Archives for October 2013

Chamblee’s comments, insinuating that Woods had cheated during the season, upset Woods. Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, called them “shameful, baseless and completely out of line,” and said that he was looking into legal action.

In an interview on Golf Channel, Chamblee said that his mistake in writing about Woods’s season was to compare his own cheating on a fourth-grade math test with Woods’s being a “a little cavalier about the rules” in incidents that led to three two-stroke penalties.

“Cheating involves intent,” Chamblee said on the “Golf Central” studio show. “Now, I know what my intent was on that fourth-grade math test. But there’s no way that I could know with 100 percent certainty what Tiger’s intent was in any of those situations.”

Chamblee, who had apologized on Twitter, said that he was resigning from Golf.com, where his remarks were published, not Golf Channel. “Tiger and his camp, they’re upset at Golf Channel,” he said. “This column appeared on Golf.com. Nobody here at Golf Channel knew anything about it and my editor at Golf.com asked me to rewrite the ending when I sent it to him.”

He added that he realized that a conflict existed in working for Golf Channel and Golf magazine, which is owned by Sports Illustrated. Now, he said, “if Tiger and his camp have an issue with something I write, they will at least be yelling at the right people.”

Mike McCarley, the president of Golf Channel, declined to comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/sports/golf/chamblee-resigns-from-golf-magazine-after-critical-remarks-on-woods.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

It is possible that Intel will forge ahead with OnCue through a partnership with Verizon, or a pact with some other company, but a purchase by Verizon is most likely, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity because the talks were supposed to be private. A deal will most likely be struck by the end of the year.

OnCue, as envisioned by Intel, would take the traditional cable television bundle and make it more consumer-friendly by transmitting it via the Internet. The company’s technology has impressed many, but channel owners have been reluctant to make the necessary licensing deals, stirring speculation that Intel might not move forward.

The other big roadblock has been an internal one. When a new chief executive, Brian M. Krzanich, took over the company earlier this year, he expressed skepticism about the television project because it was not a core part of Intel’s business, and directed the project leaders to seek partnerships for it.

Earlier this fall Intel executives privately acknowledged that they would fall short of their widely publicized goal of introducing OnCue to the public in time for the holiday season.

A takeover of OnCue could position Verizon to sell a cablelike television service across the United States through existing broadband pipes or through its Verizon Wireless business. Its current eight-year-old television subscription service, FiOS, has five million subscribers and is growing steadily, but it is available in only about 15 percent of American homes because it is delivered over a proprietary fiber-optic network. Verizon said last year that it did not plan to expand that fiber-optic network much more.

But a Verizon television service could potentially reach many more people if it were not linked to the fiber-optic network and were made available through any broadband connection. Alternatively, it could be sold as an optional mobile TV upgrade for the Verizon Wireless unit’s roughly 100 million monthly subscribers.

Verizon is in the process of gaining full ownership of the wireless unit, having announced last month a $130 billion acquisition of Vodafone’s 45 percent stake. “We don’t comment on speculation,” a Verizon spokeswoman said on Wednesday after the online technology site AllThingsD published an article on the talks with Intel. An Intel spokesman declined to comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/business/media/intel-is-said-to-weigh-sale-of-online-cable-tv-venture.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines” is one of the year’s biggest hits, but behind the scenes the song is the focus of a bitter dispute that led Wednesday to the family of Marvin Gaye filing a copyright lawsuit.

In August, Mr. Thicke and his two fellow songwriters, Pharrell Williams and Clifford Harris Jr. (also known as the rapper T.I.), sued the family of Marvin Gaye in a pre-emptive strike, saying that they expected Gaye’s children to claim that “Blurred Lines” copied Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up.”

The similarities between the songs — among them a smooth, retro beat and lots of falsetto — have been noted by critics and Mr. Thicke has acknowledged “Got to Give It Up” as an inspiration. But “being reminiscent of a ‘sound’ is not copyright infringement,” the men said in their suit.

Two of Gaye’s children, Frankie and Nona, have responded with a countersuit, filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles. The suit says that not only does “Blurred Lines” infringe on their father’s copyright, but that another of Mr. Thicke’s songs, “Love After War,” also copies a Gaye song, “After the Dance.”

According to the suit, which was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, a musicologist, Judith Finell, studied “Blurred Lines” and “Got to Give It Up” and found “a constellation of at least eight distinctive and important compositional elements” between them.

Extending their case beyond copyright, the Gayes also sued Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which controls the EMI publishing catalog, which includes Gaye’s songs. The Gayes accuse Sony/ATV — which is also a publisher of Mr. Williams’s work — of breach of contract and of fiduciary duty by taking sides against the family in the dispute and trying to intimidate them into dropping the case. Gaye died in 1984.

According to the Gayes, Sony/ATV tried to persuade them that their case was frivolous, and that the company’s chairman — who was not named in the suit, but is Martin N. Bandier, a well-known music executive — told the family they were “killing the goose that laid the golden egg” by pursuing the case.

In a statement, Sony/ATV said that another musicologist had determined that “Blurred Lines” did not infringe on “Got to Give It Up,” and also defended its corporate role as a steward for songwriters.

“We take our role in protecting the works of all of our songwriters from infringement very seriously,” the company said. “And while we very much treasure the works of Marvin Gaye and our relationship with the Gaye family, we regret that they have been ill advised in this matter.”

Both suits seek unspecified damages.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/business/in-dispute-over-a-song-marvin-gayes-family-files-a-countersuit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

That was the overall effect of two recent items on Gawker, the gossip site, that revealed that Shepard Smith, the Fox News anchor, had been seen at a Chelsea bar with a date described as “a muscular 6-foot-2 30-something white male.”

It struck some (including the New York Times reporter David Carr, in this week’s Media Equation column) as a textbook case of “outing,” to use the term that emerged in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when gay-rights activists embarked on a controversial push to expose closeted public figures, particularly those seen as homophobic.

But as the puzzled responses from some Gawker readers would suggest, outing seems to have run its course. “I’m wondering why this is even news,” one commenter wrote. “So a news anchor is gay and has a boyfriend and a private life? Color me shocked. What is this, the 1950s?”

At a time when gay people can marry and fly helicopters in the Marines, is it time to consign outing to history, alongside other ’90s crazes like Zima and square-toed shoes?

“The apparent lack of shock waves when celebs are outed these days is a good thing,” said Michael Musto, the Out.com columnist who outed several celebrities in his days with The Village Voice. “It means there are so many out celebs on the landscape that the news about another one doesn’t raise that many eyebrows.”

Wan attitudes like that are a far cry from the fierce debates (both within the gay community and the larger public) during the first Bush presidency, when combative gay groups like Queer Nation outed people it deemed hypocrites; one group, OutPost, blanketed New York with street posters modeled on Absolut vodka ads that read “Absolutely Queer” under the faces of various celebrities.

During that same era, OutWeek, a short-lived but influential gay magazine, became a touchstone of controversy for outing celebrities. For this new breed of gay activist, the ultimate targets were conservative politicians who opposed gay rights.

“There was a sense of urgency around visibility because of the AIDS epidemic,” said Michelangelo Signorile, who wrote OutWeek’s gossip column and was a pioneer of outing. “Gay people were invisible in pop culture, yet some of the most influential people in Hollywood and Washington were gay.” Mr. Signorile now has a radio show on SiriusXM and writes for The Huffington Post, where he argued that Gawker was not “outing” Mr. Smith, but merely reporting on his love life in the same fashion it would for a straight celebrity.

Opponents decried the tactic as a violation of privacy, while others said it smacked of red baiting in the 1950s. And it wasn’t just gay activists pulling the trigger. In 1997, Esquire magazine toyed with rumors that the actor Kevin Spacey was gay in a controversial cover story. (“I mean, my mother KNOWS,” Tom Junod, the author, wrote. “Or thinks she knows. Or supposes. Or suspects. I told her I was writing a story on Kevin Spacey, and she said, ‘Well, I hear he’s gay.’ ”)

“This meanspirited, homophobic, offensive article proves that the legacy of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well,” Mr. Spacey, who denied he was gay, said in a statement at the time.

But the climate for gay acceptance has changed rapidly in the last decade, and the announcement that a public figure is gay barely registers as newsworthy anymore. This is especially true when celebrities come out on their own, as was the case with Jodie Foster’s sort-of coming-out speech at the Golden Globes in January and Anderson Cooper’s email statement to Andrew Sullivan last year. For a younger generation of actors today (Matt Bomer of “White Collar,” Jim Parsons of “The Big Bang Theory”), coming out has become a relative nonevent.

Indeed, it seemed almost retro when The New York Post’s gossip column, Page Six, published a report on Oct. 10 headlined “Viacom Chief’s Ex in Lesbian Affair,” concerning Kathy Freston, the best-selling vegan cookbook author and estranged spouse of the television executive Tom Freston. (In the article, Ms. Freston was quoted as saying that the allegation was “flattering,” but not true.)

It was soon forgotten, and probably would have gotten more pickup if it were a recipe for her seitan sloppy Joes.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/fashion/how-being-outed-as-gay-lost-its-power-to-shock.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

After nearly a month of upheaval at The Philadelphia Inquirer, including the abrupt firing of the paper’s top editor and lawsuits among its owners, the majority owners on Wednesday offered to buy out the minority investors, in what they described as an effort to provide stability to the company.

George E. Norcross III and William P. Hankowsky, both majority owners in the Philadelphia Media Network, which also publishes The Daily News and Philly.com, said they wanted to put an end to the infighting. So they offered to buy out two minority investors, H. F. Lenfest and Lewis Katz, for $29 million, which they asserted was nearly a 12 percent profit in the 18 months since they made the original investment.

Mr. Norcross and Mr. Hankowsky said in a statement that they were prepared to wire the funds within 24 hours after an agreement was reached. “We did not want or initiate the litigation that has created a sideshow that will ultimately waste hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in legal fees that could be used to further strengthen and build the company,” they said.

Jay Devine, a spokesman representing Mr. Katz, Mr. Lenfest and William K. Marimow, who was the paper’s top editor, declined to comment on the offer.

Mr. Norcross, a Democratic power broker, and Mr. Lenfest, a parking lot magnate, were among a group of local investors who bought the struggling newspaper in April 2012. The investor group then hired back Mr. Marimow, who had previously served as The Inquirer’s top editor from 2006 to 2010.

While there appeared to be conflicts among investors from the start over how to run the paper and its website, these battles culminated in Mr. Marimow’s firing on Oct. 7. Three days later, Mr. Katz and Mr. Lenfest sued, claiming that Mr. Marimow should be reinstated because the firing took place without their consultation. Then Mr. Norcross countersued.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/business/media/philadelphia-inquirer-majority-owners-seek-to-buy-out-others.html?partner=rss&emc=rss