Archives for September 2013

Both sides of the political aisle registered objections to the projects, which would have explored the life of the former first lady and potential 2016 presidential candidate. Members of the news divisions at NBC and CNN publicly protested the decision by their networks to go ahead with them.

On Monday, the networks said they were abandoning their projects, bringing to an end two initiatives that were announced with much fanfare over the summer.

CNN had commissioned Charles H. Ferguson, an Oscar-winning documentary maker, to examine Mrs. Clinton’s life on film. NBC announced this summer at a conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., that it had approved a mini-series about Mrs. Clinton, a former secretary of state, in which Diane Lane would portray her.

Both ideas quickly became lightning rods. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the planned films a “thinly veiled attempt at putting a thumb on the scales of the 2016 presidential election.” He threatened to refuse to work with CNN or NBC on any presidential primary debates if the network moved forward with the projects.

But as Republicans publicly worried that the projects would cast Mrs. Clinton in a favorable light, aides trying to guard her image privately grumbled about the projects, according to a person close to Mrs. Clinton who would not discuss private conversations for attribution.

The aides expressed concern to CNN that a for-profit documentary, which would be released theatrically and broadcast on CNN, would pose a potential conflict with its news coverage, especially since the cable channel had no creative control over it. They contended that the NBC mini-series, while not a direct conflict with the separately run NBC News division, would try to enhance ratings by focusing on the more melodramatic aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s life.

Over coffee at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Georgetown, Mr. Ferguson met with Nick Merrill, a press aide to Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Ferguson requested access and interviews to make his documentary.

But what was supposed to be a cordial get-together quickly became confrontational, said the person close to Mrs. Clinton, who was briefed on the meeting. Mr. Ferguson aggressively promoted his résumé — which included the documentary “Inside Job” about Wall Street’s role in the 2008 financial crisis, and a 2007 film, “No End In Sight,” about the American occupation of Iraq. (Mrs. Clinton has strong support on Wall Street, and as a senator in 2002 she voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.)

Mr. Merrill had not seen Mr. Ferguson’s films, but expressed skepticism about his intentions after he complained to Mr. Merrill that Clinton aides had told potential sources not to cooperate with his documentary. Mr. Ferguson said he felt Mr. Merrill had “interrogated” him and was dismissing the project because of Mr. Ferguson’s history of tough coverage. Both men left the meeting feeling uneasy.

What followed was a three-month tug of war between Clinton aides and Mr. Ferguson, who had planned to explore Mrs. Clinton’s life and career from her days working at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark.

On Monday, Mr. Ferguson abandoned the documentary and CNN said it would not find another filmmaker to continue the project. In a commentary posted on The Huffington Post, Mr. Ferguson said pressure from Clinton aides who did not want the film made became too intense. “I decided that I couldn’t make a film of which I would be proud,” he wrote. “And so I’m canceling.”

He declared his failure to win the access he needed “a victory for the Clintons, and for the money machines that both political parties have now become.” (Mr. Ferguson contributed more than $30,000 to the Obama Victory Fund in 2008, which supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.)

CNN declined to respond to questions about the Clinton team’s contact with the network. In a statement, it said, “We understand and respect” Mr. Ferguson’s decision not to move forward.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/business/media/cnn-documentary-is-off-filmmaker-blames-pressure-from-clintons.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

NBC made the announcement late Monday afternoon, just hours after the CNN documentary was shelved because the director, Charles H. Ferguson, said he could not gain access to people who would speak about Mrs. Clinton.

That would not have been the issue with the mini-series, which would use actors to tell the story of Mrs. Clinton; the Oscar-nominated Diane Lane had already signed on as the star.

But the NBC project drew opposition from the moment it was announced in July, both from the Republican National Committee, which accused the mini-series — though not yet written — of being a bouquet to Mrs. Clinton that would enhance her chances should she run in the 2016 presidential election, and from NBC’s own news division.

NBC News was reacting to the threat from Republicans that they would not allow any debates among their 2016 candidates to take place on NBC networks if the entertainment division went ahead with the project.

However, NBC Entertainment did not cite those complaints as a reason for abandoning the project. Instead, the move was explained as a basic programming decision made by the network’s top entertainment executive, Robert Greenblatt. Mr. Greenblatt had signaled some reluctance earlier by saying the project was only in development and that its future would depend on a successful script being written.

NBC issued a simple statement on Monday that read in its entirety: “After reviewing and prioritizing our slate of movie/miniseries development, we’ve decided that we will no longer continue developing the Hillary Clinton miniseries.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/business/media/nbc-scraps-hillary-clinton-mini-series.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

That’s not possible — not anymore. Last week, the magazine, known for a chatty, pop-culture approach to serious science, announced that it was shutting off online comments. “Comments,” an editor wrote in an online post, “can be bad for science.”

The magazine said that vicious, insulting or ignorant comments can pollute otherwise intelligent online discussions and undermine public understanding and appreciation of science itself. “Trolls and spambots,” it said, sometimes hijacked the conversation, particularly on divisive issues like climate change and evolution.

For example: “BUNK,” one commenter said of an article posted in August about scientists finding fossil evidence that mammals weren’t the first creatures with fur. “What this actually shows is that evolution is still nonsense and doesn’t work.”

Even on sites where comments are actively screened — like Nytimes.com, where moderators either post or reject submissions — people who think evolution is bunk are generally permitted to voice their view, often to be shouted down by others; for some readers, following such comment threads is part of the fun. But Popular Science and other publications do not have the resources to moderate all comments, so personal attacks and other bits of ugliness can slip in.

Still, the move to silence what many online readers consider a digital town square has ignited a burst of reaction from bloggers and commentators on science and the media, as well as editors at other science magazines. Many sympathized with the feeling that a Wild West of uncouth, illogical commenters can infect the tenor of discussion.

“Unless a comment stream is actively moderated, it inevitably is ruined by bullies, hotheads and trolls,” James Fallows wrote, explaining why he does not allow comments on his columns on The Atlantic’s Web site.

But others called Popular Science’s move too extreme, disagreeing that public support for science could be imperiled by unbridled comments. Some people said that comments, when kept under control, could benefit science, fostering debate and displaying what Will Oremus, on Slate, called the “spirit of free inquiry that has always driven scientific discovery.”

“I have to say I don’t think comments are bad for science,” Fred Guterl, executive editor of Scientific American, said in an interview. “To a point I think it’s good when people talk about things and try their ideas out,” he said. “Social media can cause things to go off the rails, but I don’t think comments are worse than Twitter.”

To justify its ban, Popular Science turned to science, citing a recent study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggesting that people’s perceptions of the riskiness of a scientific advance can become more entrenched and polarized after reading comments written in an uncivil tone.

Popular Science’s online content director, Suzanne LaBarre, wrote that that study, and another involving some of the same researchers, imply a discomfiting spiral: “commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded.”

Ms. LaBarre said in an interview that Popular Science could not afford comment moderators. Its writers monitor and delete comments that are “racist or sexist or homophobic,” she said, but usually stop as they move on to their next story.

Two other science journals said they did not hire moderators, yet had inexpensive ways to keep comments on a polite track.

At Nature, public comments on news articles and features are removed if editors or readers flag them as abusive or as spam, Noah Gray, a senior editor, said.

“There’s no doubt that uncivil discourse is bad for science,” Dr. Gray said by e-mail.

But, he said, comments can be very valuable, sometimes pointing out errors or alternative interpretations of the facts and theories presented in the article.

“The comments section can often express the openness of scientific debate,” Dr. Gray said, adding, “Removing this channel for feedback rather than exploring an alternative means to improve it simply ignores the problem.”

Scientific American uses what Mr. Guterl called a “sort of soft approach.”

Writers of articles are asked to participate in the comments and “add their own voice to them,” he said, so “you can set a tone without having to be dictatorial.”

Scientific American’s blogs editor, Bora Zivkovic, said communities of commenters sometimes aided the cause of science, solving math mysteries or helping spur retractions of poor-quality scientific papers. But if sites don’t have “the time and energy to really work on comments, then it’s better not to have them,” he said.

When he started his job a few years ago, “it was a real cesspool in the commenting threads,” Mr. Zivkovic said, with “creationist denialists of all sorts dominating our comments, and they were often quite nasty.”

Slowly, he began deleting offensive comments, giving warnings, and posting his own in respectful language. It was like “getting into a garden that’s completely covered with weeds so you have to use a weed whacker,” he said.

Ms. LaBarre of Popular Science said that comments trafficking in conspiracy theories seemed to be “undermining scientifically sound” stories. On an article about global warming, for example, one commenter wrote: “Yeah, right….Gullible Warming. What a crock!”

So when the Wisconsin study appeared, “it confirmed a lot of the things we were already thinking,” Ms. LaBarre said.

The study asked 1,183 people to read an article about a fictitious type of nanotechnology, a scientific subject chosen because most people know little about it and have no strong ideological views, said Dietram Scheufele, one of the researchers.

The study found that people who read uncivil comments ended up more polarized in their views of the technology than those who read civil comments. Those who started off with a negative view of the technology thought it was even riskier when they read a comment like “This is a risk, you idiot,” Dr. Scheufele said.

And people who started off with a positive view thought it was even safer when they read a comment like “You’re stupid — this is a benefit.”

“There’s no way that a completely unmoderated discussion is not going to be detrimental to the facts,” Dr. Scheufele said. “But I’m torn. I do know that we need to learn how to have these debates.”

Some science journalists said they thought the results of the Wisconsin study were too subtle or unsurprising to justify banning comments.

Dr. Gray questioned whether the study accurately “mimics the natural engagement of the reader with the science blog post and comments.”

Ms. LaBarre said Popular Science would be starting a network of blogs, and might try different commenting approaches on those.

And while the magazine did not allow readers to comment on its no-comment announcement, it did permit comments on a subsequent post that quoted from reader e-mails and Facebook messages on the subject.

One reader, Steve Thorson, pleaded in an e-mail, “Please don’t turn off comments,” adding: “Popsci commenters have helped me understand articles that were over my head. I need them.”

Another e-mail, from Nick Anglewicz, archly included both points of view: “I think you’ve made the right decision, thanks for the explanation,” he wrote. “Now if only I could state my opinion on your post publicly on the Web site.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/science/comment-ban-sets-off-debate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

It has been 13 years since Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, identified the screen names of more than 300,000 Napster users in a copyright infringement lawsuit. The tarring he received in response — being derided as greedy and insensitive to fans — still makes musicians think twice before complaining about the problems with digital music.

But it hasn’t stopped David Lowery.

As the leader of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, Mr. Lowery had a modicum of fame in the 1980s and ’90s. But over the last year, he has become a celebrity among musicians for speaking out about artists’ shrinking paychecks and the influence of Silicon Valley over copyright, economics and public discourse.

In public appearances and no-holds-barred blog posts, Mr. Lowery, 53, has come to represent the anger of musicians in the digital age. When an NPR Music intern confessed in a blog post last year that she paid very little for her music, he scolded her in a 3,800-word open letter that framed the issue in moral terms. Since then, he has attacked Pandora for trying to lower royalty rates, accused Google of masterminding a broad anti-copyright campaign and compared people who doubt the effect of piracy on musicians to those who think President Obama is a Muslim.

“Once the cobra bit me, I might as well just eat the cobra,” Mr. Lowery said in a recent interview at his home here. “Nothing worse can happen to me.”

The issue has become hot as technology companies like Pandora and Google have replaced major record labels as the villains of choice for industry critics. Recently, Thom Yorke of Radiohead caused a stir by removing some of his music from Spotify and saying that the service would hurt new artists.

To his detractors, Mr. Lowery is a divisive ranter who pines for a lost, pre-Internet economy. But his knowledge of legal and technological minutiae — he is a lecturer at the University of Georgia’s music business program — make his arguments hard to dismiss.

“He’s telling his personal story and standing up to the big corporations who claim to support songwriters, even as they work to undermine our rights behind the scenes,” said Paul Williams, the songwriter and president of Ascap. “He hasn’t flinched, and I think that’s given courage to other artists.”

Like most musicians, Mr. Lowery has seen his royalties fall with the overall drop in record sales. In 2002, his share of songwriting royalties from sales of the first Camper Van Beethoven album (released in 1985) was $1,147; last year it was about $440, a 62 percent decline. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the value of record sales and streams fell about 44 percent in that time, to $7.1 billion last year, from $12.6 billion in 2002.

At the same time, the nature of royalties has changed, going from larger payments attached to CDs and downloads to fractions of a penny from streaming services. Pandora, for example, pays record labels and performers a combined 0.12 cent every time it streams a song; Spotify’s rates are not disclosed but are usually estimated at around half a cent per stream.

“As little as I was getting paid in 2002, it looks pretty nice compared to almost nothing,” Mr. Lowery said.

Mr. Lowery, who still plays with both his bands (Camper Van Beethoven released its eighth studio album, “La Costa Perdida,” in January), said he had been an early believer in the promise of the Web for artists. But in a process he describes as less of a light-bulb eureka moment than “a fluorescent light with a bad ballast, flickering there, wanting to come on,” he gradually shifted.

“What we do as musicians was slowly being devalued and demonetized, especially for niche artists who are never going to make it up on the road,” said Mr. Lowery, his face stubbled with red hair and his voice still slightly raw from a concert the night before.

On “The Trichordist,” a blog Mr. Lowery writes with a mostly anonymous group of like-minded independents — “a leaderless jihad,” he calls it — this conversation is an unvarnished monologue, with Mr. Lowery’s own royalty statements as visual aids. One popular recent post: “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!” That figure was for songwriting and did not include additional payments as a performer.

His heated tone, and his tendency to see corporate tentacles everywhere, have not endeared Mr. Lowery to everyone on his side of the business. After being rejected from a conference this year whose sponsors included Google, Mr. Lowery accused CASH Music, a two-person nonprofit that makes open-source software, of being “at best quislings and at worst shills” for not publicly defending him. Jesse von Doom, CASH Music’s co-executive director, said in an interview that his organization has indeed received $105,000 in grants from Google in the last two years. But he insisted that no strings were attached to those grants, and that he’s nobody’s shill.

“The problem with David,” Mr. von Doom said, “is that he is driving the car in the right direction, and veering off the cliff some of the time.”

Mr. Lowery’s modest three-story house here would seem an unlikely headquarters for an assault on technology companies. Sitting at his computer in his home recording studio in a room decorated with portraits of Lewis and Clark, Mr. Lowery recalled one of his blog posts, which offered qualified support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill aborted in early 2012 after a thunderbolt of opposition from Google, Wikipedia and other Web titans.

One of the first comments on that post, Mr. Lowery said, was, “We’re going to turn you into Lars Ulrich.”

Some of Mr. Lowery’s ideas oppose the unquestioned credos of music on the Internet. For example, he thinks musicians would benefit more from scarcity of their work online — and from the power to withdraw from any service using their work — than from the ubiquity we have come to expect from services like Spotify and Pandora.

He and his Trichordist colleagues also advocate for an “ethical Internet” supported by strong copyright laws and industry practices that pay artists fair royalties. In response, he has been mocked as naïve.

“People say, ‘Hey, man, you can’t fight this, we’re moving from ownership to access,’ ” Mr. Lowery said. “That’s exactly why I’m fighting it. We have to get it right. I want to get those rates right.” Speaking of young musicians like his students at the University of Georgia, he added, “I want them to have the same advantages I’ve had, to get paid fairly.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/business/media/defining-and-demanding-a-musicians-fair-shake-in-the-internet-age.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The final episode reached 10.3 million viewers in its first airing, at 9 p.m., despite ferocious competition elsewhere on television Sunday night. That was an enormous increase from the show’s previous high, 6.6 million viewers a week ago.

The finale also scored a powerhouse number in the audience that advertisers pay most to reach — in this case a reported cable record of $400,000 for each commercial — with 6.7 million viewers in the audience between 18 and 49 years old.

This performance lifted the talk show that immediately followed it, “Talking Bad,” which featured interviews with the cast and the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan. A total of 4.4 million viewers watched, with 2.7 million in the 18-to-49 group, eclipsing the drama competition on CBS and ABC at that hour.

The only other drama to attract more viewers for its finale was “The Sopranos” on HBO, which totaled 11.9 million. But “The Sopranos” always had big ratings numbers. “Breaking Bad” was truly a late finisher, growing every year, especially over its last 16 episodes, driven largely by so-called binge viewing as fans caught up with the series through streaming on Netflix or by playing DVDs.

“Breaking Bad” achieved this success despite facing a night of series premieres on the broadcast networks and some potent cable competition, including the premiere of Season 3 of “Homeland” on Showtime. That Emmy-winning drama (it won a year ago; “Breaking Bad” won the most recent drama Emmy, last week) opened to its best premiere ratings ever, with 1.9 million viewers.

The new Showtime series that followed, “Masters of Sex,” about the sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson, also had a successful opening with 1.4 million viewers, the same total that “Homeland” reached for its premiere two years ago.

“Breaking Bad” easily beat everything on network television Sunday night, with the exception of N.F.L. football. The game on NBC that played against “Breaking Bad” — the New England Patriots against the Atlanta Falcons — attracted over 18 million viewers in preliminary numbers.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/business/media/more-than-10-million-watch-finale-of-breaking-bad.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“Arbitron will allow us to analyze and understand an additional two hours of the United States consumer’s day while bringing us another opportunity to provide advertisers with metrics on the effectiveness of the mediums that they advertise on,” David L. Calhoun, Nielsen’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Arbitron, which was founded in 1949 as the American Research Bureau, will be renamed Nielsen Audio, and will be integrated into Nielsen’s U.S. Watch division, the company announced. The deal was announced in December, with Nielsen agreeing to pay $48 a share for Arbitron.

For services like Nielsen, which is best known for its television ratings but also collects data on retail spending and Internet and radio usage, the crucial challenge is how to monitor and measure consumers’ interaction with media outlets across various platforms, sometimes simultaneously.

One benefit for Nielsen will be access to Arbitron’s Portable People Meter, a small electronic device that records all the radio signals that a person comes into contact with during the day — an innovation that has given the radio business a much more detailed look at its listeners’ habits than ever before.

The Federal Trade Commission investigated the deal out of concerns that it would lessen competition among media tracking companies. Earlier this month, the agency announced a settlement that obliges Nielsen to license its data and technology — including the Portable People Meter — to another company for eight years.

Neither the F.T.C. nor Nielsen has announced a buyer for those services, but the most likely one is comScore, which entered into a cross-platform measurement deal with ESPN and Arbitron three months before Nielsen bought Arbitron.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/business/media/nielsen-completes-1-26-billion-purchase-of-arbitron.html?partner=rss&emc=rss