Archives for November 2013

Permitting a private citizen to use the Rose Garden for a personal event is extraordinarily unusual, and it attests to the deep ties the president and his photographer have forged, as Mr. Souza has shadowed Mr. Obama on virtually every day of his presidency.

Now, though, Mr. Souza’s privileged access — combined with the rise of services like Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, which has allowed the White House to distribute his official photos rapidly to the news media — is generating tension between him and the news photographers who are assigned to the White House.

In a letter two weeks ago to the press secretary, Jay Carney, the White House Correspondents’ Association and other organizations, including The New York Times, protested that the White House routinely excluded news photographers from sessions with the president and then released photographs of the events, usually taken by Mr. Souza.

“You are, in effect, replacing independent journalism with visual press releases,” said the letter, which criticized the White House’s policy as “an arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference in legitimate news-gathering activities.”

At the best of times, the relationship between outside photographers and the White House’s in-house one is fraught: they jostle for the same image of the president, but the official photographer is invariably three steps ahead of them when the president works a rope line or is in the Oval Office for his meeting while they wait outside.

Mr. Souza, a plain-spoken 58-year-old who was a news photographer for The Chicago Tribune before moving to the White House, said he believes that photographers have better access to Mr. Obama than they did to President Ronald Reagan, whom he documented in an earlier stint as a White House photographer.

Still, he said he understood the frustration of the news photographers and has advocated more access for them — to a point. “It’s legitimate for them to push for more access, and in some cases I think their arguments are valid, and in some instances I think their arguments aren’t valid,” Mr. Souza said last week in an interview in his cubbyhole office in the West Wing.

This traditional tug of war has been exacerbated by digital technology, which the White House has exploited to distribute his pictures, often soon after he takes them. That puts Mr. Souza in de facto competition with other photographers since, owing to his access, his photos are sometimes more newsworthy than theirs.

“The core issue is the White House uses his images and disseminates them to the public, and they become the only historical document of events,” said J. David Ake, the assistant bureau chief for photos at The Associated Press.

Doug Mills, a longtime White House photographer for The Times, added: “It’s not about Pete. It’s that we see Pete’s pictures of things that we’re not getting access to, and that’s incredibly frustrating for all the photographers who cover the White House.”

David Hume Kennerly, the official photographer for President Gerald R. Ford, said: “Everybody is trying to come to terms with the impact of social media. I don’t know what the right balance is, but I understand his position in terms of the historical record.”

Indeed, Mr. Souza’s principal job is to document the presidency, and all of his photographs, published and unpublished, are filed in the National Archives.

White House officials say Mr. Souza is being turned into a scapegoat for a press corps frustrated by how technology is upending its business. (The Times, they note, charges clients a service fee for reprinting Mr. Souza’s pictures and sends him royalty checks, which he does not cash.) They also say the public benefits from behind-the-scenes images, like Mr. Souza’s dramatic shot of Mr. Obama and aides watching the raid on Osama bin Laden in 2011.

“When there are decisions to release photos, those are made by the press office,” said the deputy press secretary, Josh Earnest. “We’ve always acknowledged there is a difference between what Pete does and what independent photographers do.”

That difference was evident in the case of the Bin Laden photo, which the White House digitally altered to blur out a classified document on a table in front of Hillary Rodman Clinton, then the secretary of state. Mr. Souza said he tried to get the document declassified to show it in the image, and when his request was rejected, he opted to airbrush it because otherwise the White House would not have released it.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/us/politics/limit-on-access-stirs-tensions-between-white-house-photographer-and-press-corps.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The editor, Tarun Tejpal, has denied any wrongdoing in two episodes that occurred in a hotel elevator at an annual intellectual symposium held by his magazine, Tehelka. Mr. Tejpal made written apologies to the young woman after she complained to her manager at the magazine, evidently hoping it would be possible to avoid a criminal case.

But the police in the coastal state of Goa, where the episodes occurred, reached Mr. Tejpal’s home in Delhi on Friday, and on Saturday a district court rejected a petition by his legal team for anticipatory bail, paving the way for his arrest. The public prosecutor in the case, Saresh Lotlikar, said Mr. Tejpal could not be properly interrogated unless he was in custody.

“The accused has been changing colors like a chameleon through different statements,” Mr. Lotlikar said, according to The Times of India.

If convicted, Mr. Tejpal faces a maximum of 10 years in jail. His lawyer Geeta Luthra emerged from court late Saturday, saying that he “has already joined the investigation” and plans to cooperate.

Almost two weeks ago the young woman, who has not been identified, in accordance with Indian law, approached Tehelka’s managing editor, Shoma Chaudhury, with allegations that Mr. Tejpal had assaulted her twice, at one point removing her underwear despite her protestations and manually penetrating her.

Ms. Chaudhury told staff members that there had been “an untoward incident” and that Mr. Tejpal had apologized and would step down for six months.

This seeming attempt to treat the case as an internal matter infuriated many journalists and activists, who are highly sensitized to the issue of sexual violence nearly a year after a gang rape that killed a 23-year-old student in Delhi.

After weathering widespread criticism, Ms. Chaudhury stepped down Thursday, saying in a letter that she did not want questions about her actions to “tarnish the image of Tehelka.”

The case has taken on strong political overtones, in part because Mr. Tejpal and his magazine have carried out investigations and sting operations that damaged Hindu nationalist figures and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.

As Mr. Tejpal left the airport terminal in Goa’s capital city on Friday evening, he was greeted by a group of protesters from the opposition party, waving black flags and chanting slogans. A party activist also defaced Ms. Chaudhury’s home late on Thursday, spattering black paint outside it and painting the word “accused” beside her gate.

Mr. Tejpal has said the investigation, initiated by the Goa government rather than the victim, is being driven by his ideological opponents at the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In a bail plea, his legal team described him as “a foremost critic of right-wing majoritarian politics in the country” and said the inquiry was “being used to satisfy the longstanding grudge of the political executive against the works and ideological stand of the present applicant.”

His accuser responded angrily in a letter published on Friday. She said suggestions that partisan politics was behind her complaint were “the latest depressing indications that sections of our public discourse are unwilling to acknowledge that women are capable to making decisions about themselves for themselves.”

“It is not the victim that categorizes crime: it is the law,” the letter said. “And in this case, the law is clear: What Mr. Tejpal did to me falls within the legal definition of rape.”

She went on to say that by making a public complaint about the episodes, she had lost her job and “opened myself to personal slanderous attack.”

Ellen Barry contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/world/asia/indian-editor-arrest.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A year ago, the Rutgers athletic department’s deficit was nearly $28 million, bringing the hole it has dug since 2005 to $190 million. To offset the losses, student fees have been raised and state funds reallocated. Last summer, Maryland’s athletic department cut seven varsity sports in trying to patch a $21 million shortfall.

Both schools have hit upon the same solution to their athletic and fiscal troubles: Next summer, they will join the Big Ten, among the most storied conferences in college football. To understand how Rutgers and Maryland — and college athletics in general — got to this point, you need to understand Jim Delany, the Big Ten’s 65-year-old commissioner, now in his 25th year on the job. It was the Big Ten, which will crown a football champion when Ohio State meets Michigan State on Saturday, Dec. 7, that Forbes magazine recently proclaimed the “cash king” of college sports.

The conference generated $315 million in revenue in the fiscal year ended in June 2012, the most of any conference, and was expected to reward most of its member schools with a split of $25.7 million each the next year. The primary source of the money has been television — most of it coming from a lucrative contract that Mr. Delany negotiated with ESPN and from the conference’s own cable network, which Mr. Delany was mostly responsible for creating in 2007. “Jim is a superstar,” said E. Gordon Gee, a former president of Ohio State, a Big Ten stalwart. “He knows the power of TV better than anyone.”

Mr. Delany was among the first to recognize the influence of cable, then satellite. His biggest coup has been the creation of the Big Ten Network, which is expected to produce $270 million of revenue in 2013 for the conference and its schools. And yet, for all of the TV money now in college sports, according to a recent Moody’s study, 90 percent of athletic departments at public schools require subsidies from their universities to meet their budgets.

Even as the TV ratings grow, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, college sports’ governing body, faces mounting litigation and questions about the core purpose of college athletics, most prominently: Who should benefit from all of the money that college sports generate? And why do most athletic departments still run at a deficit?

As Mr. Delany pushes the Big Ten into the New York and Washington metropolitan areas, he acknowledges the issues but says, “I’d rather have the problem of too much money than too little.”

One morning in July, Mr. Delany hosted a breakfast in a ballroom at the Hilton Chicago for athletic directors and bowl executives. The Big Ten is affiliated with 16 bowls from coast to coast, and Mr. Delany, dressed in a dark suit, posed for photographs with a representative from each one, from the Rose Bowl to the Gator Bowl.

Mr. Delany navigated the crowd as the morning’s main attraction, schmoozing, shaking hands and making introductions. When his guests sat, he addressed them about the conference’s East Coast expansion. “Our footprint is Colorado to the mid-Atlantic, Canada to the mid-South,” he said. “We wanted to have a national slate of bowls because we’re the closest thing to a national conference.”

From 1953 until 1990, the Big Ten comprised 10 schools. In 1990, Mr. Delany’s second year, Penn State, previously independent, joined. Then, in 2010, Mr. Delany plucked the University of Nebraska from the Big 12, and schools have been jumping from one conference to another ever since.

After the Southeastern Conference expanded to include the University of Missouri and after the Atlantic Coast Conference added the University of Notre Dame (the school’s football program remained independent) and the University of Pittsburgh — both schools within the Big Ten’s geographic footprint — Mr. Delany concluded that the Big Ten was in danger of ceding strategic ground. “We felt threatened,” he said.

Mr. Delany countered with the invitations to Rutgers, then of the Big East, and Maryland of the A.C.C. With their addition, the conference will cover roughly 30 percent of the country by population and more than 15 percent by geography. There are 4.7 million Big Ten alumni scattered nationwide, part of what Mr. Delany calls the Big Ten diaspora.

The strategy is about television. Mr. Delany does not expect New Yorkers to start following Rutgers football the way they follow the Giants or the Yankees, but the Big Ten alums spread throughout the New York region are likely to pay attention when Michigan and Ohio State show up. In essence, Mr. Delany has found a back door into two of the largest television markets in the country and a way to tap into that alumni diaspora.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/the-big-tens-bigger-footprint.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The cause was cancer, his brother James said.

Founded in 1987 by the investment banker Arthur L. Carter, The Observer, in the words of its website, observer.com, seeks to report on “finance, media, real estate, politics, society, tech and culture with an insider’s perspective, a keen sense of curiosity and a sharp wit.” Published weekly on pinkish paper that in its smoked-salmon hue trumpets Gotham, it reaches a primarily high-income readership.

Though its circulation has long been small — about 50,000 in Mr. Kaplan’s day and only slightly higher now — the newspaper became, under his stewardship, required reading for the very demographic it skewered.

Appointed in 1994, Mr. Kaplan served the longest term of any Observer editor. During his tenure, the paper featured the work of journalists renowned for a cutting-edge sensibility, among them Joe Conason, now the editor in chief of the political website The National Memo; Nikki Finke, who went on to found the entertainment-industry site now known as Deadline.com; and Choire Sicha, who later helped found The Awl, the current-events site.

The vigorously reported, tart-tongued coverage of New York’s power elites that Mr. Kaplan helped bring to The Observer prefigured the work of many websites devoted to politics, culture and the press.

“It’s hard to find a major publication right now, in print or online, that’s not in some way flavored by the old Observer,” The New Republic wrote in a profile of Mr. Kaplan last year. “Subtract Kaplan from the media landscape of the past 20 years and you lose The Awl, much of Gawker and a good bit of Politico, too.”

When The Observer began, it was intended to be a hyperlocal Manhattan affair. In light of what it later became, its early tone and purview — community board meetings loomed somewhat large in its coverage — seem almost bucolic.

Esteemed as a mentor to writers, Mr. Kaplan, by all accounts, helped usher in a delectable dose of snark. Writing about The Observer in The New York Times in 2006, David Carr called him “the man who turned it into a maypole of Manhattan gossip and intrigue.”

Among Mr. Kaplan’s greatest coups was hiring a little-known freelance writer named Candace Bushnell to write a column about the hunt for love, or something approximately like it, in the urban jungle. Ms. Bushnell’s column, “Sex and the City,” which appeared in The Observer from 1994 to 1996, became the basis for the hit HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

“The more cancellations we got for her column,” Mr. Kaplan wrote in an essay in New York magazine in 2011, “the more the paper knew we had hit the jackpot.”

Though he went on to help carry The Observer across the digital threshold, overseeing the creation of its website, Mr. Kaplan was regarded by those who knew him as a throwback to an earlier age — to the New York of the Stork Club, the Automat and the Algonquin. He revered the stuff of that era, from classic black-and-white films that portrayed the city at its noirish finest (he knew the credits of nearly all of them by heart) to newspapers as they were originally conceived: damp, sweet-smelling and black and white, or, in his case, black and pink.

Mr. Kaplan remained with The Observer after it passed into the hands of a new owner — Jared Kushner, then 25 — in 2006, and through its transformation from a broadsheet into a tabloid the next year. When he left the newspaper in 2009, amid a retrenchment that entailed staff cuts and shorter articles, his departure appeared to many in the industry to herald the last heady days of a certain brand of old-school print journalism.

Peter Wennik Kaplan was born in Manhattan on Feb. 10, 1954, and reared primarily in northern New Jersey. At Harvard, where he received a bachelor’s degree in American studies, he was a stringer for Time magazine; he also ran a campus film society, named for the Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, that specialized in showing the most obscure movies possible.

Before joining The Observer, Mr. Kaplan was a reporter at The Times, covering the television industry in the mid-1980s; the executive editor of the business magazine Manhattan,inc.; and the executive producer of Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show.

After leaving The Observer, Mr. Kaplan was the editorial creative director at Condé Nast Traveler. In 2010, he was named editorial director of the Fairchild Fashion Group (now Fairchild Fashion Media, a division of Condé Nast Publications), where his portfolio included Women’s Wear Daily, WWD.com, Footwear News and Fairchild Books.

At Fairchild, Mr. Kaplan oversaw the relaunch last year of M magazine, a glossy quarterly aimed at affluent men.

Mr. Kaplan’s marriage to Audrey Walker ended in divorce. Besides his brother James, a novelist and biographer, survivors include his second wife, Lisa Chase, whom he married last year; their son, David; three children from his marriage to Ms. Walker, Caroline Kaplan, Charles Kaplan and Peter Walker Kaplan; and another brother, Robert.

Though he had long made his home in suburban Larchmont, N.Y., Mr. Kaplan never stopped regarding New York City as a shimmering object of desire. Decades afterward, looking back on boyhood car trips into town, he recalled his father’s words on seeing the Manhattan skyline rise up on the horizon:

“There’s the Emerald City.”

And for the son, so it was.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/nyregion/peter-kaplan-who-brought-a-cutting-edge-to-the-new-york-observer-dies-at-59.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“The question is not ‘Will a toy break?’ ” said Rachel Rothman, technical manager and engineering director for the Good Housekeeping institute, as she studied the children around her. “It’s how it will break.”

For 113 years, Good Housekeeping has been testing and awarding its seal of approval to all kinds of consumer products, from skin creams to dishwashers. For the last six years, that testing has expanded to include toys. The magazine spends all year finding and reviewing toys for children. Then in the December issue, it bestows awards on about two dozen toys and board games that shoppers can buy just in time for the holidays.

The process is integral to Good Housekeeping’s overall business strategy. Like most magazines, Good Housekeeping, part of Hearst Magazines, has been under more pressure than ever to find new sources of revenue. According to data tracked by the magazine analyst John Harrington, Good Housekeeping’s combined revenue from magazine sales and advertising was $531 million in 2012, compared with $573 million in 2011 and $607 million in 2008. Over the last year, the magazine has undergone a redesign and recently replaced its editor in chief.

Now it is returning to its core testing business and focusing heavily on toys to help attract readers and drive revenue.

Simply put, toys equal traffic — on the web. Mimi Crume Sterling, a spokeswoman for Good Housekeeping, said that last November and December, after the awards were featured on NBC’s “Today” show, on Yahoo’s shopping section and across social media, the toy section received the most visits to the website, surpassing categories like household items and cookware.

David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, said the digital desirability of toy reviews far outweighed the costs of conducting the tests.

“It was among the most consumed in terms of page views when it ran last year,” he said. “These things lead very long lives in our digital product.”

(Roughly half the testers are children of people affiliated with Hearst, proving that in the magazine business, even if you are a preschooler, it helps to know someone).

Good Housekeeping is also trying to derive more revenue from toy testing by licensing its brand to manufacturers. Starting with this year’s awards, companies can pay a one-year licensing fee of $2,500 to $17,500 to feature the magazine’s emblem on their products. Ms. Sterling said that one company signed up for the license the day a segment about its toy aired on the “Today” show. Lisa Guili, general manager of Educational Insights, a toy company based in Los Angeles, said it might place the emblem on the game Shelby’s Snack Shack, which made this year’s list.

“Some seals don’t add value,” Ms. Guili said. “But their seal definitely adds value.”

Toy manufacturers, especially smaller brands with limited advertising budgets, also say the reviews help make sales. Andrea Barthello, co-founder of ThinkFun, a small toy company, said that when its Yackety Smack toy appeared on the list in 2012, sales doubled. After the company learned it had made the list again this year, for its Laser Maze toy, it arranged to have more items in stock because of what Ms. Barthello called the magazine’s “halo effect.”

“It influences customer buying decisions,” Ms. Barthello said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/business/seeking-top-toys-good-housekeeping-puts-them-to-test.html?partner=rss&emc=rss