YouTube began introducing a redesigned Web site on Thursday that even more resembles television by prominently highlighting its “channels,” Claire Cain Miller writes, that is, series of videos by the same creator, whether a friend, a celebrity, or a professional producer like ESPN or PBS. With the redesign, every time you visit YouTube on any device, you will see the latest videos from the channels to which you subscribe. The goal, she writes, is to make YouTube a destination for entertainment, rather than someplace you visit when you receive a link or search for a certain video.
The Washington Post reported that it would probably start charging online readers for access to newspapers articles, probably by the middle of next year. The plan would be similar to the model used by The New York Times, in that readers would only be blocked once they had surpassed a certain number of articles or multimedia features a month. Home subscribers to the print edition would have unfettered access to The Post’s Web site and other digital products. The Post credited a report by The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering taking action against Netflix and its chief executive, Reed Hastings, the company disclosed on Thursday, over a brief post he made to Facebook in July about a corporate milestone — one billion hours of video that subscribers watched the month before. The agency, in a so-called Wells notice, warned that it might file civil claims or seek a cease-and-desist order, Michael de la Merced reported.
- The idea behind notice is to ensure that a company announces information that is material to its business to all investors at the same time; typically, a company uses a news release to share such information. Mr. Hastings’s main defense will probably be that the age of social media has redefined the concept of public disclosure, Mr. de la Merced writes. His Facebook feed is public, and the information reached his 200,000 followers, and then soon the news media.
Robert Lescher, who epitomized the courtly, largely invisible ideal of an Old World author’s agent, died on Nov. 28 at 83, Paul Vitello reports. Among his clients were Robert Frost, Alice B. Toklas and Isaac Bashevis Singer. When, after long representing himself, Mr. Singer asked Mr. Lescher to be his agent, according to Al Silverman in “The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers” (2008), Mr. Lescher asked him why he thought he needed an agent: “You know, in the old days, when I wanted to reach Mr. Straus,” Mr. Singer said, referring to Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus Giroux, “I’d call him and he took my call. Now, I call and the secretary says, ‘He’s on the phone with Mr. Solzhenitsyn.’ ”
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