Archives for October 2013

There is a certain sterility to these modern celebrations, a stage-managed lack of spontaneity that would argue against anything like that moment of pure ebullience when Wade Boggs rode a police officer’s horse after the Yankees won the 1996 World Series.

Perhaps my feeling about something lost in this evolution to programmed civility arises from being more a viewer at home than a fan in attendance. At Game 6 on Wednesday, Boston Red Sox fans saw their team win its third World Series in 10 seasons and could revel, from their Fenway Park seats, in the players’ joy on the field. And that is all good — but something primal is lost when the boozy, sweaty chaos of a clubhouse has been replaced by a planned postgame event with players and team personnel milling on the field.

With the rights to Major League Baseball and the N.F.L., Fox Sports has plenty of experience with big postgame events. But this one was a little different: the first time since 1918 that the Red Sox clinched a World Series at home. It required someone on the postgame stage with more gravitas than Erin Andrews, and someone more renowned for baseball than for college football. But she was a star at ESPN when Fox hired her, and Fox executives wrongly figured that she deserved a prominent place on baseball’s biggest stage.

Andrews seemed awkward at times, checking her note cards, as if to prove how programmed this sort of event is. She addressed Commissioner Bud Selig, with whom she struggled for possession of the microphone, as “Mr. Selig,” and John Henry, the Red Sox’ principal owner, as “Mr. Henry.” This is baseball, not the military; she should have felt comfortable enough to address them by their first names.

Earlier, she was poorly prepared while in the stands interviewing Arthur D’Angelo, an octogenarian fan seated near the field; he is far better known than she or Fox realized. He is not, as she called him, a worker at a convenience store that sells T-shirts and hats across the street from Fenway; he is a local business legend who owns a large souvenir emporium on Yawkey Way, founded a prominent licensed apparel manufacturer and recently had a nearby street named for him.

And as noisy as it was at Fenway, a reporter at the World Series must be more precise in her questioning than when she asked D’Angelo, “What would it be like for you to finally see the Red Sox win a World Series game here?”

For its post-Series host, Fox should have looked more deeply into its stable of announcers for a true baseball personality.

It could have been Ken Rosenthal, Fox’s other on-field reporter, or another Fox baseball broadcaster, like Kenny Albert or Thom Brennaman. Even better would have been Tim McCarver, who was in the booth for his final World Series at the network.

That option, which would have allowed Selig to say goodbye to McCarver, could have been the send-off Fox gave him.

Instead, a taped segment featured McCarver reflecting on some of the World Series he had called and announced. It had its looking-back charms, but it felt stilted, with shots of him walking slowly on the Fenway grass, ostensibly thinking deeply. It led into a live, two-minute send-off to McCarver from the booth, with Joe Buck speaking emotionally about his 18 years with McCarver.

Fox could have sprinkled 30-second “McCarver Moments” throughout the Series and given him a great platform to end the broadcast (even if it was after midnight). This might have been the last big audience he would face. Why not give him five minutes to comment on baseball’s future, not his estimable past? It would have served as his final word, until we see him again.

McCarver’s finale attracted 19.2 million viewers, pushing the Series’s six-game average to 14.9 million, up 17 percent from last year.

Email: sandor@nytimes.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/sports/baseball/on-fox-a-sterile-end-to-a-series.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

On Thursday, Time Warner Cable reported the steepest quarterly loss of television subscribers in its history, which it partly attributed to the monthlong battle it began with the CBS Corporation in August over fees. When the third quarter wrapped up at the end of September, Time Warner Cable had shed 306,000 of its 11.7 million TV subscribers — a loss even worse than the company had anticipated.

The results underscored, to a degree rarely seen before, the damage that can be done when distributors and programmers publicly feud over contracts. They also offer vivid evidence that content has the upper hand in disputes with distributors.

The disappointing quarter comes amid continued questions about the short- and long-term health of cable television amid ever more serious competition from Internet streaming services. The incumbents have held up remarkably well — only a small fraction of American homes have stopped paying for monthly TV subscriptions in the last few years.

Thursday’s results suggest that self-inflicted wounds like the CBS blackout are just as serious a threat to cable and satellite companies, at least now. Consumers who are displeased with their TV provider are suddenly motivated to switch when their favorite shows are taken away.

A vast majority of contract negotiations between programmers and distributors, even the hard-fought ones, end peacefully. But some industry officials say the number of blackouts has increased as distributors hold the line against deep price increases. A major contract between the Walt Disney Company and Dish Network expired at the end of September, and the two sides still have not reached a new deal, though they have averted any interruption in programming by agreeing to short-term extensions.

One Wall Street analyst called the subscriber losses at Time Warner Cable “shocking.” Another said the results were “just horrible.” The financial results also prompted new speculation about a possible merger between Time Warner Cable and a smaller operator like Charter Communications.

Then again, they could have been even worse — the company persuaded other subscribers not to cancel by offering credits for the downtime, particularly for Showtime, the premium cable channel owned by CBS that was also blacked out in August. Time Warner Cable disclosed on Thursday that it dispensed about $15 million in such credits.

Robert D. Marcus, the cable company’s incoming chief executive, said on a conference call with investors that the blackout “clearly resulted in short-term pain for us.” But he reiterated what the company said during the battle — that it had to resist CBS’s attempts to win large increases for the right to rebroadcast its programming. “In the end, the deals we reached were far better than when we started,” Mr. Marcus said without elaborating.

But CBS still came away with significant fee increases, and it will most likely celebrate those when it reports third-quarter earnings next Wednesday.

For the last few years, Time Warner Cable and other cable companies have lost small numbers of TV subscribers each quarter, but they have more than compensated by gaining broadband and phone subscribers. The dispute with CBS, however, caused so much subscriber anger that Time Warner Cable reported a drop in broadband and phone subscribers as well.

In broadband, the dip was slight — just 24,000 homes. By comparison, though, the company gained 131,000 broadband subscribers in the first quarter of the year and 8,000 in the second, traditionally the weakest for cable companies.

Despite the subscriber slump, Time Warner Cable said revenue rose 2.9 percent in the third quarter, to $5.52 billion, partly because of continued gains in a relatively new category for the company, business services. The company said net income fell to $532 million, or $1.84 a share, from $808 million, or $2.60 a share, in the period a year earlier.

Excluding one-time costs, earnings were $1.69 a share in the third quarter, beating analysts’ estimates of $1.64 a share and exceeding the adjusted earnings per share of $1.41 in the third quarter of 2012.

Slivers of good news were in the results. With growth in Internet hookups for businesses, the company made significant gains in broadband revenue as more households chose to pay for faster, costlier service. But analysts’ focus on Thursday was on subscriber losses, and it furthered the notion that Time Warner Cable is underperforming its peers.

“The CBS dispute apparently took a much larger toll than anyone would have imagined, and this colored all of the results,” Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research wrote in an analysts’ note. “That’s bad news for future programming negotiations, and not just for TWC. Every cable operator now goes to the table knowing that CBS not only won the war, but left TWC badly damaged even for having fought the fight.”

Thursday’s earnings report was the last for the company’s longtime chief executive, Glenn A. Britt, who announced in July that he planned to retire at the end of the year and pass the company over to Mr. Marcus, who is chief operating officer. This week, Mr. Britt told staff members that he was battling a recurrence of cancer, five years after a bout with melanoma. He said he was getting “terrific care” and would continue to work until the end of the year.

Mr. Britt and Mr. Marcus cautiously addressed the continued merger speculation, which surfaced this year when the cable pioneer John Malone, who controls 27 percent of Charter, started suggesting a tie-up. Mr. Britt said the company had been “open to deals,” but only if they benefit shareholders. “Consolidation can be a good thing,” he said, “but the terms really matter.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/business/media/time-warner-reports-record-quarterly-loss-of-tv-subscribers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

But analysts said the results were still positive because the company closed the chapter on selling off its portfolio of tangential assets and shifted its focus to its more profitable core product, journalism by The New York Times, its website and the International New York Times, formerly known as The International Herald Tribune.

The Times agreed in early August to sell the New England Media group for $70 million to John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, and completed the deal last week.

“It’s the first time we’re analyzing the company on a pure play basis in a sense without the New England Media Group,” said Alexia S. Quadrani, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase. “It’s a different experience. The results were relatively good. The advertising decline was the most modest decline we’ve seen in about three years.”

The Times Company reported loss of $24 million in the third quarter, which included an $18.9 million loss from discontinued operations related to New England Media Group and a $2.5 million income tax expense from the sale. The Times also paid out a $6.1 million pension withdrawal expense. The company posted a $2.7 million gain in the same period a year ago. The third-quarter loss is equal to about 16 cents a share, compared with a gain of 2 cents in 2012.

The company reported a $5 million loss in income from continuing operations, compared with a $2.9 million loss the year before.

Total revenue for the third quarter rose by 1.8 percent, to $361.7 million from $355 million the year before. Over all, the company’s total advertising revenue declined by 2 percent, to $138 million from $140.9 million, the lowest year-on-year quarterly decline in the category in three years. Print advertising revenue declined by 1.6 percent. Digital advertising revenue shrank by 3.4 percent, to $32.8 million from $33.9 million, and also declined as a percentage of overall revenue, to 23.8 percent compared with 24.1 percent in 2012.

Circulation was a bright spot for The Times, with revenue growing 4.8 percent. The number of paid subscribers to the company’s digital-only packages, which include the website, e-reader and other digital editions, was 727,000, a jump of more than 28 percent from the same time the year before, when it was 566,000.

Operating profit, that from normal operations that does not include things like interest or tax expenses, was $12.8 million, a rise of 44 percent from $8.9 million a year ago.

The Alliance for Audited Media also released its data on Thursday showing that The Times’s combined print and digital circulation grew by 14 percent on Sundays to 2,391,986 and by 18 percent on Monday through Fridays to 1,897,890.

Mark Thompson, the Times Company’s chief executive, said in a news release that the company’s progress was encouraging. “We increased our revenue, decreased our costs and, as a result, significantly increased our operating profits compared with the same quarter last year,” he said.

The Times Company has been undergoing a major transformation in recent years. In addition to the New England Media Group sale, it completed sales of 16 regional newspapers, the About Group and its stake in the Fenway Sports Group. The company also has focused on its global expansion. In October, it changed the name of The International Herald Tribune to The International New York Times and continued its plan to expand its international footprint.

“We also made significant progress on our strategic initiatives,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement about the company’s expansion plans. “But we recognize that, despite these positive developments, we still have a great deal of work to do to transform our business model and to achieve our goal of long-term sustainable growth.”

Executives say they expect spending to grow as the company continues its expansion. Craig Huber, an independent research analyst with Huber Research Partners, said he would watch closely for the payoff.

“It will be very interesting to see if they get a proper return from all this internal investment,” said Mr. Huber.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/business/media/times-co-reports-quarterly-loss-after-sale-of-globe.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The two editors, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, are defendants in the case surrounding the British newspapers controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, including The News of the World, a weekly that the company shut down in 2011 after the hacking scandal broke.

Ms. Brooks was the editor of The News of the World from 2000 to 2003 and then moved to its sister daily tabloid, The Sun; Mr. Coulson was her deputy at the weekly and succeeded her as its editor, running the paper until 2007.

Andrew Edis, a prosecutor in the case, said in open court that the two began their six-year affair in 1998; Mr. Coulson married in 2000, and Ms. Brooks married in 2002. Mr. Coulson remains married; Ms. Brooks was divorced in 2009, and then she married her current husband, Charlie Brooks, who is also a defendant in the case.

The prosecutor said the Brooks-Coulson affair ended long before Mr. Coulson went to work for Prime Minister David Cameron after his election in 2010.

The prosecutor’s revelation made it legally permissible to publish reports of the affair, which had been widely discussed in private by journalists. Mr. Edis justified the revelation by saying it demonstrated the closeness of the two, who are charged with overseeing a pattern of phone hacking and other illegal efforts to obtain details of the lives of prominent people.

The targets of the hacking ranged from politicians and socialites to Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old who was abducted in 2002 and later found dead. The paper broke into her voice mail account while she was missing, to listen to messages left for her by her parents. The paper also hacked the phones of competing journalists.

“Throughout the relevant period, what Mr. Coulson knew, Mrs. Brooks knew, too,” Mr. Edis said. “What Mrs. Brooks knew, Mr. Coulson knew, too. That’s the point.” He argued that none of the illegal acts undertaken by the paper’s journalists or the freelancers it hired were likely to have been unknown to the top editors, and that they were unlikely to have kept such secrets from one another.

The relationship came to the attention of the police when investigators found a letter addressed to Mr. Coulson at Ms. Brooks’s home, written in February 2004 when Mr. Coulson was trying to end the affair. “The fact is you are my very best friend, I tell you everything, I confide in you, I seek your advice, I love you, care about you, worry about you, we laugh and cry together,” the letter said, as Mr. Edis read it in court. “Without our relationship in my life, I am not sure I will cope.”

Mr. Edis asserted that he was not trying to embarrass the two defendants, to intrude into their private lives or to make a moral judgment.

“Mrs. Brooks and Mr. Coulson are charged with conspiracy and, when people are charged with conspiracy, the first question a jury has to answer is, How well did they know each other? How much did they trust each other?” he said. “And the fact that they were in this relationship, which was a secret, means that they trusted each other quite a lot with at least that secret, and that’s why we are telling you about it.”

The trial, with a total of eight defendants, is expected to last many months. Ms. Brooks and Mr. Coulson are accused of conspiring with others to hack phones and of conspiring with others to commit misconduct in public office, a reference to payoffs made to the police and other officials. Ms. Brooks also faces charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Her husband is accused of helping her to hide evidence.

All eight defendants deny the charges against them.

On Wednesday, Mr. Edis revealed that four other people had pleaded guilty to having hacked phone accounts on behalf of The News of the World. He argued that the jury should consider those pleas as evidence of a conspiracy, and that senior editors must have been aware of the acts of underlings.

“They must have known where these stories came from, or they never would have got in the paper,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/world/europe/british-editors-in-hacking-scandal-had-affair-prosecutors-say.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The company said it was eliminating the position of editor in chief and instead bringing back Norman Pearlstine, who was editor in chief from 1995 to 2005, to take on a new role as executive vice president and chief of content.

Mr. Pearlstine, 71, is moving from Bloomberg L.P., which he joined in 2008 and where he was also chief content officer.

Time Inc. said that the current editor in chief, Martha Nelson, the first woman to hold that position, would be leaving the company. Ms. Nelson had held the job only since January, though she has been with Time Inc. for 20 years and served as founding editor of InStyle as well as editor of People.

Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine company, said the changes were meant to strengthen the leadership team before it is spun off from its parent company, Time Warner, which is expected to happen early next year. It also said it wanted to encourage innovation to happen more quickly.

In a surprisingly frank memo to the staff, Joseph A. Ripp, who became Time Inc.’s chief executive in September, said the goal of bringing back Mr. Pearlstine would be to break down barriers between the business and journalism sides.

“We believe effective collaboration across business and editorial lines is imperative if we are to succeed as an independent company,” Mr. Ripp wrote in the memo.

“With the headwinds facing our industry, we must approach our business through a more entrepreneurial lens and break free from bureaucracy. We are confident this new structure will create a strong partnership between business and editorial, promote creativity and result in a cohesive vision for each of our brands that will be essential to long-term growth,” he wrote.

Mr. Pearlstine worked for more than two decades at The Wall Street Journal before joining Time Inc. While at Bloomberg, he oversaw growth in television, radio, magazine and digital products and also supervised Bloomberg Government, a web-based subscription service covering legislative and regulatory issues.

As chief content officer, Mr. Pearlstine will supervise all Time Inc. brands, which include such household names as Fortune and People, and look for growth across other platforms, including digital and television.

In a phone interview, Mr. Pearlstine said that even though the editors would be reporting to business executives who had responsibility for the magazine’s profitability, they would also have a direct line to him so he could arbitrate any disputes that might arise.

He said he would make sure the brands maintained their journalistic integrity and independence, but said he thought that having editors report to the “people responsible to the PL leads to a better quality product and more responsive one.”

Just months ago, Bloomberg hired Justin Smith to be chief executive of the Bloomberg Media Group. Mr. Smith was lured from Atlantic Media, where he earned praise for developing digital media products.

His arrival at Bloomberg gave rise to speculation that he would supersede Mr. Pearlstine as creator of new products.

Time Inc. is at a challenging crossroads. Time Warner said in March that it would separate its print publications into a new company, allowing its main business to focus on the more lucrative television and film assets. That means Time Inc. will be on its own in a very tough market for magazines.

Mr. Pearlstine said he left Bloomberg mostly because of his relationship with Mr. Ripp, which goes back decades.

Daniel L. Doctoroff, Bloomberg’s chief executive, issued a brief statement to praise Mr. Pearlstine and wish him well.

In addition, Time announced it had hired a new executive vice president for consumer marketing, Lynne Biggar, and a new general counsel, Lawrence Jacobs.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/business/media/pearlstine-rejoining-time-as-chief-content-officer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss