Archives for September 2017

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A little more than five years ago, Savannah Guthrie became a host of the “Today” show on NBC. Since then, she has married, given birth twice, and most recently, co-written her first children’s book, “Princesses Wear Pants,” with Allison Oppenheim. During the week, Ms. Guthrie, 45, puts in nine-to-16-hour days on set. Having recently covered Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, when she gets a free Sunday, she relishes it, spending time with her husband, Michael Feldman, 48, a consultant, their daughter, Vale, 3, and their son, Charley, 9 months. The family lives in TriBeCa.

BEFORE SUNRISE I love to sleep in, but since I normally wake up between 3 and 4 a.m. for Today, my idea of sleeping in is 6 a.m, maybe 6:30. It depends whenever the kids wake me up. Sleep is a real luxury for me- I’m not one of those people who can get by with minimal rest. I make a beeline for the coffee machine. Michael got me this fancy machine by Jura a few years ago, and it grinds the beans for each cup individually.

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FEEDINGS As I’m sipping my coffee, I’m juggling the kids. I do diaper changes, give Charley a bottle and give Vale her breakfast. Actually, she has multiple breakfasts because she is ravenous in the mornings. She usually starts with cereal and milk and then moves on to toast and then maybe a yogurt.

HEARTY START Michael makes breakfast for the two of us. He likes to experiment in the kitchen, and his breakfast game is strong. Lately, we’ve been having whole wheat toast with a poached egg and avocado. He also cooks scrambled eggs with cheese, and we may have bacon. I’m gone for breakfast during the week so it’s nice to start the day with a relaxed, hearty meal.

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NEWS, TOYS Michael and I are news junkies and flip between different shows including “Sunday Today,” of course, and “Meet the Press.” We always have an eye on the kids and take turns playing with them. Vale is big into Peppa Pig and has a Peppa Pig house. She also likes puzzles and blocks and has started to play with Charley. We’re constantly cleaning up their toys, but five minutes later, there are toys all over the apartment again.

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SUNDAY SCHOOL I grew up going to church, and I like taking the kids to this church in our neighborhood called Trinity Grace. It’s a casual church, and I can go in jeans or a simple dress. Michael is Jewish and usually doesn’t come with us so I take Charley and Vale there in our double stroller. The service is about an hour and a half. Vale sits with me in the beginning when the songs are going on, and then goes to Sunday school.

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QUIET TIME By now, it’s 12:30, and I race the kids home so that they can have a quick lunch and go down for their naps. Charley eats baby food, and Vale has a sandwich or a chicken patty. Michael and I eat either a salad or sandwich. I may take a short nap or read.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/nyregion/how-savannah-guthrie-of-the-today-show-spends-her-sundays.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

It illustrates the blurry lines and policing challenge that confront Facebook in its ad targeting. And after a year in which the social network has accepted more responsibility to crack down on false or offensive material, and last week, when the company twice announced new measures to prevent abuses by advertisers, some experts said the scale of that challenge is only starting to become apparent.

“What we’re actually talking about is all of the social issues one can think of — any social issue, social debate, social strife — being reproduced in this arena,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies content moderation on digital platforms.

“These issues are taken wholly unresolved and put into a commercial context where they’re amplified and disseminated at instantaneous speed, forever,” she added. “I have great empathy around the difficulty.”

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Targeting involving contentious subjects can be done legitimately, said Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of ads products, such as companies advertising historical books, documentaries and television shows. He acknowledged situations in which certain targeting categories could be used “in malicious ways” but said, “This type of behavior is against our policies and has no place on our platform.”

Facebook said it had multiple safeguards to ensure that an ad campaign was appropriate. While its system is far from perfect — the company recently disclosed that it allowed Russian operatives using fake accounts and pages to place ads on topics that polarized American voters, like race and immigration — the company said it would block an ad that included overtly racist content or directed users to a web page promoting racist ideas.

“We are taking a hard look at our ads policies and enforcement, and are looking at ways we can do better,” Mr. Goldman said.

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How do people end up in the potential audience for Facebook’s ad-targeting categories in the first place? Facebook creates an ad category corresponding to a subject through a mix of human discretion and automated processes that it declined to describe.

Facebook users then effectively sort themselves into the targeting category by liking and visiting certain pages on the social network and through other activities they engage in on the service. Facebook has said that liking a page is one signal among many that helps it place users into the categories that advertisers can target.

So if Facebook creates, say, a red wine category, people increase their likelihood of being included in it by engaging with Facebook pages dedicated to the topic.

Once an ad category exists on Facebook, advertisers can push their messages to those users. Those who may be targeted in an ad campaign around the Confederate States may be Civil War buffs who visited or liked a page about the Confederacy set up by a seller of history books.

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But advertisers can also gain access to people associated with Facebook pages that perpetuate false, misleading or divisive information. For example, many people who liked two pages on Facebook that frequently defend the Confederacy are likely to be included in the Confederate States of America category that advertisers can target.

One of the pages, with roughly 250,000 likes, recently included a post declaring the Confederate Army “the greatest force that ever walked the Earth,” and another post prominently featuring a quote attributed to a Confederate general: “The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated. It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy.”

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Stephanie McCurry, a Civil War historian at Columbia University, examined both pages and found them littered with “fake history,” such as the suggestion that slavery was not the central reason for secession.

Despite their potential to offend, Facebook’s Confederacy pages do not appear to run afoul of the company’s standards on issues like hate speech. Some veterans of the digital advertising business said that as long as that is the case, it should be up to advertisers to determine whether to target categories composed partly of people who like these pages.

“At the end of the day, these gray areas are dictated by the advertiser,” said Chris Bolte, a longtime ad-technology official at companies like Yahoo and Walmart. Mr. Bolte said advertisers had every right to target the audiences most likely to be interested in their products and services, unless those audiences were “obvious hate groups.”

But Ms. Roberts at U.C.L.A. argued that simply by allowing Confederate States of America and similar pages to exist and then using this content to help advertisers target people with those interests, Facebook was blessing the views expressed there as legitimate.

“We can draw a line from content that proliferates on the platform to what is extracted and monetized, made into revenue flow from advertising,” she said. “It is up to Facebook to make the decision here whether to impede that process. Whatever they decide, it is no longer possible for that to fly under the radar.”

Other Facebook ad-targeting categories that fall into the gray area of being legitimate in principle but potentially problematic or open to misuse include Wehrmacht, which refers to the Nazi-era German military, and Benito Mussolini, the Fascist Italian leader during World War II, according to a test of Facebook’s ad-targeting system by The Times.

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Advertisers who target an ad using the term Wehrmacht would probably gain access to many people who liked a page dedicated to the Wehrmacht that appears to celebrate the Nazi-era military.

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While scrolling through the Wehrmacht page, Robert Citino, the senior historian at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, said, “It does implicitly accept the German propaganda view of the Wehrmacht: handsome warriors drinking beer, with their planes on a hastily constructed airfield.”

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He said people who esteem the Wehrmacht can only do so while “ignoring the fact that they were massacring supposedly inferior racial groups in the Eastern campaign,” though he defended their right to pursue an interest in the Wehrmacht’s tactics and equipment.

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University and author of a forthcoming book on the big tech companies, said Facebook should not necessarily ban content that celebrates institutions like the Confederacy or the Wehrmacht and advertising that targets people interested in these subjects. But he said allowing this content and selling ads around it should reflect on Facebook the same way it would reflect on, say, CNN or The Washington Post.

“I think it’s fairly cut and dried,” he said. “Their responsibility is the same as any other media company.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/technology/facebook-ads.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

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This scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies, John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent to the bonds of social responsibility.”

Mr. Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order — J. Edgar Hoover among them — and later by feminists. But Playboy’s circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven million in the 1970s.

Long after other publishers made the nude “Playmate” centerfold look more sugary than daring, Playboy remained the most successful men’s magazine in the world. Mr. Hefner’s company branched into movie, cable and digital production, sold its own line of clothing and jewelry, and opened clubs, resorts and casinos.

The brand faded over the years, its flagship magazine’s circulation declining to less than a million.

Mr. Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s startling (and, as it turned out, short-lived) decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs. In 2016, he handed over creative control of Playboy to his son Cooper Hefner. Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, Scott Flanders, acknowledged that the internet had overrun the magazine’s province.

“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

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The magazine’s website, Playboy.com, had already been revamped as a “safe for work” site. Playboy was no longer illicit. (Early this year, the magazine brought back nudes.)

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs.”

“You couldn’t talk politically,” Mr. Feiffer said in the 1992 documentary “Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time.” “You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”

Playboy was born more in fun than in anger. Mr. Hefner’s first publisher’s message, written at his kitchen table in Chicago, announced, “We don’t expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths.”

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Still, Mr. Hefner wielded fierce resentment against his era’s sexual strictures, which he said had choked off his own youth. A virgin until he was 22, he married his longtime girlfriend. Her confession to an earlier affair, Mr. Hefner told an interviewer almost 50 years later, was “the single most devastating experience of my life.”

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was.

“It’s laissez-faire,” he added. “It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

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The Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all its aspects, for which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws.

The magazine was a forum for serious interviews, the subjects including Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times”), Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X. In the early days Mr. Hefner published fiction by Ray Bradbury (Playboy bought his “Fahrenheit 451” for $400), Herbert Gold and Budd Schulberg. It later drew, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.

Hugh Marston Hefner was born on April 9, 1926, the son of Glenn and Grace Hefner, Nebraska-born Methodists who had moved to Chicago. Decades later, he continued to tell interviewers that he had grown up “with a lot of repression,” and he often noted that his father was a descendant of William Bradford, the Puritan governor of the Plymouth Colony.

Though father and son reached an accommodation — the elder Mr. Hefner became Playboy’s accountant and treasurer — neither changed moral compass points. Glenn Hefner, who died in 1976, said he had never looked at the pictures in the magazine.

As a child, Mr. Hefner spent hours writing horror stories and drawing cartoons. At Steinmetz High School in Chicago, he said, “I reinvented myself” as the suave, breezy “Hef” — a newspaper cartoonist and party-loving leader of what he called “our gang.” At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after serving in the Army, he edited the campus humor magazine, Shaft, and started a photo feature called “Co-ed of the Month.”

He married a high school classmate, Millie Williams, and began what he described as a deadening slog into 1950s adulthood: He took a job in the personnel department of a cardboard-box manufacturer. (He said he quit when asked to discriminate against black applicants.) He wrote advertising copy for a department store and then for Esquire magazine. He became circulation promotion manager of another magazine, Children’s Activities.

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He was meanwhile plotting his own magazine, which was to be, among other things, a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons. The first issue of Playboy was financed with $600 of his own money and several thousand more in borrowed funds, including $1,000 from his mother. But his biggest asset was a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe. He had bought the rights for $500.

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Plenty of other men’s magazines showed nude women, but most were unabashedly crude and forever dodging postal censors. Mr. Hefner aimed to be the first to claim a mainstream readership and mainstream distribution.

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When Playboy reached newsstands in December 1953, its press run of 51,000 sold out. The publisher, instantly famous, would soon become a millionaire; after five years, the magazine’s annual profit was $4 million, and its rabbit-head logo was recognized around the world.

Mr. Hefner ran the magazine and then the business empire largely from his bedroom, working on a round bed that revolved and vibrated. At first he was reclusive and frenetic, powered past dawn by amphetamines and Pepsi-Cola. In later years, even after giving up Dexedrine, he was still frenetic, and still fiercely attentive to his magazine.

His own public playboy persona emerged after he left his wife and children, Christie and David, in 1959. That year his new syndicated television series, “Playboy’s Penthouse,” put the wiry, intense Mr. Hefner, pipe in hand, in the nation’s living rooms. The set recreated his mansion on North State Parkway, rich in sybaritic amusements, where he greeted entertainers like Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, and intellectuals and writers like Max Lerner, Norman Mailer and Alex Haley, while bunches of glamorous young women milled around. (A later TV show, “Playboy After Dark,” was syndicated in 1969 and 1970.)

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In the Playboy offices, life imitated image. Mr. Hefner told a film interviewer that in the early days, yes, “everybody was coupling with everybody,” including him. He later estimated that he had slept with more than 1,000 women. Over and over, he would say, “I’m the boy who dreamed the dream.”

Friends described him as both charming and shy, even unassuming, and intensely loyal. “Hef was always big for the girls who got depressed or got in a jam of some sort,” the artist LeRoy Neiman, one of the magazine’s main illustrators for more than 50 years, said in an interview in 1999. “He’s a friend. He’s a good person. I couldn’t cite anything he ever did that was malicious to anybody.”

At the same time, Mr. Hefner adored celebrity, his and others’. Mr. Neiman, who sometimes lived at the Playboy Mansion, said: “It was nothing to breakfast there with comedians like Mort Sahl, professors, any kind of person who had something on his mind that was controversial or new. At the parties in the early days, Alex Haley used to hang around. Tony Curtis and Hugh O’Brian were always there. Mick Jagger stayed there.”

The glamour rubbed off on Mr. Hefner’s new enterprise, the Playboy Club, which was crushingly popular when it opened in Chicago in 1960. Dozens more followed. The waitresses, called bunnies, were trussed in brief satin suits with cotton fluffs fastened to their derrières.

One bunny briefly employed in the New York club would earn Mr. Hefner’s lasting enmity. She was an impostor, a 28-year-old named Gloria Steinem who was working undercover for Show magazine. Her article, published in 1963, described exhausting hours, painfully tight uniforms (in which half-exposed breasts floated on wadded-up dry cleaner bags) and vulgar customers.

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Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on Dick Cavett’s television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

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Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists, then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue featured an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright over anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

Many questioned whether Playboy’s outlook could be described as adult; Harvey G. Cox Jr., the Harvard theologian, called it “basically antisexual.” In 1961, in the journal Christianity and Crisis, Dr. Cox wrote: “Playboy and its less successful imitators are not ‘sex magazines’ at all. They dilute and dissipate authentic sexuality by reducing it to an accessory, by keeping it at a safe distance.”

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In a 1955 television interview, a frowning Mike Wallace asked Mr. Hefner: “Isn’t that really what you’re selling? A high-class dirty book?”

Such scolding sounded quaint by the time crasser competitors like Penthouse and Hustler appeared in the 1960s and ’70s. Playboy began showing pubic hair on its models, while the others doubled the dare with features on kinkier sexual tastes and close-up photos that bordered on the gynecological. Mr. Hefner would decide, after furious debate among the staff, not to compete further.

Playboy Enterprises still prospered. In 1971 it went public to finance resorts in Jamaica; Lake Geneva, Wis.; and Great Gorge, N.J.; and gambling casinos in London and the Bahamas.

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The heady mood broke in 1974, when Mr. Hefner’s longtime personal assistant, Bobbie Arnstein, committed suicide. Ms. Arnstein had just been convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and Mr. Hefner said bitterly that investigators had hounded her to set him up.

He left Chicago for his second home in Los Angeles, an enormous mock-Tudor house with a grotto and a zoo (Mr. Hefner loved animals), where he could orchestrate the company’s move into films.

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The 1980s brought a huge retrenchment for Playboy. The company lost its London casinos in 1981 for gambling violations and was denied a gambling license in Atlantic City, partly because of reports that Mr. Hefner had been involved in bribing New York officials for a club license 20 years earlier.

The company shed its resorts and record division and sold Oui magazine, a more explicit but less successful version of Playboy, while the flagship’s circulation plunged. The Playboy Building in Chicago, its rabbit-head beacon illuminating Michigan Avenue, was also sold, as was the corporate jet with built-in discothèque. Bunnies were going the way of go-go dancers, and the Playboy Clubs closed.

Mr. Hefner relied more and more on his daughter, Christie Hefner, named company president in 1982 and then chief executive, a position she held until 2009. Mr. Hefner suffered a stroke in 1985, but he recovered and remained editor in chief of Playboy, choosing the centerfold models, writing captions and tending to detail with an intensity that led his staff to call him “the world’s wealthiest copy editor.”

In 1989 Mr. Hefner married again, saying he had rethought Woody Allen’s line that “marriage is the death of hope.” His second wife was Kimberley Conrad, the 1989 Playmate of the Year, 38 years his junior. They had two sons: Marston Glenn, born in 1990, and Cooper Bradford, born in 1991.

The couple divorced in 2010, and Mr. Hefner plowed into his work, including the editing of “The Century of Sex,” a Playboy book. When a New York Times interviewer later prodded him about the rewards of marriage, he replied, “Unfortunately, they come from other women.” Meanwhile, to widespread snickering, he became a cheerleader for Viagra, telling a British journalist, “It is as close as anyone can imagine to the fountain of youth.”

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The re-emerged Hef reveled in the new century. In 2005 he began appearing on television on the E! channel reality show “The Girls Next Door,” although his onscreen role consisted mostly of peering in while his three young, blond girlfriends planned adventures at the mansion. When the three original “Girls Next Door” went their separate ways after five seasons, he replaced them with three others, also young and blond — and shortly afterward asked one of them, Crystal Harris, to marry him.

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Five days before the 85-year old Mr. Hefner was to marry the 25-year-old Ms. Harris in June 2011 — the wedding was to have been filmed by the Lifetime cable channel as a reality special — the bride called it off. Mr. Hefner, by this time a man of the 21st-century media, announced on Twitter, “Crystal has had a change of heart.”

But Ms. Harris had another change of heart, and the two married on New Year’s Eve 2012. On their first anniversary, Mr. Hefner tweeted to his 1.4 million followers, “It’s good to be in love.”

Mr. Hefner’s survivors include Ms. Harris and his four children.

Another of the “Girls Next Door,” Holly Madison, offered a much more depressing version of life in the mansion in a 2015 tell-all book. In the years when Mr. Hefner was calling her his “No.1 girlfriend,” she wrote in “Down the Rabbit Hole,” she endured a dysfunctional household of petty rules, allowances, quarrels and backstabbing, all directed by an emotionally manipulative old man.

Through those years, however, the Playboy brand marched forward. In 2011 Mr. Hefner took Playboy Enterprises private again. Scott Flanders, after taking over as chief executive in 2009, focused on the licensing business, shrinking the company and raising its profits. The website, cleansed of any whiff of pornography, enjoyed huge growth, while Mr. Hefner, who retained his title and about 30 percent of the company’s stock, cheerfully tweeted news and pictures of the many festivities at the mansion, along with hundreds of photographs from his past, in the glory decades of the ’60s and ’70s.

Last year the Playboy Mansion was sold for $100 million to Daren Metropoulos, an investor. As a condition of the sale, Mr. Hefner was allowed to continue living in the mansion for the rest of his life, with Playboy Enterprises paying Mr. Metropoulos $1 million a year to lease it.

Mr. Hefner was to be buried in Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, in a mausoleum drawer he had bought next to Marilyn Monroe’s.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/obituaries/hugh-hefner-dead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

That disconnect was on display on Wednesday night, as Facebook advertising executives mingled with reporters at the upscale 1 Hotel Central Park over cocktails and passed snacks that included duck confit taquitos and salmon caviar pancakes. Just before the event started, Mr. Zuckerberg responded to a claim from President Trump that Facebook was “anti-Trump.” The event, which Facebook told reporters in late August would be on the record — meaning discussions there could be reported on — was made off the record last week, a few hours after Ms. Sandberg posted her response to the issue of racist ads.

As Facebook sought to polish its reputation, industry leaders were wrestling with the misuse of marketing tools that had been developed for their benefit. Facebook is seen as an unavoidable force, not only because it’s the second-biggest seller of online advertising after Google, but also because it provides companies with unprecedented methods for targeting ads to people based on their tastes and habits.

“Sometimes our industry gets so enamored with new things that we lose sight of unintended consequences,” said Sarah Hofstetter, chief executive of the ad agency 360i. “Data and personalization is one of those things. It can be used for phenomenal targeting of potential consumers to buy cookies, toys and book hotel rooms, but it also can be used to target hate groups and inspire nefarious outcomes.”

She added, “Whether they like it or not, media companies have a tremendous responsibility to protect the public from itself.”

But while the social concerns over such misuse are clear, brands are not responding by changing the way they spend their advertising budgets, as they did earlier this year when ads for brands like ATT were discovered on YouTube videos promoting terrorism and hate speech.

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“We haven’t seen any clients question their investments in Facebook in response to the news, and I think the main reason for that is that no brands were directly or indirectly harmed by this activity,” said Aaron Shapiro, chief executive of the digital ad agency Huge. “It’s definitely something the marketing community is monitoring very carefully, because certainly, if it becomes a big enough issue where public association with Facebook starts to become negative, that’s a totally different story where advertisers would have to pay attention.”

Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing officer of Mastercard, said that although he was confident that digital platforms would do their best to fix their issues, their unparalleled size made the point essentially moot. “I cannot block them off and say I don’t want to deal with them anymore because they’ve got a huge reach and that reach matters to me and it is very economical reach, too,” he said of Facebook.

Still, it is very likely that Facebook — and Google — will need to do more to show advertisers that they are policing abuse and that their ads actually deliver.

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“The burden of proof that they are effective rises with every misstep on the social or political spectrum,” said Rob Norman, the chief digital officer of GroupM, the media-buying arm of the ad giant WPP.

Google and Facebook are often referred to as the “duopoly” within the ad industry; the research firm eMarketer projects that the two companies will collectively take in 63 percent of all digital ad investments in the United States this year.

Mr. Norman raised regulation as a possibility that could affect the dominance of the companies. He mused about the possibility of regulators saying “that targeted advertising of cohorts of let’s say, less than a million people, is now illegal.” A regulator could potentially argue that “the moment you can get it down to incredibly granular population groups, that’s where the bad actions start to take place,” he said.

There are also questions around how Facebook will handle disclosure of ads, for political and nonpolitical causes, going forward.

While advertising has “perennially been misused in political campaigns,” the anonymity associated with the Russian ads on Facebook makes it newly dangerous, said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and partner of the agency Goodby, Silverstein Partners.

“What would stop any of our clients from going out and doing this now?” Mr. Goodby said. “It’s a possibility to just go out there and flood social media with things that are anonymous, seemingly innocent expressions of opinion, which is what we’re addicted to. But it’s interesting to think about what happens if we’re being manipulated by that — the very thing we’re addicted to suddenly becomes like a heroin, it hurts us suddenly, people use it against us.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/business/media/facebook-advertising-week.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The situation arose Monday morning — just hours after Miller had taken the symbolic knee. At that time, KOAA-TV, which delivers news to Southern Colorado, reported that Miller had lost an endorsement deal with Phil Long Dealerships, specifically Phil Long Ford of Denver.

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The station later said it had based that on an email sent to media outlets on Monday by the advertising agency that represents Phil Long Dealerships. According to the station, the email said: “Please note ALL Von Miller ads needs to be removed. He is no longer a part of Phil Long.”

The news report has been removed from KOAA’s website. But The Denver Post reported that the station had said the dealership dropped Miller’s endorsement “because of his protest.”

Later on Monday, Robert Wilson, a spokesman for Vanguard Sports, which represents Miller, told the station that discussions were underway to renew the linebacker’s contract with the dealership but that the dealership said it had “decided not to move forward with the contract this year.”

But he also said Miller had not had a deal in place for months, so the linebacker had not been “fired.” He declined to comment further Wednesday when reached by The New York Times.

A statement released Monday by Phil Long Dealerships did little to clarify matters, saying the company had been “in the middle of contract renewal” with Miller and had not, in fact, “fired Von.”

The statement seemed to both support Miller and express concern about how his conduct reflected on the business.

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“This weekend’s events remind us that sometimes we feel that we best represent ourselves,” said the statement, which was provided to The Times. “We support Von and his First Amendment rights, we know Von and he’s a good person. He donated a police car to his hometown police dept. All that notwithstanding when we bring in celebrities to represent us we run the risk of being misrepresented.”

“While we can’t control the actions of others,” the statement continued, “we can be responsible for how we support our nation and community.”

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By Monday night, KOAA had posted a story saying it had erroneously reported that Miller had been fired, apologizing for what it called “a mistake.”

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By that time, Yelp users had descended onto the site to pillory Phil Long Ford of Denver for firing Miller. On Wednesday, Yelp added an alert that popped up on the dealership’s page noting that the business had “recently made waves in the news,” and that moderators would “work to remove both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.”

That cleanup process began on Wednesday, Yelp said, so several one-star reviews from earlier in the week remained on the company page as of Wednesday afternoon.

“We’ve seen those,” Shawn Flynn, chief marketing officer at Phil Long Dealerships, said in a phone interview on Wednesday, “and we continue to respond to them as we see fit.”

Since Monday, various media outlets have published stories about Miller and the dealership — most with slightly varying interpretations of what happened.

Flynn maintained that Miller had not been fired and that the business and athlete were “in the middle of another contract negotiation as we speak.” Their previous endorsement contract had expired months ago, he said.

Flynn also said Miller’s choice to kneel on Sunday had no effect on the dealership’s relationship with him.

Asked later Wednesday whether it was true that the dealership had at some point “decided not to move forward” with contract negotiations, as Miller’s representative had contended on Monday, Flynn issued a second statement to The Times.

That statement did not directly address the question, nor whether the public backlash had any effect on the company’s view of a future relationship with Miller.

It reiterated that “Miller was never fired,” that he did not “lose an endorsement deal over a protest” and that there had been “consistent communication” with Miller’s agent about a deal.

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“On Monday morning, our dealership rotated different TV ads while we were discussing Sunday’s situation, however Von was and still is featured in a number of our marketing assets” the statement said, adding that “we look forward to continuing our discussions and working with him in the future.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/sports/football/von-miller-endorsement.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

She said she had managed to push away her assailant, who disappeared into the house. Within minutes, two guards approached her. “They said, ‘We’re sorry, but Mr. Hefner is asking you to leave the property,’” Ms. Magnuson recalled.

“Banned from the Playboy Mansion for refusing one of his gross friend’s sexual advances — total badge of honor,” Ms. Magnuson said. (She later added in a text message: “One of the reason ingénues accepted invitations to the mansion was to have a nice meal. Sad but true. I was the proverbial starving actress back then.”)

The debauchery at the Playboy Mansion continued for another two and a half decades. In 2005, Mr. Hefner’s reality show, “The Girls Next Door,” became a tawdry hit and introduced a new generation to the property.

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Like so many things in Hollywood, though, the reality had become quite different from the carefully crafted image. Rather than a rollicking pleasure palace, the mansion had become quite sad by 2009, when I spent time at the mansion for an article that would be headlined “The Loin in Winter.” Mr. Hefner’s struggling Playboy Enterprises was renting out the grounds nonstop for corporate events. He had lost most of his hearing but was still trying to pass off his silk-pajama shtick.

I remember being horrified by the aviary, which was stacked thick with white bird excrement. Daylight was not kind to the grotto; a wet, dirty pad resembling a small mattress appeared to be rotting in an alcove. The flamingos that once prowled the property were long gone (or hiding in shame) and the monkey cages, while clean, seemed to epitomize the place — an icky vestige of another era.

Two years later, the grotto pools would be linked to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

The stone house, built in 1927 for an heir to the Broadway and Bullock’s department store fortune, may well have another act. Located a few hundred feet off Sunset Boulevard and abutting the Los Angeles Country Club, the Playboy Mansion was purchased last year by J. Daren Metropoulos, a businessman and heir to a fortune built on Chef Boyardee meatballs, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Bumble Bee tuna. The sale had one condition: Mr. Hefner could live there until his death.

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Mr. Metropoulos has fastidiously avoided the spotlight, refusing to answer questions about his plans. But as the Hefner era fades into history, it should be remembered that for all the hedonistic fun the mansion seemed to epitomize, it contained many dark corners.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/business/media/playboy-mansion-hefner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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In the daytime, Hugh Hefner wore custom-made silk — not satin, satin made him slip off the bedsheets, he said — in a shade he liked to call “gunfighter black.” At night he would transition into rich colors. Of an evening, he would add a bathrobe. For company, he’d put on a smoking jacket.

Mr. Hefner said that he did not wear underwear.

He moved his office to the bedroom in 1963, a decade after the first issue of Playboy, and never looked back. “One of the key moments in my life was the discovery that I could get away with wearing pajamas most of the time,” Mr. Hefner wrote in “Hef’s Little Black Book,” his sort-of memoir from 2004.

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He could.

In 1974, he moved to California from Chicago for good as well. He told People magazine that in those intervening 11 years, he “never went out of the house” — so it was only in his new life in Los Angeles that he began to show off his vast collection of sleepwear outdoors. (Plenty of people in Chicago made it indoors though: During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Mr. Hefner’s weeklong party found him in “blue and red print batik pajamas with an olive green bathrobe,” according to a New York Times report.)

Like so many in California, Mr. Hefner entered an endless cycle of party, rinse, repeat. In an essay comparing the “heterosexually omnipotent, but increasingly prosthetic” manhood of the fictional James Bond and the very real Hugh Hefner, Patrick O’Donnell, the academic, describes Mr. Hefner’s schedule as he exhibited it in the 1980s as one without end: “Each ‘evening’ begins precisely at the same time; each night of the week is dedicated to a different purpose: Monday is new movie night, Wednesday is poker night with the boys, Friday is party night, Sunday is vintage movie night, etc.”

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In recent years he still had the kind of schedule that a particularly anxious adolescent would find comforting. Wednesdays and Fridays, Mr. Hefner and his entourage would make the round of the clubs, and then, according to a memoir from his ex-girlfriend Holly Madison, would retire to chambers. (There, all the “girls” would change into pajamas — flannel for them, not silk, she said.)

“It was always exactly the same because that’s just how he likes to live his life,” Ms. Madison told BuzzFeed in 2015.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/fashion/hugh-hefner-pajamas.html?partner=rss&emc=rss