a practical matter: Netflix wanted to shorten the wait time between the first season and the second. In Season 2, she said, “our hope is that we can launch in late spring to early summer, rather than midsummer.”

The one-hour series, which comes online July 11, has both dramatic and comedic elements. It comes from Jenji Kohan, who created “Weeds” for Showtime, and stars Taylor Schilling as an unlikely new inmate at a women’s prison and Jason Biggs as the fiancé waiting for her release.

“Orange” has received raves from those who have seen the first episodes (The New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum called it a brilliant cross between “Oz” and “The L Word” on a podcast last week) but it doesn’t have the same name recognition as other original Netflix offerings, like “House of Cards,” the political thriller that came online in February, or “Arrested Development,” the revival of the Fox comedy that came online one month ago. Renewing the show so early may boost interest in the first season’s worth of episodes.

“To the industry, an early renewal is a vote of confidence in the show’s creators,” said Diane Gordon, the television editor for Studio System News, an industry Web site. “To fans, it encourages them to watch a show because they know it won’t disappear after two or three episodes, as often happens on broadcast networks. ”

Earning the loyalty of fans is critical for a service like Netflix, which depends on monthly subscriber fees. “Orange” continues the company’s push to compete with traditional sources of entertainment and, along the way, alter the definition of television.

Television executives could recall only a few other occasions when additional episodes were ordered ahead of a premiere — some prophetic and others, well, not. The premium-cable channel Starz did so with “Boss,” a drama led by Kelsey Grammer, only to have that series wind down after two seasons. More successfully, Starz renewed “Spartacus” a full month before viewers saw the first episode in 2010.

“Even the best of shows take more than one season to fully develop,” Chris Albrecht, the chief executive of Starz, said in an e-mail. “While we are always mindful of the audience, we are not slaves to ratings, which offers the creative teams we have confidence in the luxury of time to develop the stories and characters.”

HBO, the category leader, has a tendency to renew shows within weeks, and sometimes within days, of their start dates. In these cases, the network executives have already seen many of the coming episodes, so they have a good sense of what to expect.

Because Netflix releases all the episodes of a season at the same time, the executives there have already seen all 13 episodes of “Orange Is the New Black.” “We don’t have the benefit of having viewing information from our subscribers yet, but we do know creatively everything about the season,” Ms. Holland said.

Ms. Kohan alluded to that when she spoke at the New York premiere of the series at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. “I feel like I’m at the end of a pregnancy and I just want it out,” she said.

The announcement means that Netflix has renewed all of its original series to date, with one exception, “Arrested Development.” (While the company would like more episodes, it has warned that reassembling the cast would be very difficult.) It committed to two seasons of “House of Cards” from the get-go (the second is in production now); it long ago ordered more episodes of “Lilyhammer; and this month it renewed the horror series “Hemlock Grove.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/business/media/no-ones-seen-it-but-netflix-renews-it.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Motion Picture Academy Seeks to Expand Membership

June 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

LOS ANGELES — Reversing a policy that has more closely restricted membership in the last decade, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday invited an unusually large group of film professionals — 276 in total, including the actors Milla Jovovich and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — to join its ranks.

The invitation list represents a sharp increase from last year, when 176 new members were invited. That number was roughly calculated to maintain the size of the group, which annually awards the Oscars, and was generally consistent with the practice since 2004, when the Academy moved to tighten its rolls by focusing heavily on credentials, including any recent Oscar nomination, in deciding whether to extend an invitation.

This year, however, the Academy — which has been concerned about a lack of diversity within its ranks, and is searching for new connections to emerging aspects of cinema — dropped a system by which each of its branches was held to a quota.

It particularly encouraged the expansion of its documentary branch, which had been one of its smallest. That branch has only 173 members, but this year it invited 42 documentarians to join, compared with just 11 last year. Among those invited were Marcel Ophuls, whose work includes “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and both Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who directed “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

Other actors on a list of 22 invitees — actually fewer than the 25 invited last year — include Michael Peña, Lucy Liu, Jennifer Lopez, Charles Grodin and Jason Bateman. Among the 15 directors invited to join, an increase from last year’s 11, were Paul Feig, Benh Zeitlin and Steve McQueen.

Kevin Tsujihara, recently named chief executive of Warner Bros., was perhaps the best-known of the 17 executives invited to join. In a twist, Neil Meron, who was a producer of this year’s Oscar telecast and whose film credits include “Hairspray” and “The Bucket List,” was invited to join as a member at large rather than as a producer.

Jason Blum, whose credits include “The Purge” and “Paranormal Activity,” was among nine producers invited to join, a decline from the 12 who were invited to join last year.

The short films and features animation branch sharply increased its invitations, to 19 from 11. Among those invited this year was Matt Groening, whose feature film credits include “The Simpsons Movie.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/business/media/motion-picture-academy-seeks-to-expand-membership.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,
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