March 28, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: Ratings for "American Idol" Premiere Are Down Again

It looks like those who predicted “American Idol” would be down another 20 percent this year — despite Fox’s best efforts to pump it up with new judges like Mariah Carey and Nicky Minaj – could get jobs posting betting lines in Las Vegas.

The ratings for the premiere of the new season of “Idol” Wednesday night were down 19 percent compared with last year’s premiere in the category networks care most about, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 (because that is the audience it sells to advertisers). But the total audience for the show also dropped 19 percent.

That added up to the lowest premiere numbers for “Idol” since its very first season, which took place in the summer.

The numbers were still easily good enough to dominate Wednesday night, and would be cause for celebration at any network these days. (In fact, with “Idol,” Fox topped ABC, CBS, and NBC combined in the 18-49 audience.) But the evidence of erosion in the once-impregnable blockbuster is unmistakable.

For the two hour premiere, “Idol” attracted 17.9 million viewers, down from 21.9 last year, and scored a 6.0 rating in the 18-49 audience, down from a 7.4 a year ago. That season “Idol” ended up losing about 30 percent of its audience.

The best news for the show was that it still continues to show growth during its duration, jumping 25 percent from start to finish, and for the moment at least, it still looks more potent than the show mostly blamed for stealing some of the “Idol” thunder, “The Voice” on NBC.

That singing-competition show, which was the bulwark of NBC’s success this past fall, scored a 4.2 rating in the 18-49 segment with 12.3 million viewers for its premiere last fall.

But the concern about “Idol” will remain as the season progresses because last season the show ended up averaging a 5.1 rating, after that 7.4 rating at the start.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/ratings-for-american-idol-premiere-are-down-again/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Mexican Lawmakers Approve Overhaul of Labor Law

The law is also a test case for the incoming president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who has promised to push ahead with legislation that experts say would modernize the economy and invigorate its modest growth rate.

The labor overhaul, which the Senate passed late Tuesday, streamlines the cumbersome rules that analysts say discourage small businesses from hiring workers and instead push millions of Mexicans into the underground economy.

Mexico’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, passed the bill last week, and it will now go to President Felipe Calderón to sign. The bill’s passage was a victory for the president, who has tried repeatedly to pass economic changes only to see them watered down or languish in Congress. Minority left parties voted against the bill, arguing that it would remove protections for workers.

Although Mr. Peña Nieto, who takes office Dec. 1, supported the law, his own party managed to reverse some of the proposals in the original legislation that would have limited the control of Mexico’s union bosses. The country’s large public sector unions are a bulwark of Mr. Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

PRI legislators initially stripped out all the language that would have required more democracy and transparency from union leaders, but in the end, the PRI representatives and legislators from the left formed an unusual alliance, and the PRI was forced to agree to union elections by secret ballot and require a yearly audit of union finances. However, other efforts to improve union transparency, including giving workers the right to vote on their own contract, remained out.

Such moves have raised questions about how far Mr. Peña Nieto will go to stand up to union leaders. He will have to negotiate with the bosses of the teachers’ and oil workers’ unions if he pushes ahead with promises to overhaul the country’s failing schools and open the state-run oil monopoly to private investment.

Although Mexico has recovered the jobs that it lost after the sharp recession of 2009, an increasing number are in the underground economy, where workers have no protection or legal benefits. Mexico’s statistics institute estimates that more than 29 percent of workers are informally employed.

Analysts said that the bill was an important step that could help workers and improve the country’s productivity.

The labor changes will “have a positive impact on the quality of job creation,” wrote Luis Arcentales, an analyst with Morgan Stanley Research, in a report before the bill’s Senate passage.

“By lowering the cost of hiring and firing workers,” Mr. Arcentales wrote, “the labor reform could boost formalization.”

Among the most important changes was a one-year limit on the back wages employers must pay a worker who wins a lawsuit over a wrongful dismissal. Under the old law, the suits dragged on for years and employers were liable for all back pay if they lost.

The law also introduces part-time jobs and temporary training contracts. It regulates some of the murky practices of outsourcing temporary workers without paying them benefits, a measure many employers had used to get around the 42-year-old labor law.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/world/americas/mexican-lawmakers-approve-overhaul-of-labor-law.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Arts & Leisure: Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.)

The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used — or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. In the most famous test of the principle, the Supreme Court in 1994 found a fair use by the group 2 Live Crew in its sampling of parts of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” for the sake of one form of added value, parody.

In the Prince case the notoriously slippery standard for transformation was defined so narrowly that artists and museums warned it would leave the fair-use door barely open, threatening the robust tradition of appropriation that goes back at least to Picasso and underpins much of the art of the last half-century. Several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan, rallied to the cause, filing papers supporting Mr. Prince and calling the decision a blow to “the strong public interest in the free flow of creative expression.” Scholars and lawyers on the other side of the debate hailed it instead as a welcome corrective in an art world too long in thrall to the Pictures Generation — artists like Mr. Prince who used appropriation beginning in the 1970s to burrow beneath the surface of media culture.

But if the case has had any effect so far, it has been to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere just outside the legal debate: that today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court. It is a phenomenon that makes Mr. Prince’s artful thefts — those collages in the law firm’s office — look almost Victorian by comparison, and makes the copyright battle and its attendant fears feel as if they are playing out in another era as well, perhaps not Victorian but certainly pre-Internet.

In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a faster pace, perhaps in part because the art market has become a much bigger business and because of the extent of the borrowing ethos.

Dip almost anywhere into contemporary art over the last couple of years to see the extent. The group show “Free” at the New Museum in 2010 was built partly around the very idea of the borrowing culture, the way the Web is radically reordering the concept of appropriation, with works that “lift, borrow and reframe digital images — not in a rebellious act of stealing or a deconstructive act of critique — but as a way to participate thoughtfully and actively in a culture that is highly circulated, hybridized, internationalized,” as its curator, Lauren Cornell, wrote.

Christian Marclay’s wildly popular video “The Clock” from 2010 was 24 hours of appropriation, made from thousands of stitched-together fragments from films and television shows. Rob Pruitt’s show “Pattern and Degradation” at the Gavin Brown and Maccarone galleries in 2010 lifted designs from Lilly Pulitzer, from Web photo memes and from a couple of T-shirt designers, whose angry supporters staged a flash-mob demonstration to protest the use of the design without attribution.

Mr. Marclay and Mr. Pruitt were both born before the 1980s. But to look at the work of younger artists, especially of those who don’t remember a time before the Web, is to get a true sense of the velocity, and changing nature, of appropriation.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a47f8c0e85a26171b05d683cf57f82b7

Japan Moves to Weaken the Yen

TOKYO — Japan took steps Thursday to reverse a punishing spike in the value of its currency, intervening in the foreign exchange market and preparing to pump fresh funds into the country’s financial system.

The authorities delivered a one-two punch to markets. First, the government said it had begun selling yen and buying dollars to push down the value of the Japanese currency. Then, the Bank of Japan announced that it had further expanded its program to purchase government and corporate bonds, a form of monetary easing.

Japan has been desperate to bulwark its fragile recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami. But even as companies have raced to repair damaged factories and resume production, they have been hit by a surge in the yen that threatens their business overseas.

A strong yen hurts Japan’s export-led economy by making its cars and electronics more expensive overseas, and by eroding the value of overseas earnings when converted into yen.

But the Japanese currency, long considered a safe haven, rose as investors wary of the debt impasse in the United States fled to other currencies. Against the dollar, the yen has surged about 11 percent in the last year, and 4 percent in the last month.

The rise has accelerated an upward trend in the yen that was already squeezing Japanese exporters’ profits. Toyota, Honda and Nissan all recently blamed their sharply lower earnings in the latest quarter in part on the strong yen.

The efforts by the Japanese authorities to counter that trend appeared to be having an effect Thursday. The dollar rose to above 79 yen in afternoon trading in Tokyo. Before the government’s announcement, it had been trading around 77 yen.

Still, the effect of moves to manipulate foreign exchange markets, especially by a single country, has often been short-lived. Japan acted alone in the intervention, though Tokyo is in touch with other countries over the maneuver, Yoshihiko Noda, its finance minister, told reporters. He also said he hoped that the Bank of Japan would take steps to support the government’s move.

The central bank followed with its announcement that it would increase its asset purchase program, including Japanese government and corporate bonds, to 15 trillion yen, from 10 trillion yen previously. It said it would also expand its credit facility to 35 trillion yen, from 30 trillion yen. Those moves were aimed at increasing liquidity and helping to dilute the value of the yen.

The Bank of Japan also kept its benchmark interest rate near zero.

“Concerted action between the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan should be taken as a clear sign that both the government and the Bank of Japan do not want to break the current economic recovery due to the unacceptable yen appreciation,” Masaaki Kanno, economist at JPMorgan Securities, said in a note to clients.

Jethro Mullen contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/business/global/japan-moves-to-weaken-the-yen.html?partner=rss&emc=rss