Ruling Raises Questions About List of Unsafe Consumer Products

Consumer groups said Tuesday that a federal court decision could threaten the effectiveness of saferproducts.gov, a relatively new federal database of unsafe products.

The ruling, by Judge Alexander Williams Jr. of United States District Court in Maryland, sided with a manufacturer who sued to keep its name out of the database, arguing that the complaint against it was confusing and contradictory and therefore should not be published.

The manufacturer, whose name and product remain anonymous, submitted medical data to the Consumer Products Safety Commission, which maintains the database, showing that the information in the database was “materially misleading.” The commission staff agreed, but the manufacturer argued that the corrected reports perpetuated the errors, and it filed a lawsuit.

Judge Williams, in a decision dated July 31 but made public on Monday, ruled that the safety commission's decision to publish the complaint was “arbitrary and cap ricious” and that it could influence a consumer's behavior, despite a disclaimer stating that the safety commission doesn't endorse the findings.

On Tuesday, several consumer groups filed an appeal of the judge's decision to keep some files sealed, as well as parts of the judge's ruling. They also contested the judge's decision to allow the manufacturer to proceed under the pseudonym “Company Doe.”

“The price that we pay for secrecy in cases like this is it can open the door to lots of litigants,” said Scott Michelman, an attorney for Public Citizen, one of the groups filing the appeal. “I do not expect this to be the last time that a company tries to keep a report of one of its products out of the database.”

In a prepared statement, the safety commission said, “The decision published yesterday concerning one incident reported to the saferproducts.gov consumer database does nothing to change the agency's statut ory mandate and enduring commitment to provide the public with a timely and searchable database of incidents involving consumer products. Consistent with the decision, the Commission did not post the individual report.”

Judge Williams dismissed allegations that the decision would set off a flood of lawsuits by companies trying to stay off the database. “The prospect of successful challenges to the database does not threaten to categorically compromise the Commission's consumer safety mission,” the judge wrote. “In sum, there is ample middle ground between the foundation this opinion lays and the apocalypse the Commission predicts.”

The database is the result of 2008 legislation that gave the safety commission more money and authority after numerous product recalls, including children's toys from China.

The database, which went online in March, allows consumers, and others, to file complaints of injury, or potential harm, for all types of products except for food, drugs, cosmetics, cars and guns. More than 11,000 reports have been filed to the database so far. Before incident reports are posted, manufacturers are given a chance to respond, and if they can show that the entire report or part of it is not accurate, the report is supposed to be redacted or not posted on the database.

Technology Turns Brand Loyalty List Topsy-Turvy

The 2012 edition of the top 100 “loyalty leaders” list compiled by Brand Keys, a New York company that specializes in brand and customer-loyalty consulting, is significantly different from the lists of the last two years because of the continuous pace of change in technology.

There are 21 brands in the top 100 for 2012 that did not appear in 2011, said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, including 4 of the brands in the top 10. The report, which is the 16th from Brand Keys that ranks brands on customer loyalty, can be downloaded here.

“Brand loyalty has always been primarily driven by emotional engagement,” Mr. Passikoff said in a statement, “and the rankings on this year's list make it crystal clear that connection is everything.”

Of the top 10, three are Apple-branded products: iPad tablets, at No. 1; the iPhone smartphone, at No. 3; and Apple computers, at No. 5.

Two Amazon-branded products made the top 10: Amazon's tablets, like the Kindle Fire, at No. 2; and the amazon.com online retail service, at No. 4.

The rest of the top 10 are as follows: Samsung tablet, sixth; “Call of Duty” video game, seventh; Samsung cellphone, eighth; Halo video game, ninth; and Twitter, 10th.

Of the top 10, the four entries that did not appear on the list last year are the Apple tablets, the Amazon tablets, the Samsung tablet and “Call of Duty.”

Other technology brands on the top rungs of the list, from 11th through 25th place, are the Kindle e-reader from Amazon, No. 11; Google, No. 14; YouTube, owned by Google, No. 15; Facebook, No. 16; and Zappos, the online retailer, No. 18.

The highest-ranking brand without technology roots is Mary Kay, the cosmetics brand, at No. 12.

Mel Karmazin to Step Down as Chief of Sirius

Mel Karmazin will step down as chief executive of Sirius XM Radio on Feb. 1, as the company prepares to be taken over by Liberty Media, its biggest investor, Sirius announced Tuesday.

Mr. Karmazin will also leave the company's board of directors.

Liberty has been inching toward its takeover of Sirius all year, and there have been some public sparks between Mr. Karmazin and John C. Malone, Liberty's chairman, over whether he would remain with the company. Their comments have appeared combative, but recently Mr. Karmazin has taken a more conciliatory tone.

“Given where we started, it is amazing that Sirius XM has grown to become the largest radio company in the world,” Mr. Karmazin said in a statement. “With a deep bench of corporate talent, a roster that includes the most in-demand on-air personalities and a wide-range of exclusive programming, Sirius XM has never been better positioned than it is today.”

He added: “Sirius XM has a strong f oundation to build on for the future and there is a great team in place to keep the company moving forward.  I am confident that Sirius XM's best years are ahead.”

In the same statement, Mr. Malone said, “While we understand, we regret Mel's decision to pursue other interests and are grateful for his willingness to oversee a smooth and orderly transition.”

Liberty saved Sirius from bankruptcy in 2009 through a $530 million loan, which gave it a 40 percent of the company. It has been buying shares in Sirius on the open market for months, and currently owns just less than 50 percent of the company.

In August, Liberty asked the Federal Communications Commission for its approval to take over Sirius outright. After a public comment period, the F.C.C., which must approve a transfer of broadcast licenses, is expected to rule by December.

Sirius was hit hard by the recession, but has rebounded over the last two years as automotive sales have improved. It has 23 million subscribers and in its second quarter reported $838 million in revenue and $868 million in cash.

The company will report its third quarter earnings next Tuesday.

Final Debate Draws Nearly 60 Million Viewers

Nearly 60 million television viewers at home tuned into the final presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney on Monday night, despite stiff competition from two big sporting events.

Nielsen, a measurement company, said 59.2 million viewers at home were watching during an average minute of the debate, down from 67.2 million for the first debate on Oct. 3 and 65.6 million for the second debate on Oct. 17. The vice presidential debate on Oct. 11 drew 51.4 million viewers.

The match-up between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney was up against a “Monday Night Football” game on ESPN that had 10.7 million viewers and the final game of the National League Championship Series on Fox, which drew 8.1 million viewers.

All of the Nielsen numbers significantly understate the total viewing audience for the debates because they do not count viewers outside their homes, nor do they count viewers on computers, tablets or cell phones. YouTube, for instance, said it served up millions of views of each debate, though it declined to say exactly how many.

The debate drew several million more viewers than did the third debate between Mr. Obama and John McCain in 2008, according to Nielsen, reflecting intense interest in the final weeks of the presidential election season this year.

About 11.5 million of the 59.2 million total viewers watched the debate on the Fox News Channel, a record high for the 16-year-old cable news channel. The channel's previous record, 11.1 million, was set during the debate last week.

Two broadcast networks, NBC and ABC, edged out Fox News during the debate, with 12.4 million and 11.7 million viewers, respectively. The other major broadcaster, CBS, had 8.4 million viewers.

More than 59.2 million viewers were watching at the beginning of the debate, and fewer were watching by the end - a typical result for an event that edges up against bedtime. According to a nother TV measurement firm, Rentrak, the typical viewer watched 68 percent of the debate, down from 76 percent for the feistier town hall debate on Oct. 17. “Americans are just not as interested in foreign policy as they are in domestic policy in this election,” said Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak's chief research officer.

Data provided by TiVo, a maker of set top boxes, showed significant declines in viewership between 9 and 10:30 p.m. Of the major networks, Fox News viewers tended to tune out the fastest, according to the company's anonymous sample of set top box users.

Netflix Shares Slide as Subscriber Goal Falls Short

Netflix has hit a milestone: its streaming video service now has 25 million subscribing households in the United States, reaching nearly a third of all the homes that have broadband.

But the service isn't adding subscribers fast enough to satisfy investors or its own forecasts. On Tuesday, the company's third-quarter earnings were met with disappointment on Wall Street; its stock declined sharply in after-hours trading.

Netflix's third-quarter revenues of $905 million, up from $822 million in the same quarter last year, were in line with estimates. But its United States streaming subscriber total of 25.1 million, while up from 21.4 million in the same quarter last year, was weaker than expected. Netflix had expected to end the quarter between 24.9 million and 25.7 million such subscribers.

Netflix now expects to end the year between 26.4 million and 27.1 million streaming subscribers, thanks to the usual holiday season lift. Earlier it had expected to sur pass 28 million.

In a letter to shareholders, the Netflix chief executive, Reed Hastings, and the chief financial officer, David Wells, emphasized that subscriber satisfaction was “very high.” They cited a record high level of time spent viewing per subscriber in the third quarter, achieved, they said, through improvements to “our content and member experience.”

The company, which reported a loss in the first quarter because of international expansion plans but returned to profitability in the second quarter, stayed that way in the third, with a profit of about $8 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with $62 million, or $1.16 a share, for the third quarter last year. In its international markets, including Canada, Britain and Latin America, Netflix gained 690,000 subscribers in the quarter, on the high end of its forecast.

“Our aggressive investments today in international expansion have laid the foundation f or building long-term profitable franchises in these markets, just as we have already done in Canada,” Mr. Hastings and Mr. Wells wrote.

The men reiterated their belief that HBO, the premium cable channel, is Netflix's chief competitor. HBO provides cable subscribers with an app called HBO GO for video streaming.

In northern Europe it is starting a Netflix-like service, bypassing cable companies; given that Netflix expanded to the same countries last week, “this will be the first test of our relative strengths in stand-alone subscription video-on-demand,” Mr. Hastings and Mr. Wells wrote. “We think it will make strategic sense eventually for HBO to go direct-to-consumer in the U.S., and become more of a competitor to Netflix; so, that is our operating assumption, and we are looking forward to competing in the Nordics.”

Netflix stock, which closed at $68.22 on Tuesday, dropped about 16 percent after earnings were announced, marking the third quarte r in a row when the stock was hammered in after-hours trading after warnings of slower-than-expected growth.

After Consolidation at Simon & Schuster, Top Two at Free Press Are Leaving

The top two executives at Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, are leaving the company as a result of the reorganization of the company's adult publishing divisions, which will consolidate its imprints from six groups into four.

According to a memo sent to employees on Tuesday by Carolyn Reidy, Simon & Schuster's chief executive, the reorganization “will lead to a sharper editorial focus for our imprints even as it takes consideration of the natural affinities among them.”

According to the memo, Martha Levin, the publisher of Free Press since 2001, and Dominick Anfuso, its vice president and editorial director, are both leaving, and Free Press will come under the responsibility of Jonathan Karp at the Simon & Schuster Publishing Group, which is part of the CBS Corporation.

Also as part of the reorganization, Howard Books, a Christian imprint, will become part of the Atria Publishing Group under Judith Curr.

Free Press, founded in 1947 and part of Simon & Schuster since 1994, has been one of the company's flagship intellectual imprints. Over the years its successes have included Ernest Becker's “Denial of Death,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, and the 1994 book “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,” a controversial look at
genetics and inherited intelligence, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Its biggest title recently has been “The 17 Day Diet” by Dr. Mike Moreno, which came out last fall and has sold about 1.3 million copies.

In another memo, Mr. Karp said there were no plans to discontinue Free Press.

“We plan to continue publishing thought leaders and other important cultural voices under the Free Press imprimatur,” he wrote, “while also introducing many other Free Press authors, such as novelists and historians and business writers, to the flagship Simon & Schuster imprint.”

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

When Free Stuff Leads You Astray

The main menu on Waze, a navigation and traffic app.

We all like freebies. But sometimes, free stuff can lure you into making choices that may not really be best. I learned that lesson anew last week, while on a road trip that took me through rural parts of Arkansas and Missouri.

A quick comparison of flying time versus driving time had led me to choose the automobile for this outing. That meant I'd be behind the wheel for about six hours, but at least part of the route promised to include scenic foliage, and the weather looked good.

Since I was driving alone, I decided to use a voice-guided G.P.S. system, to avoid having to check maps while dodging road kill. I had recently acquired an iPhone (not the mos t recent version, infamous for its map snafus). So I did a quick online search to see what navigation app might work best. My cellular provider, Verizon, offered one, for an extra $5 a month. That might not sound so pricey, but I think my cellphone bill is already outrageous, so I balked and kept searching.

I quickly - too quickly, it turns out - settled on a free app called Waze that got high marks from various reviewers (including one for The New York Times). The app's main benefit is that it pools information from its users and sends back real-time information about traffic conditions, making it particularly popular with urban commuters seeking to avoid freeway snarls. I perhaps should have realized that an app aimed at commuters traveling familiar routes might not be the best fit for my purposes. But I figured it could still give me basic directions - and did I mention that it was free?

I ran a short test of the app the day before my trip, as I was running an errand, and it seemed to work. So I was hopeful when, in my driveway in the predawn darkness, I fired up the app and typed in the address of my destination. But at the end of my street, it told me to turn left. The correct option was to turn right. O.K., I thought, it will recalculate my route when it “sees” where I'm going. Ten miles later, it was still haranguing me to turn left - as if I were driving in some alternate universe, in which Missouri is west of Arkansas.

Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski, communications director for Waze, explained that the app, which was introduced in the United States in 2009, begins with maps from the United States Census Bureau's Tiger system, but that they are tweaked and updated constantly by Waze users. That means that in areas like Los Angeles, where the app claims 10 percent of drivers as users, the maps get constant feedback from users, who help keep the app updated. In flyover country, however, there are fewer users - at least for now - so the maps are not always as accurate. (That's too bad. I wish the app could have warned me about those early-morning rural school buses, stopping every mile or two to pick up farm children.)

He encouraged me to correct any errors in the map, which is how Waze users benefit the system and others. But that is more of a commitment than I want to make for a one-time trip. I guess Waze isn't for me right now. Except for intermittent reporting trips, I work at home, so the commuting I do usually is from my desk to the coffeepot.

After realizing that Waze was not going to get me where I needed to go, I debated whether to forge ahead without electronic assistance. The directions on my print map looked simple enough, but I had an appointment to keep and didn't want any delays. So I pulled over and hunted down a new app on my phone. Not wanting to waste time, I opted for the Verizon app, VZ Navigator. It would give 30 days free on trial, it turned out, and it g ot me to my destination without a hitch. I wish I could say the same for the radio options on my route. I didn't have satellite radio or an iPod jack, so I had to choose between classic rock (Pat Benatar is as annoying now as she was then) or Glenn Beck (news flash: stockpiling nonperishable food is the new version of investing in gold).

The trip back home was almost as smooth, after an initial problem. When I tried to retrace my route in reverse, the VZ Navigator kept telling me to “take the next legal U-turn” for the first 20 minutes or so. It finally gave up and reset itself - just before I was about to turn it off and sing along to some vintage Journey.

Have you had any disappointing experiences with free stuff? What happened?

Lessons for Madison Avenue From \'Real-Time\' Olympics

Julio Cortez/Associated Press Cullen Jones, Olympics medal in tow, appeared this month at the New York Jets-Houston Texans game.

The World Series is about to begin, but for the experts at the Nielsen Sports Forum Tuesday morning the focus was on the Summer Games in London and the lessons for marketers who sponsor live sports events.

The panel, which took place in Manhattan, even included a gold-medal-winning American Olympic athlete, the swimmer Cullen Jones, who in keeping with the subject matter talked about how he tends to his brand. Responding to a joke about how obligatory it is for Olympians to give audiences a glim pse of their gold medals, Mr. Jones did just that as the panel began.

(Another panelist was also an Olympian: Tommy O'Hare, a speed skater and member of the United States team at the 1998 Winter Games. Mr. O'Hare is now manager for sports content partnerships at the YouTube division of Google.)

The Nielsen event is not the first attempt to share with Madison Avenue lessons learned from the Summer Games.

For instance, last month NBCUniversal, the Comcast division that owns the American rights to the Olympics through 2020, presented results of a dozen studies about how viewers' behavior this summer differed from how they responded to the Winter Olympics in 2010 and the Summer Olympics in 2008.

A central topic of the panel, as it was for the NBCUniversal studies, was the so-called second screen behavior of Olympic TV viewers, who used devices like smartphones and tablets to read articles online, chat with friends and check their social media accounts.

The ability to communicate in real time while in London with people on Twitter “was absolutely amazing,” Mr. Jones said, adding that he “felt I was closer to my fans” than when he engaged with them on Facebook during the Summer Games in Beijing four years ago.

His followers on Twitter increased to more than 50,000 during the London Olympics, Mr. Jones said, compared with “not even 10,000” before. (His handle on Twitter is @CullenJones.)

“If I tweeted one thing, I would get at least 100 responses,” he added. “They were able to live through my journey.”

He added that “as an athlete, I need to be as active as possible” on social media to keep fans interested, particularly during “the next four years” as he prepares to compete in the 2016 Summer Olympics.

But he also offered some cautionary words. “Whatever you do, don't tweet the first thing that comes into your mind,” he said, adding that because he considers himself a brand, such candor may sully his image and not “look right for the sponsors,” which in his case include Citigroup, Deloitte and Nike.

Another panel member, Lisa Baird, chief marketing officer at the United States Olympic Committee, cautioned marketers who sign athletes as endorsers.

“At some point you have to remember” that the athletes “are training and competing,” Ms. Baird said, and give them a chance “to go back into the pool” rather than take part in another marketing-related activity.

Ms. Baird said that since the end of the cold-war-era rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States committee has found that focusing on the biographies and personalities of the members of Team U.S.A. was the best way to stimulate public interest in the Summer and Winter Games.

For instance, teenage girls and boys “are captured by the stories of the athletes,” Ms. Baird said, because th ey themselves often play sports and can relate to the Olympians.

In live online chats with American Olympic swimmers like Mr. Jones during the London Games, she added, “swimmers who are 15 and 16” would ask for more information about training routines and recovering from injuries.

Another panelist, Niel Sandfort, director for marketing at Chobani, the Greek-yogurt maker that is a Team U.S.A. sponsor, discussed his company's experience with what Ms. Baird called the “real-time, multiplatform content machines” that marketers manage during events like the Olympics.

Chobani has decided to concentrate its efforts in social media on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube, Mr. Sandfort said, to avoid trying to do too much at once. “We've never done any sports marketing before,” he added, “and then we spent all our money on the Olympics.”

Chobani wanted to become a sponsor of Team U.S.A. and run commercials during the coverage of the Summer Games to build awareness, Mr. Sandfort said, knowing full well that “75 percent” of people watching NBC, YouTube and other channels “would say, ‘Who the heck is Chobani?'”

But the gamble paid off, he added, as “shelves got wiped out” in stores, “sales went way up” and the Chobani yogurt plant was “maxed out.”

“We had to cut certain flavors,” Mr. Sandfort said, “which upset the lemon fans out there.”

Among the Chobani marketing efforts was a takeover of the youtube.com home page on July 28, he added, and the commercial that appeared there performed “phenomenally for us.”

Mr. O'Hare used the same word, “phenomenally,” to describe YouTube's overall results during the Summer Games compared with its forecasts.

A YouTube channel devoted to the International Olympic Committee “still gets a lot of viewers,” he added.

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

Consumer Bureau Is Seeking Credit-Reporting Complaints

Have a gripe about a your credit report, or a credit reporting bureauâ€"like Equifax, TransUnion or Experian? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now accepting complaints about credit reporting.

Credit reporting affects you when you try to apply for a credit card, home loan or car loan. It can even come into play when you seek insurance, or apply for a job.

Consumer credit bureaus track a consumer's credit history and create reports that are used to generate a three-digit credit score. Lenders use the information to decide whether they should give you a loan, and what sort of interest rate they will offer you.

If you think there is an error on your credit report, the bureau recommends that you first go through the credit bureau's own process for trying to correct the problem. But if you do so and are not satisfied with the resolution, the bureau wants to hear from you and is offering individual assistance to help resolve problems.

Other area s of concern may be problems in obtaining a copy of your credit report or your credit score, which is based on information in the report; improper use of your credit report; or problems with credit-monitoring products.

As with other areas that the bureau oversees, consumers submitting complaints about credit reporting issues are given a tracking number and can check the status of their complaint by logging on to the bureau's Web site. Each complaint will be processed individually and sent to the appropriate company for response. The bureau expects the reporting agencies to respond to complaints within 15 days and explain the steps they have taken or plan to take. Consumers will have the option to dispute the company's response to the complaint.

Have you run into trouble with one of the credit reporting bureaus? What happened when you tried to fix it?

 

 

 

NBC Continues Its Unlikely Run Atop in the Ratings

NBC made it four weeks in a row as the top-rated network in prime time among viewers most prized by advertisers, edging CBS by one-tenth of a point, according to the official Nielsen weekly numbers released Tuesday.

The network's recent success - after a decade of being last among younger viewers - has been the surprise of the season. There is a wider story, too, about how, NBC aside, the networks' ratings have been down this fall.

The winning streak for NBC had been threatened because CBS had a highly rated hour of run-over for its Jets-Patriots NFL afternoon game - an 8.2 rating for that hour - and NBC's own Sunday night game (Steelers-Bengals) was not a top-level match-up, scoring a 6.7 rating.

Still, NBC averaged a 2.6 rating for the week among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, just ahead of the 2.5 for the week posted by CBS. As has been the case for years, CBS dominated among total viewers, averaging 10.3 million total viewers, to 7.5 million f or NBC.

ABC was a bit farther back in the 18-49 segment with a 2.3 rating (eight million total viewers), and Fox, which added to its consistent woes this fall with a disastrous rain-marred baseball night, scored only a 1.6 for the week (5.5 million total viewers).

That 18-49 number for Fox was down 47 percent from the same week last year (a 3.0). Over all, for the first four weeks of the season, Fox is down 24 percent from last year in the 18-49 group, while NBC is up 19 percent. CBS is down 18 percent and ABC is down 11 percent.

Earlier Coverage

• NBC Finds Itself in Unfamiliar Territory: On Top

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

The Breakfast Meeting: Obama the Aggressor at Debate, and Clark Kent Quits Daily Planet

President Obama and Mitt Romney had their third and final debate Monday night, focused on foreign affairs, David E. Sanger reports in The Times, noting that Mr. Romney “avoided the more bellicose tone he often struck during the Republican primaries.” That made for a debate with broad agreement on policies between the two, though Mr. Obama sought to highlight differences and “cast Mr. Romney as a man unwilling to recognize how perceptions of American strength have changed,” Mr. Sanger wrote. The most quoted comment of the night â€" from Mr. Obama â€" was along those lines. When Mr. Romney complained that the Navy was the smallest it had been since World War I, Mr. Obama dismissed the criticism, noting that ships were much bigger and more capable than in the past, adding: “Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.”

• Whether because it was the third one, or because the topic was more remote from Americans' everyday lives, the debate generated les s public enthusiasm, Brian Stelter writes. (It was also up against “Monday Night Football” and a baseball playoff game.) One broad gauge involved Twitter: posts during the third debate fell to 6.5 million messages (particularly involving bayonets) from 10 million during the Oct. 3 debate and 7.2 million during the one last Tuesday.
• In her take on the debate, Alessandra Stanley viewed Mr. Romney as on the defensive, “particularly because he at times stuttered and sputtered in his haste to make his points.” It was a role reversal, she writes: “Usually, it is Mr. Obama who seems professorial and long-winded. There were long moments when Mr. Romney made the president sound succinct and sharp-edged.”

The new head of the BBC, George Entwistle, defended the institution on Tuesday before a committee of Parliament investigating a growing sex abuse scandal involving Jimmy Savile, a TV and radio personality who died last year, Alan Cowell reports. The co mmittee is also examining why the BBC canceled an investigation into Mr. Savile by one of its own shows. Mr. Entwistle, who became director general in September, conceded that the BBC's response had “taken longer to do things than in a perfect world I would have liked, but I think if you looked at what we have achieved since the scale of the crisis became clear, I think you see we have done much of what we should have done and done it in the right order with proper respect paid to the right authorities.” Mr. Cowell writes:

Asked whether sexual abuse was endemic at the BBC, as some victims have suggested, Mr. Entwistle said he did “not have enough of a picture to know it was endemic.” But he went on: “There's no question that what Jimmy Savile did and the way the BBC behaved - the culture and practices of the BBC seemed to allow Jimmy Savile to do what he did - will raise questions of trust for us and reputation for us.”

Add Ad obe to the list of companies that are using frank language (or an easily recognized abbreviation of frank language) in advertising to try to speak more naturally to their audience, Stuart Elliott writes. The Adobe campaign itself is intended to show the usefulness of social media in marketing.

A new service called Detour, which is along the lines of Kickstarter, is attempting to encourage musical acts to travel more widely across the world, Ben Sisario writes. Rather than gamble that there is an audience in Latin America waiting for an act like the songwriter Andrew Bird, the service allows fans in a city to buy tickets in advance. As is true for Kickstarter projects, the payments only go through if there is enough interest to support a concert.

Online commentators saw deep meaning in the news in Superman issue 13, which goes on sale on Monday, that Clark Kent quits his job at The Daily Planet. USA Today notes that it had been a long run for mild-mannered Clark a s an ink-stained wretch â€" dating back to the Superman issues in 1940, though The Planet has since become part of Galaxy Broadcasting. The new Superman writer, Scott Lobdell, tells USA Today:

This is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren't really his own. Superman is arguably the most powerful person on the planet, but how long can he sit at his desk with someone breathing down his neck and treating him like the least important person in the world?

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.

Tuesday Reading: The Hunt for an Affordable Hearing Aid

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.

• Settlement eases rules for some Medicare patients. (National)
• Concern with drug compounders predates meningitis outbreak. (National)
• A 5-concussion pee wee football game brings penalties for adults. (Sports)
• Tech giants scramble to get up to speed in mobile world. (Business)
• Flu vaccine effective against four strains, study finds. (National)
• Monster energy drink cited in deaths. (Business)
• Microsoft tightens personal data rules. (Business)
• Amazon's cloud service goes down and so some Web sites. (Bits)
• Nissan Altimas recalled for steering issues. (Wheels)
• Young people frequent libraries, study finds. (Media Decoder)
• Middle markets suffer airline neglect. (Business)
• Plane or train? More travelers choose both. (Business)
• The hunt for an affordable hearing aid. (Well)
• Curbing enthusiasm on daily multivitamins. (Well)
• Thinking twice about health checkups. (Well)
• Plush pets that parrot your speaking. (Gadgetwise)
• Your story, onstage. (The New Old Age)