Archives for April 2022

The executive producer of “Ten Percent” is John Morton, best known for his comedy “W1A,” which satirizes the BBC. In a recent interview, he said he was cognizant of the high stakes he was facing when he took the job of adapting the beloved series. Attracted to the show’s “warm heart” and its ability to connect its audience to its fallible main characters, Mr. Morton said, he was intimidated by the idea of “starting again with something that’s already so good.”

His strategy was to go back and rewatch the first season of “Call My Agent!” in its entirety but then never refer to it again. As of the interview, he had yet to finish the third season and hadn’t watched the fourth.

The ultimate goal was to take the essence of “Call My Agent!” and make it specifically British, capturing the diversity of London, from its architecture to its people.

“London is chaotic — architecturally, logistically, creatively — and that throws up wonderful things and also terrible things,” Mr. Morton said, adding that, as in “Call My Agent!,” the talent agency has a rooftop. But rather than looking out over a pristine Parisian night sky, this roof “looks out over a certain sort of unconnected chimneys.”

The cast of the British version is also more diverse, with the secret daughter from the original now played by the British actress Hiftu Quasem, who is of Bengali descent, and the bumbling agent, Dan, portrayed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, a British actor of Sri Lankan descent. Yet the archetypes from the original prevail. For example, Ms. Cottin’s character, a hard-charging lesbian agent, is now played by Lydia Leonard, and her character’s frenetic love life is also complicated by her career ambitions.

Mr. Davoli — who since becoming the head of Bron TV has sold three other co-productions to streaming companies, including “The Defeated” to Netflix and “Kin” to AMC — admits that the market for format deals has become more challenged in recent years.

“The thing that’s most important that I’ve learned over the last four years is the quality bar cannot be messed with,” he said. “The only way to protect the investment is to ensure that you’re creatively making content that can sell into the U.S., because our audiences are so sophisticated now. They won’t stick around for stuff that’s not rising above a certain bar.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/media/ten-percent-call-my-agent-streaming.html

Last fall, Quartz considered turning to investors to weather the storm. One investment pitch reviewed by New York Times reporters said the company was seeking to raise between $2 million and $3 million at a valuation of $20 million.

Mr. Seward committed $100,000 of his own money to the round, according to the pitch, and was planning to ask readers to invest by buying cryptocurrency tokens. Quartz also sought recognition as a so-called B Corp, or benefit corporation, a distinction granted to socially conscious companies.

This year, Quartz hired Grimes, McGovern Associates, an advisory firm, to pitch media companies on an outright acquisition of the property, the people said.

Mr. Spanfeller said plans call for Quartz to be profitable by the end of the year. Quartz should receive additional readers from referral links embedded on other websites owned by the company, which would increase the site’s advertising revenue.

Quartz was co-founded by Mr. Seward in 2012 as a business news site with about 20 journalists under the auspices of Atlantic Media, the publisher of the magazine The Atlantic. The site was sold in 2018 to Uzabase, a Japanese firm, in a deal that amounted to about $86 million. But the pandemic shrank advertising revenue, and Uzabase cut nearly half of Quartz’s staff. After two years of ownership, it put the publication up for sale.

Mr. Seward bought Quartz in November 2020 and took it private. The website has expanded its paying subscriber base to around 25,000, from fewer than 18,000 in April 2020.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/media/quartz-sale.html

“It was quite unusual,” Fuller recalled in a recent interview, “to have these five young girls come bounding in the office with confidence and say, ‘You have to manage us, and we’re not leaving until you agree.’ It was just very contagious, that energy.”

From the Girls’ perspective, “it just clicked,” Chisholm said. “When we met him, it felt very much like he got it.”

Instead of turning the Girls into clones of one another, as the Herberts had intended, Fuller told them to focus on who they genuinely were and just dial it up. “If you like pink and fluffy and your mum is your best friend, then be pink 24/7, have fluffy on you all the time. If you’re the rowdy northern girl who has no airs and graces, sexy and dominant and noisy, then be that,” Fuller explained. This idea, Fuller revealed in a 2014 BBC documentary, was inspired by Lennox, who, upon meeting the Girls, encouraged them to “ham up” their personalities.

The approach fit the Spice Girls perfectly.

The band’s “girl power” message, Chisholm said, also gave the group a focus: “At first, we wanted to make music and have fun and travel the world and do all those fun things. But the messaging gave us more motivation. We were expressing ourselves, as young women, in the mid-90s. It was giving fuel to this fire.”

Their first single, “Wannabe,” was released in Britain on July 8, 1996, and by the end of that year it hit No. 1 in more than 20 countries. Their debut album, “Spice,” released in November 1996, also went to No. 1 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best British or Irish album of the year.

“It was like, you know, the preparation, the waiting, the frustration,” Chisholm said. “And then ‘Wannabe’ is released and bam — just two years of mayhem.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/arts/music/spice-girls-girl-power.html

The executive producer of “Ten Percent” is John Morton, best known for his comedy “W1A,” which satirizes the BBC. In a recent interview, he said he was cognizant of the high stakes he was facing when he took the job of adapting the beloved series. Attracted to the show’s “warm heart” and its ability to connect its audience to its fallible main characters, Mr. Morton said, he was intimidated by the idea of “starting again with something that’s already so good.”

His strategy was to go back and rewatch the first season of “Call My Agent!” in its entirety but then never refer to it again. As of the interview, he had yet to finish the third season and hadn’t watched the fourth.

The ultimate goal was to take the essence of “Call My Agent!” and make it specifically British, capturing the diversity of London, from its architecture to its people.

“London is chaotic — architecturally, logistically, creatively — and that throws up wonderful things and also terrible things,” Mr. Morton said, adding that, as in “Call My Agent!,” the talent agency has a rooftop. But rather than looking out over a pristine Parisian night sky, this roof “looks out over a certain sort of unconnected chimneys.”

The cast of the British version is also more diverse, with the secret daughter from the original now played by the British actress Hiftu Quasem, who is of Bengali descent, and the bumbling agent, Dan, portrayed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, a British actor of Sri Lankan descent. Yet the archetypes from the original prevail. For example, Ms. Cottin’s character, a hard-charging lesbian agent, is now played by Lydia Leonard, and her character’s frenetic love life is also complicated by her career ambitions.

Mr. Davoli — who since becoming the head of Bron TV has sold three other co-productions to streaming companies, including “The Defeated” to Netflix and “Kin” to AMC — admits that the market for format deals has become more challenged in recent years.

“The thing that’s most important that I’ve learned over the last four years is the quality bar cannot be messed with,” he said. “The only way to protect the investment is to ensure that you’re creatively making content that can sell into the U.S., because our audiences are so sophisticated now. They won’t stick around for stuff that’s not rising above a certain bar.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/media/ten-percent-call-my-agent-streaming.html

Trump Media and Technology Group, the company founded by Mr. Trump to develop Truth Social, did not respond to requests for comment.

Inconsistent Censorship

In general, there wasn’t enough activity on Truth Social to get a strong sense of whether its content moderation policies were looser than those of mainstream social media. Like Twitter and Facebook, Truth Social has terms of service that state that illegal activity is not allowed on the app.

In some cases, the app appeared stricter than Twitter. While Twitter allows some pornographic content, Truth Social forbids sexual content and language altogether, according to its terms of service. On some posts containing the hashtagged F-word, Truth Social hid the content and displayed a warning about sensitive content. (Tapping on “Show Content” revealed the hashtag.)

To test the app’s claims about political ideology, I published a Truth with a New York Times Opinion article that was critical of the Republican Party, and other posts with news articles about the Jan. 6 riot and how Truth Social’s prospects could be hurt by Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter. None of the posts were flagged as problematic. That suggested the app wasn’t discriminating based on politics, just as it had said it wouldn’t.

I also found some accounts that were not allowed to post on Twitter — like The Babylon Bee, the right-wing satire site that was suspended for misgendering a transgender Biden administration official — posting regularly on Truth Social. It was another sign that the app was less restrictive than Twitter.

But Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, said the notion that Truth Social could be an uncensored social network was ultimately far-fetched. In reality, social networking sites are not truly the internet’s public squares, he said; they are commercial products that are required to obey the law, with communities of users who need to feel safe.

“A platform with no rules quickly descends into child pornography and Nazism,” he said.

Brianna Wu, a video game developer, said policies were necessary to keep social networks a safe place for people to communicate.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/technology/personaltech/truth-social-review-trump.html

“Do I think Elon Musk is going to be a vanguard about addressing the problems of disinformation and rising extremism? No, I just don’t,” he said, adding, “I think there’s a very strong case to be made that there’s going to be a dilution of whatever policies Twitter has had in place.”

Mr. Musk’s fortune and celebrity — he is also behind Tesla and SpaceX — will give him a powerful bully pulpit in the roiling debates over the limits of free speech, which he called “the bedrock of a functioning democracy” in a statement on Monday announcing the purchase.

He could also face financial and political constraints, like a new law by the European Union to require social media platforms to scrub their sites of misinformation and abuse. That could temper some of the “sky is falling” fears of his takeover.

At least one idea he has floated, making public the algorithms the company has designed, echoes those put forward by people in favor of reducing harmful content.

They include, most prominently, former President Barack Obama, who last week outlined a vision for combating disinformation at a conference at Stanford University that included subjecting algorithms to greater scrutiny and regulation.

“The real problem,” said Rachel Goodman, counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit, “is that the future of how we share and advance knowledge and debate the issues central to our democracy shouldn’t depend on whether a single person in control is a superhero or supervillain.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/technology/musk-misinformation-twitter.html

Mr. Baquet said that A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, raised the idea of a new fellowship program earlier this year.

“We started to talk about it, and it was immediately appealing,” Mr. Baquet said. “It was a way for me at this point in my career to give back to the profession. And it was also a way for me to teach — hopefully teach — young journalists and others how to do investigative reporting.”

In a news release announcing the fellowship, Mr. Sulzberger said that Mr. Baquet’s “deep passion for local and investigative work” would pit “his relentless journalistic mind and ability to nurture talent against one of our industry’s most urgent needs.”

Mr. Sulzberger described the decline of local investigative journalism as a “national tragedy,” saying fewer and fewer people across the country had access to information about their community and that many local news outlets lack journalists who can uncover wrongdoing in local governments.

“It’s our hope that this fellowship can play a small role in addressing this dangerous and growing societal gap,” he said.

Mr. Baquet got his start in local newsrooms like the The States-Item and The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, his hometown, and at The Chicago Tribune, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative work that uncovered corruption in City Council committee spending.

During his time as executive editor of The Times, the newsroom won 18 Pulitzer Prizes during a period punctuated by the political rise of Donald J. Trump and a pandemic that disrupted the globe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/business/media/dean-baquet-nyt-fellowship.html

If the $44 billion deal between Elon Musk and Twitter falls apart, either side may have to pay the other $1 billion, according to a securities filing on Tuesday.

The world’s richest man struck a deal on Monday to buy the social media company for $54.20 a share. Mr. Musk, who also leads the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, has said he plans to take Twitter private and that he wants to improve the product and promote free speech on the platform.

The deal is not set to close for another three to six months, Twitter told its employees on Monday. According to Tuesday’s filing, Twitter would have to pay Mr. Musk in certain circumstances if the deal goes awry. That would include if the social media company signed a deal with another suitor whose offer it deemed superior. Mr. Musk, for his part, would have to pay if his financing for the deal falls apart.

Twitter declined to comment. Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk’s financing has played a key role in the deal’s intrigue. He initially did not appear to have any funding lined up for his bid. But last week, he revealed in a filing that he had commitments for loans from various banks. Mr. Musk is paying with $13 billion in bank loans, plus another $12.5 billion in loans against his stock in Tesla. He has pledged another $21 billion in cash, though he has not outlined the source of that money.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/technology/twitter-musk-breakup-fee.html