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Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff

July 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

At ESPN, Mr. Silver is expected to have a wide-ranging portfolio. Along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to “Olbermann,” the late-night ESPN2 talk show hosted by Keith Olbermann that will have its debut at the end of August. In political years, he will also have a role at ABC News, which is owned by Disney.

An ESPN spokeswoman declined to comment on Friday night. Mr. Silver declined to comment. The employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Silver’s deal could be announced as soon as Monday.

Before creating statistical models for elections, Mr. Silver was a baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform in the future. For a time he was a managing partner of Baseball Prospectus.

At public events recently, he has expressed interest in covering sports more frequently, so the ESPN deal is a logical next step.

Mr. Silver’s three-year contract with The Times is set to expire in late August and his departure will most likely be interpreted as a blow to the company, which has promoted Mr. Silver and his brand of poll-based projections.

He gained such prominence in 2012 that President Obama joked that Mr. Silver had accurately predicted which turkeys the president would pardon that Thanksgiving. “Nate Silver completely nailed it,” he said. “The guy’s amazing.”

Speculation about the future of Mr. Silver and FiveThirtyEight heated up shortly after last November’s election, and he was wooed by no small number of other news organizations. Jill Abramson, the newspaper’s executive editor, and Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, said earlier this year that they would try hard to sign Mr. Silver to a new contract.

NBC News and its cable news channel MSNBC was another interested party.

In an e-mail several weeks ago, Mr. Silver said negotiations were continuing with The Times “and I’m still trying to make a decision.” He informed The Times on Friday of his plan to leave.

He occasionally hinted in interviews and public appearances that his relationship with The Times had moments of tension. But it was mutually beneficial. The news organization gained Web traffic and prestige by hosting his work, and he received a salary, a wider audience and editorial support.

The same will most likely be true at ESPN.

James Andrew Miller contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/media/nate-silver-blogger-for-new-york-times-is-to-join-espn-staff.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Vertigo, a DC Comics Brand, Is Rebuilding With 6 New Series

June 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Superheroes are the lifeblood of the comic book industry and have proved to be a big draw at the box office. But Vertigo, whose slate includes fantasy, horror and speculative fiction outside of the publisher’s mainstream lineup, has had difficulty building an audience and developing new properties.

DC, whose parent company is Time Warner, is hoping to change Vertigo’s fortune this fall with six new series premiering from October to December. The most anticipated project, “The Sandman: Overture,” a mini-series by Neil Gaiman, will begin on Oct. 30.

Vertigo, which was introduced in 1993, became known for developing new talent and presenting illustrated stories that eschewed the never-ending battles between superheroes and arch villains. The new series continue that trend and include “Hinterkind,” by Ian Edginton, which focuses on a post-apocalyptic world in which the creatures of myth and legend have returned, and “The Discipline,” by Peter Milligan, an erotic thriller about a woman at the center of an shadow war that spans eons. No capes or utility belts are to be found in the mix.

“It’s so liberating to know that I can talk about all these wonderful books,” said Shelly Bond, the executive editor of the imprint, who joined DC Comics a month before Vertigo began.

The future of Vertigo has been a source of speculation for reasons internal and external. In March, Karen Berger, Vertigo’s founding executive editor, left her full-time position. New concepts have struggled to build an audience. “Saucer Country,” a series about politics and alien abductions in the Southwest, which began in March 2012, had its final issue in April with estimated sales of fewer than 5,700 copies. The top DC book that month was “Batman,” with 132,100 copies.

DC’s biggest rival is Marvel Comics, which has 37.59 percent of the market, just slightly more than DC’s 36.75, according to John Jackson Miller, who tracks industry figures on his Web site, the Comics Chronicle (comichron.com). Vertigo is not tracked separately. DC’s market share has been steadily rising from just under 32 percent in 2008.

The industry overall also has been growing. Mr. Miller estimated that comic book sales were $700 million to $730 million last year, up from $660 million to $690 million in 2011.

Other companies, like Image Comics, have raised their profile as publishers for creators who want to retain full control, and profits, of their work. “The Walking Dead,” the zombie phenomenon from Robert Kirkman, began life at Image.

Although “Sandman,” which began in the late ’80s, predates the imprint, it was branded as a Vertigo book in 1993 and became one of its biggest successes: a perennial seller of collected editions, critically beloved, winner of multiple awards. “Sandman” helped shape the career of Mr. Gaiman, who seems to write in every form these days, including fantasy novels, screenplays and television scripts; his most recent novel, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” was published by William Morrow in June.

“The most peculiar thing for me about returning to ‘Sandman’ is how familiar it all feels,” Mr. Gaiman said. What is new, however, is the level of attention. “When I was writing ‘Sandman’ from 1987 to 1996, I never had the feeling at any point that approximately 50 million people were looking over my shoulder scrutinizing ever word.” (Mr. Gaiman has about two million followers on Twitter.)

For the six-issue “The Sandman: Overture,” Mr. Gaiman has been paired with J.H. Williams III, an illustrator known for his moody imagery and innovative page layouts. “They are the most beautiful pages I have ever seen in periodical comics,” Mr. Gaiman said. “I ask him to do the impossible, and he gives me back more than I asked for.”

The series will be published every other month and will alternate with a special edition of each issue, which will include more of the artwork (because of translucent word balloons developed by the letterer Todd Klein), as well as behind-the-scenes commentary and character sketches.

Another of Vertigo’s new series, “The Dead Boy Detectives,” due in November, is tied to the “Sandman” mythos. It features two characters that were introduced in “Sandman” No. 25 from 1991. The characters, Edwin and Charles, are boarding school students who died tragically and returned as ghost detectives. (In the new series, a girl, whose mortality status is unknown, will join them.)

Ms. Bond sees comic books as having been “accepted as an integral part of pop culture with all the TV shows and film franchises.” Among the ventures were the 2005 film “Constantine,” with Keanu Reeves as a man involved in the occult, which had ticket sales of around $75 million. She is eager to continue the legacy of Ms. Berger, who was known for developing emerging talent.

Some good news for Vertigo was found in an analysis of the imprint’s May sales on The Beat, the news blog of comics culture run by Marc-Oliver Frisch. The first issue of “The Wake,” a 10-issue series by the writer Scott Snyder and the artist Sean G. Murphy, sold an estimated 45,000 units, “the highest number for a Vertigo comic book since the year 2000,” he wrote.

Mr. Snyder is one of the recent success stories for Vertigo. His “American Vampire,” which began in 2010, is about a new breed of those bloodsucking creatures. The series is on hiatus and will return in December. Mr. Snyder also writes “Batman,” which was the second-best selling comic for May, at an estimated 129,039 copies. (The top seller was the first issue of a new X-Men series, from Marvel, at 177,633 copies.)

“Right now, we’re in the middle of Vertigo’s transformation from a relatively sheltered idea and talent farm to a much more competitive place,” Mr. Frisch wrote. “Whether or not this is going to help DC in re-establishing the Vertigo brand as a selling point, we’re going to find out in the next several months.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/media/vertigo-a-dc-comics-brand-is-rebuilding-with-6-new-series.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Times Shifts on ‘Illegal Immigrant,’ but Doesn’t Ban the Use

April 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

As the debate over a new immigration bill preoccupies Washington, a quieter debate over the use of the term “illegal immigrant” has stirred up the country’s newsrooms.

This month, The Associated Press announced it would eliminate the use of “illegal immigrant” entirely. The news agency wrote, “Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use ‘illegal’ only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”

On Tuesday, The New York Times updated its policies on how it uses the phrase “illegal immigrant” in its coverage. The newspaper did not go as far as The Associated Press, and it will continue to allow the phrase to be used for “someone who enters, lives in or works in the United States without proper legal authorization.” But it encourages reporters and editors to “consider alternatives when appropriate to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions.”

Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who oversees The Times’s style manual, made the announcement on Tuesday shortly after a group staged a protest in front of The New York Times headquarters and delivered more than 70,000 signatures to Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The Times, asking her to end the use of the phrase.

Mr. Corbett said in a statement that editors had spent months deliberating the updated style change. He said he shared these changes “with key reporters and editors over the last couple of weeks.” He said he recognized how sensitive this issue is for readers.

This nuanced approach to the term “illegal immigrant” was far from what the protesters who appeared outside of the Eighth Avenue entrance to The Times building had sought. Four protesters held signs that read “No Human Being is ‘Illegal’ Drop the I-Word.”

Fernando Chavez, son of the Mexican-American activist Cesar Chavez, flew in from Northern California for the protest to represent the views of his mother, Helen Fabela Chavez.

He said the widespread use of “illegal immigrant” represented one of the few times his mother had “displayed an opinion” about an issue. “It dehumanizes the individual and it’s counterproductive,” he said of the phrase.

Among the protesters was Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who emphasized that he wanted Tuesday’s protest to remain civil. He revealed that he was living undocumented in the United States in an article that ran in The New York Times Magazine in June 2011 after his former employer, The Washington Post, decided not to run the story. Since then, he has spoken publicly about being undocumented. He is producing a documentary on the topic.

“I have a lot of respect for The New York Times,” Mr. Vargas said. “The New York Times published my essay after that Washington Post rejected it.” But he said he felt that The Times needed to make some changes. “The New York Times needs to get with the times.”

Last fall, when Mr. Vargas spoke at a San Francisco conference held by the Online News Association, he started to challenge the use of the term illegal immigrant in the news media. Shortly afterward, he also exchanged e-mails with Margaret Sullivan, The Times’s public editor, about the phrase. She wrote in an Oct. 2, 2012 article, “I see no advantage for Times readers in a move away from the paper’s use of the phrase ‘illegal immigrant.’ ”

Since then, discussions have circulated throughout the news media about the use of the phrase. Julia Preston, The Times’s immigration reporter, said in a blog post written by Ms. Sullivan in September that the paper needed “a little more flexibility.” But she said “we should use the term at times — it is accurate.”

The changes announced by Mr. Corbett to the stylebook suggested caution when looking for alternatives to “illegal immigrant.”

” ‘Unauthorized’ is also an acceptable description, though it has a bureaucratic tone,” Mr. Corbett said. ” ‘Undocumented’ is the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, but it has a flavor of euphemism and should be approached with caution outside quotations.” The stylebook also calls for special care to be taken with those who have a complicated or shifting status, like those brought to the United States as children.

“Advocates on one side of this political debate have called on news organizations to use only the terms they prefer,” Mr. Corbett said. “But we have to make those decisions for journalistic reasons alone, based on what we think best informs our readers on this important topic.” He added: “It’s not our job to take sides.”

Some of the protesters outside The New York Times represented people with complicated immigration statuses themselves. Mikhel A. Crichlow, the 27-year-old co-chairman of the International Youth Association, said he appeared on Tuesday because he was undocumented and could not work in the field he trained in, which is architecture. Mr. Crichlow said he moved to New York City 12 years ago when the city’s Department of Education recruited his mother from Trinidad and Tobago to work as a schoolteacher. While Mr. Crichlow’s mother is in the country legally and about to qualify for her green card, Mr. Crichlow has become too old to remain here legally.

“The ‘illegal’ word conjures up the wrong associations for people,” Mr. Crichlow said. “I’m not authorized to work because of my status.”

Mr. Vargas said he had mixed emotions about The New York Times’s updated policy.

“The New York Times can’t have it both ways,” he said. “But at the end of the day, the bottom line is I am for reporters, including reporters at The New York Times, to be as descriptive and contextual as possible.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/business/media/the-times-shifts-on-illegal-immigrant-but-doesnt-ban-the-use.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Assange Assails ‘Propaganda’ Film, and Netflix Surges

January 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Netflix surprised Wall Street with a fourth-quarter profit of $8 million and a customer base of more than 27 million American households, causing one analyst to say the company has “risen from the ashes” of its disastrous 2011. Shares jumped 30 percent in after-hours trading. Apple reported a profit of $13.1 billion and a 28 percent increase in the sale of iPhones but that still wasn’t enough for investors, who pounded the stock down 11 percent in after-hours trading.

Appearing via link from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Julian Assange attacked a new Hollywood film about WikiLeaks in an address to the Oxford Union. “The Fifth Estate,” a film by Bill Condon about the early days of WikiLeaks, is a “massive propaganda attack” according to Mr. Assange, who also said the film depicted Iran on the verge of having a nuclear arsenal.

Rolling Stone has laid off two longtime employees of the magazine: Eric Bates, the executive editor who had been with the magazine for more than a decade, and Mark Neschis, who handled press for Wenner Media, which owns Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal and US Magazine. Wenner Media has been struggling with declining ad revenues and a negative credit rating issued by Standard Poor’s in December.

Fox announced it would put “Ben and Kate” on the shelf, another sign of a poor season for comedies. Ratings for “Ben and Kate,” “The Mindy Project” and “The New Girl,” all on Fox, have struggled this year, along with NBC’s “Go On” and “The New Normal,” both of which sank to new lows this past week.

A good time was had by all: more than 70 reporters and editors have responded to a casting call for a new reality series about a small-town newspaper, according to a report on Romenesko.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/the-breakfast-meeting-assange-assails-propaganda-film-and-netflix-surges/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Rolling Stone Lays Off Two Noted Staff Members

January 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

6:02 p.m. | Updated Rolling Stone, amid a variety of magazines responding to a troubled advertising environment by trimming staff, laid off two of its bigger names this month.

Eric Bates, the magazine’s executive editor who had worked there for nearly a decade, was laid off on Jan. 4. And Mark Neschis, who previously worked in the Clinton administration, reported for his last day on Jan. 11.

Mr. Neschis was handling press for Wenner Media, which owns Rolling Stone, along with Us Weekly and Men’s Journal. He did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. But Mr. Bates looked back at his tenure at the magazine fondly. He helped edit Rolling Stone’s article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal and was involved with visiting the White House with the company’s founder, Jann Wenner, to interview President Obama.

“I’m going to be rooting for them and looking forward to whatever is next for me,” said Mr. Bates. “We were really modeling the way journalism can be done, even in a time of cutbacks and showing that there’s a real hunger for long-form journalism.”

Melissa Bruno, a spokeswoman for Wenner Media, declined to comment on the departures. But a December report issued by the rating agency Standard Poor’s noted that Wenner Media had been assigned a negative rating when it tried to refinance a loan for the company.

The report called the company’s earnings profile “vulnerable” and said that the rating “reflects our expectation that leverage will remain high, given the structural pressures of declining newsstand and print advertising revenues facing the magazine publishing business.”

The rating agency was not hopeful that cuts could make much of a difference for Wenner, saying that “cost reductions may not fully offset the company’s weak revenue trends.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 23, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the name of a magazine owned by Wenner Media. It is Men’s Journal, not Men’s Health.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/rolling-stone-lays-off-two-noted-staff-members/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: New York Times Seeks Buyouts From 30 in Newsroom

December 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Aiming to cut costs in an increasingly troubled advertising environment, The New York Times announced on Monday morning that it would offer buyout packages to newsroom employees. While the primary goal of the buyout program is to trim managers and other nonunion employees from its books, the company is offering employees represented by the Newspaper Guild the chance to volunteer for buyout packages as well.

In a letter to the staff, Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times, said she was seeking 30 managers who are not union members to accept buyout packages. She stressed that the paper had been reducing as many newsroom expenses as possible, like leases on foreign and national bureaus. But the hiring The Times has done in recent years to help make it more competitive online has restored the newsroom to the same size it was in 2003 — about 1,150 people.

“There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced,” Ms. Abramson said in the letter.

Employees have until Jan. 24 to accept a severance package. Ms. Abramson pointed out in her note that the business side had cut its staff by more than 60 percent in recent years. The company recently announced that it was offering buyouts to 30 employees in the advertising department. The newsroom had its most extensive cuts in 2008 when it eliminated 100 jobs through buyouts and layoffs. Ms. Abramson urged employees to consider “whether accepting a voluntary severance package at this time in your life makes sense.”

She added: “I hope the needed savings can be achieved through voluntary buyouts but if not, I will be forced to go to layoffs among the excluded staff.”

These buyouts are not being offered to members of the editorial department. Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, wrote in a note that “we, too, have made reductions to our expenses to meet our share of this burden, but we are not going to be offering buyouts in the Editorial Department at this time.”

The newspaper industry as a whole is confronting a drastic falloff in advertising revenue. Print advertising at The New York Times Company’s newspapers, which include The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, shrank 10.9 percent, according to the latest earnings report. Digital advertising across the company fell 2.2 percent.

“These are financially challenging times,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman of the Times Company, said in a statement. “While our digital subscription plan has been highly successful, the advertising climate remains volatile and we don’t see this changing in the near future.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/new-york-times-seeks-buyouts-from-30-newsroom-managers/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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At PBS’s NewsHour, Departures, Questions and Complaints

November 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It’s never good when a news organization loses its political editor just a year before a presidential election. But in the next two weeks, “The PBS NewsHour” will say goodbye not only to its political editor, David Chalian — he is becoming the Washington bureau chief for Yahoo News — but also its managing editor for digital news, Maureen Hoch, who is headed to the World Bank.

They said separately that they were leaving for new professional challenges. But the departures, announced last week, come on top of other changes at the show’s parent, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, where in recent months both the president and the head of fund-raising and marketing left for other jobs.

In addition, the show’s main corporate underwriter, Chevron, will bow out at the end of the year, leaving a hole of just over $2 million in the $27 million annual budget. A long-planned effort to raise money from wealthy supporters, which was to start last month, has been delayed until the new president of the production company starts in January.

Even Mr. Lehrer’s continuing role on the air with the show that he and Robert MacNeil began in 1975 has become a question.

In June, Mr. Lehrer, 77, cut back to anchoring one night a week, Fridays, although he has been absent recently while promoting his book “Tension City,” a personal look at the history of televised presidential debates.

In an Oct. 27 press release, the show said Mr. Lehrer, who remains executive editor, would retire permanently from appearances on the air in December. But in a telephone interview, he said he was not going anywhere.

“In the course of the last several weeks, I just felt, maybe I’ll do it a little longer,” Mr. Lehrer said. Partly, he said, “I still enjoy doing it.”

But he also acknowledged that he had heard complaints from some PBS stations that the program’s new format — in which a different pair of “NewsHour” senior correspondents anchors each night — was confusing viewers.

The show drew 10.7 million total viewers in September, down 11 percent from 12 million a year ago, according to ratings provided by PBS. Viewers who do watch are doing so more frequently, PBS said; visits to the show’s Web site are up significantly from year to year, and a new live stream online is growing quickly.

“There are always going to be some dead-ender television types who believe there has to be a strong anchor system. We decided to go a little different route this time,” Mr. Lehrer said, by rotating among Gwen Ifill, Judy Woodruff, Jeffrey Brown, Ray Suarez and Margaret Warner.

Many viewers, he added, “love that there are different voices, different faces. It isn’t the voice of God. I see it as a positive thing, but I realize that not everybody does. That’s one reason I’m maintaining my presence for a while.”

Mr. Lehrer said, however, that he would not be anchoring PBS’s coverage of next year’s political conventions, where he has been a fixture.

With the departure in September of Simon Marks, the president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, Mr. Lehrer and his business partner, Mr. MacNeil, are bringing in Boisfeuillet Jones Jr. to oversee the company.

A longtime friend of Mr. Lehrer’s, Mr. Jones, 64, is a past publisher of The Washington Post and currently vice chairman of the Washington Post Company.

“He knows about the business of journalism, which is what we need now. We’ve got to create a new way of funding the ‘NewsHour,’ ” Mr. Lehrer said, adding that the show needed to appeal more directly to the public.

Mr. Jones declined to talk about specific recommendations he would make until he starts the job, but commented on the broad challenge he faces, saying, “You grow your digital business and your mobile; it’s important to do that, but at the same time, you don’t want to neglect the core journalism.”

An immediate priority is to replace the underwriting from Chevron, the energy company, which in September was criticized by the PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler, for what he said was a misleading sponsorship message.

Brent Tippen, a Chevron spokesman, when asked about ending the underwriting after four years, said in an e-mail: “We constantly review which media we use to reach our target audience given our yearly budget and specific goals,” adding that “we hope that we will be able to partner with them again at some point in the future.”

“That’s a blow, there’s no question about it,” Mr. Lehrer said of losing the money. He predicted it soon would be replaced, but one foundation that was approached for support earlier this year turned down “NewsHour.” The Knight Foundation helped finance the overhaul of the show’s Web site in late 2009, but declined this time.

Eric Newton, senior adviser to Alberto Ibargüen, the foundation’s president, said in a telephone interview that Knight was “interested in the leading edge.”

“I’m not trying to cast any indictment on the quality of the news report,” he continued, adding that Knight wanted to help preserve high quality journalism.

But, he said, “our issue with it is that it’s what they usually do. We’re interested in new and different ways of doing things, because one thing you can say about the future of news is it’s not going to be the same. Folks who can be nimble and change are going to do better in the future than those who are slow to change.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9bb89ed64f8b27cf2cb336e318a2af52

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