March 29, 2024

Mona Ackerman, Psychologist Who Wrote Advice Column, Dies at 66

The cause was ovarian cancer, said Richard Cohen, her longtime companion and a columnist for The Washington Post.

Dr. Ackerman ran a private practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan before a meeting with Arianna Huffington led to “Dr. Mona Knows,” a question-and-answer column. The format was more narrative device than “Dear Abby”; Ms. Ackerman at times wrote the questions along with the answers.

Topics included coping with the death of a child; psychological profiles of public figures like Bernard L. Madoff; and appraising Dr. Phil’s therapeutic credentials.

Her treatment for cancer forced her to end the column in 2009, but Dr. Ackerman continued to write occasionally online for The Daily Beast.

Mona Riklis was born in Tel Aviv on May 22, 1946, to Judith and Meshulam Riklis. They emigrated to America, where Mr. Riklis became a billionaire by pioneering leveraged buyouts and junk bond deals.

Her marriage to Irwin Ackerman, in 1966, ended in divorce. She graduated from New York University and earned her Ph.D. from the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University.

In addition to Mr. Cohen, Dr. Ackerman is survived by her father; a sister, Marcia Riklis; a brother, Ira Riklis; a half-brother, Kristofer Zadora Riklis; a half-sister, Kady Zadora Riklis; a son, Ari Ackerman; a daughter, Gila Steinbock; and two grandchildren.

Answering a question in her column about how to communicate with a dying friend, Dr. Ackerman advised: “Don’t be afraid, be honest and ask questions.

“Don’t assume you understand or can make the pain go away,” she added. “What you can do is listen, respond and give back what is needed, even if that is silence.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 12, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary, using information provided by Dr. Ackerman’s family, omitted the names of two of her survivors.  She is also survived by a half-brother, Kristofer Zadora Riklis, and a half-sister, Kady Zadora Riklis

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/nyregion/mona-ackerman-psychologist-who-wrote-advice-column-dies-at-66.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Media Equation: Michael Arrington’s Audacious Venture

In doing so, they signed on with Silicon Valley’s moneyed elite to be part of CrunchFund, the new enterprise run by the famously influential and blustering Mr. Arrington. The coverage of technology has spawned many innovations in the news business, but now it seems to be the source of a particularly problematic one.

At this point, it seems that AOL executives would open up a lemonade stand in front of their headquarters if they thought it would help their bottom line. But the idea of a news site that covers every aspect of nascent tech companies sharing a brand name and founder with a venture capital firm financing these same companies seems almost comically over the line.

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards,” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, said Thursday afternoon when CrunchFund was announced. “We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

It was a breathtaking admission of TechCrunch’s exceptionalism, and news of Mr. Arrington’s audacious caper roiled the blogosphere all day. At midnight on Thursday I reached Arianna Huffington, head of AOL’s editorial operations, who was traveling in Brazil. Things seemed to have changed in only a few hours.

“Michael has stepped down,” to become a venture capitalist, she said, “and is no longer on the editorial payroll effective immediately.” She added that he could continue to write — Mr. Arrington is a prolific, forceful voice on technology matters — but as an unpaid blogger. Gee, I said to Ms. Huffington, I know we are in a bold new epoch of technology journalism, but the whole thing still seems, well, naughty.

It’s not the usual case of conflict of interest — someone being sent a shiny new gadget and writing about how spiffy it is. This time, there are tens of millions of dollars in play. Coverage in TechCrunch can make or break a start-up, and what about those companies that are not F.O.M.’s (Friends of Mike)?

“David, honestly, don’t be silly,” she said. “It is very, very clear that they are distinct entities and Michael will have no influence on coverage.”

Really? It’s worth pointing out that earlier that day, Mr. Arrington told my colleague Claire Cain Miller, “I am TechCrunch and TechCrunch is me.” It’s now hard to know whether AOL is Mr. Arrington’s partner, client, employer or banker.

AOL, challenged on both business and editorial fronts, has enabled Mr. Arrington at every turn, allowing him to bestow his blunt brand of editorial favor or wrath as he saw fit.

When he turned his withering guns on Engadget, a sibling site at AOL, executives looked the other way even as most of the people at Engadget left. When he bashed the reputation of Caterina Fake, the well-regarded co-founder of both Flickr and Hunch, for breaking the news of her own start-up (instead of letting him break it), they said nothing. Along the way, he ridiculed the enterprise he worked for with a seemingly endless stream of Twitter posts, all but begging to get fired. He got financed instead.

As business reporters, we are often pressed up against the glass, watching as others take risks, make investments and build companies. We are observers, not players. But the froth and money sloshing around has reached a whole other level, and looks enticing no matter what side of the glass you are on.

Michael Arrington kicked a hole in the glass. A former lawyer and investor who founded TechCrunch in 2005, he told his bosses at AOL in April that he was going to continue to edit the site, but resume investing in some of the companies TechCrunch covered.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter.com/carr2n

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 4, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Michael Arrington’s investment in Milk, a mobile-development lab. A round of funding closed on April 26; the funding did not close on April 1. In addition, the article incorrectly described the disclosure about the investment on Mr. Arrington’s blog, TechCrunch. The investment was disclosed in a post on April 26. It was not the case that there was no disclosure.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2de2c4a86e6e5a6040338307c10f3640

That Remake of AOL? It’s Still Being Written

Last week it reported another loss and told Wall Street analysts it was not going to get much better: operating income for the year could be down as much as 20 percent because of weaker ad sales. The performance raised new doubts about whether AOL’s big bet on editorial content, including the acquisition of The Huffington Post news site, co-founded by Arianna Huffington, would reverse a decade-long decline.

The investor response to these disappointments was emphatic. The company’s shares lost a third of their value over two days.

“Frankly, AOL hasn’t delivered on its promise yet,” said Sameet Sinha, an analyst with B. Riley Company. “It’s just been a series of stumbles.”

Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, is confident that his company can regain some of its former glory. Despite the recent setback, he says he remains committed to rebuilding AOL and using The Huffington Post as the foundation.

“We believe that The Huffington Post acquisition is one of the best things we’ve done,” Mr. Armstrong said in an interview.

Mr. Armstrong, 40, is trying to remake AOL into a media powerhouse to offset the lost revenue from a steadily dwindling Internet access business. It’s a big site. More than 105 million unique visitors dropped in during July to use e-mail, catch up on celebrity gossip and check the weather. The strategy is just the latest formulated by a string of leaders at AOL, which merged with Time Warner during the Internet boom and then almost immediately started to struggle.

Mr. Armstrong, a former top ad executive at Google, joined AOL two years ago just before it regained its independence.

Fixing the company will take until 2013, he acknowledged. Meanwhile, he said he was spending up to $250 million of the $459 million the company had on hand to buy back its devalued stock. The gesture helped the shares regain some of their losses for the week. He has been spending heavily in the core products too. Since buying The Huffington Post in March for $315 million, Mr. Armstrong has added 17 new sections, like divorce, parenting and Latino issues. AOL is introducing international editions for Canada and Britain.

AOL also added 300 journalists to The Huffington Post as it shifted from its roots in aggregating coverage from others to writing more original news.

As leader of AOL’s content operations, Ms. Huffington is a crucial player at the company and the face of its content arm. She oversees established AOL sites like Stylelist, Moviefone and MapQuest along with more recent additions like the technology blog TechCrunch, acquired six months before The Huffington Post deal, for $25 million.

Ms. Huffington, 61, cited a number of journalistic high points since joining AOL, including a scoop that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey used a state helicopter to attend his son’s baseball game and a series on college students prostituting themselves to pay for tuition.

In terms of low points, The Huffington Post briefly suspended a writer last month who “over-aggregated” an article from Advertising Age by summarizing its contents too thoroughly. It underscored a frequent complaint that The Huffington Post steals traffic from publishers by rewriting articles to the point that it is unnecessary for readers to click on a link to the original source.

AOL lost $11.8 million in the second quarter compared with $1.06 billion during the same period a year ago, on $542 million in revenue compared with $584 million a year ago. Global advertising revenue grew 5 percent, the first gain by the company in overall advertising since it split from Time Warner.

Still, AOL executives conceded that they could have done a better job with search and domestic display ads. AOL’s display ad gains of 14 percent in the quarter were less than the 24.5 percent expected growth for the overall industry this year, according to eMarketer.

Last month, Mr. Armstrong also replaced his top ad executive.

AOL’s decline in value is so great that analysts point out that the company may be worth more now broken into pieces and sold. The Internet access business, in particular, would be good to unload, they say.

Other ideas include closing Patch, AOL’s local news initiative that has reporters in 850 towns. Eliminating the money-losing service would free $160 million and lift AOL into profitability.

Mr. Armstrong responded to such suggestions by saying that the long-term benefits of his strategy outweighed any short-term gains promoted by Wall Street analysts. High-quality content, he said, is the Internet’s future growth engine.

Meanwhile, AOL struggles to attract more visitors because of an eroding base of dial-up subscribers. The number of subscribers fell 21 percent in the last quarter to 3.4 million, for example.

Maintaining existing traffic numbers to its sites should therefore be considered a victory, Mr. Armstrong said. In July, all of AOL’s sites attracted 105 million unique visitors, 2 percent fewer than in the same month last year, according to comScore.

In contrast to the overall flat growth, traffic in The Huffington Post sites has grown around 12 percent since it was acquired, to nearly 35 million. But some of that gain is from shifting traffic from established AOL sites that were closed.

Ms. Huffington, who has a multiyear contract, said that she was as encouraged as ever by AOL, and that there remained more work ahead to integrate The Huffington Post with the rest of the company’s sites.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ms. Huffington said. “I’m having a great time.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0cb92f924e0b358db4b3905093b437ba