Archives for December 2013

The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, Ray Cave.

Ms. Ryan became the second managing editor of People, the immensely popular weekly devoted to personalities in the news, in 1982. She was  the first woman to be appointed to the top editorial job at a Time Inc. publication in 27 years.

Known at the time as People Weekly, the magazine had made its appearance in 1974 and under its founding managing editor, Richard B. Stolley, became known for its celebrity covers and snappy prose. When Mr. Stolley moved to Life magazine, Ms. Ryan, who had been an editor at People for four years, was named to succeed him.

In her five-year tenure, she allowed articles to run longer and expanded the magazine’s coverage of more serious news, exploring topics like sexual harassment on college campuses, the spreading AIDS epidemic and children orphaned by civil war in Nicaragua, even devoting an entire issue to life in the Soviet Union, then still the Cold War foe of the United States. Ms. Ryan also inaugurated one of People’s glitziest traditions, its annual anointing of “the sexiest man alive,” with the first honoree, Mel Gibson, in 1985.

Under her leadership, People won a national magazine award for general excellence in 1987, the only such honor in the magazine’s history.

“Pat was good at story ideas, and she was a writer’s editor,” James Seymore, who worked for both Mr. Stolley and Ms. Ryan at People and was later the top editor of Entertainment Weekly, said in an interview Monday. “That is, she was more comfortable with well-written material than not. Before her, like Time, People had been an editor’s magazine, but she made the articles longer, and generally under Pat we favored writers more.”

Ms. Ryan was born on June 18, 1938, in Unionville, Pa., west of Philadelphia. Her father, James, was a horse trainer, and the knowledge she gleaned from him would later serve her professionally when, as a secretary at Sports Illustrated, she gave betting tips to Andre Laguerre, the managing editor.

According to family lore, one day in the early 1960s, when Mr. Laguerre was short of reporters, he sent her to the Belmont Park racetrack to investigate a strike by the grooms. She was promoted rapidly, from reporter to writer to editor — she was the magazine’s first female senior editor — and, until moving to People in 1978, worked with many of the magazine’s more literary contributors, including Frank Deford and George Plimpton.

“Pat Ryan edited more of my stories than anyone else,” Mr. Deford wrote in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time.” “She understood me, as both a writer and a person, better than any male editor.”

In addition to Mr. Cave, himself a former managing editor of Time and Sports Illustrated, Ms. Ryan is survived by a brother, Owen; a sister, Oonah; two stepchildren, John and Catherine Cave; and a stepgranddaughter.

From 1987 to 1989, Ms. Ryan was editor of Life, the general-interest magazine known for its photographic storytelling, originally published weekly but by then a monthly. Her cover subjects were both serious and lighthearted, including an airplane crash, Elvis Presley’s ex-wife and daughter, the legacy of Robert F. Kennedy and a history of the brassiere at age 100.

Her 28-year career at the company, then known as Time Warner, came to an end in August 1989, when she was fired without explanation by Jason McManus, the company’s editor in chief. Mr. McManus had been a longtime professional rival of Mr. Cave, with whom Ms. Ryan was living, and he had dismissed Mr. Cave several months earlier.

In the 1960s, while she was working at Sports Illustrated, Ms. Ryan, whose only post-secondary education until then had been secretarial school, earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia. It was an achievement acknowledged in a letter written by the magazine’s publisher, Garry Valk, and published there in 1969. Vaguely condescending as it praised her, it was a document equal parts pat on the back and pat on the head.

“So our fondest congratulations, Pat,” Mr. Valk concluded, after boasting like a proud papa of Ms. Ryan’s record both in the academy and at the magazine. “You are a lady and a scholar. And a writer.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/business/media/patricia-ryan-75-an-editor-at-time-inc-dies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Human rights organizations have denounced the charges, accusing the authorities of deliberately confusing the act of reporting on the Muslim Brotherhood with belonging to the group, which has been officially classified as a terrorist organization. Rights advocates said the accusations had sent a worrying signal about the military-backed government’s approach to press freedoms.

Four journalists from Al Jazeera were arrested on Sunday, and one, an Egyptian cameraman, was later released. Prosecutors began interrogating the three remaining in custody, including the bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian-Egyptian citizen; Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent; and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian producer.

The arrests were part of a widening government crackdown on the Brotherhood, the Islamist group that fell from power after the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, in July.

Last Wednesday, the government designated the Brotherhood a terrorist group, and in recent days, Egyptian courts have convicted hundreds of Mr. Morsi’s supporters who participated in protests, sentencing them to prison.

The charges against the journalists also appeared intended as retaliation against Al Jazeera, the Qatari channel whose Arabic-language service has strongly backed Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood. The English language news service takes a far more independent editorial position.

Several journalists from both the English- and Arabic-language services have been detained since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, and two Al Jazeera Arabic journalists have remained in prison for months.

Prosecutors released a lengthy list of accusations on Tuesday, saying the journalists worked for a network affiliated with the Brotherhood, joined a terrorist group and possessed the kind of equipment typically found in Egyptian news bureaus, including cameras, gas masks and microphones, without a permit.

Mr. Fahmy, a veteran journalist who has worked for CNN and contributed to The New York Times, was singled out in the statement, accused both of terrorism and of turning suites in the Marriott into a news media center where he “manipulated” footage to harm Egypt’s reputation, prosecutors said.

A brother, Sherif Fahmy, said that Canadian diplomats had not attended the beginning of his brother’s interrogation. Mr. Fahmy, who suffered a dislocated shoulder unrelated to his arrest, had not been allowed to see doctors at Tora Prison, where he was being held, the brother said.

Ragia Omran, a human rights advocate, called the terrorism-related accusations “ridiculous” and said they could be applied to “anyone who works in journalism.”

The charges, she said, were part of a pattern of aggressive prosecutions under the military-backed rulers, including convictions of protesters, that were seldom pursued even under Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s authoritarian president who was deposed in 2011.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/world/middleeast/egypt-says-3-journalists-will-be-held-15-more-days.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In a post on Sunday that looked back on her yearlong recovery from a bone-marrow transplant in 2012 to treat a rare blood disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome, Ms. Roberts wrote, “I am grateful for my entire family, my long time girlfriend, Amber, and friends as we prepare to celebrate a glorious new year together.” (Ms. Roberts did not give her girlfriend’s last name, but People magazine identified her as Amber Laign, a licensed massage therapist from San Francisco whom she met through friends about a decade ago.)

That passing reference was soon followed by a statement from ABC News (“We love Robin and Amber, who we have all known for a long time. We were so touched by Robin’s Facebook message today and so thankful for all the loving support she has in her life.”) as well as this Twitter message from Michelle Obama on her @FLOTUS account: “@RobinRoberts, I am so happy for you and Amber! You continue to make us all proud. — mo”

Ms. Roberts’s announcement, accompanied by no other interviews or TV appearances (she did not appear on “Good Morning America” on Monday), follows several other coming-out pronouncements by TV news personalities these past few years, some of whom did so on the air, some in a public statement, but all in a way that treated the news as almost casual occurrence, and no longer worthy of a Time magazine cover.

Here are some examples.

Who Thomas Roberts, MSNBC

How He Came Out In 2006, when he was working for CNN, Mr. Roberts announced that he was gay at the annual meeting of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, saying that he had decided it was time to go public with news that he had already shared with many of his co-workers. “When you hold something back,” he told attendees, “that’s all everyone wants to know.” In 2012, Mr. Roberts married his longtime partner, Patrick Abner, in a ceremony officiated by Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California.

Who Sam Champion, ABC

How He Came Out Though Mr. Champion, the longtime weather anchor for “Good Morning America” and now anchor and managing editor at the Weather Channel, never hid his homosexuality (and in fact, came out in a casual comment to a reporter in the Vows column about the wedding of Mr. Roberts and Mr. Abner), his official pronouncement came on morning TV in 2012. Sitting on a couch with his fellow anchors, including George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Champion disclosed that he was engaged to his boyfriend, Rubem Robierb (who was shown standing in the wings), saying “I am so, so lucky to have this person in my life.”

Who Jenna Wolfe, NBC

How She Came Out Prodded by a beaming Matt Lauer to share her “big news” with the “Today” show audience in March last year, Ms. Wolfe said, “I’m actually pregnant, I’m quite pregnant.” She then added, almost as an aside, that she was having a baby girl with “my girlfriend, Stephanie Gosk,” a foreign correspondent for NBC. “This is the adventure of a lifetime,” she added.

Who Anderson Cooper, CNN

How He Came Out After years of dodging speculation about his sexuality and refusing to discuss his private life, Mr. Anderson finally opened up in an email to his friend, the blogger Andrew Sullivan, which Mr. Sullivan then published with Mr. Cooper’s permission. “The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud,” Mr. Cooper wrote. “I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I’m not an activist, but I am a human being and I don’t give that up by being a journalist.”

Mr. Cooper said that he had previously declined to discuss his sexuality because his work often took him to war zones, and that “for my safety and the safety of those I work with, I try to blend in as much as possible.” But he added that he realized that his continued silence on this subject had “given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something — something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.”

Who Dan Kloeffler, ABC

How He Came Out In perhaps the most spontaneous public declaration of one’s sexual orientation, the “World News Now” anchor came out on air in the middle of the night in 2011, wrapping up a brief report about the actor Zachary Quinto disclosing that Mr. Quinto was gay. “He’s 34, I’m 35,” Mr. Kloeffler said as his co-anchor, Yunji de Nies, looked on with a mix of surprise and amusement. “I’m thinking I can lose my distraction about dating actors, for that one, maybe.” Later, in a blog post for ABC, Mr. Kloeffler elaborated on his decision. “I’ve never shared that I’m gay on-air, even though I’ve been out to my family, friends and co-workers for years,” he wrote. “In fact, an old boyfriend — now best friend — has always given me a hard time about not doing so. But for the same reason that Zach decided to come out, I too, no longer wanted to hide this part of my life.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/fashion/gay-news-anchors-coming-out-lgbt-news.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

O’Connor, the Mexico representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists, died in his sleep at his home in Mexico City on Sunday. The cause was a heart attack, according to his wife Tracy Wilkinson, who is bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.

Local journalists and colleagues remembered O’Connor as a man with an unparalleled grasp of the perils and complexities of working as a journalist in Mexico. Hard on those he felt were failing to protect reporters, O’Connor showed boundless sympathy for journalists struggling to maintain careers and personal lives in the face of threats.

“He would spend hours over the phone with local journalists in the most isolated places in Mexico, just to listen to the stories and to try to help them cope with fear,” said Carlos Lauria, senior Americas program coordinator for the New York-based nonprofit where O’Connor had worked since 2009.

Born in a refugee camp where his father was stationed in post-war Germany, O’Connor lived along the U.S.-Mexican border with his parents, often moving between the two countries on short notice, a childhood he described in a 2007 memoir, “Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run.”

O’Connor worked as a television reporter in California, then covered Latin America during the 1980s for CBS News before moving into print, writing for The New York Times in Central America and the former Yugoslavia. He also reported for National Public Radio from Haiti, where he earned an Overseas Press Club award, the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East, where he covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“He was a journalist and this made him different from other members of groups that protect the press and freedom of expression,” said Marcela Turati, a reporter who covers the drug war for the investigative news magazine Proceso. “He took defending journalists very personally.”

O’Connor was one of the most important forces behind a 2012 Mexican law giving federal authorities greater powers to prosecute crimes against journalists in Mexico. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 29 have been killed in the country in retaliation for their work since 1992.

O’Connor’s reporting skills and knowledge of Mexico allowed him to pierce the secrecy and ambiguity around many attacks and determine which had been motivated by the victims’ work and which were unrelated.

At one press conference in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, long dominated by a cartel of the same name, O’Connor issued a challenge to authorities, saying “Who’s in control here? You or them? In the government, the governor’s office, who’s in control?” remembered Javier Valdez Cardenas, a correspondent for the Sinaloa paper Rio Doce.

O’Connor also made many trips to Mexican states where journalists were under daily threat, producing vivid, highly detailed reports on areas that were receiving little national or international attention.

U.S. State Department spokesman Jen Psaki issued a message of condolences on O’Connor’s death, calling him “a fearless truth seeker” as well as “a passionate and articulate voice of conscience for many.”

“We honor the memory of Mike O’Connor, and know that his legacy will inspire many to keep fighting for truth and for the defense of human rights and a vibrant, free press,” Psaki wrote.

O’Connor is survived by his wife, two sons from a previous marriage, and two granddaughters, as well as two sisters and two half-brothers.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/12/31/world/americas/ap-lt-obit-mike-oconnor.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In the six months the firm was given to make Americans aware of Ms. Bridges and her online weight-loss program, 12 Week Body Transformation (12WBT), its conference room was home to the following interactions: a strategy meeting with Blue State Digital, the marketing firm that worked for President Obama’s campaign; discussions about which photos made Ms. Bridges look younger, and how maybe the ones in which she had bangs made her look too severe; analysis of focus groups; invocations of a technology in which Internet ads would follow users around other websites until they signed up for the program, all because they had clicked on Ms. Bridges’s ad once; a conversation that was supposed to be light but turned a little tense about the fact that the American firms seem to keep saying “12-Week Body” as an abbreviation for the program; many debates over American vernacular; conversations over transferring recipes to an American audience, most notably finding substitutes for kangaroo as a protein source; and crinkly conference calls during the one or two hours when parties in California and Australia are both reasonably awake for passionate negotiations of Ms. Bridges’s time.

At any given point there are more than 100 people working on Ms. Bridges’s brand, but there is only one Michelle Bridges.

In Australia, Ms. Bridges is best known for her role as the trainer on that country’s edition of the TV show “The Biggest Loser.” She has lines of housewares and workout clothes sold through discount department stores. She is also the personality behind 12WBT, an interactive online diet and fitness program in a country for which obesity rates have grown to 63 percent in recent years. Since 12WBT was introduced in January 2010 in Australia, more than 250,000 people have joined at $199 Australian ($176) or 12 weekly payments of $19.99.

Now she’s bringing 12WBT to the United States, along with the rest of her brand, in an attempt to gain a share of the lucrative diet industry. It remains to be seen, though, if there’s room for another diet guru in a saturated field.

“Losing weight is a science,” Ms. Bridges said recently over breakfast at Mr. C in Los Angeles, where she ordered an egg white omelet and black coffee. “Keeping weight off is a psychology.”

It is this distinction between psychology and science (though psychologists might debate the notion that their field isn’t a science) that Ms. Bridges believes gives her an edge. She said 12WBT attacks “problematic thinking” with a full month of “preseason,” in which dieters clean out their refrigerators, have important conversations with their families, prepare their schedules and, most importantly, practice the fine art of “getting real,” Ms. Bridges’s favorite term for overcoming the thinking that led them to becoming overweight in the first place.

“Science and psychology are separate,” she said, every word punctuated with a pleading intensity that never let up. “I can get weight off anyone. I can get weight off anyone. Keeping it off, that’s a different ballgame. That’s your head.” (How well they keep it off is anyone’s guess, though. Like other diet companies, 12WBT says it does not keep track of how their clients do long-term, but that some are so successful that they keep signing up.)

Ms. Bridges, 43, has bright blue eyes, a deep orangy tan and shoulders that seem more like a diagram of the muscular system. She leaned back, mock exhausted from having to explain her philosophy yet again. She took a bite of toast. “Yes,” she said, shaking the bread, “I eat carbs.”

When Ms. Bridges was a fitness trainer at a gym, said her ex-husband, Bill Moore (who owned that gym and is now her business partner), “she had this very empathetic way about her. Instead of saying, ‘I’m super fit and you’re not,’ she would be going: ‘This class is killing me, but I’m going to go harder. Come with me, come with me.’ ”

He and Ms. Bridges would sit on the couch at home, he said, and watch the first season of Australia’s “Biggest Loser,” which featured Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, the trainers from the American version of the show. Ms. Bridges would say to Mr. Moore, “I could do that job.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/fashion/Weight-Loss-Program-Personal-Fitness-Trainer-Michelle-Bridges-.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Shares in the Times Company jumped more than 4 percent to a five-year high on Monday, shortly after the businessman, Chen Guangbiao, hinted at his plans in a speech in southern China.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, said in 2013 that the family that controls the paper is not interested in selling it.

In a phone interview on Tuesday, Mr. Chen said he had been thinking about “working with” The New York Times for years. Recently, he said, he had persuaded two businessmen, including a Hong Kong tycoon, to help him raise about $1 billion to snap up a large portion of the company, now valued at about $2.4 billion based on its stock price.

Because of the way its shares are structured, the company is controlled largely by a special class of stock, Class B shares, held by descendants of Adolph S. Ochs, who acquired the paper in 1896. The Class A stock, which is publicly traded, rose about 86 percent in 2013.

Mr. Chen, who made a fortune in the recycling business, said he had set up a meeting with Times representatives next week in New York and planned to make his pitch because The New York Times was the world’s most influential publication. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Times, said, “We have no information about any such meeting.”

In the telephone interview, Mr. Chen said, “If I can get this deal with The New York Times, I will be able to bring more positive images and influence to contribute to world peace and make the world a better place.” He added, “If the deal breaks off, I will keep searching for another credible and influential media company in the U.S. to achieve my goal.”

Mr. Chen, who is estimated to be worth about $800 million, according to the Hurun Rich List, has been praised and ridiculed for his publicity stunts, which have included handing out cash and “canned fresh air” to raise awareness about charitable giving and the environment.

Although The Times has a news bureau in China, the paper’s English- and Chinese-language websites have both been blocked here since late 2012, after The Times published an article about the hidden wealth of the relatives of Wen Jiabao, then Chinese prime minister.

Mr. Chen said he would work to repair The Times’s image in China, and to improve the paper’s understanding of the country.

“My plan for The New York Times if I get the deal will be putting the paper on every newsstand across the country and making The Times accessible to every Chinese household. China is such a big market and is too big to miss,” he said.

The New York Times’s strong recent stock performance follows several quarters of positive earnings results and gains in circulation, though it still faces a struggling advertising market. The company’s stock closed on Tuesday at $15.87, down 22 cents.

In 2014, it plans several initiatives, including a website redesign, new digital products and the use of native advertising, which is paid content from marketers that is designed to look more like the online articles it appears alongside than traditional advertising.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from New York and Stephanie Yifan Yang contributed research from China.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/business/media/chinese-businessman-announces-bid-to-buy-stake-in-times-co.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

She testified before the Food and Drug Administration, but nothing happened. It wasn’t until she went online, using a petition with the help of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, that her pleas to remove artificial dyes from food seemed to be heard.

Mars, the candy’s maker, is now hinting that it may soon replace at least one of the dyes with an alternative derived from seaweed.

“I’ve really thought about calling them,” Ms. Shutters said about Mars. “I’m not trying to be this horrible person. What I’m really thinking is that this is an opportunity for their company to lead what would be an awesome publicity coup by taking these dyes out of their products.”

While the F.D.A. continues to allow certain dyes to be used in foods, deeming them safe, parents and advocacy groups have been using websites and social media as powerful megaphones to force titans of the food industry to reconsider the ingredients in their foods and the labeling and processing of their products. In several instances in the last year or so, major food companies and fast-food chains have shifted to coloring derived from spices or other plant-based sources, or changed or omitted certain labels from packaging.

Matthew Egol, a partner at Booz Company, the consulting firm, said that while food companies had benefited from social media to gain rapid insight into trends, data on what products to introduce and which words to use in marketing, they also had been the target of complaints that sometimes become magnified in an online environment.

Mr. Egol said companies were approaching the negative feedback they get with new tools that help them assess the risks posed by consumer criticism. “Instead of relying on a P.R. firm, you have analytical tools to quantify how big an issue it is and how rapidly it’s spreading and how influential the people hollering are,” he said. “Then you can make a decision about how to respond. It happens much more quickly.”

From Cargill’s decision to label packages of its ground beef that contain “pink slime,” or what the industry prefers to call finely textured meat, to PepsiCo’s decision to replace brominated vegetable oil in Gatorade with a natural additive at the behest of a teenager, corporations are increasingly capitulating to consumer demands.

Companies are reluctant to admit a direct connection between the crusades of consumers like Ms. Shutters or Vani Hari, a blogger known as the Food Babe, and their decisions to tweak products, but the link seems clear. More than 140,000 people have signed Ms. Shutters’s petition on petroleum-based food dyes, and dozens have commented on Ms. Hari’s posts about some of the ingredients in items on Chick-fil-A’s menu.

“We’ve always tried to be a customer-focused organization,” said David B. Farmer, vice president for product strategy and development at Chick-fil-A. “What has clearly changed is some of the channels of communications, which wasn’t a factor in the past like it is today. We’ve had to adapt to that.”

Two years ago, Ms. Hari marveled in a blog post about the nearly 100 ingredients in a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich and took issue with some of them, like MSG, artificial colors and TBHQ, or tertiary butylhydroquinone, which is used as a preservative in many foods.

“TBHQ is a derivative of butane,” she said in a telephone interview. “The F.D.A. says TBHQ cannot exceed 0.02 percent of fats and oils in a product, but consumers who are eating a sandwich that has it plus French fries and other things that also have it in a single meal may be getting more than that.” She followed that post with another, offering a recipe her readers could use to make a chicken sandwich that is a pretty fair imitation of Chick-fil-A’s — but with only 13 ingredients, none of them artificial.

Chick-fil-A eventually responded, inviting Ms. Hari in October 2012 to spend a day at its headquarters in Atlanta, where she discussed her concern about some ingredients as well as larger issues like the use of chicken from animals whose feed contains antibiotics and the potential for labeling products that have genetically engineered components.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/business/media/social-media-as-a-megaphone-to-push-food-makers-to-change.html?partner=rss&emc=rss