Times Reaches Tentative Deal With Newspaper Guild

The New York Times said Sunday night that it had reached a tentative agreement with the Newspaper Guild, setting the stage for a new labor contract after more than 18 months of negotiations.

In a message to the staff, the executive editor, Jill Abramson, said the paper and the union had agreed “in concept” on a new five-year contract. She said that at the request of the mediator, Martin Scheinman, no further details would be forthcoming because the agreement still needs to be put in writing.

Mr. Scheinman was appointed as mediator on Oct. 10 after negotiators remained at odds over issues like pensions, wages and health care benefits. In recent weeks, members of the newsroom have staged several labor-related actions, including a gathering in the lobby of the Times headquarters where employees held signs with messages for the incoming chief executive, Mark Thompson.

The Billionaires Club

The cover of the December issue of Bloomberg Markets.

As the rich grow richer, so does the coverage of their fortunes.

Later this week, Bloomberg Markets, the 375,000-circulation magazine distributed mainly to Bloomberg terminal subscribers, is publishing a “World's Richest People” December issue. The issue features 200 billionaires, including a few previously undiscovered billionaires and China's richest man, Zong Qinghou.

The latest issue is part of Bloomberg's broader plan to capture a reporting thread that Forbes has dominated for decades. Last year, Matthew G. Miller, former global wealth editor at Forbes Media, said that at Forbes he had been stru ggling to cover the wealthy with a rapidly diminishing pool of reporters. When he moved to Bloomberg last year, he suddenly had its 1,600 journalists spread across 72 countries to help him cover the world's billionaires.

In March, Bloomberg started publishing on its terminal a ranking of the world's billionaires that it updates daily based on how their fortunes are doing. Mr. Miller said that since he came on board last year, Bloomberg reporters have discovered more than 40 hidden billionaires. These billionaires include several women that the Forbes list had not uncovered like Elaine Marshall, a major shareholder of Koch Industries, and Dirce Camargo, Brazil's richest woman, who is worth $13.4 billion.

“Our reporters are essentially billionaire-hunters,” said Mr. Miller. “Our reporters are constantly calling these billionaires. Some of them are on speed-dial.”

Bloomberg executives stressed how important this coverage i s since these billionaires control so much of the world's wealth. Ronald Henkoff, Bloomberg Markets' editor, said the 200 billionaires on the Bloomberg list have a net worth of $2.7 trillion, which is about the gross domestic product of France. Matt Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, said he planned to build on this coverage.

“Like everything that we've started at Bloomberg, once we're committed to it, we see it as ever expanding,” Mr. Winkler said. “That certainly applies to this subject.”

OpenX Acquires JumpTime

Publishers, in print and online, have long sold space to advertisers based on the perceived value of the publisher's audience. The quality of that audience, in turn, was based on its location, income, education level and propensity to buy the product the advertiser sold.

Digital advertising has grown in sophistication, allowing advertisers to tailor messages for specific audiences and to buy those audiences. Still, technologies that inform publishers of the value of editorial content have not been widely available.

On Monday, OpenX Technologies, a provider of digital advertising technologies, will announce that it has acquired JumpTime, a company that helps publishers determine what each piece of their digital content is worth.

Tim Cadogan, the chief executive of OpenX, said the merger would provide technology that makes it easier for publishers to “connect the left brain and the right brain of the publishing organization.â €

“You have to produce content that is exciting,” Mr. Cadogan said. “The way you make money is advertising. Those two worlds need to be connected.” Instead of focusing on pages that generate high C.P.M. rates, or cost per thousand views, publishers should focus on content that encourages users to go deeper into a site and spend more time there, he said. “If the publishers are able to create more engagement on good content, then those are great places to advertise,” he said. “That's where you want to be.”

Using JumpTime technology, publishers have access to a dashboard that shows, in real time, the value of each photo, article and other content on a Web page.

The economics are simple, said Michele DiLorenzo, the senior vice president of OpenX and former chief executive of JumpTime. A publisher can focus on attracting users to a piece of content that generates $18 for every thousand views, or they can focus on drawing users to many pieces of content that have lower individual C.P.M.'s - say five pieces valued at $5 each - but can end up generating a higher total revenue.

“If you only think about the immediate value, you don't know what value is. You're going to consistently make mistakes,” Ms. DiLorenzo said.

News Corporation Is Said to Bid for Penguin

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has entered what could become a bidding war for Pearson PLC's Penguin book publishing division, according to a person briefed on the talks who could not discuss private negotiations publicly.

News Corporation's interest comes just days after Pearson confirmed that German media giant Bertelsmann, the parent company of Random House, had approached the British company about acquiring its Penguin division.

News Corporation owns HarperCollins, one of the units of the media conglomerate that will soon be spun off into a separate publicly traded company consisting of other print assets like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.

Penguin, which publishes authors like Juno Diaz and crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, would give HarperCollins greater scale as the book industry grapples with how to take on technology companies like Amazon, Google and Apple, whose cheap e-books have transformed the publishing landscape.

P earson recently said its longtime chief executive Marjorie Scardino would step down at the end of the year, prompting speculation that it may sell its print assets, Penguin and The Financial Times, to focus on the faster-growing education business.

A spokeswoman for News Corporation declined to comment.

Analysts have said consolidation of the “big six” publishing houses is inevitable, given the headwinds the industry faces as consumers turn to e-books and brick-and-mortar stores go out of business. They likened it to what the music industry dealt with when it faced iTunes and online downloads of songs.

Mr. Murdoch's interest in Penguin, first reported in The Sunday Times, which is also owned by News Corporation, could stir the pot and prompt a competitive bidding war for the book publisher.

According to the Times report, News Corporation made a cash offer of $1.6 billion. That could blunt a potential merger with Random House. If completed, a Rando m House-Penguin merger would create a publishing behemoth that would control roughly 25 percent of all books published in the United States and present major competition for HarperCollins.