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Reuters Ends Plans for Ambitious Direct-to-Reader Service

September 18, 2013 by

Reuters, a venerable news organization with a network of 2,000 journalists across the globe, has worked largely as a news wire service, with its reports and photos appearing in other publications. Next was to be a platform to reach readers directly, but it has been plagued by missed deadlines and cost overruns.

In an e-mail to employees that went out this morning and appeared soon after on The New York Observer’s Web site, the chief executive of Reuters, Andrew Rashbass, said the causes of the decision were cost overruns and the failure to reach international consumers.

“The project as a whole has struggled to meet delivery deadlines and stay within its budget,” he wrote. “Also, it does not capitalize on our strengths.”

Mr. Rashbass, who was hired in May from the Economist Group, added: “Next is a long way from achieving either commercial viability or strategic success. In fact, I believe the existing suite of Reuters.com sites is a better starting point for where we need to go. Therefore I have decided to cancel the Next project and put our efforts into enhancing and improving the existing Reuters.com sites. We will repurpose as much of the Next development work as we can for that.”

The e-mail said that several executives at the company had decided to leave as a result of the decision, including Jim Roberts, executive editor of Reuters Digital, who was hired at the beginning of the year after taking a buyout from The New York Times. Mr. Roberts was not immediately reachable for comment, though he posted to Twitter: “Yes, I’ll be leaving@Reuters, though not right away. I’m not leaving news. Stay tuned.”

In looking toward the future, Mr. Rashbass said: “We need to make our core strength of international news relevant to local audiences — which means, among other things, having local-language sites.”

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, said he was surprised by Reuters’s decision because the preview version of Next had been generating such interest. “There were a lot of really exciting ideas in Reuters’s Next,” he said. “What we saw in the preview was very forward-looking in terms of both content and technology. It generated a fair amount of excitement as a news organization doing something that looked digitally savvy.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/business/media/reuters-ends-plans-for-ambitious-direct-to-reader-service.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Reuters Names New Head of News Operation

May 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Thomson Reuters has hired Andrew Rashbass, chief executive of The Economist Group, to take on a newly created role overseeing the sprawling Reuters news operation.

In his time as head of the group that publishes The Economist magazine, Mr. Rashbass oversaw a period of growth, especially in the type of deep-pocketed global readers Reuters covets. Even as other magazines suffered declines in advertising and newsstand sales, The Economist had attracted new digital subscribers and sold nearly 1.5 million copies each week, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

Reuters employs more than 2,800 journalists in nearly 200 bureaus worldwide. Much of the news they produce is distributed via Thomson Reuters financial terminals as well as in newspapers and Web sites that pick up Reuters articles. Mr. Rashbass’s hiring signals Thomson Reuters’s continued desire to turn its news organization into a dominant — and profitable — force.

“Andrew’s track record as C.E.O. of The Economist Group speaks for itself,” James C. Smith, chief executive of Thomson Reuters, said in a statement. “He brings to us a rare blend of commercial acumen, sensitivity to the best traditions of quality journalism and editorial integrity.”

Mr. Rashbass, 49,, will be based in London, where for the last 15 years he has held various positions at The Economist. He served as managing editor of Economist.com and publisher of the weekly economic and world events magazine. He has been chief executive of The Economist Group, half owned by Pearson, since 2008.

In his new capacity, Mr. Rashbass will hold the title of chief executive of Reuters. Stephen J. Adler, Reuters’s president and editor in chief, will report to Mr. Rashbass.

Thomson Reuters, with revenues of $12.9 billion in fiscal 2012, no longer owns a print publication and makes the vast majority of its revenues from its financial and legal data services. But unlike its main competitor, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters has deep roots in regional newspapers, feeding speculation about whether the company eventually wants to expand its news organization with a print publication like The Financial Times, which is also owned by Pearson.

The company publishes an occasional Reuters magazine at events like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and recently redesigned its consumer Web site. (Pearson has said The Financial Times is not for sale.)

“Our family’s commitment to news stretches back three generations,” said David Thomson, chairman of Thomson Reuters. “We are determined that Reuters news should not only fulfill its critical journalistic mission but also its potential in creating long-term value for our customers and shareholders.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/business/media/reuters-names-new-head-of-news-operation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Holder Defends Justice Department in Journalists’ Records Seizure

May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. “And trying to determine who was responsible for that, I think, required very aggressive action.”

In a statement in response, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, disputed that the publication of the article endangered security.

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

At a news conference at the Justice Department, Mr. Holder also disclosed that he recused himself last year from overseeing the case after F.B.I. agents interviewed him as part of their investigation. His deputy, James M. Cole, approved the subpoena seeking call records for 20 office and personal phone lines of A.P. reporters and editors.

Mr. Pruitt disclosed the seizure of the phone records on Monday in a letter to Mr. Holder protesting the action as overly broad and “a serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

But in a letter to The A.P. on Tuesday, Mr. Cole portrayed the search as justified and disputed a detail in the wire service’s account of the Justice Department action. While the news organization had said that records from “a full two-month period” had been taken, Mr. Cole said that the seizure covered only “a portion” of two calendar months.

“We understand your position that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn, but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope,” he wrote. He added that “there was a basis to believe the numbers were associated with A.P. personnel involved in the reporting of classified information. The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls.”

The dispute centered on an ambiguous description in the original notice to The A.P., which an employee of the news organization said was sent as an attachment to an e-mail on May 10 from Jonathan M. Malis, a federal prosecutor, to several A.P. employees.

The attached letter, the employee said, consisted of a single sentence citing the Justice Department regulation for obtaining journalists’ telephone records, and saying that The A.P. “is hereby notified that the United States Department of Justice has received toll records from April and May 2012 in response to subpoenas issued” for 20 phone numbers in five area codes and three states.

The regulation requires subpoenas for reporters’ tolling records — logs of calls made and received — to be narrowly focused and undertaken only after other ways of obtaining information are exhausted. Under normal circumstances, news organizations are to be notified ahead of time so they can negotiate or ask a judge to quash the subpoena, but the regulation allows exceptions, in which case journalists must be notified no later than 90 days afterward.

Mr. Cole said the department had undertaken “a comprehensive investigation” before seeking the phone records, including more than 550 interviews and a review of “tens of thousands of documents.” The calling records, he added, “have been closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation” and would not be used in any other case.

The A.P. on Tuesday was still examining whether any telephone companies had tried to challenge the subpoena on its behalf before cooperating. But at least two of the journalists’ personal cellphone records were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena, the employee said. Debra Lewis, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, said the company “complies with legal processes for requests for information by law enforcement,” but would not comment on any specific case.

Christine Haughney contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/us/politics/attorney-general-defends-seizure-of-journalists-phone-records.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Holder Defends Justice Department in Records Seizure

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. “And trying to determine who was responsible for that, I think, required very aggressive action.”

In a statement in response, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, disputed that the publication of the article endangered security.

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

At a news conference at the Justice Department, Mr. Holder also disclosed that he recused himself last year from overseeing the case after F.B.I. agents interviewed him as part of their investigation. His deputy, James M. Cole, approved the subpoena seeking call records for 20 office and personal phone lines of A.P. reporters and editors.

Mr. Pruitt disclosed the seizure of the phone records on Monday in a letter to Mr. Holder protesting the action as overly broad and “a serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

But in a letter to The A.P. on Tuesday, Mr. Cole portrayed the search as justified and disputed a detail in the wire service’s account of the Justice Department action. While the news organization had said that records from “a full two-month period” had been taken, Mr. Cole said that the seizure covered only “a portion” of two calendar months.

“We understand your position that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn, but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope,” he wrote. He added that “there was a basis to believe the numbers were associated with A.P. personnel involved in the reporting of classified information. The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls.”

The dispute centered on an ambiguous description in the original notice to The A.P., which an employee of the news organization said was sent as an attachment to an e-mail on May 10 from Jonathan M. Malis, a federal prosecutor, to several A.P. employees.

The attached letter, the employee said, consisted of a single sentence citing the Justice Department regulation for obtaining journalists’ telephone records, and saying that The A.P. “is hereby notified that the United States Department of Justice has received toll records from April and May 2012 in response to subpoenas issued” for 20 phone numbers in five area codes and three states.

The regulation requires subpoenas for reporters’ tolling records — logs of calls made and received — to be narrowly focused and undertaken only after other ways of obtaining information are exhausted. Under normal circumstances, news organizations are to be notified ahead of time so they can negotiate or ask a judge to quash the subpoena, but the regulation allows exceptions, in which case journalists must be notified no later than 90 days afterward.

Mr. Cole said the department had undertaken “a comprehensive investigation” before seeking the phone records, including more than 550 interviews and a review of “tens of thousands of documents.” The calling records, he added, “have been closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation” and would not be used in any other case.

The A.P. on Tuesday was still examining whether any telephone companies had tried to challenge the subpoena on its behalf before cooperating. But at least two of the journalists’ personal cellphone records were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena, the employee said. Debra Lewis, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, said the company “complies with legal processes for requests for information by law enforcement,” but would not comment on any specific case.

Christine Haughney contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/us/politics/facing-trio-of-crises-white-house-dodges-questions.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Al Jazeera Hires First Anchor for New U.S. Channel

April 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Al Jazeera on Thursday hired its first new anchor, Ali Velshi of CNN, for its forthcoming cable channel in the United States, and confirmed that the channel would be called Al Jazeera America.

Mr. Velshi, currently the chief business correspondent and an anchor for CNN, will host a half-hour business program in prime time once the new channel replaces Current TV. Neither he nor a spokesman for the channel said they knew exactly when the channel would start, but the transition is expected to happen later this year.

Mr. Velshi said in a telephone interview that he “was really struck by their commitment to building a strong news organization.” When asked whether he was concerned about aligning himself with the Al Jazeera brand name, he indicated that he was not.

“I think the product will trump any preconceived notions that people may have going into it,” he said. “They’re very determined for this brand to make an impact and for this brand to be a meaningful provider of news.”

In many parts of the world Al Jazeera, owned by the emir of Qatar, is already a force to be reckoned with. The Al Jazeera Media Network operates Arabic and English-language international news channels as well as a growing number of niche channels. But in the United States it has very little viewership because cable and satellite companies have, for the most part, declined to carry its channels.

In January, Al Jazeera bought its way into the country by acquiring Current TV, the channel co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, for an estimated $500 million.

Al Jazeera opted not to use the channel space to simulcast Al Jazeera English; instead, it announced that it would set up a new channel specifically for the United States, and that about 40 percent of the programming would come from New York and other cities in the United States. (The remaining 60 percent, it said, would come from Al Jazeera English, whose headquarters are in Doha, the Qatari capital.) It said that the tentative name was Al Jazeera America, and seemed to confirm that on Thursday by setting up promotional accounts for the channel on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

“Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making announcements about talent, programming and bureau locations across the United States,” the channel’s announcement on Tumblr stated.

Mr. Velshi is the first boldface name to be announced. He said he anticipated others would be announced soon, but did not know who because his talks with the channel took place in secret. Referring to Al Jazeera’s public estimate that it received 18,000 job applications for the 170 positions it advertised last winter, he said, “This is the first big journalism hiring binge that anyone’s been on for a long time.”

Mr. Velshi’s plan to leave CNN was announced internally earlier this week. He has spent the last 12 years at the network, initially as an anchor for the now-defunct business news channel CNNfn. He was a fixture on CNN during the financial crisis in 2008; more recently he tried his hand at morning and evening anchoring, but was passed over for permanent positions at either time of day.

For the past year he has anchored a daily newscast, “World Business Today,” for CNN’s international news channel, and a weekly personal finance program, “Your Money,” for CNN’s flagship American channel.

Jeff Zucker, the new president of CNN Worldwide, has been making sweeping changes to the flagship channel lately, but Mr. Velshi indicated that he was leaving of his own volition.

He said he was content at CNN, but as an anchor and correspondent there, “you’re limited because it’s a big company.” Al Jazeera America, on the other hand, is something that “we’re starting from scratch.”

“I wanted to be somewhere where there’s a real challenge to build the audience, to build the infrastructure, the whole thing,” he said.

Al Jazeera said in a news release that Mr. Velshi’s half-hour program would have a magazine format. It will initially begin as a weekly program, but “is expected to move to a five-days-a-week schedule by year’s end,” the channel said.

Ehab al-Shihabi, the executive director of Al Jazeera international operations, said in a statement, “We are thrilled to secure Ali’s extraordinary talents and services. Al Jazeera America will be bringing respected, independent reporting to its viewers and that’s exactly the type of coverage Ali Velshi is known for.”

Representatives of Al Jazeera have previously said that they expect the new channel to be available in roughly 40 million homes in the United States when it has its premiere. About 100 million homes subscribe to cable or satellite service.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/al-jazeera-hires-first-anchor-for-new-u-s-channel/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Wall Street Journal Reports Attack by China Hackers

February 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

On Thursday, The Journal reported that it had been attacked by Chinese hackers who were trying to monitor the company’s coverage of China. It said hackers had broken into its network through computers in its Beijing bureau.

In a written statement, the business newspaper owned by News Corporation described the attack as an “ongoing issue” and said it was working closely with authorities and security specialists to clean up its systems. It said that it completed a “network overhaul” on Thursday in an effort to rid its systems of hackers.

China’s Ministry of National Defense has denied any involvement in the cyberattack at The Times or any other American corporations.

But security experts said that in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting American news organizations as part of an effort to monitor coverage of Chinese issues.

In a report for clients in December, Mandiant, a computer security company, said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a “short list” of journalists for repeated attacks. Among those targeted were journalists who had written about Chinese leaders, political and legal issues in China and the telecom giant Huawei.

Bloomberg News, another American news organization, was targeted by Chinese hackers last year, and some computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation. The attack occurred after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, a Chinese official who is expected to become president in March.

Bloomberg has confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

The timing of the attacks on The New York Times coincided with the reporting for an investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks found digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that officials in the Obama administration were considering more assertive action against Beijing to stop Chinese computer espionage campaigns.

The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said Thursday a global effort was needed o establish “rules of the road” for cyber activity.  In her final meeting with reporters at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton addressed a question about China’s efforts to infiltrate computer systems at The New York Times. 

 “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also non-governmental ones,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The Chinese, she said, “are not the only people who are hacking us.” 

 “There is a lot that we are working on that will be deployed in the event that we don’t get some kind of international effort under way,” Mrs. Clinton added without elaborating.

The United States has been increasingly vocal about such efforts against government and private industry. In a November 2011 intelligence report, government officials specifically accused China and Russia of stealing intellectual property for economic gain.

Michael Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/technology/wall-street-journal-reports-attack-by-china-hackers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Tentative Deal Reported in Chinese Censorship Dispute

January 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“The paper is coming out tomorrow, and the propaganda department is going to hold a meeting with staff about this tomorrow,” said the journalist, who spoke Wednesday on the condition of anonymity. Several other reporters said that details of the agreement remained murky Wednesday morning, and that the deal could fall apart.

Protests over censorship at Southern Weekend, one of China’s most liberal newspapers, had descended into ideological confrontation on Tuesday, pitting advocates of free speech against supporters of Communist Party control, who wielded red flags and portraits of Mao Zedong.

The face-off outside the headquarters of the company that publishes Southern Weekend came after disgruntled editors and reporters at the paper last week deplored what they called crude meddling by the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, which has long had a reputation as a bastion of a relatively free press.

With a number of celebrities and business leaders rallying online to the liberal cause, senior propaganda officials in Beijing began this week to roll out a national strategy of demonizing the rebel journalists and their supporters. The Central Propaganda Department issued a directive to news organizations saying the defiant outburst at Southern Weekend, also known as Southern Weekly, had involved “hostile foreign forces.”

The order, translated by China Digital Times, a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that studies Chinese news media, said that Chinese journalists must drop their support of Southern Weekend and insisted that “party control of the media is an unwavering basic principle.”

An editor at a party news organization said the term “hostile forces” had been used in an internal discussion with a senior editor about the Southern Weekend conflict. Several Chinese journalists outside Guangdong said Tuesday that a call by Southern Weekend reporters and editors for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, the top provincial propaganda official, who took up his post in May, was probably too radical for higher authorities to accept.

The protesting journalists at Southern Weekend blame Mr. Tuo, a former journalist, for ordering a drastic change in a New Year’s editorial that had originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights. The revised editorial instead praised party policies. Mr. Tuo has not commented on the accusation.

Early Wednesday, there was online chatter among Chinese journalists that Dai Zigeng, the publisher of The Beijing News, had balked at an order from the Central Propaganda Department to print an editorial attacking Southern Weekend. A truncated version ran on Wednesday deep inside the paper, and several Beijing News reporters confirmed that Mr. Dai had been uncomfortable with it.

A former editor for the Nanfang Media Group, which includes Southern Weekend, said provincial propaganda officials and disgruntled journalists talked Tuesday in Guangzhou. The talks focused on the journalists’ demands for an inquiry into the New Year’s episode and for the newspaper’s managers to rescind a statement that absolved Mr. Tuo of responsibility for the editorial.

“They want that statement to be removed, and they also want assurances about relaxing controls on journalists — not removing party oversight, but making it more reasonable, allowing reporters to challenge officials,” the editor said. “The other main demand is for an impartial explanation of what happened, an accounting so it won’t happen again.”

Senior Chinese officials have not commented publicly on the censorship dispute at the paper, which could test how far the recently appointed Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, will go in support of more open economic and political policies.

“I don’t believe that Xi is totally hypocritical when he talks about reform,” said Chen Min, a prominent opinion writer for Southern Weekend who was forced out of the newspaper in 2011 during a party-led crackdown on potential dissent.

Defenders of Communist orthodoxy turned up at the newspaper headquarters on Tuesday to make the case for firm party control of the media.

“We support the Communist Party. Shut down the traitor newspaper,” said a cardboard sign held up by one of 10 or so conservative demonstrators.

“Southern Weekend has an American dream,” another sign said. “We don’t want the American dream. We want the Chinese dream.”

Most of the party supporters refused to give their names. One who did, Yang Xingfa, 50, from Hunan Province, said: “Southern Weekend belongs to the people. However, the paper always ignores the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party and asks why China isn’t more like the United States. Outrageous!”

The participants said they had come on their own initiative.

The dueling protests outside the newspaper headquarters reflected the political passions and tensions raised by the quarrel over censorship. Finding a resolution to the standoff poses a challenge both to the central authorities and to Hu Chunhua, the new party chief of Guangdong and a potential candidate to succeed Mr. Xi in a decade.

Hundreds of bystanders watched and took photos on cellphones as the party supporters shouted at the 20 or more protesters who had gathered to denounce censorship, and shoving matches broke out.

One defender of the Southern Weekend journalists was Liang Taiping, 28, a poet who wore a Guy Fawkes mask popularized by “V for Vendetta,” the Hollywood movie and British comic book. Mr. Liang said he had bought the mask after watching the movie recently on state-run China Central Television, which had surprised many Chinese with its willingness to show the film uncut, since the film advocates the overthrow of a one-party dictatorship.

“It’s the only newspaper in China that’s willing to tell the truth,” said Mr. Liang, who added that he had traveled by train about 350 miles from the southern city of Changsha. “What’s the point of living if you can’t even speak freely?”

Edward Wong reported from Guangzhou, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Jonah M. Kessel contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing. Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/world/asia/faceoff-in-chinese-city-over-censorship-of-newspaper.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Breakfast Meeting: Victories for Gore and Google, but Not Barnes & Noble

January 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Al Gore used his considerable lobbying and negotiating skills when he started Current TV in 2005, and he used them again last month in arranging the sale of the channel to Al Jazeera, Brian Stelter reports on Friday in The New York Times. He used persuasive legal arguments with cable and satellite providers to convince them that Al Jazeera, like Current, offered news content and that they were obligated to carry the new channel run by the Middle Eastern news organization. In the process, Mr. Gore, already estimated to be worth about $100 million, assured himself some $100 million more from the sale.

Google scored a major victory on Thursday when the Federal Trade Commission ruled that it had not violated antitrust statutes, Edward Wyatt reports. The commission had been looking into whether Google’s search results were arranged in a way that favored its own services — a complaint from competitors who feared that the Internet giant was abusing what amounted to a monopolistic position.

Barnes Noble delivered more sobering news on Thursday, releasing holiday sales figures that were sharply down from the same period a year earlier. Leslie Kaufman writes in The Times that the figures for the company’s Nook division were especially disappointing and showed how difficult it will be for the bookseller to shift to a digitally oriented business strategy.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/breakfast-meeting-victories-for-gore-and-google-but-not-barnes-noble/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: In Boost to U.S. Plans, BBC World Service Is Added to Time Warner Cable

December 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In a sign of progress for its push to get on cable and satellite systems across the United States, the BBC World News channel is now available in about 10 million homes that subscribe to Time Warner Cable.

The rollout in Time Warner Cable markets was announced this month and was completed Thursday, according to representatives of the BBC and the cable company.

Last year, the BBC began aggressively to seek American distribution for its international news channel, which it says is available full time in more than 200 million homes worldwide. Relatively few were in the United States, however, at least until Comcast signed up late last year, increasing the channel’s reach to about 15 million.

Now, with the Time Warner Cable carriage deal, the channel is up to about 25 million homes, including much of New York City (where advertisers and reporters congregate) and Los Angeles.

“There is still some way to go before we can say we have reached everyone — but 2012 has been a year of significant breakthroughs for us in the U.S.,” the news organization noted earlier this month.

About 100 million homes in the United States have cable or satellite subscriptions. The deals with Comcast and Time Warner Cable are crucial because they are the two biggest cable providers in the country, and where they lead, others tend to follow. But it’s an uphill climb, nonetheless, since providers are generally reluctant to add new channels to their lineups. One of the BBC’s competitors, Al Jazeera English, has been on a similar campaign for cable carriage in the United States, with less to show for it.

In the United States, BBC World News seems to be positioning itself as an alternative to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN. “We are really pleased by the growing demand in the U.S. for a global news network which is both nonpartisan and nonsensational in approach,” Jim Egan, the chief operating officer of the BBC unit that is distributing the channel worldwide, said in a statement when the Time Warner Cable deal was announced.

Mr. Egan added: “BBC World News is about serious news; with on-the-ground reporting and analysis from different parts of the world and a mandate to inform and provide a balanced view. We know that audiences around the world value the channel’s distinctive worldview and we are pleased that more United States viewers now have access to it.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/in-boost-to-u-s-plans-bbc-world-service-is-added-to-time-warner-cable/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Richard Engel of NBC Is Freed in Syria

December 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The journalists were unharmed. The news organization released a short statement that said, “We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country.”

The identities of the kidnappers and their motives were unknown. But an article on the NBC News Web site quotes Mr. Engel as saying their captors “were talking openly about their loyalty to the government” of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Their kidnapping once again highlights the perils of reporting from Syria, which is said by the Committee to Protect Journalists to be “the world’s most dangerous place for the press.”

NBC declined to specify the number of crew members that were with Mr. Engel but a person with specific knowledge of the situation said there were three. The person did not say whether Mr. Engel was traveling with security.

Mr. Engel covertly entered Syria several times this year to report on the insurgency that is fighting President Bashar al-Assad there. Mr. Engel was last seen on television last Thursday in a taped report from Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, where he reported that “the Syrian regime appears to be cracking, but the rebels remain outgunned.” He and his crew members had apparently moved to a safer location outside the country to transmit their report (two days earlier he had reported live on the “Today” show from Turkey, having just come back from Aleppo) because they were detained on Thursday when they were trying to move back into Syria.

Mr. Engel and the crew members, whose names were not released by NBC, were blindfolded by the kidnappers and “tossed into the back of a truck,” NBC’s Web site said. From that point on, NBC had no contact with them. The network’s Web site said there was “no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing.”

The site said the crew members were being moved to a new location on Monday night “when their captors ran into a checkpoint manned by members of the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group. There was a confrontation and a firefight ensued. Two of the captors were killed, while an unknown number of others escaped.” The rebels helped escort the crew to the Syrian border.

NBC tried to keep the crew’s disappearance a secret for several days while it sought to ascertain their whereabouts. Its television competitors and many other major news organizations, including The New York Times, refrained from reporting on the situation, in part out of concern that any reporting could worsen the danger for the crew. News outlets similarly refrained from publishing reports about a 2008 kidnapping in Afghanistan of David Rohde of The New York Times and a local reporter, Tahir Ludin. The two reporters escaped in June 2009 after seven months in captivity.

In the case of Mr. Engel, some Web sites reported speculation about his disappearance on Monday. NBC declined to comment until the crew members were safely out of Syria on Tuesday.

Mr. Engel is perhaps the best-known foreign-based correspondent on television in the United States. Hop-scotching from Iraq to Afghanistan to Egypt and other countries in recent years, he has had more airtime than any other such correspondent at NBC, ABC or CBS. Thus the news of his kidnapping and safe release is likely to generate widespread interest from viewers.

Mr. Engel has worked for NBC since May 2003, two months into the Iraq war. He was promoted to chief foreign correspondent in 2008. At the time, the NBC News president Steve Capus said, “There aren’t enough superlatives to describe the work that Richard has done in some of the most dangerous places on earth for NBC News. His reporting, his expertise on the situation in the Middle East, his professionalism and his commitment to telling the story of what is happening there is unparalleled.”

The “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams has been among Mr. Engel’s most ardent fans. Without alluding to his disappearance, Mr. Williams brought up Mr. Engel while being interviewed onstage at a charity fund-raiser in New Jersey on Sunday night. “What I know about Richard Engel is, he’s fearless, but he’s not crazy,” Mr. Williams said. When Mr. Engel’s name came up, there was spontaneous applause from the crowd.


Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/business/media/richard-engel-of-nbc-is-released-in-syria.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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