Rothman Exits as Head of Fox Film Division

September 14, 2012, 7:49 pm

By BROOKS BARNES AND MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES â€" Thomas E. Rothman, a chairman and chief executive officer of Fox Filmed Entertainment, resigned late Friday, a move that comes as 20th Century Fox fights to regain market share and forge ahead with two “Avatar” sequels.

News Corporation, which owns the studio and announced the departure, also reversed a three-year-old decision to consolidate management of its movie and TV operations. Going forward, Jim Gianopulos, who shared responsibility for those businesses with Mr. Rothman, will have a narrower focus, running 20th Century Fox Film â€" the movie studio, the Fox Searchlight specialty label and home entertainment.

The newly separate 20th Century Fox Televisi on will be overseen by its current co-chairs, Dana Walden and Gary Newman. Mr. Gianopulos, Ms. Walden and Mr. Newman will report to Chase Carey, News Corporation's chief operating officer.

Mr. Rothman's resignation takes effect Jan. 1. In an internal email addressed “dear friends,” Mr. Rothman, 57, offered no details about his decision to leave after 18 years. But he may have chafed at News Corporation's decision to strip television out of his control. In the internal note, Mr. Rothman said he needed “some new challenges and to write a new chapter.”

Although Fox insiders were stunned, the movie capital has been rife with speculation in recent weeks that Mr. Rothman is a candidate for a top movie job at Universal Studios, where the president, Ron Meyer, is expected to retire.

In his note to the staff, Mr. Rothman â€" a company man to the degree that he used Fox's signature trumpet fanfare as his cell phone ring tone â€" spotlighted the role he played in creating Fox Searchlight, which won a best picture Oscar with “Slumdog Millionaire.” He also listed his involvement with the two highest-grossing movies in history, “Avatar” and “Titanic,” as being among his proudest achievements.

Among contemporary studio chiefs, Mr. Rothman was a bit of a paradox. He is an ardent film-lover who hosted his own screenings of classic films, called “Fox Legacy,” on the Fox Movie Channel. But he also focused heavily on populist films that could border on the low-brow, as with the successful “Alvin and the Chipmunks” series.

Mr. Rothman, one of the longest-tenured studio chiefs in Hollywood, started his career as an entertainment lawyer and had been an executive vice president at Columbia Pictures under David Puttnam in the 1980s.

Known for its tough cost controls, Fox is coming off a difficult stretch. Films like “Prometheus,” “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “We Bought a Zoo” were disa ppointing at the box office, and Mr. Rothman has been waiting for James Cameron to finish scripts for two “Avatar” sequels that now won't arrive before 2015.

But Mr. Rothman â€" exhibiting his colorful style - expressed confidence in his internal email over the coming Fox slate, which includes “Life of Pi,” an Oscar hopeful directed by Ang Lee. “A bunch of you guys know what the tattoo on my ankle says,” he said. “It's what I wish for us all: ‘Excelsior!'”

Critics Find a Target in the Circles of USA Today\'s Redesign

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY and DAVID CARR

The day after USA Today unveiled its new edition, the design community was in a fluster about the newspaper's new look and puzzled by the bold circles that appear in the top, left-hand corner of every section.

“It's a mess,” said Steven Heller, the co-chairman of the M.F.A. design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “It's a mélange of a lot of things that forces the eyes to cross rather than focus on any one thing.”

But he gave USA Today credit for trying something new.

“It could be the last gasp of what is a newspaper, or it could be the beginning of what is the next stage of newspapers,” said Mr. Heller, who writes the Visuals column for The New York Times Book Review. “I give them a little credit more than not for trying this out.”

Roger Black, an art director who worked on the original design of USA Today's Web site, said he missed the news paper's old typeface, and called the circles in the corner of each section “a little odd” and reminiscent of the Japanese flag.

Memos coming out of Gannett, which owns USA Today, drew more attention to the circle, or ball, with phrasing that will no doubt be highlighted and parsed in social-media realms.

In a note to employees that was published by Jim Romenesko, the chief marketing officer of Gannett, Maryam Banikarim, shared a memo from Sam Ward, the artist and illustrator at USA Today who was behind the ball-centric redesign.

“Just what are our balls?,” he wrote. “Well, they are what we will make of them. I believe our balls are symbols of who we are and where we're headed. Sure, our competitors will laugh. Let them laugh so hard that they cannot breathe.”

Why Consumers May Not Win Much From Latest Fed Action

September 14, 2012, 5:09 pm

By RON LIEBER

Over on Dealbook, there's a post making the case that it may be the banks that are standing in the way of the Federal Reserve's latest move to try to improve the economy. At the moment, many of them simply do not want to give up the profit margins they're earning on new mortgages.

At Village Voice, Editor and Music Editor Depart and Weekly Will Have a New Address

By DAVID CARR and BEN SISARIO

After five-and-half-years as editor of The Village Voice, Tony Ortega announced in a by-the-way blog post that he will be leaving to work on a book about Scientology while music editor Maura Johnston took to Twitter to say she was leaving the paper as well.

In a phone call, Mr. Ortega said the two events were not related. Also seemingly unrelated? According to a post in The Local, The Voice is leaving its Cooper Square offices, where it has been since 1991, when its lease expires next year.

Mr. Ortega said that he will be done next week and that there is staff on hand to handle the transition. No successor has been named, but Mr. Ortega said that Christine Brennan, executive managing editor of the company, was looking to hire in New York, a fact he said, “should please all the writers out there.”

It was a wan reference to the fact that Mr. Ortega, who came from South Florida, has a b it of bumpy ride when he started. That bumpy ride continued as the newspaper, owned by a chain of now struggling weeklies, confronted headwinds that had buffeted newspapers of all kinds. Mr.Ortega led The Voice through several rounds of layoffs.

In an e-mail, Michael Lacey, the executive editor of the newspaper chain, credited Mr. Ortega with managing through a very tumultuous time in the industry.

“Tony Ortega did a great job for us and managed a difficult transition in a miserable economy,” he said. “During that time he became the single most informed reporter on Scientology. No one is better positioned to write the book on that organization.”

He added that “his departure creates an opening for one of the most compelling jobs in journalism.”

Apart from trends in print publishing, The Voice faces increased competition from the Web, with sites like Gawker and Captital New York, who are vying for similar audien ce and attention.

Mr. Ortega said he was leaving because the increased profile of Scientology - including the release of “The Master,” the Paul Thomas Anderson movie about a Scientology-like cult, and a cover story about Scientology in Vanity Fair - made it a good time to shop a book about the topic. Mr. Ortega, always an editor who also wrote, has published hundreds of blog posts on the religion in the past two years.

“I've been an editor in chief of The Village Voice for five years and this seemed like a good time to try something else,” he said. “I think we did a good job of focusing the paper back on New York stories and I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a Web site into a digital enterprise. And because I asked my writers to contribute every day, it only made sense that I do the same thing.”

He remains fascinated by Scientology because “this is religion that considers all of us to be their dupes,” adding, “They've been able to fend off all kind of government investigations by claiming to be a religion and have managed to hide behind the Constitutional rights that Americans treasure.”

Ms. Johnston, the music editor, said in an interview on Friday that “the decision to leave was not mine.”

Ms. Johnston began her career in music blogs and is perhaps the most hyper-digital figure in the small circle of pop music critics. She churned out a constant stream of Twitter messages and Tumblr posts each day in addition to her work at The Voice, which included editing the music coverage in the paper as well as blog items by a stable of freelance and staff writers.

But she also embodied the Voice tradition of thoughtful cultural criticism, and resisted the kind of light, easily-consumable items - like Top 10 lists and photo compilations - that tend to draw the most traffic online.

While she said she was interested in what engages the online public - and why - she is less interested in generating that kind of “clickbait.”

“I prefer to analyze the ways that people migrate to certain pieces of content rather than engaging it myself,” Ms. Johnston said. “I guess doing it gets more traffic than looking at it from a critical point of view.”

Giving in to “the Darwinistic pageview coverage of anything,” she added, “is damaging to culture as a whole.”

It was unclear who would be taking her place.

Last week, Village Voice Media appointed Ben Westhoff, the music editor of LA Weekly, to oversee music coverage for the company's chain of weeklies, and Ms. Johnston's dismissal was widely seen as the result of a power struggle over the direction of music coverage at the chain.

Many have suggested that the weekly lost relevance some time ago, but Mr. Ortega's history as a serious reporter was evident even as the newspaper shrunk in pages and staff. This week, The Voice has an amazing tale about how the video collection of Mondo Kim's, the storied meagstore in the East Village, ended up shipped off to a town in Sicily.

Times Co. Offers Former Employees Lump Sum Option for Pension

September 14, 2012, 2:09 pm

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The New York Times Company, which like many of the nation's newspaper publishers is dealing with large pension obligations, is offering former employees the option of taking a lump sum payment for their pensions instead of a monthly payout.

The company made the announcement in a securities filing released on Friday morning.

According to the filing, about 5,200 former employees of the Times Company who have vested in the pension plan can continue to receive a pension when they retire or can accept a lump-sum payment in cash or to roll into a retirement plan. The participants must choose an option between Sept. 24 and Nov. 2.

The former employees being offered the option do not belong to the union and could include former employees of newspapers previously owned by the Times Company.

These employees account for just 15 percent of the company's total pension liabilities. The New York Times Company's total pension liabilities as of late last year totaled $1.987 billion.

Times Company officials are hoping this will help cuts costs.

“This offer is another step the company is taking to reduce the size of its pension obligations and the volatility in the company's overall financial condition,” according to the statement.

A Reminder of the Perils of Retirement Planning

September 14, 2012, 1:52 pm

By BUCKS EDITORS

People without a pension who want to set up something that will pay them set amounts of money when they're in retirement often turn to annuities. But Paul Sullivan writes this week in his Wealth Matters column about a decision by Prudential Annuities to suspend the ability of some policyholders to make further contributions. And annuity experts told Paul that they expect other insurers to take similar steps because they made promises before the financial crisis that they are now unable to keep.

The money the affected Prudential policyholders have already contributed to their annuities is safe, but people who thought they could continue adding to their accounts will now see smaller payments than they had thought they would.

Retirement income is an issue that's going to come up repeatedly, as companies stop offering pensions and workers have to come up with their own plans. Those unable to put aside money may end up without much income beyond Social Security in their old age, a subject Paul wrote about for the special Retirement section this week. He found that millions of people are in that situation.

How do you plan on paying your expenses when you retire? Are you planning on buying an annuity to get regular checks to supplement your Social Security? Do you have a 401(k)? Or are you one of the lucky people who expects to get a pension?

Village Voice Editor Blogs That He Is Quitting

September 14, 2012, 11:53 am

By THE EDITORS

Tony Ortega, the editor of The Village Voice, announced Friday morning on the site's news blog that he would be leaving - effective next week - to “pursue a book proposal about Scientology in its time of crisis.”

It was a notable announcement in that his leaving as editor was almost a side note (for example, no successor was named), as the headline indicated: “Scientology Watchers: A Message From Tony Ortega.”

Also on Friday, the weekly's music editor, Maura Johnston, took to Twitter to say that this was her last day.

Earlier

The Breakfast Meeting: USA Tomorrow? And an Anti-Muslim Video Vexes YouTube

September 14, 2012, 9:59 am

By NOAM COHEN

A redesigned USA Today was on newsstands on Friday, and the redesign owes a big debt to the aesthetics and customs of the Internet, Christine Haughney reports. The USA Today Web site, which will be unveiled this weekend, has been redesigned to resemble an e-reader, with a smoother scroll from page to page. The twist, however, is that the abundance of information on the Internet has largely taken away what made the national newspaper special 30 years ago. The moves are part of a broader rethinking by USA Today's parent company, Gannett, to consolidate the news gathering of its TV and newspaper assets.

The amateurish anti-Muslim video that, when translated into Arabic and posted on YouTube, led to furious pr otests in the Middle East appeared to be the work of a shadowy man with a criminal record, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, write Adam Nagourney and Serge F. Kovaleski. Mr. Nakoula was sentenced to prison in a check-kiting scheme in 2010 and served about a year. In the course of producing the video â€" “The Innocence of Muslims” - in the remote hills of Los Angeles County, Mr. Nakoula apparently used a series of pseudonyms in his dealings with fellow backers and some of the actors. Outside of his house, 20 miles south of Los Angeles, members of the news media were encamped, but there was no response to knocks at the door.

• The decision by YouTube to block “The Innocence of Muslims” in Libya and Egypt in light of the violence there was seen as a potentially significant move for YouTube's parent, Google. The only reasons YouTube will take down a video, Claire Cain Miller reports, is if it is hate speech, violates its terms of service, or in response to valid court o rders or government requests; YouTube said it had determined that under its own guidelines, the video was not hate speech. These decisions highlights the outsize role a company like Google has in the Internet Age.

• In Afghanistan, the government pressured Internet service providers to block sites that hosted the video in an effort to hold off violent protests there, Alissa J. Rubin reported. By early evening, YouTube was blocked, and the government wrote to ask Google to take down the video. It was unclear late Thursday whether the decision to block the video in Egypt and Libya would extend to Afghanistan as well.

A French magazine published a paparazzi's topless photos of Kate Middleton, the wife of Prince William, taken as she was sunbathing in Provence, Alan Cowell and John F. Burns report. The appearance of the photos in Closer magazine drew a strong rebuke from the British royal family that invoked the death of Princess Diana, the prince's mo ther, who was killed in a car crash in Paris as photographers were in pursuit. The images of Ms. Middleton were not, initially at least, published in Britain, where newspapers have been under official scrutiny related to a phone hacking scandal.

The Hollywood Reporter looked at the decision to ban the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks by New York's Board of Health through the prism of movie theater owners, who by some estimates make up to 40 percent of their profit from concessions, with soda and candy the two most popular items. The Reporter notes that the ban â€" the first in the country - comes as movie ticket sales have slowed down.

Friday Reading: Would You Take a Pregnancy Test in a Bar?

September 14, 2012, 8:05 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.

Answers to Your Questions About Student Loans, Part 3

September 14, 2012, 8:00 am

By ANDREW MARTIN

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. Along with questions, some readers proposed their own answers. The first set of answers is here, the second is here, and the third set 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.

I h ave a few different loans under both my name and my mom's name and one under both of ours with Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority. The rest are federal direct loans and Parent Plus. How can I consolidate them all under my name? What would you recommend me do to lower my monthly payments? I'm paying about $1,500 a month. â€" Bruno Elqker

: Bruno, first of all, my condolences on your monthly payment. $1,500? Ouch. That's a mortgage payment on a nice home in many parts of the country, though unfortunately not in suburban New Jersey. But I digress. According to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of finaid.org, a Web site devoted to college financial aid, you cannot consolidate federal loans that have different borrowers, even if one of them is your mom. (It may be possible, however, with private loans depending on the credit scores of you and your mom). To get a lower monthly payment, you might consider income-based repayment for your federal loans and obtaining a long er repayment term on your private loans.

My federal loan is now in the hands of a private company, Aspire. Will Aspire raise my rates? Can they raise my rates? And how is it possible that the liberty could be taken to transfer a loan to a private company without my knowledge or consent? â€" Amanda Jones

The federal government employs private firms and nonprofits like Aspire to manage student loans day to day, and it is perfectly legal for them to do so. Those firms, however, cannot change the terms of the loan after it has been transferred to them unless it has a variable rate, which is highly unlikely for a federal loan.

I have two consolidated loans, both at high interests. One from 20 years ago and another from 11 years ago. Is there any way to get the interest lower and more in line with today's rates? Or is there ever a window when the life of the loans will expire? I've paid back my education several times over at this point. â€" Laurie Matthews

Laurie, I hope you got a killer education considering how long you have been paying on those loans. Having said that, you can try to consolidate your loans again, though that will not bring down the interest rates since it is a weighted average of your current loans. You may want to consider trying to obtain a home equity loan at a lower rate and then paying off your student loans. Or, if they are federally guaranteed loans, you may be eligible for income-based repayment, which will reduce your monthly payments.

After multiple deferments, I can no longer delay on repayment - I cannot afford even the income-based reduced payment. I've fallen behind on payments and each month incur more and higher late fees. A Sallie Mae representative's suggestion was to basically bite the bullet and make a huge payment (which I don't have the funds to do). Any suggestions on getting Sallie Mae to work with people who are actively trying to repay? Are these inflated late fees real ly legal? No doubt they are, but man - Sallie Mae is not shy about applying them! â€" Rebecca Smallman Ellis

Since you refer to income-based repayment, it sounds like you are referring to federal student loans. If that's the case, income-based repayment is set up so that you pay just 15 percent of your discretionary income, which tends to be a relatively small amount. If the problem isn't so much your student loans but other bills, you may want to consider credit counseling. The Department of Education also has an ombudsman who may be able to provide some guidance.

What happens to your student loans if you are diagnosed with a terminal condition? My job prospects are slim to none with my current state of health. Thank you. â€" Angela Bekzadian-Avila

There is a disability discharge for federal loans, so it will require a doctor to certify that you are permanently disabled and with a condition that prevents you from working or is expected to result in deat h. Some private lenders offer disability discharges as well.

If your private student loans were taken over by a collection agency, is it possible to declare bankruptcy on them? Also, what are the options for reducing federal student loans? The cost of education in our country has become absurd. â€" Nicole Kt

As I stated previously, you cannot discharge student loans in bankruptcy without submitting a separate petition to the court, whether they are private or federal loans. It doesn't make a difference that a debt collection agency is involved. If you have enough money to make a lump-sum payment, you may be able to get a reduction on the balance of your federal loans, Mr. Kantrowitz said.

I consolidated all of my student loans with the government and am now enrolled in income-based repayment. Every month I accumulate twice as much interest as the monthly payment I make. However, I have been told that if I pay on time each month while I work for full time for a nonprofit organization for 10 years, all will be forgiven at that 10-year point through the public service loan forgiveness program. My question: How can I ensure that my loans will be forgiven after 10 years of paying on time? I currently work full time for a nonprofit org, and pay my income-based payments on time. I plan to do both of these for 10 years, but am concerned that there are no guarantees my loans will be forgiven and the interest will have doubled my balance at that point. â€" Carrie Hott

Carrie, I would suggest you check to make sure your employer qualifies for the public service loan forgiveness program. You can do so by going on studentaid.gov/publicservice and filling out an employment certification form.