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Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

July 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

At 5 p.m. on April 18, three days after the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, the F.B.I. released grainy photographs of two suspects. For the past month, the Tripathis had been renting a house and spending their days working with F.B.I. agents, Brown administrators and an organization dedicated to finding missing persons. Early on in the search, the family created a Facebook page called “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which included video messages from family and friends and recent images of Sunil — walking the beach with his older brother, Ravi; attending his sister’s graduation ceremony; posing with his mother at a Phillies game.

Minutes after the world first saw the suspects’ photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil’s facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil’s disappearance and the F.B.I.’s involvement in his search. By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page, and at 8:15 Ravi received a phone call from a reporter at ABC News in New York, who asked if Sunil had been spotted in Boston and if Ravi had seen the F.B.I. photos of Suspect No. 2. Ravi, unclear at what she was getting at, told her there had been no word from Sunil. As the minutes passed and the volume of threatening Facebook messages increased, the Tripathis finally called their F.B.I. contact in Providence, who assured them that nobody within his office believed that Sunil was Suspect No. 2.

The family had been told that missing people sometimes go to libraries or other places with free Internet service, where they type their own names into search engines to track their cases. The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends. Now they worried that he would see what was being written about him and take drastic measures to harm himself. Around 11 p.m., at roughly the same time that the news came out that Sean Collier, a 27-year-old police officer at M.I.T., had been shot and killed, the Tripathis closed the page so that no more messages could come in.

The removal of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noted by several people in the media, including Sasha Stone, who runs an inside-Hollywood Web site called Awards Daily. At 10:56 p.m., Stone tweeted: “I’m sure by now the @fbipressoffice is looking into this dude” and included a link to the Facebook page. Seven minutes later, she tweeted: “Seconds after I sent that tweet the page is gone off of Facebook. If you can cache it . . .” For Erik Malinowski, a senior sportswriter at the Web site BuzzFeed, the takedown of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noteworthy enough to pass along. At midnight, Malinowski, whose Twitter following includes a number of journalists, tweeted: “FYI: A Facebook group dedicated to finding Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student, was deleted this evening.” Roughly 300 Twitter users retweeted Malinowski’s post, including the pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton, who sent Sunil Tripathi’s name out to more than six million followers. From there, the small, contained world of speculation exploded on every social-media platform. Several journalists began tweeting out guarded thoughts about Sunil’s involvement. If the family had taken down the Facebook page, the reasoning went, it must mean that the Tripathis had seen their missing son in the grainy photos of Suspect No. 2.

Jay Caspian Kang is the author of ‘‘The Dead Do Not Improve’’ and an editor at Grantland. He last wrote for the magazine about the shootings at Oikos University.

Editor: Joel Lovell

 

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/magazine/should-reddit-be-blamed-for-the-spreading-of-a-smear.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder: Sooner Than Expected, CBS Largely Finishes Upfront Sales

June 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Word that CBS, part of the CBS Corporation, was finishing up came on Friday afternoon, a week after a network spokesman described the network as “in active negotiations” with advertisers and agencies.

Late on Wednesday, CW, which is owned by the CBS Corporation and Time Warner, became the first major English-language broadcaster to cross the upfront finish line.

The upfront market is called that because the sales take place before the start of the coming season. Industry analysts are predicting that the five big broadcasters — ABC, CBS, CW, Fox Broadcasting and NBC — will struggle to match the estimated $9.2 billion worth of commercial time they sold last spring in the 2012-13 upfront market.

The analysts cite factors like ratings erosion, the bumpy economy and intensifying competition from rivals like cable television and online video.

That CBS is concluding its upfront sales is a bit unexpected because some Web sites of trade publications reported on Thursday and Friday that the 2013-14 upfront market had turned sluggish, slowed or was even approaching an impasse. (Indeed, if this article were to have run decades ago in, say, Variety, it might have carried a headline like “Eye Surprise,” after the CBS logo.)

The rates CBS is charging advertisers for the 2013-14 season — known as c.p.m.’s, for the cost to reach each 1,000 viewers, a standard measurement in the television business — are estimated to be increasing by an average of 7.5 percent. By contrast, in the upfront market last year, estimates were that CBS was able to raise c.p.m.’s an average of 8 to 9 percent.

Analysts also predicted that c.p.m. increases would probably be lower during the 2013-14 upfront market than they were in the 2012-13 upfront market.

Before the current upfront market began, Leslie Moonves, president and chief executive of the CBS Corporation, said he was anticipating that CBS would obtain c.p.m. percentage increases in the high-single-digit to low-double-digit range when compared with last year. Seven and a half percent does qualify as a high-single-digit gain.

Turning to the volume of commercial time sold, estimates are that the CBS total will be about $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion — and perhaps closer to $2.5 billion than $2.6 billion — compared with estimates last year that the network took in $2.5 billion to $2.75. (The numbers are not more definite because during the season,advertisers can usually cancel their upfront market commitments without penalty.)

CBS is selling about 80 percent of its commercial inventory in this upfront market, holding the rest back to sell during the course of the 2013-14 season in what is referred to as the scatter market. That is slightly higher than what CBS did in last year’s upfront market, when it sold 77 to 78 percent of its inventory.

CBS plans to add six series to its prime-time schedule for 2013-14, five in the fall and one in midseason.

With CW and CBS wrapping up their upfront sales, that leaves ABC, Fox Broadcasting and NBC to continue making deals with advertisers and agencies.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/media/sooner-than-expected-cbs-largely-finishes-upfront-sales.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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House Nearing Completion of Patent Office Overhaul

June 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

WASHINGTON — A legislative overhaul of the United States Patent and Trademark Office moved toward completion in the House on Tuesday when members of the two important committees agreed to keep the office subject to annual appropriations but to end for the first time the diversion of patent fees to other uses.

The agreement between leaders of the House Judiciary and Appropriations committees clears the way for the bill, H.R. 1249, to be brought to the House floor as soon as Wednesday, when other amendments also will be considered.

The bill generally updates the process for challenging patents and would change the patent system to one that awards a patent to the first inventor to file a specific claim.

Currently, the first person to invent something has patent priority, whether or not he is the first to file an application.

The financing agreement received conditional support from the sponsor of a similar Senate bill that passed by a wide margin in March.

The White House added its cautionary backing to the agreement, although it noted that the final bill might need “additional direction” to ensure adequate financing for the patent office.

“After six years of working towards patent reform, we are near the finish line,” Lamar S. Smith, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday.

Members of the appropriations committee were reluctant to support a proposal that would make the patent office self-funding, leaving it outside the annual appropriations process.

The compromise calls for any collections of fees in excess of the annually appropriated budget for the patent office to be deposited in a reserve fund solely for the patent office.

The specific language, however, says that the House will have to separately authorize the use of any part of the reserve fund.

The Office of Management and Budget said that the provision “does not by itself ensure” access to the reserve fund.

“The administration looks forward to working with Congress to provide additional direction” to provide “timely access to all of the fees collected,” the O.M.B. statement said.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and who was the primary sponsor of a similar patent bill, said that the compromise language on a reserve fund “would be a concrete step in the right direction,” if it is “coupled with a commitment by the House Appropriations Committee to provide the Patent and Trademark Office with access to the excess fees it collects each year.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7b367c565946dcf8f7da3e2c8bc8d87e

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,