Earlier Kickoff for Super Bowl Advertising Campaigns

Stuart Elliott, the advertising columnist of The New York Times, discusses with David Gillen, a deputy business editor, a recent change in thinking among Super Bowl advertisers. Once, the content of the ads was a closely guarded secret, often first shown during the game itself; this year, many companies are teasing what is in their ads, hoping to stoke interest on social media.

The Advertising Column

Marketers Start Super Bowl Campaigns Earlier

The New York Times Names a New Business Editor

Dean E. Murphy, a reporter and editor with The New York Times for the last 12 years, has been named the next editor of the business section of The Times. The announcement was made on Wednesday afternoon in a memo from Jill Abramson, the executive editor.

Mr. Murphy, 54, succeeds Larry Ingrassia, who has been the business editor since 2004. While it is unclear what Mr. Ingrassia's new position will be, Ms. Abramson said it would be “a larger role” that would be announced early next year.

Mr. Murphy previously worked at The Los Angeles Times, where he was a foreign correspondent based in Poland and South Africa and reported on the war in the former Yugoslavia. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and has a master's degree in international affairs from < a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/j/johns_hopkins_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org" class="tickerized" title="More articles about Johns Hopkins University">Johns Hopkins University.

Since he joined The Times in 2000, Mr. Murphy has reported on politics, worked as a San Francisco correspondent and served as deputy national editor before joining the business section as a deputy editor in 2010. Ms. Abramson credited Mr. Murphy for his handling of several highly regarded articles, including an exposé on the hidden wealth of the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China as well as a series on the digital economy that looked at working conditions in both the United States and in China.

Ms. Abramson described Mr. Murphy as “one of our most accomplis hed editors, a staunch advocate for reporters and a fine writer himself.” She added that “his years of reporting from abroad and from both coasts as well as his role as deputy national editor brought heart and breadth to our already superb business report.”

McAfee\'s Ride With the Press Is Still as Bumpy as Ever

Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's office, via Associated Press John McAfee on Thursday was photographed in an immigration detention center in Guatemala City, where had access to devices he has used to communicate with the world.

The tumultuous relationship between the technology entrepreneur John McAfee and the reporters who have covered his flight from Belize took another turn on Tuesday, when McAfee announced on his blog that he would no longer cooperate with Vice, the publication that revealed his location when it posted an image embedded with information about wher e it had been taken.

That location â€" poolside at the Hotel and Marina Nana Juana in Izabal, Guatemala - made clear that Mr. McAfee had left Belize, where he is wanted for questioning in the death of a neighbor.

Thus Vice becomes the latest example of a publication that was granted access to Mr. McAfee only to have it withdrawn after events didn't play out as expected. It is a strategy that has helped Mr. McAfee get publicity across a wide array of media outlets, as I wrote in an article that appeared in Monday's newspaper. But that strategy has also backfired by, among other things, revealing Mr. McAfee's location to the Guatemalan authorities, who now have him in custody.

McAfee wrote the following on his blog, which he has maintained while being d etained in Guatemala on immigration charges: “Due to information just received, it is no longer clear to Mr. McAfee that the ‘accidental' release of his co-ordinates due to Vice Magazine's editorial department's failure to remove location data from their now notorious photo, was indeed an accident. This incident led directly to Mr. McAfee's arrest.”

The day before, on Monday, I at last spoke on the phone with Rocco Castoro, the Vice editor in chief whom I had written about. Over all, I got the sense that he was still struggling with what to believe in the McAfee case.

While we were chatting, an e-mail popped up in my inbox from none other than John McAfee, who hadn't responded to my phone calls and e-mails since I published an account of his life in Belize for Gizmodo. The e-mail was addressed to me, but it must have been intended for Rocco. It read:

“Rocco â€" keep in mind at this point I believe Jeff is working for the lawyers so I am throwing the lawyers off…………”

Who can say what he meant exactly? At any rate, I immediately replied to the e-mail, expressing my delight at hearing from him, and asking if we could talk on the phone. I haven't heard back.

Another Portrait of Imminent Death, but One Worthy of Publishing

N.Y.P.D.This security-camera still taken moments before the murder of Brandon Woodard, who is looking at his smartphone.

Last week, there was a Web's worth of debate about the decision of The New York Post to publish a salaciously headlined photo of a man just before he was struck and killed by a subway train in New York.

On Wednesday, many newspapers that cover New York, including The New York Times, published another photo of another man who was about to die.

In this instance, Brandon Lincoln Woodard, visiting from Los Angeles, was shown strolling down West 58th Street in New York, unaware that just over his shoulder, a man with a nickel-plated gun was about to shoot him dead. The image, lifted from a surveillance video, was cinematic and chilling, a still from a murder mystery movie that was all too real.

It is less a portrait of mayhem than a deconstruction of assassination. It is a deeply compelling image, not because of any gore - there is none - but because it shows a man whose f ate has arrived without his knowledge. In that sense, it is the opposite of the subway photo in which the victim, Ki-Suck Han, is staring at an on-rushing train bearing down on him.

As Jack Shafer has pointed out, there is an entire popular genre of “about to die” photos, in part because unlike battlefield images, they suggest we are all targets in one way or another. Barbie Zelizer, a media scholar, told Mr. Shafer that images of impending death tend to provide curiosity rather than repelling the viewer. “They often draw viewers in, fostering engagement, creating empathy and subjective involvement, inviting debate,” she said.

As with the subway photo in The New York Post, the photo published on Wednesday will provoke lot s of discussion, but not for the same reasons. It is ghoulish in aspects, but there is a persistent and immediate public interest in publishing the photo, as Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor at The Times who oversees photography, explained to me.

The decision to publish the photo “was not a close call,” she said. “There is a crime being committed, there is information that could help locate the suspect, and there is other information in the photograph that when it is put out there, could be helpful in solving the crime. It was a no-brainer.” (By contrast, she said, the Post photo left her “ambivalent” and she “would have consulted with many,” adding, “I think a lot of criticism of the picture comes from the way it was displayed in the Post, the headline and caption and the ethics of lifting a camera at that moment in time.)

And Mr. Woodard's death is, unfortunately, far less anomalous than someone being thrown in front of a sub way train. In a typical year, more than 10,000 people in America die at the wrong end of gun. How ubiquitous is gun crime? When I made a brief inquiry of Ms. McNally by e-mail about the “photo of the shooter,” she immediately replied, “Which one?”

U.S. Ad Spending Rose in Quarter, Nielsen Reports

There was a relatively strong increase in advertising spending in the United States during the third quarter, according to data to be released on Wednesday morning by Nielsen.

Ad spending rose 7 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago, Nielsen reported,  stoked by advertising related to the Summer Olympics and political campaigns.

That gain is nearly three times the increase that Nielsen reported for the second quarter -  2.4 percent - when compared with the same period of 2011.

For the first three quarters, Nielsen reported, United States ad spending rose 2.5 percent from the same period last year.

The third quarter is traditionally a busy one for automakers and their dealers, spending money to promote clearance sales at the end of the model year.The third quarter of 2012 was no exception, according to Nielsen.

Ad spending by the automakers rose 26 percent compared with the year-earlier period, Nielsen said, and ad spending by aut o dealers rose 22 percent.

The automakers spent the most in dollars in the quarter, Nielsen said, at $2.7 billion, followed by fast-food restaurants, up 14 percent to $1 billion, and auto dealers, also at $1 billion. Wireless providers were next, at $887.3 million, up 15 percent.

There were large declines in spending in two big categories, according to Nielsen: movies, down 12 percent to $689.7 million, and pharmaceuticals, down 22 percent to $661.7 million.

There was a small decline in a third big category, Nielsen reported: department stores, down 1 percent to $772.8 million.

The Nielsen data is based on ad spending in 17 types of media in seven categories: television, magazines, newspapers, radio, outdoor ads, coupon inserts and national Internet display ads.

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

The Breakfast Meeting: Tribune Looking for Buyers, and Imus Stays Put

The Tribune Company, owner of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, is looking for bankers to help sell some of its papers after it emerges from bankruptcy on Dec. 31, according to a Bloomberg News report. Rupert Murdoch has been reported to be interested at least in the Chicago and Los Angeles papers for his new publishing-focused News Corporation.

An aide to Britain's culture secretary attempted to ward off reporters investigating the minister's expense reports by warning them about her role in implementing press regulations outlined in the Leveson Report, according to The Daily Telegraph. The paper, which had reported that the secretary, Maria Mi ller, was submitting expenses for her parents' house in London, said that her aide told reporters: “Maria has obviously been having quite a lot of editors' meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am just going to kind of flag up that connection for you to think about.”

Don Imus, the 72-year-old host of “Imus in the Morning” has signed on to do his radio show for three more years. Mr. Imus has much lower numbers than hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity but his popularity in New York means that the show can charge higher advertising rates.

The authors of “Game Change” have signed a deal with Penguin Press to release their coming book about the recent presidential campaign, “Double Down: Game Change 2012.” HBO, which based a film on the 2008 book, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, has already optioned the rights to the new film.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation of Reed Hastings, the chief executive for Netflix, for possible violations of disclosures laws after he wrote about a company milestone on Facebook, says more about the flawed rules surrounding public information than it does about bad acts by Mr. Hastings, writes Steven M. Davidoff, the Deal Professor columnist for DealBook. Announcing that Netflix had streamed a billion hours of programming in one month doesn't seem to divulge information that is either private or material, he writes.

Finally, Rupert Murdoch added some of his own reporting to a Times article on Monday that outlined Michael Bloomberg's interest in buying possibly buying The Financial Times. In a tweet this morning, Mr. Murdoch wrote: “Bloomberg may buy FT but likes New York Times too. Both small change for him and new challenge after 12 years great public service.”