Jon Platt, Powerful Talent Scout in Urban Music, to Join Warner/Chappell

September 10, 2012, 7:05 pm

By BEN SISARIO

As the dust settles on the $2.2 billion sale of EMI Music Publishing to an investor group led by Sony, Jon Platt, a former EMI executive who is one of the most successful and powerful figures in urban music, is joining Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of the Warner Music Group.

Mr. Platt - widely known as Big Jon - will be president of creative, and will report to Cameron Strang, Warner/Chappell's chief executive, the company announced. In 17 years at EMI, Mr. Platt signed some of the biggest names in R&B and hip-hop, like Jay-Z, Kanye West, Usher, Drake and Ludacris. EMI has a particularly strong lineup of songwriters in urban music genres.

Mr. Platt, 47, left EMI in late June, shortly after Son y's deal was completed, and his destination had been the subject of frequent speculation. One scenario had him joining Roc Nation, the joint venture between Jay-Z and Live Nation Entertainment. It was considered unlikely, however, that he would return to EMI and be reunited with Martin N. Bandier, his former boss at EMI, who is now the chairman of Sony's publishing branch, Sony/ATV.

Sony's deal for EMI Publishing was one of two reached last November by Citigroup, which acquired EMI after its previous owner, the private equity firm Terra Firma, defaulted on a loan. The other deal was the Universal Music Group's $1.9 billion bid for EMI's record labels.

Universal's deal has been under rigorous review by European regulators for most of the year. To appease regulators concerned that Universal would have too much market power - in some European countries, it would control more than half the market, according to most estimates - Universal has offered to sell large piec es of EMI.

As part of Universal's deal to buy EMI, the company agreed to pay Citi about 90 percent of the price by Monday - 10 months after reaching the original deal - regardless of the status of regulatory approval. According to a person briefed on the deal, who spoke anonymously because the deal has not been made public, that payment was made last week.

Last month, Universal offered to sell EMI assets in Europe worth as much as two-thirds of the company's annual revenue there. To meet further demands by the commission, Universal recently agreed to include the worldwide rights to those labels, which include Parlophone, one of EMI's oldest labels and the home of acts like Coldplay, according to two people briefed on the deal. (Recording rights to Parlophone's biggest name, however, the Beatles, will not be sold.) The size of the divestment package is unclear, but may exceed $500 million.

The European Commission's final decision is due Sept. 27, although it could come as early as next week.

In the United States, Universal's deal for EMI is still under review by the Federal Trade Commission, which has not said when it will issue its decision, although many expect it to come after the European Commission's decision is announced.

HarperCollins Reaches New Agreements With Amazon and Others on E-Book Prices

September 10, 2012, 6:22 pm

By JULIE BOSMAN

HarperCollins has struck new agreements with Amazon and other retailers that allow its e-books to be sold at a discount, the publisher said on Monday.

Some current bestsellers released by HarperCollins, including “The Fallen Angel” by Daniel Silva and “Solo” by Hope Solo, were being sold for $9.99 on Amazon's Web site on Monday afternoon.

The agreements appear to make HarperCollins the first of the three publishers to renegotiate its contracts with retailers, as required by the terms of a settlement the publishers reached with the Department of Justice in April. That settlement was approved by a federal judge in Manhattan last week.

Under the terms of the settlement, the three publish ers may not agree to contracts with e-book retailers that restrict the retailer's “discretion over e-book pricing,” the court said in a 45-page opinion last week. Under previous agreements between major publishers and retailers that began in 2010, publishers set prices for e-books.

Those agreements came under the scrutiny of the Justice Department, which accused five major publishers and Apple of colluding to fix prices. HarperCollins, along with Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster, agreed to settle while denying any wrongdoing; two publishers, Penguin Goup USA and Macmillan, along with Apple, did not settle, and face trial next year.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said in an e-mail that the publisher “has reached agreements with our e-retailers that are consistent with the final judgment,” or settlement. “Dynamic pricing and experimentation will continue to be a priority for us as we move forward,” she said.

Sarah Gelman, a sp okeswoman for Amazon, said in an e-mail, “We are happy to again be lowering prices on a broad assortment of HarperCollins titles.” She declined to comment on any other publisher negotiations.

The agreements call for HarperCollins to set the list price of the book, but allow the retailer to discount the titles. The new prices could give HarperCollins a competitive advantage - at least temporarily - if their books are priced lower than those of other major publishers.

Spending Your Money to Make Someone Else Happy

September 10, 2012, 3:21 pm

By CARL RICHARDS

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at BAM Advisor Services. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

In the early 1990s, I went to Philadelphia on a Mormon mission and lived in a tough section of the city. One day I received a letter from a friend. In it was $100 and instructions to spend it doing something nice for someone else. No spending the money on myself.

It was the holiday season, and I figured it would be fun to provide a great dinner for a family we had recently met who was clearly going to go without. We bought a turkey, stuffing, all the fixings, a p ie and small gifts. I still remember leaving the box of food on the doorstep, knocking a few times and running.

We watched from a hiding place as someone came to the door, looked at the food, looked around, gathered it all up and went inside. I have no idea what the reaction was after that. We never saw that family again, but I do know that the experience ranks among the best I had during that time in my life.

I find it interesting that spending that money on someone else made me far happier than it would have if I had spent it on myself. Part of that feeling might come from the fact that the money was a gift and came with specific instructions on how to spend it.

But there's another part to consider. In a fascinating paradox, the more we try to find happiness and the more we devote our resources, time, talents, energy and money to making ourselves happy, the less it seems to work. Something weird happens when we use our money t o make someone else happy though: we get happier. This seems to be true of charitable giving in general, as well as for gifts to family and friends.

Turns out that there is research to support this idea. In a paper by Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson that was originally published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, they shared the results of a 2008 experiment:

Researchers approached individuals on the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus, handed them a $5 or $20 bill, and then randomly assigned them to spend the money on themselves or on others by the end of the day.  When participants were contacted that evening, individuals who had been assigned to spend their windfall on others were happier than those who had been assigned to spend the money on themselves.

So if happiness is the goal, we get a two-for-one deal when we spend our money on other people. We're happier, and the people we spend it on are hap pier too. And then there's the story Gretchen Rubin shared in The Huffington Post as part of her encouragement to pursue nonrandom acts of kindness:

… a friend told me a wonderful story about a nonrandom act of kindness she'd performed. On April 15 a few years ago, she was standing in a post office crowded with people who needed to mail their tax returns. There was a huge line in front of the one machine that dispensed stamps.

When my friend's turn finally came, instead of buying the minimum number of stamps, she bought $20 worth. Then she went along the line of people behind her, handing each person as many stamps as needed, until she ran out.

The people who got the free stamps were ecstatic â€" and even the people who didn't get the free stamps were ecstatic, because the long, slow line got so much shorter so quickly. Everyone was surprised, excited and laughing.

Imagine if someone walked up to you today and handed you $10 0. How would you use that money to make someone else happy? For close to 20 years my experience has stuck with me. I have a strong suspicion that if you try it, it will stick with you too.

 

Ask About Navigating Student Debt

September 10, 2012, 3:13 pm

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Struggling to pay your student loans? Have a question about how to navigate the debt trap?

You aren't alone. There are more than 37 million borrowers with outstanding student loans, and nearly one in six is in default. Millions more are behind on their payments but not yet in default.

Two New York Times reporters and Geoffry Walsh, an expert on student debt and bankruptcy at the National Consumer Law Center, are available to answer questions about ways to avoid default, pay off student loans or try to expunge student loans through bankruptcy court.

The reporters, Ron Lieber and Andrew Martin, wrote recent articles about the difficulties of paying back student loans as part of The New Yo rk Times's series Degrees of Debt, which examines the implications of soaring college costs and the indebtedness of students and their families.

Mr. Lieber described how extraordinarily difficult it is for borrowers to expunge their student loans in bankruptcy court. As told through the story of a legally blind man in Ohio named Doug Wallace Jr., a borrower needs to convince a judge that his or her economic prospects are beyond hope.

“Do I think I'm hopeless?” Mr. Wallace said. “Well, yeah, I mean, by looking at it you would think I am hopeless. “

Mr. Martin detailed how the debt collection industry is cashing in on the rising number of borrowers who default on their student loans. Last year, for instance, the Department of Education paid more than $1.4 billion to private collection agencies and other groups to collect defaulted student loans.

“While the Department of Education debt collection contract has been one of the most highly sought- after contracts within the ARM industry for years, I believe it is now THE most sought-after contract within this industry, centered within the most sought-after market - student loans,” Mark Russell, a mergers and acquisitions specialist, wrote in InsideArm.com, an online publication for the debt collection industry, in October.

After Summer of Turmoil, Oxford American Appoints Roger Hodge Editor

September 10, 2012, 3:00 pm

By JULIE BOSMAN

After enduring weeks of unflattering attention over the firing of its editor, The Oxford American has hired a successor: Roger D. Hodge, a Texas-born editor and veteran of New York media.

Mr. Hodge, who was the editor of Harper's magazine from 2006 to 2010, will become the second editor in the 20-year history of The Oxford American, a feisty southern journal of arts and culture. Warwick Sabin, the publisher, announced Mr. Hodge's appointment in a statement Monday, saying it will begin “an exciting new era.”

The move offers the magazine a chance for reinvention after the unsavory events of the summer.

The Oxford American's founding editor, Marc Smirnoff, was fired July 15 following an inve stigation by the magazine's board into accusations by young employees of sexual harassment and improper conduct. Mr. Smirnoff has strongly denied any wrongdoing and has started a Web site, editorsinlove.com, defending himself from allegations of sexual harassment and what he has called unfair press reports about his dismissal.

The offer to edit the magazine was unexpected, Mr. Hodge said in an interview, adding that he has deliberately stayed uninformed of the circumstances surrounding Mr. Smirnoff's departure.

“It's an awful thing for the individuals concerned and for the institution and I just want to move on from it,” he said. “I just want to make a good magazine.”

Though Mr. Hodge, 45, lives in Brooklyn, he has ties to the South. He grew up in Texas, studied comparative literature at Sewanee in Tennessee, and began his career as a freelance writer in North Carolina. While Mr. Hodge has not been a subscriber recently, he said he has been an admir er of The Oxford American since the mid-1990's.

While the writing in The Oxford American is “consistently good,” Mr. Hodge said, “the thing that I felt was missing was journalism.”

“That's the thing that I love doing,” he said. “What I can bring to this magazine is experience with long-form pieces, literary journalism that is vital and important to readers.”

In mid-August, before accepting the job, Mr. Hodge flew to Little Rock to meet with the staff and members of the board.

“He brings impeccable literary credentials as well as a rigorous experience editing Harper's Magazine,” Mr. Sabin said. “Roger is a son of the South, having been born in Texas and educated at Sewanee. Roger has an intuitive understanding of the unique spirit and character of The Oxford American, and he is the perfect person to shepherd it in a rapidly evolving publishing landscape.”

Mr. Hodge is the author of “The Mendacity of Hope,” a critique o f President Obama published by HarperCollins in 2010, and is currently working on another book focusing on life in the borderlands of West Texas.

He will inherit a magazine with close to 20,000 subscribers that sells about 15,000 copies on the newsstands and operates out of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Ark., with a staff of about 10 editorial employees. Mr. Hodge said he planned to “commute” to Arkansas for the foreseeable future rather than uproot his wife and two sons from their home in New York.

Mr. Hodge, who has never met Mr. Smirnoff, said has “nothing but respect for what Marc accomplished at the magazine.” Mr. Smirnoff founded The Oxford American in 1992.

Pietsch of Little, Brown to Become Hachette Book Chief

September 10, 2012, 11:59 am

By JULIE BOSMAN

Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown and Company, has been named chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, replacing David Young, the company is expected to announce in a memo to staff on Monday.

Mr. Pietsch will take over on April 1.

A gregarious, well-liked figure at Hachette who has held his current position since 2006, Mr. Young has successfully brought the company up to speed digitally while navigating relations between the Hachette Book Group and its corporate parent in Europe. Hachette Book Group is owned by Hachette Livre, a publishing company based in France.

For months, Mr. Young, 61, has told associates that he was ready to leave his post and join his family outside L ondon, where his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Noble, and their three children have been living for two years.

“I realized that despite loving this job, I couldn't bear being separated from my family much longer,” Mr. Young said in an interview at the Hachette offices in Manhattan on Monday.

Mr. Pietsch, 55, is a natural successor from within the company, a hands-on editor who has proven that he can edit literary titans like David Foster Wallace as deftly as blockbuster commercial authors like James Patterson.

In March, Mr. Young told Arnaud Nourry, the chairman of Hachette Livre, that he intended to step down in a year.

Asked how long it took Mr. Nourry to find Mr. Young's replacement, Mr. Nourry said, “It took me about a minute and a half.”

“Frankly, I did not meet with anyone but Michael,” Mr. Nourry said.

Mr. Pietsch said he accepted the job “after two deep breaths.”

“It's a bigger t ransition than I've ever made,” he said. “The job of C.E.O. is much bigger than the job of a publisher. I get to the drive the Maserati that David has built. He really made it one company. He really made it come together.”

The succession plans call for Mr. Young to retain the position of chairman of the Hachette Book Group, spending approximately one week each month in New York. He will also take on the role of deputy chief executive of Hachette UK and chief executive of the Orion Publishing Group, a division of Hachette UK.

Mr. Pietsch, who will report to Mr. Young, will be responsible for leading the company through the digital transition that is changing the industry. But his first task will be finding his own replacement as publisher of Little, Brown. He said his search would include looking outside the company for candidates.

Several executives within Hachette said that the temperamental differences between Mr. Young and Mr. Pietsch were stark: w hile Mr. Young is known as charming and accessible, Mr. Pietsch can be more difficult to approach.

He is also a publisher who is deeply involved on the content level and comfortable in the arcane details of a manuscript - skills that may lessen in importance to his broader role as the executive in charge of Hachette's direction and profitability.

Mr. Pietsch has published some of the biggest authors in the business, including Martin Amis, Michael Connelly and Stacy Schiff, and worked on memoirs by Keith Richards and Chuck Berry.

He edited “The Pale King,” the posthumously published novel by Mr. Wallace that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction this year. Mr. Pietsch assembled the book after Mr. Wallace died in 2008.

This fall, Little, Brown will release “The Casual Vacancy,” J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults, a major acquisition for the imprint. Mr. Pietsch also lured the novelist Tom Wolfe away from his longtime publisher, Far rar Straus & Giroux, paying him close to $7 million for “Back to Blood,” which will be released in November.

Mr. Pietsch has been with Little, Brown since 1991 and previously worked at Scribner and Harmony Books.

According to the company's Web site, the Hachette Book Group publishes close to 650 adult books and 125 young adult and children's books every year. In its quarterly report announced late last month, Hachette said its revenues were down 4 percent because of weak sales of newly released books. The company said it expected the second half of 2012 to be strong enough to reverse the sales trend.

Why Medicare Cards Still Show Social Security Numbers

September 10, 2012, 11:01 am

By ANN CARRNS

Images of a woman waving her Medicare card on television at the Democratic convention last week in Charlotte, N.C., prompted the folks at Credit.com and others to ask: Why do Medicare cards still have Social Security numbers on them anyway, when access to the numbers can post a risk of identity theft?

The answer is that the federal government has been dragging its heels for years on making a change, because, according to various reports from the agency that oversees Medicare, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it would be both expensive and complex technologically to re-issue cards with new identification numbers.

According to testimony from a C.M.S. official before Congress in August, “transitioning to a new identifier would be a task of enormous complexity and cost and one that, undertaken without sufficient planning, would present great risks to continued access to health care for Medicare beneficiaries.”

About 48 million Americans carry Medicare cards that use their Social Security number as part of their health-claim number.

In a report issued in 2006, C.M.S. said it would cost $300 million to remove SSNs from Medicare cards. Then, in an updated report last November, it said it would cost at least $803 million, and possibly as much as $845 million, depending on the option chosen. Much of the cost, the agency said, was for upgrading computer systems not only at the federal level, but also at the state level, for coordination with Medicaid systems.

But the Government Accountability Office said in its testimony to Congress in August that the methods and assumptions that C.M.S. used to develop its costs estimates “raise questions a bout their reliability.”

“Lack of action on this key initiative leaves Medicare beneficiaries exposed to the possibility of identity theft,” the G.A.O. said. It recommended that C.M.S. select an approach to modify or remove the numbers from Medicare cards and develop an “accurate, well-documented cost estimate.”

According to the G.A.O., C.M.S. agreed with its recommendations and will conduct a new estimate with improved methodology. That's likely to take some time. So don't expect Medicare cards free of the numbers anytime soon.

Meantime, the AARP and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse suggest making a photocopy of your Medicare card, cutting it to wallet size and cutting out the last four digits of your Social Security numbers. Carry the photocopy in your wallet instead of the actual card. (You'll still need your original card the first time you visit a provider, because they'll likely want a photocopy of it).

Do you have a Medicare card? How do you safeguard it?

The Breakfast Meeting: Journalism\'s Big Tent, and Google vs. Amazon on Search

September 10, 2012, 9:40 am

By NOAM COHEN

An experiment in journalism education at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., will also inject life and resources into the professional journalism in the city, Christine Haughney writes. Backed by a $4.6 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Mercer's Center for Collaborative Journalism will be home to reporters and editors of the city's 186-year-old paper, The Telegraph, and the local public radio station. Students will do reporting legwork, with guidance from professors and working journalists, in what the university's president compares to the way medical schools use hospitals to train their students.

The journalism start-up Homicide Watch D.C. has a clear mission statement - “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case” - but until this weekend, it's fate was anything but clear, David Carr writes. The idea would seem to be exactly the kind of journalism that the Web can uniquely nurture, he writes, “part database, part news site, it also serves as a kind of digital memorial for homicide victims in Washington.” And, as it turns out, after failing to win funding from granting organizations, Homicide Watch was saved in a uniquely Web way - a Kickstarter campaign that raised $40,000.

The commercial Web site Wikitravel has a neat business model - volunteers create the content and readers visit the site and click on the advertising. There were some catches, however, when Internet Brands bought Wikitravel in 2005, as described in the Link by Link column: the material lives under a license that means it can be copied and used by another site, and, since the site's volunteers do not expect a paycheck, they might find it easier to le ave. The news that the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia site among others, is creating a travel guide site that will use the Wikitravel material has led both sides to go to court.

Joseph Hayden, 71, has been a familiar figure in Harlem, training his video camera on police officers when they stop and question and frisk residents, Kia Gregory writes. In December, Mr. Hayden himself was stopped and arrested while he was driving. He described it as punishment for his aggressive journalism, which he posts to his Web site, All Things Harlem; the police said the stop was prompted by a broken taillight and ultimately led to a weapons possession charge. (A grand jury will meet on the case on Thursday.) Mr. Hayden, who has a long criminal record, including 12 years in prison on a manslaughter conviction, quoted what he believed was a line of Malcolm X's: “There's nothing wrong with being a criminal - it's staying a criminal.”

Google is revamping its shopp ing site, for the first time charging online stores to appear there, which will put pressure on smaller e-commerce outlets, Claire Cain Miller and Stephanie Clifford report. The changes reflect Google's concern that it is losing out to Amazon in its area of strength, search, as shoppers increasingly turn to Amazon to look for products. Charging to appear, Google says, will make its results better because retailers will be motivated to include up-to-date listings.

 

Monday Reading: Space Tourism Is Here!

September 10, 2012, 8:08 am

By ANN CARRNS

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.

Oscar Mayer Proposes a New Bacon as a New Currency

September 10, 2012, 7:04 am

By STUART ELLIOTT

Many people, even those who are not New York State residents, have probably heard the lottery slogan, “All it takes is a dollar and a dream.” Now comes an actor, comedian and writer, seeking to make his way across the country in the next two weeks with only a dream and, oh, yes, instead of a dollar, a trailer filled with 3,000 pounds of a new bacon.

The actor, Josh Sankey, will embark this week on a promotion for the Oscar Mayer division of Kraft Foods that is being called the Great American Bacon Barter. The promotion includes a Web site, baconbarter.com; social media like Twitter; and a public relations campaign.

Mr. Sankey's trailer will be filled by Oscar Mayer with a ton and a half of it s new Butcher Thick Cut bacon, which he is to trade for food, fuel, a place to spend the night and anything else he might need during his trip from the New York area to Los Angeles, by way of a route that is to include what Oscar Mayer executives describe as bacon-loving locales like Charleston, W.Va.; Louisville, Ky.; Chicago; and Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Mr. Sankey is being asked to barter his way across America because, Oscar Mayer says, he is being sent without cash or credit cards. The idea is to turn him loose with his cache of bacon and see what happens, not unlike the stories about power barterers who start with, say, a paper clip and wind up with a house.

Butcher Thick Cut bacon is being introduced by Oscar Mayer, joining its regular bacon offerings like Oscar Mayer Center Cut. The price of a 22-ounce package of the new variety is about $8.99, compared with about $5 for a 12-ounce package of Center Cut.

The new Oscar Maye r product is intended to capitalize on a national craze for bacon that has spawned a rash of higher-end brands, sold by mail order as well as in supermarkets. The mainstream bacon brands like Oscar Mayer, Hillshire Farms, Hormel and Armour are scrambling to keep up with the newcomers.

“There's this fever for bacon in this country,” said Tom Bick, director for integrated marketing communications and advertising at Oscar Mayer in Madison, Wis.

“How do we tap into that?” he asked. “If we don't do something to put Oscar Mayer in its rightful place, then shame on us.”

Butcher Thick Cut is “massive, awesome bacon,” Mr. Bick said, “the highest-quality bacon we have.”

The new product “is the new gold standard in bacon,” Mr. Bick said, and “we think it's worth its weight in gold” â€" thereby inspiring the cross-country barter binge.

The promotion is an example of how Oscar Mayer and other Kraft divisions to try to reach consum ers in new ways apart from tried-and-true tactics like television commercials.

“We have to think beyond the traditional means we've used,” Mr. Bick said, “shooting a commercial for $500,000 and airing it for $5 million.”

The promotion, by contrast, is costing “a couple hundred thousand dollars,” he added.

The promotion is the brainchild of 360i, the Oscar Mayer digital agency, and the public relations campaign to support it is being handled by Olson. (The creative agency for Butcher Thick Cut is McGarryBowen, which is creating print ads that declare, “It scares other bacon to bits.”)

Mr. Bick, who joined Oscar Mayer a year ago, said he challenged 360i to develop an imaginative way to promote the new bacon in keeping with his mandate “to elevate advertising and marketing for Oscar Mayer.”

Sarah Hofstetter, president at 360i, part of the Dentsu Network division of Dentsu, said, “As we thought about bacon and its popularity, w e thought, ‘What better currency to drive social actions for the brand' ” than the product itself.

“It's less about what wouldn't you do for bacon and more about what would you do for bacon,” she added.

The goal of the promotion is, clearly, to generate engagement, Ms. Hofstetter said, adding: “It's not just one man's journey. He's going to invite America to join him via social media, helping him barter or even putting some challenges in his path.”

Mr. Sankey can be followed during his trip on Twitter, the baconbarter.com Web site and a YouTube channel, youtube.com/BaconBarter.

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter by clicking here.