The Breakfast Meeting
What’s making news in media.
Movie attendance was up 5.6 percent, despite a weak summer, punctuated by mass killings at a screening in Aurora, Colo., of the latest Batman feature, Brooks Barnes writes. Ticket revenue at North American theaters is projected to jump by 6 percent, to $10.8 billion, according to an analysis by Hollywood.com. In 2012, industry executives say, the increase from foreign sales was even more critical, salvaging the prospects of movies that were mild disappointments in the United States like “Ice Age: Continental Drift,” from 20th Century Fox, which made $68 million in China alone.
- This year was a particularly lucrative year for Lions Gate Entertainment, which includes both the Lionsgate and Summit banners, Mr. Barnes writes, which had a pair of blockbusters, “The Hunger Games” and “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2.” As a result, Lions Gate, a small movie company bolstered by its acquisition of Summit Entertainment, will end the year as North America’s fifth-largest distributor as measured by ticket sales, surpassing 20th Century Fox and Paramount.
A pair of books by the Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly about a pair of presidential assassinations — Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s — sit atop The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. He writes them with a researcher, Martin Dugard, Leslie Kaufman reports; Mr. O’Reilly says he does the writing himself, setting a word count for each week. Asked whether 1,000 a day would be a good pace, he replied, “I can write 1,000 words in my sleep.” The day after Christmas, he starts on his next book, part of a three-book deal with Henry Holt. He won’t say what his next topic is, but on his office wall, next to a newspaper announcing the Kennedy news, is one reporting on William McKinley’s assassination at the turn of the last century.
Amazon has been cracking down on users’ rave reviews of books that appear to be less than objective, according to writers who have noticed that their disappearance, David Streitfeld reports. Amazon won’t discuss the purge — including the basis for eliminating reviews and how many have been eliminated — which only adds to the authors’ uncertainty. The move follows a number of highly publicized cases of authors using “sock puppets,” or fake online identities, to increase the number of positive reviews of their work. Critics of the rise of sock puppets have also aimed at a retired librarian from Atlanta who has more than 25,000 reviews, almost all of them granting four or five stars.
The settlement with the government of e-book pricing that was intended to counteract an anticompetitive agreement between the big publishers and Apple hasn’t yet led to more competition, David Streitfeld reports. Amazon, a critic of the pricing agreement, has largely respected the $10 floor for e-books the publishers were seeking. A reason, analysts say, is that the growth in e-book market share is slowing down. “Even retailers like Amazon have to be wondering, how far can we go — or should we go — to make our prices lower than the other guys if it’s not helping us with market share?” said Michael Norris, a Simba Information analyst who follows the publishing industry.
Midge Turk Richardson, a former Roman Catholic nun who later edited Seventeen magazine, died last weekend at age 82, Margolit Fox writes. Her life had a neat symmetry – 18 years in a convent in Los Angeles as Sister Agnes Marie, from the ages of 18 to 36, and 18 years as the editor of Seventeen from 1975 to 1993. While a nun, she taught and became a principal of a school in a largely Latino section of the city; after much soul-searching, she asked to be released from her vows, headed to Greenwich Village and began a career in publishing.