9:28 a.m. | Updated Comcast agreed to pay General Electric $16.7 billion to acquire their remaining 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal on Tuesday, Amy Chozick and Brian Stelter write. Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chief executive, said that the acquisition was a necessary step given the rapidly changing television business and the necessity of owning content. Comcast bought a 51 percent share in NBCUniversal in early 2011, with the option of buying the rest of the company over the next seven years; the process was accelerated at least in part by a clash in corporate cultures between G.E. and Comcast. The deal will also include 30 Rockefeller Plaza and the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for about $1.4 billion. Naming rights are included in the deal, so the red G.E. sign atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza could be replaced with a Comcast logo.
Web sites devoted to reviewing and recommending books have begun to fill the void left by disappearing bookstores, inconsistent book clubs and potentially suspect reviews on retail sites like Amazon.com. The largest of these sites is Goodreads.com, a social media site devoted to finding and sharing titles that has 15 million members and is exploding in popularity, Leslie Kaufman writes. The theory behind Goodreads and two smaller competitors, Shelfari and LibraryThing, is that people will put more faith in recommendations from a network they construct themselves. Publishers like HarperCollins now consider Goodreads a necessary part of promotion, and USA Today features Goodreads reviews on its Web site.
Streaming digital music service Slacker takes aim at much larger competitor Pandora in an online-only ad meant to highlight the differences between their approaches, Ben Sisario explains. The spot features two women in a coffee shop, one of whom opens a blue box bearing Pandora’s “P” logo, unleashing a particularly annoying song on all within earshot. “It plays that over and over again,” one of the women says to her friend, who blames Pandora’s small music library. The commercial points out that Slacker has 10 times as many songs as Pandora. The campaign will also include display ads on sites like CollegeHumor.com that point out the site’s human element, like playlists created by music experts and stations featuring D.J.’s. The ads points to the difficulty in building a following as a digital music service, which often happens by word of mouth; despite its many features Slacker only has four million monthly users to Pandora’s 65 million.
Jonah Lehrer, the journalist who was fired from The New Yorker for plagiarizing published blog posts and fabricating quotes, was paid a $20,000 honorarium to appear at a journalism conference in Miami on Tuesday sponsored by the Knight Foundation. Mr. Lehrer began with a firm mea culpa, but then tended to describe his troubles as “errors” and “mistakes” rather than deception and lies, Jennifer Schuessler writes on ArtsBeat. Mr. Lehrer vowed to implement “Standard operating procedures” that, he acknowledged, most journalists already follow, if he is ever lucky enough to write again. Dylan Byers also addressed Mr. Lehrer’s talk on Politico.
The Oscars and host Seth MacFarlane are poised to help one another, Michael Cieply explains in The Carpetbagger. Henry Schafer, executive vice president for the Q Scores Company, which rates celebrity appeal among consumers, said that a new Q Score for Mr. MacFarlane was surprisingly high. Though Mr. MacFarlane is mainly known as a television writer and producer, jobs that generally lack the caché of a famous actor, he was ranked as comparable to Sally Field and Matt Damon.
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