\'Goat Farmer\' With a Side Project in Advertising Wins \'Amazing Race\'

Chris Ramirez/PRNewsFoto - Planet Green Josh Kilmer-Purcell, left, and his partner, Brent Ridge, created a reality show about their lives as farmers in upstate New York. On Sunday, they were revealed to be the winners of a million dollars on a different reality show, “The Amazing Race.”

Remember in the theme song of the CBS sitcom “Green Acres” how Eva Gabor, as Lisa Douglas, bade goodbye to city life? That also seems to be the fate of a winner of a CBS reality series.

< p>Josh Kilmer-Purcell, who, with his fiancé, Brent Ridge, finished first on the 21st season of “The Amazing Race” on Sunday night, will be leaving his job at the JWT New York advertising agency, he said on Monday. He will be joining Mr. Ridge in Sharon Springs, N.Y., where the couple own a farm that has been the subject of another reality series, “The Fabulous Beekman Boys,” and a book, “The Bucolic Plague.”

During the season, the couple were identified onscreen by CBS as “goat farmers.” (Each pair of contestants has a description superimposed onscreen when they appear.)

In the closing moments of the final episode, when Mr. Kilmer-Purcell and Mr. Ridge won the $1 million prize, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell told Mr. Ridge that “winning this race will bring us together for the next 50 years.”

Mr. Kilmer-Purcell has been living in the couple's apartment in Manhattan while working as a creative director at JWT New York, part of the JWT division of WP P. He joined Mr. Ridge - who formerly worked at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia - on the farm on weekends.

“I've been talking to JWT for a while” about leaving, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell, 43, said in a phone interview, particularly as the couple's business centered on the farm - selling products like soap, linens, stationery and cookbooks - “has been growing.”

If anything, competing in “The Amazing Race” may have delayed his decision to leave, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said, because if he had announced he was leaving while the show was still weeding out contestants, others might infer that the reason was the couple's first-prize finish.

Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said he hoped to have his work at the agency wrapped up by the end of the year. “We want to make sure the transition is smooth,” he said. And “hopefully, when they need me on a project basis, I could still” return, he added.

Mr . Kilmer-Purcell and Mr. Ridge, 38, who joined him for the phone interview, said they were hopeful that the outcome of “The Amazing Race” could lead to a third season for “The Fabulous Beekman Boys.”

That reality series, about the couple's life on the farm, ran for two seasons on the now-defunct Planet Green cable channel, which had been part of Discovery Communications. Reruns of the show, which ended in 2011, are now appearing on the Cooking Channel cable network, part of Scripps Networks Interactive.

If there is a third season, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said, he hoped it would be “a wedding season for us.” The couple have been together for 15 years.

The first out gay couple to win a reality series competition, Chip Arndt and Reichen Lehmkuhl, appeared on “The Amazing Race” during Season 4, in 2003. The couple broke up soon after, however.

When reminded of that during the interview, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell replied, laughing, “Reichen's been re aching out to me all day.”

More seriously, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said he wanted to speak out in favor of reality TV.

“Reality television gets a lot of bad knocks,” he said, because of series like “The Real Housewives” shows and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” “I'm proud that I've been able to be part of two shows that have had a positive impact,” he added.

Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said he used vacation and personal time from JWT New York to film “The Amazing Race” during the summer with Mr. Ridge. The two, like all contestants on the show, were asked not to discuss the outcome with anyone until the finale was broadcast.

This reporter met the couple at an event in September during Advertising Week New York and, indeed, they remained mum about the outcome - not even hinting that they had won.

Mr. Ridge said he and Mr. Kilmer-Purcell had been reading reactions to their victory that are both positive and negative. Among the negative was Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly, who declared that the “wrong team” had won; he had been rooting for a team composed of two Chippendale dancers.

Mr. Ridge and Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said they believed their careers in advertising, branding and media helped their game on “The Amazing Race.”

“You have to be intuitive and strategic” to win the numerous competitions during the season, which pit the teams of contestants against each other, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said. “We might not have had the muscle or youth on our side, but we were intuitive and strategic.”

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 n ewsletter.

The Breakfast Meeting: Bloomberg and The Financial Times, and the First \'Telecopter\'

The stars are aligning, perhaps, for the purchase of The Financial Times by Bloomberg L.P., the media company whose shares are 90 percent controlled by New York's mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, Amy Chozick and Michael Barbaro write. The departure of two top executives at Pearson, the owner of The Financial Times, has made the sale of the newspaper seem a possibility. Bloomberg, which makes its money primarily from desktop terminals, would have to weigh the business advantages of going backward technologically to print; one advantage would be to gain a well-respected daily platform for Bloomberg content. (Thomson Reuters is also said to be likely to bid on the newspaper.)

• The mayor has been cagey on the subject. Asked by an editor at The Financial Times in London, where Mr. Bloomb erg was visiting, if he would buy the paper, Mr. Bloomberg replied, “I buy it every day.”

The division of News Corporation into separate entertainment and publishing companies has led to a change in leadership at The Wall Street Journal, the flagship of the soon-to-be-created publishing company. The newspaper's editor, Robert Thomson, will lead the publishing company, and his deputy, Gerard Baker, will succeed him at The Journal, an appointment that was christened by News Corporation's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, in a widely shared video that left no doubt about Mr. Murdoch's confidence in the appointment, David Carr writ es in the Media Equation column. Mr. Baker's background as a neoconservative columnist with little management experience has many on the staff - speaking anonymously - expressing worries about what direction he will lead the newspaper.

The life on the run of the software pioneer John McAfee has been an irresistible draw for news media outlets, Jeff Wise writes. Mr. McAfee, the creator of a defense to computer viruses and founder of the company that bears his name, had relocated to the jungles of Belize, and in recent days he is reported to be a “person of interest” in the death of a neighbor. Since then, he has taken flight to Guatemala, all the while dropping hints and granting interviews. In retrospect, Mr. Wise writes, his decision to let journalists from Vice magazine tag along may not have been so advisable.

As part of a sponsorship deal with Pepsi, the pop star Beyoncé will appear in a new TV ad - her fifth for the soft drink since 2002 - and her face will be on a limited-edition line of soda cans, Ben Sisario writes. But, under an unusual arrangement, PepsiCo has agreed to create a multimillion-dollar fund to support the singer's chosen creative projects. For Pepsi, Mr. Sisario writes, “the goal is to enhance its reputation with consumers by acting as something of an artistic patron instead of simply paying for celebrity endorsements.”

This fall, NBC has pulled off a notable turnaround, from worst to first in the ratings, Bill Carter writ es. Its strategy has been to rely heavily on its singing competition, “The Voice,” broadcasting more than 40 hours of the show this season, which has improved ratings of the programs airing near it. Senior executives at competing networks warned that NBC could be overplaying its hand; the current edition of “The Voice” ends Dec. 18.

John Silva, the inventor of the “Telecopter” in the 1950s while he was chief engineer of the Los Angeles TV station KTLA, died on Nov. 27, Paul Vitello writes. Mr. Silva was 92. From today's vantage point, where TV station's helicopters are vital to local news - whether for reporting on traffic jams, car chases or out-of-control fires - the invention seems inevitable. But Mr. Silva had to work around many hurdles to turn a helicopter into a mobile TV station - both to ensure that a s ignal could be sent out, and that the helicopter could safely travel with the extra equipment.

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