Total Pageviews

After \'Today\' Criticism, NBC News Chief Apologies to Affiliates

September 12, 2012, 7:02 pm
By BILL CARTER

As it promised, NBC did not apologize on the air Wednesday for its decision not to observe a moment of silence during the “Today” show on Sept. 11.

But Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, did send out a message to the managers of NBC's affiliated stations Wednesday, which acknowledged that they had been hit with a storm of criticism from their viewers over the decision â€" and apologized for putting the stations through that.

The incident received wide coverage Tuesday, mainly because “Today” was the only one of the three network morning shows not to participate in the moment of silence in memory of those who died on 9/11, but also because “Today” happened to be in the midst of a seg ment that seemed to invite ridicule: an interview with Kris Jenner, the matriarch of the tabloid-darling Kardashian clan, who was discussing her breast augmentation.

Mr. Capus sent his memo to NBC Affiliate Corporation Group executives, and began by citing the extensive coverage “Today” provided Wednesday to the attacks on the American embassies in Libya and Egypt. Then he added: “Yesterday, we made an editorial call resulting in the September 11 moment of silence not being seen. While we dedicated a substantial amount of airtime to anniversary events, we still touched a nerve with many of your viewers…and for that we apologize.”

NBC's position on Tuesday had been that “Today” did not routinely observe the 9/11 moment of silence, and in fact had included it only once â€" on the 10-year anniversary last year - since 2006.

One NBC executive, who did not want to be identified because the network was seeking to move past the incident, said that th e memo to the affiliate executives did not represent a contradiction in NBC's position on not apologizing for the decision.

It was, rather, an effort to acknowledge that the stations had been subjected to criticism over a decision made by the network, the executive said, and that was what warranted the apology.



Omnifone Posts Rare Profit in World of Streaming Music

Music September 12, 2012, 4:47 pm
By BEN SISARIO

How do you make money streaming digital music? One way is to provide the electronic guts that allow other services to operate - and to take the financial risk.

Omnifone, a British company whose technology is used by various digital music services, including Sony's Music Unlimited, Rara.com and BBM Music (for BlackBerry phones), announced on Tuesday that it had turned a profit for the first time. For the year that ended in April, its revenue was $47.2 million, up 118 percent from the year before, and its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were $6.1 million. Omnifone was founded in 2003.

Those are still relatively small returns, but they of fer some encouragement in a marketplace in which most players, even major ones like Pandora and Spotify, are not profitable. Omnifone's music platform is used in digital music services in 28 countries, the company said, and as part of its earnings announcement the company also said that it was buying Global Media Bank, a Swedish database and content management company - in other words, guts within the guts. The price was not disclosed.

Growth for Vevo: The numbers keep going up for Vevo, a source for music videos online whose majority owners are Sony Music and the Universal Music Group.

The service, which has material from those labels as well as from EMI - but not from the Warner Music Group, the fourth major label - streamed 40 billion music videos around the world in the year that ended in June, with 9.3 billion of them viewed in the United States. According to an announcement this week, an average of 103 million videos are streamed each day.

Also import ant to Vevo is that its mobile audience is increasing quickly. In the second quarter, 1.3 billion videos were watched on mobile systems, which the company said was nearly double the number from the first quarter of the year. Vevo has a deal with YouTube to host its videos, although the company is reported to have discussed whether to move to another platform.

Warner Music recently started its own channel on YouTube, the Warner Sound, which has become one of the most popular channels on the site.

  • On Wednesday, Vevo also announced a partnership with Virgin America to provide 30-minute blocks of videos on the airline's in-flight entertainment channel, Virgin Produced. Each segment is also to include “a musical tour” of one of the airline's destinations.

Karmazin Hints at Exit From Sirius: On Tuesday, Liberty Media increased its stake in Sirius XM Radio yet again, to 49.7 percent. Last month, Liberty told the Federal Communications Commission th at it intended to take over Sirius by buying a majority of its shares.

The relationship between Mel Karmazin, Sirius's chief executive, and John C. Malone, who controls Liberty, has been strained, with both men making barbed public comments about whether Mr. Karmazin would hold on to his job. Speaking at a media conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Mr. Karmazin suggested that he may soon be stepping down.

“My instincts today are that Liberty does not need me,” Mr. Karmazin said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. His employment contract expires at the end of the year.

A Hologram Fades Out: Digital Domain, the company that found itself suddenly in the spotlight in April, when its technology was used to project a hologramlike image of the rapper Tupac Shakur at the Coachella music festival, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, 10 months after going public.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter .



@InvisibleObama Was Quick Twitter Thinking by Digital Ad Executive

By STUART ELLIOTT

A post to Twitter, on Aug. 31.

The creator of a Twitter account called Invisible Obama - born five minutes or so after the furniture-centric speech by Clint Eastwood at the Republic National Convention ended - is making himself, er, um, visible.

Invisible Obama turns out to be Ian Schafer, chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital agency with a specialty in social media like Facebook and, yes, Twitter. Mr. Schafer has long had a Twitter account under his own name, @ischafer, which has more than 13,600 followers, and the agency, part of Engine USA, has one, too, @deepfocus, with almost 1,700 followers.

But @InvisibleObama, which began on Aug. 30, already dwarf s them both, with almost 69,700 followers; there is also a complementary presence on Facebook. And the Twitter account has been the subject of a fair amount of news coverage, on television and blogs.

The experience of shepherding the @InvisibleObama account, Mr. Schafer shared in an interview, has been a blend of practicing what you preach, the law of unintended consequences, putting your money where your mouth is and being careful what you wish for.

“It's been kind of a fascinating ride,” Mr. Schafer said. “It started as a joke and became a responsibility.”

The Invisible Obama Twitter feed is another example of the real-time nature of social media, which can help marketers immeasurably as they seek to capitalize on the attention that consumers pay to major news events and other aspects of popular culture.

“This is what we do,” Mr. Schafer said, “try to take these moments in the zeitgeist and use them as a launching pad for relevancy.”

This was not the first time he created a Twitter account to tap into, and create, consumer buzz, Mr. Schafer said.

“But this is the first one that took off immediately,” he added. The takeoff was so abrupt that at one point Twitter administrators shut down the account because it “gained so many followers so quickly.” (The initial blackout was resolved, Mr. Schafer said, after he contacted them.)

The tactic of taking advantage of larger events, known as borrowed interest, can be a double-edged sword. What may seem topical or witty to some could be deemed by others to be jumping on a bandwagon or childish - or, in the case of an election year idea, overly (or overtly) political.

“I was being very careful not to be too partisan,” Mr. Schafer said, because he was hoping for “attention from both sides” of the political spectrum.

In fact, “I started making jokes about the Republican convention from my p ersonal account and certain people were taking them way too seriously,” he added. “This was for fun, certainly not the agency talking; I'm doing it on my own.”

The idea was that “if this invisible Obama” - who, according to Mr. Eastwood, was seated in the chair he brought onstage as a prop for his speech - “had a voice, what would he be saying?” Mr. Schafer said.

“I wanted to make it more about the humor of an invisible president running around who was not just a figment of Clint Eastwood's imagination,” he added, than just another way to be “critical of Mitt Romney.”

Mr. Schafer said he hoped to keep the account going, “out of a passion for politics, media and social media.” He has been posting each day to keep his Twitter followers interested until the presidential debates, he added, which will be “an inflection point for the account,” generating many posts.

“What I'm learning is that people respond when they're consu ming television news,” Mr. Schafer said, demonstrating how, as is widely discussed in social media circles, consumers are increasingly using smartphones, tablets and other devices to accompany their TV watching.

“That talk about the ‘second screen?' ” he asked. “It's for real.”

As for the red chair that serves as the avatar for the account, Mr. Schafer said, laughing, that it was “the first red chair I could find in a Google image search without a watermark.”

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.



An Update on a Student Debt Case

September 12, 2012, 1:05 pm
By RON LIEBER

In an article about what happens to people who try to get a judge to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy court, I told the story of Doug Wallace, a blind man in Ohio in the middle of his own case. He's trying to prove that paying his debt would cause an “undue hardship,” according to the governing legal standard. To do so, he needs to prove, among other things, that there is a “certainty of hopelessness” that he will be unable to pay his debt during the term of the loans.

Last week, he had his latest hearing in front of C. Kathryn Preston, the federal bankruptcy judge overseeing his case. She set Jan. 28, 2013, as the date for a new mini-trial to discuss medical issues that have arisen (in cluding a hernia and problems with his fingers) in the last two years. He'll also have to discuss whether he has made any effort to find work or attempted to get any additional assessment of whether he's employable.



Answers to Your Questions About Student Loans, Part One

September 12, 2012, 8:00 am
By ANDREW MARTIN and RON LIEBER

This week, two New York Times reporters and Geoffry Walsh, an expert on student debt and bankruptcy at the National Consumer Law Center, are answering questions about ways to avoid default, pay off student loans or try to expunge student loans through bankruptcy court. The first set of answers is below.

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

List government work programs that will pay off student debt in return for service.

There is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, under which qualified employees can have the remaining balances of their loans forgiven after 10 years of on-time payments.

According to Department of Education, any full-time government job qualifies, whether it's federal, state or local, and so do full-time jobs for nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501 (c)(3) of the federal tax code.

Furthermore, some other private nonprofits may qualify if they provide certain public services, like emergency management, military service, public safety, law enforcement, public health services, public education, public library services, school library and other school-based services, public interest law, early childhood education, public service of individuals with disabilities and the elderly. Labor unions and partisan political groups do not qualify.

Religious organizations don't quality either, which rabbinical students and seminarians d on't like.

What loans are eligible for forgiveness?

Only loans you received under the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan (Direct Loan) Program are eligible for public service loan forgiveness. Loans you received under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program (in which the government guarantees loans made by banks and which was ended in 2010), the Perkins Loan Program or any other student loan program are not eligible for the forgiveness program.

If you have FFEL and/or Perkins loans, you may consolidate them into a Direct Consolidation Loan to take advantage of public service forgiveness. However, only payments you make on the new consolidated loan will count toward the 120-month payment requirement for the forgiveness program. Payments made on your FFEL or Perkins loans, even if they were made under a qualifying repayment plan, do not count as qualifying public service loan forgiveness payments.

What about some a dvice for those who are drowning in tens of thousands of dollars in PRIVATE student loans which you can't put on the income-based repayment or public service loan forgiveness program? Oh wait…there is none! They are basically pay-or-default loans, and as of 2005, Congress stripped away bankruptcy rights on these loans. These loans will literally crawl into the grave with you! Something needs to be done NOW to allow one to combine these loans with federal loans to qualify for income based repayment or restore bankruptcy rights so people can be given a second chance to live their lives!

You are right that borrowers with private student loans have fewer options than those with federally guaranteed student loans. There are some efforts in Congress to change the law so that it won't be so difficult to expunge private student loans in bankruptcy, but there is no guarantee that they will succeed. In the meantime, your best bet is to call your private loan servicer and try t o work out an affordable payment plan.

A Sallie Mae spokeswoman adds the following: “While private student loans do not guarantee repayment entitlements available on some federal loans, we work with our customers one-on-one if they experience financial difficulty. As appropriate, we customize assistance using a variety of tools â€" in some circumstances that means modified loan terms, lower interest rates, good-faith catch up programs or temporary suspension of the requirement to make payments. Since 2009, we have modified $1.1 billion in private education loans with interest rate reductions or extended repayment terms.”

I will be completing a graduate program next year with approximately $70,000 in debt (all on government student loans, not private ones). I plan to get in the IBR plan as soon as possible to prevent default. This sounds like a better deal, since it will keep my payments manageable for 25 years, and if I don't have a high paying job to make la rge payments, the rest of the balance is forgiven at that time. My two questions are, does carrying a large balance, even if on IBR, over that time period negatively affect my credit score? Will that make it difficult or impossible to be approved for a car or home loan in the future if I have a large balance on IBR but am current on all payments?

We turned to credit industry veteran John Ulzheimer for help with this one. Here's his reply:

“Carrying a large amount of student loans has a surprisingly benign impact to your credit scores. The reason: they're installment loans rather than revolving accounts. Installment debt, when paid on time, has almost no impact to your credit scores. Installment loans (autos, mortgages and student loans, for example) are less indicative of elevated credit risk, thus the small impact. That's another reason you should always pay off credit card debt faster than you pay off installment debt.”

Mr. Ulzheimer adds that the imp act of any student loan balance on, say, a home loan application will depend on your income. Mortgage lenders want to know how much other debt you'll be paying off besides their home loan, and then they'll compare it to your income to decide how much they're willing to lend you.



Wednesday Reading: Study Finds Acupuncture Provides True Pain Relief

September 12, 2012, 8:38 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.



Employers Use Carrots and Sticks to Promote Worker Health

September 12, 2012, 10:50 am
By ANN CARRNS

Employers are using financial carrots and sticks to get workers to adopt healthy lifestyles, in an effort to improve well-being and lower health costs, a new report on employer health benefits finds.

Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of firms offering health benefits offer at least one wellness program to employees, like nutrition classes or programs that help people lose weight or stop smoking, according to the 2012 Employer Health Benefits report from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

About a tenth offer some sort of financial incentive for participation, like smaller premium contributions, smaller deductibles, higher health-savings account contributions, gift cards, merchandise or even cash.

More than a third of large firms (those with more than 200 employees) reported asking employees to complete risk health assessments. Those assessments include questions about the worker's medical history, health status and lifestyle. And of those firms, nearly two-thirds dangle financial incentives for them to do so, the study found.

Eleven percent of firms that use health assessments said that workers with identified risk factors must complete a wellness program or face financial penalties, like higher insurance premiums, and 9 percent reward or penalize employees based on whether they meet “biometric” measures, like certain cholesterol levels or a target body-mass index.

The findings were reported as part of an annual review of employer health benefits, which found that overall family health insurance premiums rose 4 percent in 2012, a relatively modest increase.

The report is based o n a survey of more than 2,000 human resources professionals at randomly selected firms, and was conducted for the foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust in January through May of 2012.

What incentives or penalties does your employer offer promote healthy behavior? Do you think they're effective?



Suggested Retirement Savings Goals, by Age

September 12, 2012, 12:33 pm
By ANN CARRNS

For those of you wondering if you're saving enough money for retirement, here are some new savings guidelines to ponder.

Fidelity Investments has recommended that most workers should strive to save at least eight times their final salary before they retire to adequately prepare for retirement. (Saving that amount puts you on track to replace 85 percent of your salary, Fidelity says.)

Now, the investment firm is suggesting earlier milestones to help you get to that eight times goal by the time you're 67.

Namely, Fidelity suggests workers should aim to save about one times their salary at age 35, three times at age 45 and five times at age 55.

So if you're 45 a nd you're making $50,000 a year, you should have put away $150,000.

“We believe these savings targets offer a rule of thumb to help employees get engaged in retirement planning by making it simpler and more achievable, but we recognize many individuals may need more than eight times their ending salary in retirement based on their lifestyle,” James M. MacDonald, president of workplace investing at Fidelity, said in a news release.

The company's savings guideline is based on an employee in a workplace retirement plan, like a 401(k), beginning at age 25, working and saving continuously until age 67 and living until age 92. The goal would include savings in all retirement accounts, like 401(k)'s and I.R.A.'s, as well as other savings.

The calculation includes several assumptions, like a lifetime average annual portfolio growth rate of 5.5 percent and income growth of 1.5 percent a year over inflation with no breaks in employment.

So, all of you out t here who are 35, 45 and 55(ish), are you anywhere near those targets? How did you do it?



Jason Sudeikis, and His Romney Impression, to Stay at \'Saturday Night Live\'

By BILL CARTER

With just four days before somebody will have to play Mitt Romney on NBC's “Saturday Night Live,” Lorne Michaels cleared up any lingering doubts.

“Jason is in,” Mr. Michaels, the show's executive producer, said in an interview Tuesday night.

He was referring, of course, to Jason Sudeikis, the longtime cast member who, since the show's finale last May, has been the subject of many rumors that he would be departing after seven seasons. Mr. Michaels said he was relieved to have the comedian back in the cast this season.

Losing Mr. Sudeikis would have been a blow because the almost four-decade-old program has already lost two of its biggest recent stars, Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg, who departed at the end of last season. Also, Mr. Sudeikis had nailed down the Romney impression. “S.N.L.” will be delving heavily in the presidential race in its seven shows between Saturday and Election Day.

“Right n ow the idea is that Jason will go through at least until January,” Mr. Michaels said. But he did not foreclose the possibility that Mr. Sudeikis would be around for the full season. “He's a fiercely loyal guy, both to the show and to me,” Mr. Michaels said.

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.



The Breakfast Meeting: Beck Back on TV, Facebook on Nipplegate

September 12, 2012, 9:32 am
By THE EDITORS

Glenn Beck, who left Fox News for his online TheBlaze TV network, has decided to return to television. Today, the conservative talker is expected to announce a deal with the Dish Network to bring his streaming network to television subscribers, the first of what he hopes are many deals with more traditional distributors.

Katie Couric scored the best opening-day share for a daytime talk show since the premiere of “Dr. Phil.” Her overnight rating was a 2.8, although the full audience number won't be known for a couple of weeks.

Michael Lewis had extraordinary access to President Obama for a profile in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, including playing in the president's regular basketball game, but even the best-selling author of “Liar's Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side” had to submit his quotes for the customary approval by the White House before publication.

Bad news for “Girls” fans: they'll have to keep going to their parents' house for dinner Sunday night. HBO's Alison Moore told a TechCrunch conference the channel had no plans to create a separate HBO Go service for noncable subscribers.

Joe Scarborough told Politico that he had ”no plans” to run for president in 2016, contradicting a photo caption by Douglas Brinkley in this month's Vanity Fair. He added that the photo and interview were actually done in 2010.

The absence from some news outlets of any marking of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks offended critics, online and off. NBC's “The Today Show” was criticized for not observing a minute of silence, which has become traditional to commemorate each of moments when the planes struck the twin towers. (The show was in the middle of an interview with the mother of Kim Kardashian on the subject of breast enlargement.) And as Poynter notes, neither The New York Times nor The New York Post featured the anniversary on their front pages. Margaret Sullivan, The Times's new public editor, discussed the issue in her blog.

The Man Booker Prize, the British award that attracts more argument and certainly more organized betting than any other literary prize, announced its shortlist. Among the writers: Tan Twan Eng, Alison Moore and Will Self.

In an interview with The New York Times, John Paton, the head of Digital First Media Group, said the bankruptcy of its subsidiary, the Journal Register Company, its second in the last three years, has been humbling. “It's pretty damn public and it's pretty damn embarrassing,” he said, but added that the bankruptcy of the newspaper company was “the absolute right thing to do.”

Facebook has now responded to a blog post by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, who explained how the social site had blocked a cartoon showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. His conclusion: under Facebook's rules, men's nipples are O.K., female nipples are not.

Facebook's response, which is as amusing in its own way as the original blog post, follows: “Recently, we mistakenly blocked a cartoon as part of our efforts to keep the site safe for all and quickly worked to rectify the mistake as soon as we were notified. Facebook is a place where almost a billion people share click more than a trillion links a day. Our dedicated User Operations Team reviews millions of pieces of this content a day to help keep Facebook safe for all. Our policies are enforced by a team of reviewers in several offices across the globe. This team looks at hundreds of thousands of reports every week, and as you might expect, occasionally, we make a mistake and block a piece of content we shouldn't have. We have already taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”



A New Movie Streaming Service Has Commitments From Studios

Movies September 12, 2012, 10:11 am
By BROOKS BARNES

A new digital entertainment service called M-Go is expected on Wednesday to announce agreements with five of Hollywood's six major movie studios that will allow M-Go to stream or rent movies as soon as they are released on DVD or Blu-ray.

The agreements â€" covering every big studio except Disney and its Marvel and Pixar units - will begin later this year, when M-Go makes its debut to consumers with a national advertising campaign. The service aims to compete in the crowded digital media arena by making it easier for consumers to watch movies and TV shows across various devices.

“Consumers don't want industry explanations about who owns what rights and which r elease window we're in this week,” said John Batter, the start-up's chief executive. “Just make it happen is their message, and it's what we are focused on.”

M-Go's interface will be preloaded on a variety of devices, ranging from Samsung's 2012 Smart TVs, Blu-ray players and tablets; Vizio electronics; and Intel Ultrabooks. M-Go, backed with funding from DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, will be compatible with Android, iOS and Windows operating systems.

“We believe that M-Go will help consumers future-proof their media investments with a buy-once, share-anywhere value,” David Bishop, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, said in a statement. The goal, Mr. Bishop added, is for M-Go to “accelerate digital ownership.”

Brooks Barnes writes about Hollywood with an emphasis on Disney. Follow @brooksbarnesnyt on Twitter.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)