Archives for April 2019

The magazine was intended to directly take on Sports Illustrated with an appeal to a younger, hipper crowd. “It’s Rolling Stone crossed with Sports Illustrated,” Skipper said in the ESPN oral history “Those Guys Have All The Fun.”

“Everything we wanted to do was a clear delineation with that’s them and that’s old, and that’s last generation, and that’s the thing that happened yesterday,” he added.

Skipper estimated on a recent episode of Bill Simmons’s podcast at The Ringer that in the mid-2000s the magazine earned a profit of $30 to $40 million annually, though this likely includes other ESPN products that were bundled with it. Its success helped propel Skipper up the ESPN hierarchy to president of the company.

But not only has the world of print publishing changed radically since then, so has ESPN.

Skipper, who spoke frequently about the importance of storytelling and rigorous journalism, is no longer at ESPN. He resigned in 2017 after what he described as an extortion attempt related to a purchase of cocaine.

In the last several years, ESPN has undergone successive rounds of layoffs. The company is still highly profitable, but its growth has ground to a halt as consumers continue to abandon pay television. In 2011, about 100 million Americans subscribed to a television package with ESPN. That number is down to less than 85 million, a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

As the company has reoriented toward a future in digital video, it has shed some of its high-minded projects. Grantland, a sports and pop culture site built in Simmons’s image, was shut down in 2015. FiveThirtyEight, a data-heavy sports and politics site created by Nate Silver, was transferred to ESPN’s corporate sibling ABC News last year. Subscriptions to ESPN Insider, a fantasy sports and gambling-heavy section of ESPN’s website which used to be merged with the magazine, were instead merged in August into ESPN+, ESPN’s new subscription digital video service.

Under the new president, Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN has focused on getting back into the good graces of the N.F.L. and rapidly growing ESPN+ by filling it with thousands of sports contests.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/sports/espn-magazine-print-closes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Limited Love for ‘Cher’

“The Cher Show,” a jukebox musical about you-know-who, scored notice for its leading lady, Stephanie J. Block, its glittery costumer, Bob Mackie, and its lighting designer, Kevin Adams, but not for the show itself or for other figures on its creative team. The musical, backed by the “Hamilton” lead producer Jeffrey Seller, has been selling well but not amazingly, and this is a show that could benefit from a strong musical performance on the awards broadcast.

A Split Verdict on Topicality

“What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s autobiographical reflection on gender and American law, has benefited from perfect timing, arriving on the scene amid the #MeToo movement and the contentious battle over President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

But “American Son,” a Kerry Washington-backed play about the fraught relationship between young black men and the police, got no nominations.

Zeroed Out

Nine shows were completely overlooked by the nominators. The immediate commercial implications are significant only for “Pretty Woman,” a stage adaptation of the film, with music by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, that has been doing reasonably well at the box office despite unfavorable reviews.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/theater/tony-award-nominations-2019-snubs-and-surprises.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The focus on Facebook Groups is convenient for the company because it reduces the amount of public content that it has to moderate and ultimately answer for, said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of media and communication at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. “I think it’s a way for them to offload responsibility,” the professor said.

Facebook’s developer conference, called F8, began in 2007 to entice developers to build apps for the social network. The company offered developers access to its so-called social graph, its rich web of user connections and personal data.

Last year, The New York Times and others revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British political firm with developer access to Facebook’s social graph, had harvested the personal information of millions of Facebook users without their consent, in order to build voter profiles for the Trump presidential campaign. That revelation brought heightened scrutiny to the social giant, particularly on how it handled users’ information.

Facebook has since vowed to supervise its users’ information more closely and placed greater restrictions on developer access. That makes this year’s F8 more challenging for developers who have relied on the social network’s data.

“It’s going to make developing for the platform harder for a lot of these folks,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He added that any short-term difficulties for developers were worth the long-term benefit of greater user trust in the platform.

The new privacy direction may create other issues. Closed groups and encrypted services will make it more difficult to identify and root out dangerous or abusive behavior, Mr. Zuckerberg said, though he added that the company’s automated systems had ways of detecting illicit activities — like examining traffic patterns — without scanning the content of private messages.

“There’s still a lot more to do,” he said, adding that the spotlight on the company had “definitely prompted more introspection around what direction our services should go in.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/technology/facebook-private-communication-groups.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

‘Hadestown’ and ‘The Ferryman’ get Tonys love

“Hadestown,” a folk-and-blues-inflected musical reimagining the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, led the Tony nominations on Tuesday, winning nods in 14 categories and becoming a front-runner in the hotly contested, and financially significant, race for the season’s best new musical.

An unconventional show nurtured by the downtown theater scene — sung-through, poetic, packed with emotion and politics — “Hadestown” will now face off against four others for the big prize. “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” an exuberantly sung and danced jukebox musical, garnered 12 nominations; “Tootsie,” a musical comedy adapted from the popular film but updated to reflect today’s gender politics, got 11. “Beetlejuice,” another movie adaptation, scared up eight nominations; and “The Prom,” about egotistic New York actors who insert themselves into a debate about sexuality at an Indiana high school, received seven.

“I can’t believe this is real — I never expected that this road was going to lead here,” said the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, who fell in love with the Greek myth as a child and then, a dozen years ago, adapted it for the stage in a DIY-production that she packed into a silver school bus and toured around community theaters in Vermont.

Now she is a two-time Tony nominee, for the show’s book and score. “I just got captivated by the idea that there’s this character who believed that if he could make a piece of art beautiful enough, he could change the world,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/theater/tony-nominations-nominees.html?partner=rss&emc=rss