Archives for November 2017

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Fans gathered as usual outside the “Today” studio on Thursday morning. Some took time to discuss the firing of Matt Lauer and the allegations against him.

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By Jaclyn Peiser

Nov. 30, 2017

A day after the announcement that Matt Lauer was fired as co-host of the “Today” show, hundreds of tourists and die-hard fans gathered outside the NBC studio on Rockefeller Plaza. It is a daily occurrence that has become as much a part of the show as Al Roker’s weather forecasts. On Thursday, many fans carried homemade signs proclaiming their affection for the morning show, but they were also processing the sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Lauer, who, for some, has been a part of their morning ritual for decades.

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Burlington, Ky.

Dan Burns, 56, and Lisa Burns, 56

The couple, who work in radioactive waste management, said visiting “Today” was a priority during their trip to New York. They made posters before their arrival.

“We actually had Matt on it,” Ms. Burns said. “We made it Tuesday night! And we get here, it was like: We have to take Matt off.”

Being outside the studio on a day when the “Today” anchors were reporting on Mr. Lauer’s firing also made for some surreal moments.

“The crowd, each time the news would come on, they were subdued and solemn and just a little sad,” Mr. Burns said.

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New port Richey, Fla.

Angela Napolitano, 49

Ms. Napolitano, a travel agent, said she had debated standing outside “Good Morning America” but had decided on “Today” once she heard the news about Mr. Lauer.

“I thought it would be a little bit more interesting even though it is a very touchy subject,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in him.”

She added: “I was shocked. I was like, ‘Him? Of all people?’ Because I always thought he was a really nice guy. Some people you think are slime or pigs, but I really didn’t think he was like that.”

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Nokesville, Va.

Joe Blake, 57, and Deborah Linton-Blake, 52

Mr. Blake, an airline pilot, and Ms. Linton-Blake, a real estate agent, were visiting New York with friends. The couple said they weren’t surprised by the revelations about Mr. Lauer.

“Men of power, you know, end up doing this all the time,” Mr. Blake said. “It’s pretty sad.”

Ms. Linton-Blake said she felt sorry for Mr. Lauer’s former co-anchors, who had to go on the air and deliver the news about their colleague.

“It’s got to be tough for them in the morning to have to talk about it,” she said. “I wanted to see how they were actually going to address it.”

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Newport, R.I.

Michele Douglas, 63

Ms. Douglas said her husband had wanted them to go because of the news surrounding Mr. Lauer.

“I thought: ‘Well, you know what? This might be fun,’” she said. “And it was.

“It was very interesting just to listen to how the show had to come out and not defend him,” she added. “But it must have been very uncomfortable for them to have to go on the air this morning without him there and explain how they felt. I felt a little uncomfortable for them.”

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Wilmington, N.C.

Sarah Bramlett, 11, and Traci Bramlett, 53

The mother and daughter are longtime fans of the program and were excited to visit the studio while on a girls’ trip to New York.

“It was very sad to hear. Shocking,” Ms. Bramlett, a nurse practitioner, said of the allegations against Mr. Lauer.

But it didn’t stop them from going to the plaza, and it won’t stop them from watching the show.

“Of course, he seems to have been a cornerstone or, you know, a familiar face,” Ms. Bramlett said. “But there’s other personalities there that are just as warm and inviting that I enjoy.”

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Buffalo

Charlie Frederiksen, 60

Mr. Frederiksen, who restores old houses, has been watching the show for 27 years and has been to a live broadcast six times.

Mr. Frederiksen said he had seen abuses of power throughout his former career as a city planner.

“I’m not surprised that someone who has been around so long and has so much power that — how many women have thrown themselves at them for so many years,” he said of Mr. Lauer. “With people of fame, you know, people give them everything, and they feel powerful.”

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Clifton Forge, Va.

Ricky Swoope, 51, and Amy Swoope, 47

Mr. and Mrs. Swoope, who were in New York on a four-day bus tour, watch “Today” every morning, saying they feel that it’s lighter and more positive than the other morning shows.

“I think everyone’s in shock because you spend your mornings with people on TV and you think you know them when really, at the end of the day, no one knows anyone,” Mrs. Swoope said. “But forgiveness and grace, because everyone makes mistakes.”

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Indianapolis

Jacob Trusnik, 18; Barrett McDaniel, 18; Ruhan Syed, 17

The students were in town for a conference with a high school club, which always includes a visit to “Today.”

“We did talk about it a little bit on the way back to our hotel last night,” Mr. Trusnik said. “But we still decided on the ‘Today’ show because everyone was excited to participate in the events here.”

Mr. McDaniel added, “In my personal opinion, the bad actions of one guy don’t negatively reflect on the company as a whole.”

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Impeachment just became a lot more likely.

The Flynn deal opens the door to charges against the president’s inner circle — and his family.

The president is acting more deranged than usual, but Republicans in Congress don’t care.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/media/today-show-fans-matt-lauer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The company has done all this without raising outside funding, unlike digital powerhouses such as BuzzFeed and Vice, which have collected hundreds of millions of dollars. It also has only 41 employees, and the low operating costs, along with its enormous popularity, have made for good business. Tomas Banisauskas, Bored Panda’s founder, told me he expects to be profitable this year with $20 million to $30 million in revenue, mostly from the advertisements that appear on its website. Roughly 90 percent of its web traffic comes from Facebook, making the social network by far the biggest factor in Bored Panda’s success.

“They’re a really helpful company for us,” Mr. Banisauskas, 31, said of Facebook.

Bored Panda began as a side project in 2009, while Mr. Banisauskas, then a freelance videographer, was studying business administration at Vilnius University. He was inspired by feats of internet creativity like the Million Dollar Homepage, in which an entrepreneur auctioned off a million pixels on a website for $1 each. And he came up with the idea for a website that would, as he put it, “fight boredom with art and good news stories.”

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On the content side, Bored Panda’s strategy followed a familiar playbook. It collected user-generated content from Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and other social platforms and repackaged it with tempting headlines. But by focusing on art, photography and other creative pursuits, and by studiously sticking to the kind of apolitical content that few people object to, Bored Panda has steadily built a feel-good, escapist empire.

Bored Panda has the advantage of getting most of its content free from up-and-coming artists and other creative types who want the kind of exposure a large Facebook page can bring. (And, yes, it does ask for permission. I contacted several artists whose work had been featured on Bored Panda, and all said they’d given their blessing.) It has also adopted a quality-over-quantity strategy that appears to have served it well. It published only 519 articles in October, or roughly 16 posts a day, according to NewsWhip. Compare that with CNN, which published 5,595 articles during the month, and Fox News, which published 51,919 articles.

It hasn’t been a straight line to success. In its early days, Bored Panda relied on StumbleUpon, a link aggregation site that was popular at the time, for much of its traffic. But in 2010, according to Mr. Banisauskas, StumbleUpon sharply reduced Bored Panda’s prominence on the site and pressured him to buy ads instead.

As Mr. Banisauskas would later write in a post on Medium, the experience taught him that “the only way to survive in this industry is to build long-term value through loyal followers.”

The next several years were a struggle, but in 2013, Bored Panda began to see a spike in viewers being sent from a new source: Facebook. Its positive, lighthearted content was a hit with the social network’s users, and the site’s traffic grew tenfold in a single year. Soon, despite Mr. Banisauskas’s intentions, Bored Panda was far from self-sufficient — its prospects hinged almost entirely on Facebook.

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More recently, while its competitors have hedged their risks by diversifying away from Facebook, Bored Panda has made a conscious effort to pull the platform even closer. It has started several offshoot Facebook brands, including pages for art and animal-themed stories, and a page called Crafty Panda that focuses on D.I.Y. projects. It has begun creating original content, too, and recently set up a video studio in its office, a hospital from the 19th century that was converted into a tech office complex.

“Everyone wants to be not so dependent on Facebook,” Mr. Banisauskas told me. “At the same time, it’s impossible — Facebook is the place where people share their ideas.”

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But dependence comes with real risk. Last month, for example, Facebook began testing a new design for its news feed. In this version, which is being tested in six countries, Facebook posts from pages (including businesses, public figures and publishers like Bored Panda) were removed from the regular news feed. They were placed in a separate section called “Explore Feed,” where they appeared less prominently.

This change caused tremors in the Facebook publishing world. Several publishers from countries included in the test complained that their Facebook traffic had plummeted overnight. A social media manager from a news site in Slovakia, one of the countries included in the test, called it the “biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen.”

Facebook told me it planned to continue testing the Explore Feed changes for several more months. In a blog post, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, wrote that the test was meant to “understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” but that the company had “no plans to roll this test out further.”

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Rafat Ali, a digital publishing veteran and chief executive of the travel media company Skift, said that while these particular algorithmic changes might not come to pass, sites like Bored Panda could still be easily crushed by a future Facebook experiment.

“You never know when the rug could be pulled from under them,” Mr. Ali said. “They could be done in a year or two.”

Mr. Banisauskas knows that Facebook can be a fickle landlord, and he worries that as a small foreign company that specializes in aggregated entertainment content, Bored Panda is in a more precarious position than most. Roughly half of Bored Panda’s Facebook audience is American, and Mr. Banisauskas worries that the site could be punished inadvertently by efforts to combat fake news and Russian-style influence campaigns.

“We’re not part of the problem,” he said, “but we could get the collateral damage.”

Last summer, Mr. Banisauskas traveled to New York to meet with a group of other Facebook-focused publishers. All these companies produce entertaining material that reaches millions of people every day. In another era, that alone might have been enough to guarantee them a stable future. Today, they exist at Facebook’s mercy and might be wiped away at any moment.

For now, though, Bored Panda is charging ahead, and hoping to remain on Facebook’s good side.

“Everyone should be worried,” Mr. Banisauskas said, before he injected a note of Bored Panda-style positivity: “But I believe everything will work out well.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/technology/facebook-bored-panda.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Fans gathered as usual outside the “Today” studio on Thursday morning. Some took time to discuss the firing of Matt Lauer and the allegations against him.

Image

By Jaclyn Peiser

Nov. 30, 2017

A day after the announcement that Matt Lauer was fired as co-host of the “Today” show, hundreds of tourists and die-hard fans gathered outside the NBC studio on Rockefeller Plaza. It is a daily occurrence that has become as much a part of the show as Al Roker’s weather forecasts. On Thursday, many fans carried homemade signs proclaiming their affection for the morning show, but they were also processing the sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Lauer, who, for some, has been a part of their morning ritual for decades.

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Burlington, Ky.

Dan Burns, 56, and Lisa Burns, 56

The couple, who work in radioactive waste management, said visiting “Today” was a priority during their trip to New York. They made posters before their arrival.

“We actually had Matt on it,” Ms. Burns said. “We made it Tuesday night! And we get here, it was like: We have to take Matt off.”

Being outside the studio on a day when the “Today” anchors were reporting on Mr. Lauer’s firing also made for some surreal moments.

“The crowd, each time the news would come on, they were subdued and solemn and just a little sad,” Mr. Burns said.

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New port Richey, Fla.

Angela Napolitano, 49

Ms. Napolitano, a travel agent, said she had debated standing outside “Good Morning America” but had decided on “Today” once she heard the news about Mr. Lauer.

“I thought it would be a little bit more interesting even though it is a very touchy subject,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in him.”

She added: “I was shocked. I was like, ‘Him? Of all people?’ Because I always thought he was a really nice guy. Some people you think are slime or pigs, but I really didn’t think he was like that.”

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Nokesville, Va.

Joe Blake, 57, and Deborah Linton-Blake, 52

Mr. Blake, an airline pilot, and Ms. Linton-Blake, a real estate agent, were visiting New York with friends. The couple said they weren’t surprised by the revelations about Mr. Lauer.

“Men of power, you know, end up doing this all the time,” Mr. Blake said. “It’s pretty sad.”

Ms. Linton-Blake said she felt sorry for Mr. Lauer’s former co-anchors, who had to go on the air and deliver the news about their colleague.

“It’s got to be tough for them in the morning to have to talk about it,” she said. “I wanted to see how they were actually going to address it.”

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Newport, R.I.

Michele Douglas, 63

Ms. Douglas said her husband had wanted them to go because of the news surrounding Mr. Lauer.

“I thought: ‘Well, you know what? This might be fun,’” she said. “And it was.

“It was very interesting just to listen to how the show had to come out and not defend him,” she added. “But it must have been very uncomfortable for them to have to go on the air this morning without him there and explain how they felt. I felt a little uncomfortable for them.”

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Wilmington, N.C.

Sarah Bramlett, 11, and Traci Bramlett, 53

The mother and daughter are longtime fans of the program and were excited to visit the studio while on a girls’ trip to New York.

“It was very sad to hear. Shocking,” Ms. Bramlett, a nurse practitioner, said of the allegations against Mr. Lauer.

But it didn’t stop them from going to the plaza, and it won’t stop them from watching the show.

“Of course, he seems to have been a cornerstone or, you know, a familiar face,” Ms. Bramlett said. “But there’s other personalities there that are just as warm and inviting that I enjoy.”

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Buffalo

Charlie Frederiksen, 60

Mr. Frederiksen, who restores old houses, has been watching the show for 27 years and has been to a live broadcast six times.

Mr. Frederiksen said he had seen abuses of power throughout his former career as a city planner.

“I’m not surprised that someone who has been around so long and has so much power that — how many women have thrown themselves at them for so many years,” he said of Mr. Lauer. “With people of fame, you know, people give them everything, and they feel powerful.”

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Clifton Forge, Va.

Ricky Swoope, 51, and Amy Swoope, 47

Mr. and Mrs. Swoope, who were in New York on a four-day bus tour, watch “Today” every morning, saying they feel that it’s lighter and more positive than the other morning shows.

“I think everyone’s in shock because you spend your mornings with people on TV and you think you know them when really, at the end of the day, no one knows anyone,” Ms. Swoope said. “But forgiveness and grace, because everyone makes mistakes.”

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Indianapolis

Jacob Trusnik, 18; Barrett McDaniel, 18; Ruhan Syed, 17

The students were in town for a conference with a high school club, which always includes a visit to “Today.”

“We did talk about it a little bit on the way back to our hotel last night,” Mr. Trusnik said. “But we still decided on the ‘Today’ show because everyone was excited to participate in the events here.”

Mr. McDaniel added, “In my personal opinion, the bad actions of one guy don’t negatively reflect on the company as a whole.”

Image

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In postwar Japan, a single-minded focus on rapid economic growth helped erode family ties. Now, a generation of elderly Japanese is dying alone.

An overhaul championed by President Trump and Republican leaders could reshape health care, education and social services.

The music mogul talks with The New York Times’s executive editor at the close of an eventful year.

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Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN and the former executive producer of the “Today’’ show, said Thursday that reports of sexual misconduct by Matt Lauer were “incredibly disturbing’’ and that some of the behavior being described was “deviant” and “predatory.” He said he had no knowledge of inappropriate actions by Mr. Lauer when he was a top executive at NBC.

Mr. Zucker made the remarks at Business Insider’s Ignition conference in Manhattan during an interview with Mike Shields, the advertising editor of Business Insider. Mr. Shields opened the discussion with a question on many people’s minds: How much did Mr. Zucker know about Mr. Lauer, the longstanding host of the “Today” show, who was fired on Wednesday after a woman accused him of sexual misconduct?

“No one ever brought to me, or to my knowledge, there was never, there was never a complaint about Matt,” Mr. Zucker said. “There was never a suggestion of that kind of deviant, predatory behavior. Not even a whisper of it, nothing like that.”

Mr. Lauer’s firing was announced by Andrew Lack, the NBC News chairman, who told staff members that until Monday the network had never received a complaint about Mr. Lauer in his more than 20 years at the network. That span covered part of Mr. Zucker’s tenure at the network, both as an executive producer of “Today” from 1992 to 2000 and through his rise to become the president and chief executive officer of NBCUniversal.

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Later on Wednesday, after Variety published a report saying that some women had complained to NBC executives about Mr. Lauer’s behavior but that nothing was done about it, the network issued another statement.

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“We can say unequivocally, that, prior to Monday night, current NBC News management was never made aware of any complaints about Matt Lauer’s conduct,” the statement said.

Mr. Lauer is the latest high-profile media figure to face a swift fall from grace amid accusations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/media/jeff-zucker-matt-lauer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Sunset is one of four publications whose sales were in the works before the deal was made. Sales of Essence, Golf and Time Inc. UK are also being brokered, said Jill Davison, a spokeswoman for Time Inc.

Sunset’s editor, Irene Edwards, broke the news to the staff of about 30 on Thursday.

“It’s an amazing scenario,” she said in an interview. Sunset had long been something of a dinghy attached to the back of Time Inc.’s ship. “We were just a very small brand in a large portfolio, and we got a commensurate amount of resources.”

Some staff members were told they would not have jobs, and some parts of the business will be restructured. There will be a greater focus on the magazine’s wine and food events and its model homes, which are designed to showcase innovations in architecture and construction. Mr. Reinstein also plans to invest more in the magazine’s digital and video offerings, and to make better use of longtime Sunset personalities like the food editor Margo True, a veteran of both Saveur and Gourmet.

The Southern Pacific Railroad Company started Sunset as a promotional travel brochure, but it quickly grew along with the American West, and eventually became a prototype for today’s food and lifestyle magazines.

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Early editions, however, were more literary. The writer Jack London and John Muir, the naturalist who helped establish Yosemite National Park, contributed stories.

Its first recipe, for chayote squash, was printed in 1915. By the 1940s, the publication was calling itself “the Magazine for Western Living,” and introducing readers to fresh chiles, cilantro and tamales long before they hit the American mainstream.

Sunset has long been a friend to gardeners, too. It publishes separate editions in different growing zones, offering planting advice tailored to several Western states. During World War II, Sunset editors planted a one-acre garden in Berkeley, Calif., to help readers grow successful victory gardens.

When the suburban boom hit, Sunset was there, helping readers make the most of their newly built ranch homes and introducing them to a newfangled concept: the family room.

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The magazine and its books have been reliable award winners, and its editors became fierce defenders of well-tested recipes when the digital revolution unleashed a flood of sometimes unreliable cooking content.

The magazine began blogging in 2009, and won a James Beard award for its blog about a do-it-yourself project focusing on what staff members could grow, pickle and preserve within a one-block radius of the 1950s Menlo Park ranch house that had long been its headquarters. Cliff May designed it, and he and Sunset helped popularize the suburban ranch house that would come to define a certain slice of California.

In 2014, the house and the magazine’s serene seven-acre Menlo Park campus were sold to Embarcadero Capital Partners, a San Francisco real estate investment and management company. A year later, Ms. Edwards took over as editor in chief, and the offices moved to Oakland.

After Sunset is sold and the Time Inc. deal is complete, Meredith Corporation will control almost two dozen food and food-related titles, including powerhouses like Food Wine and Martha Stewart Living, regional favorites like Southern Living, and newer efforts like Extra Crispy, a Time Inc. digital platform that was introduced in 2016 and is dedicated to breakfast and what it calls “morning culture.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/dining/sunset-magazine-sale-regent.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul who co-founded Def Jam Records and a slew of other businesses, is stepping down from his companies after a woman said he sexually assaulted her in 1991.

His resignation followed a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter by Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter best known for “The Mummy” and “Rachel Getting Married.”

“I have been informed with great anguish of Jenny Lumet’s recollection about our night together in 1991,” he said in a statement. “I know Jenny and her family and have seen her several times over the years since the evening she described. While her memory of that evening is very different from mine, it is now clear to me that her feelings of fear and intimidation are real. While I have never been violent, I have been thoughtless and insensitive in some of my relationships over many decades and I sincerely apologize.”

On Nov. 19, The Los Angeles Times reported that Keri Claussen Khalighi, a model who was 17 at the time, had accused Mr. Simmons of coercing her into performing oral sex on him.

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“Everything that happened between us 26 years ago was completely consensual and with Keri’s full participation,” Mr. Simmons, 60, said in a statement denying that allegation. “Abusing women in any way shape or form violates the very core of my being.”

In her column, addressed to Mr. Simmons, Ms. Lumet, who was 24 at the time, said Mr. Simmons offered her a ride home from a restaurant, but when she got in the car the doors locked and Mr. Simmons and told the driver to go to his apartment instead of her home address.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/arts/russell-simmons-sexual-harassment.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

For NBC News, Mr. Lauer’s ignominious exit represents another setback in an already difficult period. And it has plunged morning television, a genre that depends on maintaining a mood of homey continuity, deeper into upheaval.

The move occurred a week after one of Mr. Lauer’s main competitors, Charlie Rose, the co-host of “CBS This Morning,” was fired after he faced his own spate of sexual harassment allegations.

Mr. Lauer, 59, had a greater impact on “Today” than Mr. Rose had on “CBS This Morning,” however. Inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Mr. Lauer was a one-man fief who wielded more behind-the-scenes influence than any other on-air personality.

With a reported annual salary of $25 million, he had the ear of top executives and a big voice in the making of “Today.” When an executive producer, Jamie Horowitz, was abruptly fired in 2014, Mr. Lauer was said to have played a role in the decision: The host was reportedly not on board with the changes that Mr. Horowitz was preparing to make.

Much of Mr. Lauer’s power stemmed from the bond he had forged with viewers as the longest tenured host in the program’s 65 years. The first two hours of “Today” — Mr. Lauer’s showcase — generated $508 million in revenue last year, more than the amount brought in by the other network morning shows, according to Kantar Media.

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That windfall was $100 million more than the earnings at ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and nearly three times greater than the revenue from “CBS This Morning.” In recent months, the dollar figure was only tracking higher: Through the first half of 2017, revenue for “Today” was on the upswing once again, according to Kantar. In effect, Mr. Lauer helped subsidize a good portion of the network’s entire news operation.

Although “Good Morning America” draws a bigger overall audience than “Today,” the NBC show has beaten its ABC rival in the 25-to-54-year-old age bracket important to advertisers for 100 consecutive weeks, according to Nielsen.

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The termination comes toward the end of a year that was supposed to be a kind of victory lap for the host. In January, to acknowledge his 20 years on the program, “Today” aired a celebratory piece that included snippets of Mr. Lauer’s 10 interviews with presidents, nine stints as an Olympics host and reports from more than 60 countries.

“He’s like your breakfast smoothie, you know?” the former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw said in the segment. “He’s kind of a high-energy drink. Easy on the palate.”

Mr. Lauer lasted so long on “Today” because he gave the impression of being equally at ease with celebrities, world leaders and the throng of sign-wielding onlookers who crowded the show’s windowed studio in Rockefeller Plaza.

All that came to an end when he joined the roster of powerful men in the media and entertainment industries — a list that includes the late Fox chairman Roger Ailes, the former Fox News Channel prime time host Bill O’Reilly, the film mogul Harvey Weinstein, the political reporter Mark Halperin and many others — who lost their positions as a result of accusations made against them by numerous women, the majority of them co-workers or job seekers.

NBC’s news division has weathered a series of contentious episodes dating back to last year’s presidential race. After a live forum of the presidential candidates in September hosted by Mr. Lauer, he received poor reviews for his handling of Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, with critics arguing that he questioned Mrs. Clinton aggressively and interrupted her repeatedly while giving Mr. Trump friendlier treatment.

In October, the network was scooped by a competitor, The Washington Post, which posted the “Access Hollywood” audio recording from 2005 that captured Mr. Trump boasting to the correspondent Billy Bush about grabbing women by the genitalia and kissing them.

NBC’s failure to be first with that story in the last days of a heated campaign seemed like a strange misstep to those who watch the media closely. “Access Hollywood,” a syndicated program, is an NBC property, and the network reviewed the audio before it was leaked to The Post.

At the time when the recording was made public, Mr. Bush was working as a 9 a.m. co-host for “Today.” Two days later, NBC suspended him for his role in the lewd, off-camera conversation. The network fired him 11 days later. (Mr. Trump apologized on video for his remarks the day after they surfaced.)

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NBC News once more passed on a story it could have reported first when it asked Ronan Farrow to stop reporting his expose of Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Farrow, who was a contributor for MSNBC until the network decided against renewing his contract two months ago, later published his findings in The New Yorker. Along with articles in The New York Times and other publications, Mr. Farrow’s series set off a national conversation about powerful figures and sexual misconduct.

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“Today” has been described as a boys’ club in past years. Earlier this month, a booker who worked at “Today,” Matt Zimmerman, was fired after the network received allegations of inappropriate behavior with female colleagues.

Colleagues of Ann Curry, who served alongside Mr. Lauer as the co-anchor on “Today” from 2011 to 2012, said that she was undermined by male colleagues during the time after she had risen to a prominent role on the show. In an interview with People on Wednesday, Ms. Curry said, “We need to move this revolution forward and make our workplaces safe.” (She had no comment for this article.) In October, Ms. Curry was among the many women who posted the #metoo hashtag on social media to signal solidarity with the anti-sexual harassment movement.

Mr. Trump, who starred in “The Apprentice,” a long-running hit for NBC, has in the past singled out the network’s news division in his criticism of American media outlets. On Wednesday, he seized on the developments involving Mr. Lauer.

“Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for ‘inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace,’ ” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:16 a.m. “But when will the top executives at NBC Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News.”

Since his years as a New York socialite, tabloid figure and a reality star, Mr. Trump has frequently offered his opinions of television executives and producers obscure to the average viewer. In his Wednesday tweets, Mr. Trump called for the firing of two senior NBC News executives — Mr. Lack and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. He also referred to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory involving Joe Scarborough, host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.

“Investigate!” the president wrote at the end of his Twitter post.

The “Today” show has weathered other disruptions this year. The anchor Tamron Hall left her perch on the show’s 9 a.m. hour. She was later replaced by Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News star who accused Mr. Ailes of sexual harassment in her 2016 memoir, “Settle for More.”

Ms. Kelly’s show has gone through growing pains in its first two months on the air. In recent weeks, she has averaged a little more than two million viewers at 9 a.m., and has lost more than 20 percent of the audience that was tuning in at that hour a year ago.

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ABC’s “Live with Kelly and Ryan,” with Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest, regularly reaches a million more viewers each morning.

On Wednesday, after wrapping a difficult edition of their show, the stars of “Today” had a long day ahead of them. At 7 p.m., Ms. Guthrie, Ms. Kotb and Al Roker were expected to host the annual Christmas tree lighting celebration at Rockefeller Plaza.

As of Tuesday, Mr. Lauer had been scheduled to join them.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/media/matt-lauer-nbc-news-firing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A fixture of American living rooms for more than two decades, Mr. Lauer was uncharacteristically silent on Wednesday in the wake of his firing, which left the television industry stunned and dominated headlines around the country. His former co-host on the “Today” show, Savannah Guthrie, read his statement aloud at the start of Thursday’s 7 a.m. broadcast, saying the program had received Mr. Lauer’s remarks just moments before going on air.

“It is a difficult morning here again,” Ms. Guthrie said at the beginning of the show, as headlines flashed onscreen about “Troubling Allegations” involving the man who, until Tuesday, had welcomed millions of Americans every morning to the same broadcast.

Stephanie Gosk, an NBC News correspondent, came on set to present a report on the allegations against Mr. Lauer, describing him as “one of the most high-profile faces of the sexual harassment firestorm engulfing this country.” Ms. Gosk confirmed a report in The New York Times that two additional women had filed complaints about Mr. Lauer to NBC News on Wednesday, in the hours after the anchor’s firing was announced, bringing the total number of complaints against him to three.

In a sign of how dominant the issue of harassment has become, much of Thursday’s “Today” program touched on allegations of abuse and misconduct. Ms. Guthrie conducted an interview with Marion Brown, who described being harassed by Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who is at the center of his own scandal.

Megyn Kelly, the host of the show’s 9 a.m. hour, used her opening segment to invite Mr. Lauer’s accusers, and Mr. Lauer, to appear with her on the show.

“We have been that place in all the other cases, and we will be that place, as well as for the accused, here on this hour,” Ms. Kelly said, looking into the camera.

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Citing allegations from various news reports, Ms. Kelly also spent more time describing Mr. Lauer’s alleged misbehavior than his former co-hosts in the show’s 7 a.m. hour had.

Still, some members of the “Today” team found room for lighter fare. Ms. Guthrie and Mr. Lauer’s substitute, Hoda Kotb, gushed about the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree on Wednesday evening, a live television event that Mr. Lauer had been scheduled to co-host (he did not appear). And when the meteorologist Al Roker came onscreen for his first weather report, he adopted his usual perky mien.

“You know what today is?” Mr. Roker said chirpily to his co-hosts. “It is the last day of hurricane season!”

He added, happily, “Let’s get rid of this thing.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/media/matt-lauer-nbc-statement.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

One by one, they have fallen to a range of allegations of sexual misconduct against them — the latest coming against Mr. Lauer and Mr. Keillor on Wednesday. And their sudden loss of stature is stripping away their television personae and swiftly ripping down the edifice of the old television news patriarchy in the process.

For their networks, these stars, whose talent for storytelling was matched by their ability to charm audiences, were money in the bank. They also drew salaries that were commensurate to how important they were to their bosses’ budgets. Mr. Lauer and Mr. O’Reilly each made more than $20 million.

The size of those investments would have provided their networks with ample motive to turn a blind eye to their alleged misdeeds. And NBC and CBS, like Fox News before them, now face questions about where their managerial systems broke down — as they inarguably did — to allow such sickening behavior to go unaddressed in ways that allowed the offenses to repeat themselves over years.

The arrival of hard consequences for these men may have come too late in the news industry, but media organizations are unquestionably leading the national reckoning now underway.

For the news business, this is the way it has to be: Its main product, after all, is integrity, which, in the case of the networks, is personified by those who sit behind the desk. Once the audience’s trust is lost, the entire enterprise falls apart.

President Trump appeared to seize on the idea on Wednesday when he wrote a message on Twitter that read in part, “Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC,” before moving on to his favorite pastime of undermining journalism, adding, “But when will the top executives at NBC Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News.”

Mr. Trump wrote that tweet not long after offering his support for Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. This is the man who — as The Washington Post first revealed in a meticulously reported investigative article — stands accused of making unwanted sexual advances (and in one case, committing an assault) against teenage girls when he was in his 30s.

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And, of course, there are the 10 women who have leveled accusations against Mr. Trump — who boasted of using his own star power to make surprise sexual advances on women in a “hot-mic” moment captured during a 2005 appearance on “Access Hollywood.”

In op-ed pages and on cable news, progressive commentators are questioning why television personalities, news executives and Hollywood heavyweights are losing their jobs while the politicians facing accusations — a list that also includes the Democrats Al Franken and John Conyers Jr. — remain gainfully employed.

But the two worlds have different accountability structures: Politicians will not get the hook from the public stage if their core supporters will stick with them, provided that enough of them step into the voting booth.

Journalists and news executives, on the other hand, must answer to their audiences — which overwhelmingly comprise women for the morning shows hosted by Mr. Lauer and Mr. Rose. They must also take into account their shareholders, their advertisers, their staff members and their peers, who are the ones who have been aggressively digging into these stories.

CNN on Wednesday dismissed a producer for “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper, Teddy Davis, after allegations of workplace misconduct surfaced against him. Mark Halperin, the political commentator, author and correspondent, lost his job at MSNBC because of allegations that he made unwanted and aggressive sexual advances against underlings when he worked at ABC. He also lost a lucrative book contract and his place on Showtime’s political documentary program “The Circus.” In addition, The New York Times has suspended a White House correspondent, Glenn Thrush, and NPR forced out two of its top news editors, Michael Oreskes, a former Times journalist, and David Sweeney, after allegations surfaced against them.

As leading national news hosts able to reach millions of people, Mr. Lauer and Mr. Rose are in a different sphere. The notion of anchor as authority — a stubbornly male prototype that goes back to the pre-feminist days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — was flawed to begin with. And yet, news organizations continue to depend on stars to what often seems like an unhealthy degree. In this, they are not so different from Hollywood producers whose main concern is having a big opening weekend.

The stature of the men behind the desk was such that they ended up holding a high level of power within their organizations to go with their lavish pay. And, per the accusations against them, they used it on underlings who, as one of Mr. Lauer’s accusers put it to The Times, did not feel as if they were able to say no or report mistreatment to higher-ups.

The networks bear extra responsibility because they did so much to make them into the larger-than-life — and, therefore, not-true-to-real-life — characters they became.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/media/matt-lauer-sexual-misconduct.html?partner=rss&emc=rss