Hearst Plans Holiday E-Book of Its Magazines\' Recipes

The season has arrived when newsstands stock their shelves with holiday magazines with plump turkeys on their covers, and this year, those cover stars are joining magazines' transition to digital publishing.

On Tuesday, the Hearst Corporation, which has been at the forefront of searching for profits in the digital publishing world, is printing an electronic book called “Let's Talk Turkey.” While Hearst has already dipped its toe into electronic publishing for individual magazines like Cosmopolitan and Esquire, this is the first time Hearst has published content from a variety of its magazines in digital form.

The e-book contains 100 holiday recipes, including herb roasted turkey from Woman's Day, herb oyster stuffing from Good Housekeeping, butternut squash soup from Country Living and pumpkin pie from Redbook. Its online price, $3.99, and its cover photo of an herb roasted turkey, make it competitive with many other holiday magazine issues.

David Car ey, the president of Hearst Magazines, said expanding into electronic books with content from its portfolio makes sense because holiday magazines have been selling well this year and the company has a vast recipe archive. An e-book format also consolidates many recipes readers of Hearst magazines have been saving for years.

“You think of how many readers keep clip files,” Mr. Carey said. “This kind of does that for them.”

Mark Gompertz, creative director of content extensions for Hearst Magazines, who joined the company this summer after 17 years at Simon & Schuster, said he was eager for the first e-book to be about holiday recipes. He said that when he moved recently, he lost his family's file of Thanksgiving recipes. He hopes that Hearst eventually will publish an e-book a month, he said, adding that it has already planned for a grilling e-book near Father's Day and a design e-book tied to Mother's Day.

Jane Friedman, co-founder and chief executi ve of Open Road, a digital publisher that is working with Hearst under the imprint eHearst Books, said there is enough demand for a book about turkey recipes to be profitable. She said that is especially true because the e-book does not carry the overhead or require the planning of publishing a print book.

“This is a curated product that has come from a very trusted source,” Ms. Friedman said. “It's very, very timely.”

Agency Puts City Stories on Stage

Many a newcomer to New York has dreams of Broadway stardom. The new New York office of the Chicago-based Leo Burnett advertising agency has made it, at least for now, as far as a theater in the East Village.

The 9th Space Theater at P.S. 122, at 150 First Avenue, will soon be home to a play called “8 Million Protagonists,” to be presented by Leo Burnett New York in a joint venture with The Village Voice. The play is based on an online initiative called New York Writes Itself that helped introduce the office when it was opened last year by Burnett, part of the Publicis Groupe.

If the play's title - evocative of the line “There are eight million stories in the naked city” from the 1948 movie “The Naked City” and its TV spinoff - is not sufficient to tip off potential ticket buyers to the subject matter, the subtitle might: “An Off Broadway Play Written by the Streets of N.Y.” The play is composed of material from the New York Writes Itself Web sit e, submitted by New Yorkers, about their everyday lives in the city.

“When we originally came to New York, we thought this city was filled with amazing stories,” said Jay Benjamin, chief creative officer at Leo Burnett New York, “and we wanted to make something of those.”

Plans call for nine performances of “8 Million Protagonists,” from Nov. 1 through Nov. 10; tickets are $20 each. Proceeds from ticket sales are meant to offset the production costs of the play, estimated at under $100,000.

The play is being presented in association with a production company named, coincidentally, LB Entertainment; it is unrelated to Leo Burnett New York, which is the play's executive producer.

“Everyone” in the office “has touched the play in some capacity,” Mr. Benjamin said, giving as an example a co-producer, Shaina Stigler, who works in the creative department.

Also, Michael Canning and Kieran Antill - the executive creative directors at the office who developed New York Writes Itself with Mr. Benjamin - share a credit, “original concept by.”

The play is another spinoff from New York Writes Itself, which also includes a YouTube channel and a letterpress art exhibit in collaboration with the Art Directors Club. After its run, “8 Million Protagonists” could become “an ongoing play,” Mr. Benjamin said, adding, “The script could change based on what happens in the city.”

Debate? Football? Why Not Both?

Fans of political and athletic battles face quite a conundrum on Monday night.

The third and final presidential debate coincides with ESPN's “Monday Night Football” game between the Chicago Bears, from President Obama's adopted hometown, and the Detroit Lions, hailing from Mitt Romney's birthplace.

What's a patriotic American to do?

ESPN is subtly advertising a solution: watch both. Not with a picture-in-picture display on the TV screen - that's so 1990s - but with two screens, like a TV set and an iPad.

A pair of ads that started appearing on ESPN on Saturday promote the WatchESPN app, which allows subscribers of certain cable companies to watch ESPN on phones and computers at no additional charge.

“This debate will be settled on the gridiron,” one of the ads says, after referencing the verbal battle that will be taking place on a stage in Boca Raton, Fla. The ad concludes, “Don't miss a minute of Monday Night Football on ESPN, the WatchESPN app and WatchESPN.com.”

“Monday Night Football” is blacked out on phones because the National Football League has a separate mobile carriage deal with Verizon. So the ads for Monday night's game show a big-screen TV set transforming into a laptop computer and then a tablet computer, but not a phone.

Of course, some football fans may relegate the debate to the laptop or tablet screen while keeping the game on the big-screen TV, since ESPN's sibling ABC and dozens of other outlets are live-streaming the debate.

Recent second-screen studies by Nielsen and other measurement companies have found that many tablet and phone owners use the devices at least once a day while watching television.

This has been on display during the presidential debates, as millions of real-time reactions to comments from Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have been recorded on Facebook and Twitter.

Surely at least a few debate-and-football watchers will have a third screen handy for reacting to both events.

AMC Networks and Dish Reach Deal for Return of Channels

A suite of cable channels operated by AMC Networks is coming back on the Dish Network, ending a blackout of months that had affected millions of customers.

AMC Networks' flagship channel, AMC, returned to Dish on Sunday in time for the second episode of the new season of “The Walking Dead.” The first episode drew 10.9 million viewers on Oct. 14 - even with the channel blacked out for Dish's 14 million customers. AMC offered a Web stream of the episode to Dish customers. It is the highest rated drama in cable history.

The other channels owned by AMC Networks, the Sundance Channel, WE tv and IFC, will return to Dish Network homes on Nov. 1, the company said on Sunday. The terms of the carriage agreement were not disclosed, but Dave Shull, the senior vice president for programming at Dish, said in a statement that it was a “multiyear deal.”

Josh Sapan, the chief executive of AMC Networks, said in a statement, “We are glad to partner again with Dish Network and are delighted to bring back our popular channels and programming to their customers.”

The end of the blackout coincided with a settlement in a four-year breach-of-contract lawsuit between Dish, controlled by Charles W. Ergen, and VOOM, a former subsidiary of Cablevision, which like AMC Networks is controlled by Charles F. Dolan. Dish contended that its decision to stop carrying AMC's channels on July 1 was unrelated to the legal fight, but AMC said otherwise.

VOOM, a set of high-definition TV channels founded by Mr. Dolan, sought more than $2 billion in damages after Dish stopped distributing the channels in 2008. Dish asserted that it had the right to terminate the carriage contract because Cablevision had not lived up to its commitment to invest $100 million a year in VOOM. The case went to trial at the beginning of the month, but court was adjourned on Wednesday, causing speculation that a settlement was imminent.

In the settlement, announ ced Sunday afternoon, Dish will pay $700 million to Cablevision and AMC Networks, $80 million of which is for the purchase of spectrum licenses from Cablevision. The licenses will expand Dish's ability to sell wireless broadband service to customers.

Along with the restoration of AMC Networks' channels, Dish will also start to carry Fuse, a channel operated by the Madison Square Garden Company, which is overseen by Mr. Dolan's son James.