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Al Jazeera Makes Limited American Debut

August 20, 2013 by

There was ample attention in journalistic circles as Al Jazeera America had its premiere on Tuesday — particularly among those who could not watch.

The news channel — which replaced Current TV at 3 p.m. Eastern time — was expected to be carried by five of the country’s 10 biggest television providers, but one of those, ATT U-verse, dropped Current, and thus Al Jazeera, late Monday night.

That decision irritated some U-verse subscribers, who complained online about the company’s move and which further limited Al Jazeera America’s potential audience on Day 1.

On Tuesday evening, Al Jazeera said it was looking to the court system to resolve the contract dispute.

“Unfortunately ATT’s decision to unilaterally delete Al Jazeera America presented us with circumstances that were untenable — an affiliate that has willfully and knowingly breached its contractual obligations,” the broadcaster said in a statement. “We had no choice but to take this action and to enforce Al Jazeera’s rights under its agreement with ATT — and to compel ATT to do the right thing.”

The complaint, filed in Delaware Chancery Court, accuses ATT of wrongful termination and seeks restoration of the channel as well as damages.

ATT said it had not yet seen the lawsuit. In a statement, it hinted that Current’s transformation into Al Jazeera gave it an opening to drop the channel: “As a result of our inability to come to terms on a new agreement and due to certain breaches of the existing agreement, we have decided not to carry Current TV on U-verse.”

People who were curious about the new channel but were not able to access it on TV found that they could not access it online, either. It is not being live-streamed on the Internet, much to the disappointment of a small but vocal group of longtime Al Jazeera viewers in the United States.

Those fans had grown accustomed to watching the pan-Arab broadcaster’s existing English-language news channel, called Al Jazeera English, via the Internet. But on Monday, Al Jazeera English turned off its live stream for users in the United States. It also started to geo-block the news reports it posts on YouTube, so that instead of seeing the videos, American users saw a message that said, “The uploader has not made this video available in your country.”

Al Jazeera officials said privately that in the run-up to the premiere of the new American channel, they had little choice but to acquiesce to cable and satellite providers, which generally discourage online competition of the kind that Al Jazeera English previously represented. In effect they have sacrificed Internet distribution for a shot at traditional distribution.

Al Jazeera’s decision made a certain amount of sense, considering that most Americans spend far more time with television than the Internet. Still, complaints about the blockade piled up on Al Jazeera America’s Facebook page. One of the most-liked comments criticized the broadcaster for “going backward” by prioritizing TV over the Internet.

The concerns were shared by some Al Jazeera staff members, especially those who have been at Al Jazeera English, or A.J.E. for short, for years. The live stream and the YouTube page were the main ways their work was seen in the United States until the restrictions were put in place this week. The staff’s complaints were channeled by Rob Reynolds, an A.J.E. correspondent based in Los Angeles, who wrote on Facebook on Monday that “the great blackout has begun.”

“Al Jazeera is now blocking all A.J.E. videos from the U.S.A.,” Mr. Reynolds wrote. “It’s a form of corporate censorship that would make the Chinese Politburo jealous. And an incredible show of disrespect to all the reporters operating in the U.S. who have helped build Al Jazeera’s brand name in this country.”

Mr. Reynolds deleted the Facebook post, but not before other Al Jazeera staff members saw it and shared it with each other approvingly. Reached on Tuesday, Mr. Reynolds said the post was intended for family and friends and was written out of frustration. He deleted it, he said, because he concluded that it was unfair to his colleagues. He said his reference to censorship was aimed at the cable and satellite providers, not his employer.

Mohamed Nanabhay, the former head of Al Jazeera English’s Web site, pointed out in an e-mail message that there were thousands of Al Jazeera videos “embedded on third-party sites across the Internet that have suddenly become unavailable to audiences” because of the blockade.

Mr. Nanabhay said Al Jazeera America could have gone in a different direction and tried to appeal to the growing number of Americans dissatisfied with cable, the so-called cord-cutters who access video online.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but the head of social media for the new channel, Riyaad Minty, hinted about a possible solution. To those “who have lost the live streams,” he wrote on Twitter, “We hear you. We’re working on it.”

The new American channel was supposed to be available in about 48 million homes, according to Nielsen. The loss of U-verse reduces that to around 45 million.

Still, that is a decent start for a new channel: many other now-successful cable channels, including Fox News and MSNBC, started in fewer homes.

On Tuesday, Al Jazeera America was available to some subscribers of Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, and Verizon FiOS. The biggest provider that is not yet carrying the new channel, Time Warner Cable, said it remained in negotiations about possibly carrying it in the future.

As for the channel itself, when it started Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to deliver on what it promised — serious, straightforward news. The first hour had a lengthy promotional video that said, among other things, “We will connect the world to America, and Americans to the world.” Then, at 4 p.m., the news began, led by the former CNN anchor Tony Harris, who updated viewers on the unrest in Egypt and a shooting at a school in Georgia.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/business/media/al-jazeera-makes-its-american-debut.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Disappointing Fall for ‘Rock Center,’ a News Program With Big Ambitions

June 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The ambitious NBC newsmagazine was scheduled to be shown for the final time on Friday night. Within NBC News, employees expressed a sense of disappointment — not so much in the quality of the program, but that it was not rated highly enough to remain on the network schedule. To those who invested much in producing the show, its demise raises doubts about whether any new newsmagazine can succeed on network television these days.

To that point, Rome Hartman, the founding producer of “Rock Center,” said in an interview: “I hope that’s not true. I sure hope that somebody figures it out.”

“Rock Center” was the first new prime-time newsmagazine to be introduced by any network since CBS added “60 Minutes II” in 1998. Mr. Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” had been eager to try something in prime time, and when Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in 2011, he got his chance. For Comcast, giving the go-ahead to “Rock Center” was, among other things, a way to provide clear support to the network news division it had just acquired.

The newsmagazine had its premiere on Halloween. Unlike CBS’s “48 Hours” and NBC’s “Dateline,” which are mainly about crimes and court cases, “Rock Center” presented a wide array of stories each week and was closer to the “60 Minutes” model than anything else on television. But the comparisons to “60 Minutes” were rarely complimentary; “It’s a very hard standard to match,” Mr. Hartman said.

More important, “60 Minutes” was able to find its footing four decades ago, before the days of cable and Internet competition. It has a protected Sunday night time slot that often gets a big ratings lift from sporting events that are shown beforehand.

“60 Minutes II,” on the other hand, was canceled in 2005. And “Rock Center” was canceled in May, shortly before NBC announced its schedule for the television season that starts in September. With an audience that sometimes slipped below three million people, the network could not justify another season of “Rock Center.”

At a time when audiences have far more choices than ever before, online as well as on TV, the people involved with “Rock Center” may have simply overestimated the public’s appetite for taped news stories in prime time. Said one former NBC executive: “You can’t launch a serious newsmagazine anymore. Those potential viewers, if they’re around, they’re watching cable news.”

There is no shortage of niche news and information programming on cable. CNN, for instance, will show a new documentary series from Morgan Spurlock this Sunday. HBO recently granted a second season to a youthful newsmagazine, “Vice,” and OWN has “Our America,” hosted by Lisa Ling. These programs, though, do not have the sweep of a network newsmagazine.

If the decision to cancel “Rock Center” was not surprising, it was still dismaying to Mr. Williams and to others on the staff, some of whom will lose their jobs after Friday’s final broadcast. (Many others will be absorbed by other NBC News programs.) One staff member said Mr. Williams felt insulted by the network’s decision; another said what pained Mr. Williams most were the layoffs. Staff members were told not to talk to the news media, so those who did speak did so on condition of anonymity.

An NBC spokeswoman said on Thursday that Mr. Williams was not available for an interview about the program’s accomplishments. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the end of “Rock Center.”

Staff members expressed pride in the program, asserting that it was a rare outlet for interviews and investigations that lasted longer than a few minutes. (Typically the program had three to five stories an hour. Once in a while the hour was devoted to a single subject, like one show titled “Mormon in America.”)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/business/media/demise-of-rock-center-shows-difficulty-of-creating-a-newsmagazine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Economix Blog: A Bad Jobs Report Turns Out to Have Been Wrong

February 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The jobs report for last March was a big disappointment, one that spurred talk of a new recession. Now we learn that report was simply wrong, that March was actually a very good month and that jobs rose much more rapidly in 2012 than we had previously been told.

Last April, with the presidential campaign heating up, the Labor Department reported that its survey of employers showed the economy added only 120,000 jobs in March, far below forecasts. The unemployment rate — based on a separate survey of households — did decline a bit, to 8.2 percent, but that was widely dismissed as indicating some people gave up looking for work.

From the next day’s Times:

Republicans pounced on the lower than expected payroll numbers, with the party’s front-runner, Mitt Romney, declaring, “This is a weak and very troubling jobs report that shows the employment remains stagnant.” Speaker John A. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, also deplored the numbers and laid the blame for them at Mr. Obama’s feet.

The report came out on Good Friday, when the stock market was closed, so investors had all weekend to ponder the numbers. They did not like what they saw, and the Dow tumbled on both Monday and Tuesday.

Now we know what really happened in March. On Friday, the Labor Department issued its “benchmark revision” for the 12 months through March 2012. The new numbers are based on far more reliable — but slower to arrive — counts of the the number of workers for whom unemployment insurance premiums were paid. It turns out 205,000 jobs were added that month.

For all of 2012, we are now told that the average month added 181,000 jobs. A month ago, we were told the average for the year was only 153,000, basically the same as in 2011. With the revisions, we are told that the 2011 average was really 175,000.

At the end of last year, the official figures showed employment had risen 3.7 percent from the bottom in February 2010 to the end of 2012. Now that figure is 4.1 percent.

A year from now we will get benchmark revisions for the last nine months of 2012. It is quite possible the 2012 annual average will then rise further, to more than 200,000.

A couple of weeks ago, speaking in Hong Kong, Charles Evans, the president of the Chicago Fed, was asked about what would show things were getting better. He replied, according to Reuters, “One good indicator of labor market improvement would be if we saw payroll employment increase by 200,000 each month for a number of months. We’ve been averaging about 150,000, but it’s been very uneven.”

Turns out the average was a lot higher than the Fed thought. Could that signify we are closer to an end to quantitative easing than we thought?

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/a-bad-jobs-report-turns-out-to-have-been-wrong/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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It’s Not ‘American Idol,’ but ‘The X Factor’ Has Its Audience

December 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Worthington, of Bowling Green, Ky., disdains the newcomer’s emphasis on elaborate stage shows and arguments between the judges. “It takes away from the contestant’s voice,” Ms. Worthington said. While she said she would “always watch ‘American Idol,’ ” she is done with “The X Factor,” which had its debut in September and wraps up its first season on Dec. 22.

Ms. Le, of New York, tunes in to “X Factor” for the same reasons Ms. Worthington tunes out. “American Idol,” Ms. Le said, “is just old and tired.” She doubts she will watch the next season, which will begin on Jan. 18.

The ratings for “The X Factor,” the most-promoted new show of the fall television season, support the attitudes of Ms. Worthington and Ms. Le.

While many “Idol” viewers have sampled “The X Factor,” it is appealing to a distinct audience. And a smaller one: “The X Factor” is averaging 11 million to 12 million viewers this season, half as many as “Idol” averaged earlier this year and half as many as Simon Cowell, the “Idol” judge turned “X Factor” creator-producer-judge, had hoped. “Idol” is by far the biggest reality show in the United States.

Mr. Cowell has not been able to live down his assessment before the premiere that anything short of 20 million viewers would be a disappointment. He laughs now when he is asked about that target and says, “I wish it had started with a one rather than a two.”

And yet by almost any other standard, his show is a clear success. It is enormously lucrative. It has lifted Fox’s ratings on Wednesday and Thursday nights, making the network competitive in the fall for the first time in years.

In fact, Fox is tied with CBS for first place among adults 18 to 49 this fall, something that would have been unfathomable without the singing competition.

Perhaps the lesson is that in the ever-more-fragmented world of television, the marathon is more important than the high jump.

“The X Factor” was “given the unfortunate task of being compared to the biggest show on television, instead of being compared to all the other television shows,” said Mike Darnell, the president of alternative entertainment for Fox, who called the show a “very big success for us.”

Calling Mr. Cowell a “showman” who talked up the show “the way a fighter would,” Mr. Darnell added, “If he hadn’t hyped it as much as he did, maybe it wouldn’t be as big as it is.”

Still, the fact that “The X Factor” has not defied ratings gravity has pleased some of Fox’s competitors.

When the show came on in September, the trade magazine Broadcasting Cable quoted rival network executives as saying things like, “Thank God it’s not another Death Star” and “It’s good to see it’s mortal.” And because of the show’s lower-than-promised performance, Fox has given advertisers some extra ads to compensate for the high rates they paid for air time ahead of the premiere. (Fox says such ads, called “make goods,” are typical throughout the season.)

Fox, a unit of News Corporation, has been sensitive about the preshow hype. When a reporter inquired last week, a Fox spokeswoman implored him to “separate expectations from the actual ratings.”

Mr. Darnell, who told The Wall Street Journal in October that his competitors would give “one eye and two legs” to have “The X Factor” on their schedules, stepped it up a notch in an interview last week, saying without being prompted, “All the networks would literally give all their arms, legs and one eye for a show like this.”

Fox has already ordered a second season of “The X Factor,” as well as a second season of a sitcom that has outperformed it in some weeks among 18- to 49-year-olds, “New Girl.”

In an late-night interview after Thursday’s episode, Mr. Cowell pointed to the interview itself as evidence of his satisfaction with his show’s performance. “If I wasn’t proud of it,” he said, “I’d be ducking for cover.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0af6e6cdcc1162f27503bc0250e40d88

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Mets’ Deal With Einhorn Is Off

September 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The move by the Mets immediately raised questions as to what they would now do to seek an influx of cash to address their continuing financial problems. One person directly involved in the talks between the Mets and Einhorn said the team would try to recruit investors willing to buy stakes in the team for perhaps $20 million apiece.

Doing so might create a roomful of partners for the Mets’ owners — Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz — and would be time-consuming to carry out, but none of those individuals, with their relatively tiny stakes in the team, would have a potential pathway to majority ownership, as Einhorn clearly sought.

In announcing that negotiations had ended without a deal, the Mets said that they had decided “to explore other options,” that they had additional capital “to cover all 2011 losses” and that they were under no deadline to arrange new deals with other investors to provide more money for the team.

Meanwhile, in a conference call shortly after the Mets’ statement was issued, Einhorn said that the Mets sought changes to their agreement late last week, setting the stage for the breakdown in talks.

“I received a new round of comments on our definitive agreement,” he said. “I was very surprised to see that many of the provisions of the deal, that were in place since May, had been changed.”

He added: “A week ago I thought this deal was in great shape and would be done very soon.” But he said that the conversations held with the Mets’ owners after receiving the comments were “troubling.”

In particular, he cited his disappointment at the Mets’ opposition to a provision that would have given him preapproval to be the majority owner of the team at some point in the future. He said that Commissioner Bud Selig “assured us there would be no problem” with such a provision and that after the Mets agreed to it, they then lobbied against it.

The original agreement with the Mets provided Einhorn with an option that he could trigger in five years to gain majority control of the team. The Mets could block that option, but to do so they would have had to return his $200 million. If they did, Einhorn would have remained a minority partner.

The Mets announced their pending deal with Einhorn in late May, four months after disclosing their need to raise money. They have encountered significant financial difficulties, in part because of their investments in the Ponzi fraud run by Bernard L. Madoff, and in part because of the team’s sagging performance and declining attendance at Citi Field, which opened in 2009.

Of the $200 million that Einhorn would have invested, $100 million was to go into team operations, $75 million was to pay bank debt, and $25 million was to repay a loan made in November by Major League Baseball, which was due in June.

Adding to the financial pressures is the fact that Wilpon and Katz are embroiled in a costly legal battle over a $1 billion lawsuit filed against them by Irving H. Picard, the trustee for the victims of Madoff’s scheme.

In seeking to attract people willing to purchase what amounts to a vanity share in the Mets, the owners will be pursuing an option that was previously available to them. The Mets’ investment banker, Allen Company, was contacted by a number of small investors when they were conducting a search for a minority partner that eventually settled on Einhorn.

As for Einhorn, he had been a periodically visible presence at Citi Field over the last few months — with his family in a luxury suite, or standing with Wilpon on the field during batting practice. He was even at the ballpark Tuesday to watch the Mets play the Florida Marlins, the same day that the exclusive negotiating period with the Mets ended. And now, quite suddenly, he is out of the picture.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=eb784b197e23499a2febc383771a7e09

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