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NBC News Said to Pick A Woman As Its Chief

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

NBC News is on the verge of naming Deborah Turness, the head of ITV News in Britain, as its next president, according to several people with knowledge of the appointment.

Ms. Turness, if appointed, would be the first woman to become president of a network television news division in the United States, succeeding Steve Capus, who stepped down from the position in February after nearly eight years.

A spokeswoman for NBC News, a unit of Comcast’s NBCUniversal, declined to comment. In an e-mail message on Friday, Ms. Turness said she could not respond to what she called speculation.

But others with knowledge of the appointment said that her promotion could be announced as early as Monday.

Ms. Turness’s name surfaced last month in a Los Angeles Times article that identified her as a candidate. Though she is not widely known in the television news industry in the United States, Ms. Turness has strong credentials. She has worked at ITN, a British producer of television news, for 25 years. ITN provides three daily newscasts to ITV, a broadcaster that is one of the BBC’s main rivals in Britain, under the banner of ITV News. Ms. Turness has overseen those newscasts as the editor of ITV News since 2004.

When asked about Ms. Turness’s future, a spokeswoman for ITV News said, “We don’t comment on speculation.”

Mr. Capus’s departure was spurred partly by his frustration with a new management structure set up in July, which folded NBC News and two cable news channels, MSNBC and CNBC, into a new unit called the NBCUniversal News Group. The group is led by Pat Fili-Krushel, and Ms. Turness would report to her, according to the people with knowledge of the appointment.

The next president of NBC News will face an array of challenges. NBC has the highest-rated evening newscast (“NBC Nightly News”) and a big source of revenue (the cable news channel MSNBC) that its rivals envy. But it also has a morning show, “Today,” that has sunk to second place behind ABC’s “Good Morning America,” resulting in the loss of tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.

More broadly, NBC News faces the same ratings difficulties as other television networks, as well as fresh competition on the Internet.

Ms. Turness is used to competition, given that the BBC usually could outnumber and outspend her at ITV News. She is described by colleagues there as ferociously energetic and savvy about what viewers want to see.

In a 2010 profile in the British newspaper The Guardian, she was quoted as saying: “The battleground now is in news, it’s about quality. News is the best drama on television because it’s real.”

“She was here for at least one presidential election cycle,” said Simon Marks, who worked at ITN in the late 1980s and knew Ms. Turness in Washington in the 1990s. “I think she’ll be a fantastic breath of fresh air in the elite world of network news in New York.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/business/media/nbc-to-name-new-head-of-news-division.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Maria Shriver Returning to NBC as a ‘Special Anchor’

April 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The announcement, made on the “Today” show on Tuesday morning, is a significant moment in Ms. Shriver’s move away from political life. Ms. Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, was the first lady of California while her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was governor from 2003 to 2011. She and Mr. Schwarzenegger separated in 2011 after he admitted that he had fathered a child with a member of their household staff a decade earlier.

Until Mr. Schwarzenegger ran for governor, Ms. Shriver was a familiar face on NBC as a correspondent on the network newsmagazine “Dateline.” Her formal homecoming was foreshadowed last month when she contributed to NBC’s coverage of the selection of the new pope.

“Through her reports, her books, her events, her activism and the powerful social community that she has built, Maria Shriver has become a leading voice for empowering women and inspiring all of us to be architects of change in our lives,” said Pat Fili-Krushel, the NBCUniversal News Group chairwoman, in a statement on Tuesday. “We are delighted that Maria will play such a key role in our efforts to examine this important topic, and all of us at the NBC family are excited to welcome her home.”

In Ms. Shriver’s new role, she will not appear regularly on any one NBC program, but will be on a variety of them and will produce and anchor prime-time special reports. Her appearances will not be limited to NBC’s network news programs; they could also come on the cable channels MSNBC and CNBC and on the company’s sports shows. Her other title will be editor at large for women’s issues for the Web sites owned by NBC News, indicating that she will contribute to those as well.

Responding to questions via e-mail on Tuesday, Ms. Shriver said she worked with Ms. Fili-Krushel “and the NBC News team to create a new role that supported the work I’ve been doing and allowed me to take it all forward.”

NBC briefly partnered with Ms. Shriver in 2009 when she published a study titled “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” about the increase of women in the workplace and its effects. When the next such report is released next year, NBC will have “exclusive broadcast access” to it, the network said in a news release.

Ms. Shriver will remain in Los Angeles, and she said that she would not give up any of her outside work.

While the NBC positions are not full time, Ms. Shriver said, “knowing me and my love of reporting, I imagine it will fully occupy my mind.”

She added: “I see it as a partnership that will evolve over time and give me an ongoing outlet for many of the stories I want to tell. Like so many women, I’m trying to craft a life that allows me to do meaningful work and keep a focus on my family, which will always be my No. 1 job.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/media/maria-shriver-to-return-to-nbc-news.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Four Phone-Hacking Cases to Be Tests for Further Claims, Judge Says

April 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“Otherwise we will be going on forever,” said the judge, Geoffrey Vos. “Some people may want to, but I don’t.” Judge Vos added that he wanted to “achieve a resolution of all these cases in the shortest possible time at the minimum possible cost.”

He said he would decide later which cases to bring forward, but that he was inclined to proceed with those brought by the actress Sienna Miller; the designer Kelly Hoppen; Andy Gray, a television sports commentator; and Skylet Andrew, a sports agent. Those cases have advanced further than some others, he said, and represent a range of issues and possible levels of damage.

Judge Vos made his remarks at a hearing intended to bring some order to the mushrooming civil actions proceeding against the News of the World. Last week, the newspaper admitted to illegally intercepting the voice-mail messages of eight public figures in the mid-2000’s. It apologized and offered to pay compensation.

At the hearing on Friday, it emerged that the paper had offered one of the victims, Ms. Miller, about $163,000 in damages, and given her a deadline of 21 days to consider the offer. Her lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said she had not yet decided what to do.

At least 12 other people have begun cases against the newspaper, and at the hearing a lawyer for the Metropolitan Police said that officers had discovered at least 91 possible victims, and potentially many more.

The courtroom was crammed with lawyers: for phone-hacking victims like Ms. Miller and Mr. Andrew; for the News of the World’s parent company, News Group Newspapers; for the police department, which has assigned 40 officers to the criminal case; and for Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired in the mid-2000s by News of the World.

Along with the News of the World’s royalty reporter, Clive Goodman, Mr. Mulcaire was jailed in 2007 for hacking into the phones of aides to members of the royal family. Information found in his notebooks, which have been seized by the police, has led in the past few weeks to the detention and questioning of three senior News of the World journalists on suspicion of engaging in phone hacking.

At the hearing, Mr. Mulcaire’s lawyer, Alexandra Marzec, said he wanted to protect himself against possible criminal charges and was admitting to nothing.

“The admissions which have been made by News Group in the past week are made solely on behalf of News Group, and Mr. Mulcaire does not admit doing anything, and does not associate himself with these admissions,” Ms. Marzec said.

The police said that they were currently going through 9,200 pages of material seized from Mr. Mulcaire.

Meanwhile, in a separate but related case, the police said they were considering opening an investigation into whether journalists had paid police officers for information. The move stems from remarks made in 2003 by Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor and now the chief executive of News International, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is News Group’s parent company.

Mrs. Brooks told the culture and media committee at the time that “we have paid the police for information in the past.” Asked this week about the remark, Mrs. Brooks said in a letter to a different parliamentary group, the home affairs committee, that she had been speaking generally.

“I was responding to a specific line of questioning on how newspapers get information,” she wrote. “My intention was simply to comment on the widely held belief that payments had been made in the past to police officers. If, in doing so, I gave the impression that I had knowledge of any specific cases, I can assure you that this was not my intention.”

In a letter to the home affairs committee, Assistant Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said that a senior officer had been assigned “to conduct a scoping exercise to establish whether there are now any grounds for beginning a criminal investigation resulting from the comments made by Rebekah Brooks” in 2003.

A spokeswoman for News International said the company had no comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/world/europe/16hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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