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Abundance of News, but Mixed Sales, for News Magazines

August 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But newsstand sales for the top weekly news magazines told two different stories. Time, the country’s best-selling news weekly, posted considerable gains. Newsweek, under the leadership of a prominent new editor, barely moved the needle despite creating provocative covers like one with a digitally altered and age-enhanced rendition of Princess Diana.

At Time, sales at the newsstand rose 16 percent from January through June, to 83,796 on average, a rate of increase far higher than others in the category. Total circulation at Time rose almost 2 percent to just under 3.4 million.

At Newsweek, which has undergone significant changes both cosmetic and cultural under Tina Brown, its new editor who revitalized Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the 1990s, overall circulation fell 5 percent, to just over 1.5 million. Sales of single issues ticked up nearly 3 percent to an average of 46,561 an issue.

On Tuesday, Newsweek business executives defended their strategy as a work in progress and swiped at the competition.

“If you take a look at the last five or six issues of Newsweek, and you compare them to the last five or six issues of Time magazine, you can see the different directions we’re going in,” said Ray Chelstowski, Newsweek’s publisher, who characterized Time’s news judgment as lacking urgency.

Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, said the sales figures showed that Time had become the preference of more readers. “There’s a continuing flight to quality,” he said. “And in difficult economic times, that helps iconic brands like ours.”

By and large, circulation trends at weeklies were flat from January through June as sales across the magazine industry fell more than 9 percent over all. Subscription numbers can be manipulated by publishers cutting prices or deciding to cut back on unwanted circulation. For that reason, newsstand sales are often seen as a good proxy for the overall health of a magazine.

Bloomberg Businessweek, which has also switched ownership and editors recently, held steady at just under 922,000 total copies. Copies sold at newsstands dropped by more than a third, to a weekly average of just 14,260. The New Yorker held steady with an overall circulation of just over 1 million. Single-copy sales rose 1.2 percent.

The Week, a digest of opinion and news that has been making steady inroads into the weekly news magazine market, ended the six-month period with a circulation of just over 525,000, up 2 percent. Newsstand sales account for only a fraction of the magazine’s circulation.

Entertainment Weekly (1.8 million circulation), Sports Illustrated (3.2 million) and People (3.6 million) — all published by Time Inc. — had relatively unchanged circulation. But their newsstand sales all slipped, including 11 percent for People.

Sales of other gossip magazines fell as well. US Weekly’s newsstand sales fell 17 percent to over 646,685. Star’s fell 17 percent to 442,131.

Beyond the weeklies, newsstand sales at many women’s and fashion magazines suffered. Glamour was down almost 18 percent. Cosmopolitan declined nearly 3 percent. The outlier among fashion magazine’s was Vogue, which rose almost 13 percent at the newsstand.

With newsstand sales falling, there was some concern that advertising could be next.

“The big question if you’re an advertiser is, how do you look at this in combination with all that’s happening on Wall Street?” said Steven Cohn, editor of The Media Industry Newsletter. “Are you going to sit on your hands? We certainly saw that two and three years ago.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=71bd7b42d06fb603db61da370204662f

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Security Firm Says It Found Global Cyber Spying

August 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The company, McAfee, said it had alerted the 72 targets it identified and also informed law enforcement agencies, which it said were investigating. The 14-page report calls the attacks highly sophisticated and says they appear to have been operated by a government body, which it declined to name.

“We’re not pointing fingers at anyone but we believe it was a nation-state,” Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president of threat research and the lead author of the report, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. China has repeatedly been the focus of suspicion in such cases.

The report comes after high-profile cyberattacks aimed at the International Monetary Fund, Sony and the Lockheed Martin Corporation, America’s largest military contractor.

McAfee, which was recently acquired by Intel, said it released the report to coincide with the start of the annual Black Hat technical security conference in Las Vegas. Briefings at the conference are scheduled to be delivered Wednesday and Thursday. Details of the study were first published on the Web site of Vanity Fair.

Although in recent months there have been an alarming number of reports about computer spying, many offer few details, citing concern for the targets’ privacy. The 14-page McAfee report, for instance, offers little detail about the cases, what kinds of documents were stolen or what kind of evidence was found to determine the perpetrator was a government body.

Among the few targets the report mentions by name is the International Olympic Committee. However, Mark Adams, a spokesman for the committee, said early Wednesday: “We are unaware of the alleged attempt to compromise our information security claimed by McAfee. If true, such allegations would of course be disturbing.”

Spokesmen for the United Nations and another named target, the World Anti-Doping Agency, could not immediately be reached for comment. The report said that 49 targets were in the United States and that governments, companies, and organizations in Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland and Britain were also targets multiple times.

“After painstaking analysis of the logs, even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,” Mr. Alperovitch wrote.

McAfee said it learned of the hacking campaign last March, when it discovered logs of attacks while reviewing the contents of a server it had discovered in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense companies.

It dubbed the attacks Operation Shady RAT — RAT stands for remote access tool, a type of software used to access computer networks.

The company dated the earliest breaches to mid-2006, though it said other intrusions might have gone undetected. The duration of the attacks ranged from a month to what McAfee said was a sustained 28-month attack against an Olympic committee of an unidentified Asian nation.

What was done with the data “is still largely an open question,” Mr. Alperovitch wrote in the report. “However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat.”

Asked why McAfee decided not to identify most of the corporations that were targets in Operation Shady Rat, the company said on Wednesday that most corporations were worried about being identified and alarming shareholders or customers.

Cyber security is now a major international concern, with hackers gaining access sensitive corporate and military secrets, including intellectual property.

In some attacks, the culprits are believed to be professional hackers engaged in disrupting an organization’s operations for the sheer pleasure of it, or seeking revenge.

In mid-May, the Obama administration proposed creating international computer security standards with penalties for countries and organizations that fell short. The strategy calls for officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Commerce Department and the Department of Homeland Security to work with their counterparts around the world to come up with standards aimed at preventing theft of private information and ensuring Internet freedom.

David Barboza reported from Shanghai, and Kevin Drew from Hong Kong.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1f0c90cc1c09fbe3cdc35ae3f8803592

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Regrets, Resentment and Trivia in a Microsoft Partnership

March 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

At one time in his life, Mr. Allen writes, Mr. Gates liked to eat chicken with a spoon. He liked to save time by buying clothes that were easy to match. And at Harvard, Mr. Gates would nap at his terminal and then awaken to pick up precisely where he had left off, a “prodigious feat of concentration.”

As Mr. Allen highlights these and other traits about Mr. Gates, with whom he co-founded Microsoft in 1975 in one of the biggest partnerships in American business, some are trivial, like Mr. Gates’s choice of utensils at a dinner prepared by Mr. Allen’s girlfriend at the time, or that he read Fortune magazine “religiously” as a scruffy youth in enormous saddle shoes.

But in his book, “Idea Man,” to be published next month by Portfolio, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Mr. Allen also hints at disappointment in the way he was treated by Mr. Gates during their ground-breaking partnership.

It is a portrayal shot through with occasions of Mr. Allen’s regret or resentment in their years of collaboration, which started when they were schoolboys in the late 1960s and Mr. Gates was a “gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all arms and legs and nervous energy.”

In excerpts from the book published in Vanity Fair, Mr. Allen suggests that Mr. Gates at times brushed aside or undermined their agreements and his position as a partner.

Mr. Allen eventually resigned in February 1983. But before that, after he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982, Mr. Allen said he overheard Mr. Gates and Steven A. Ballmer, who was hired to run the business side of Microsoft, talking about Mr. Allen in Mr. Gates’s office.

“They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders,” Mr. Allen wrote. “It was clear that they’d been thinking about this for some time.”

While Mr. Allen said he confronted the two men, he wrote that Mr. Gates later tried to pressure him to sell his stock in the company with a “lowball offer” of $5 a share, which Mr. Allen declined.

Mr. Allen also wrote that Mr. Gates offered to hire Mr. Ballmer for 8.75 percent of the company, which Mr. Allen considered “a major breach of faith” because the offer was made while Mr. Allen was away and was more than the 5 percent Mr. Allen had agreed on.

Mr. Allen also said that Mr. Gates sought, and Mr. Allen agreed to, a greater share for himself in the early days of their business together, asking for a 60-40 share and then later a 64-36 split. But the recollection seems to suggest that Mr. Allen felt their partnership was uneven in many ways from the start.

“From the time we’d started together in Massachusetts, I’d assumed that our partnership would be a 50-50 proposition,” Mr. Allen wrote. “But Bill had another idea.”

Negotiations made him question the value of his own contribution, Mr. Allen wrote, and he might have “haggled” with Mr. Gates over the terms of their partnership agreement, “but my heart wasn’t in it.”

He said such discussions “exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer.”

Mr. Gates left full-time work at Microsoft in 2008 to devote more time to his philanthropic foundation.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=deba4d637c1204695f18c7d47cdac0eb

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