Participant Media Plans New Cable Channel

Monica Almeida/The New York Times Jeff Skoll, right, the founder and chairman of Participant Media, with the company's chief executive, Jim Berk.

Participant Media, the production company behind films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Food, Inc.” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,” said on Monday that it planned to start a cable channel of its own by combining the assets of two obscure channels, The Documentary Channel and Halogen TV.

Participant said it was aiming to start the untitled channel in the summer of 2013. Evan Shapiro, a former president of IFC and the Sundance Channel, who joined the company last spring, will run the new channel.

“The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change. With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day,” said Jeff Skoll, the founder of Participant.

The channel could be a destination for documentary films made by Participant and other producers. Participant said it would also have original programming. It named several people who are involved in making it, including Brian Graden, Brian Henson, Davis Guggenheim, Meghan McCain and Morgan Spurlock.

The channel will target viewers under the age of 35 - those, as Mr. Shapiro put in a news release Monday, that cable and satellite distributors are “most at risk of losing.” In other words: Participant might try to get the channel picked up by pitching it as a way for distributors to retain young subscribers. Distributors, however, are generally reluctan t to carry new channels.

When it starts, the new channel will already reach 40 million homes, Participant estimated, thanks to the channels it is acquiring. The company said on Monday that it had completed a deal to acquire The Documentary Channel, which is available in about 25 million homes, and was working on a deal to take over Halogen TV's channel position in about 15 million homes.

The terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Among the many documentaries distributed by Participant was “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” a feature about The Times that was released last year. (Several reporters from the newspaper's media desk, including the one writing this story, were featured in the film.)

Premiere of Violent Tarantino Film Is Canceled Because of School Massacre

LOS ANGELES â€" Citing the mourning and emotional distress resulting from the Connecticut school massacre, the Weinstein Company late Monday canceled a premiere for its violent film “Django Unchained.”

The movie, directed by Quentin Tarantino and scheduled for release on Christmas Day, was to be unveiled in Los Angeles on Tuesday night with the usual red carpet splash. Instead, Weinstein will hold a private screening for industry insiders and the cast, which includes Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., and in this time of national mourning we have decided to forgo our scheduled event,” a Weinstein Company spokesperson said in a statement.

The Weinstein Company has been advertising the film, a spaghetti western, with a poster featuring guns and a blood spatter. Over the weekend, Mr. Tarantino, who is known for making highly violent films, defended the gore in “Django Unchained,” which is about a freed slave trying to save his wife from a vicious plantation owner.

At least two other major movie promotional events have been canceled in the aftermath of the Connecticut shootings, which took place last Friday. Paramount scrapped plans for a premiere last Saturday of “Jack Reacher” in Pittsburgh, and on Monday the Film Society of Lincoln Center postponed a special fund-raising event featuring that film's star, Tom Cruise. Also, 20th Century Fox halted a Los Angeles premiere over the weekend for “Parental Guidance,” a comedy.

The Breakfast Meeting: Reporting From Newtown, and a Puppet Provocateur

The senseless murders of 20 schoolchildren and six adults who cared for them at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., has shocked the nation, and the world, drawing round-the-clock news coverage to the town, Peter Applebome and Brian Stelter report. Nearly every newscast on CNN since Friday night has been broadcast from Newtown, for example, as has been true for nearly every network television morning and evening newscast. There has been tension, however, with some townsfolk lashing out at reporters, and others welcoming the chance to share their grief with the rest of the country. Big-name anchors can be spotted going door-to-door, seeking interviews. The anchors, Mr. Applebome and Mr. Stelter write, said they know when no means no.

• The world news media reaction has focused o n the easy availability of guns in the United States, giving China's official news agency a chance to lecture America for a change, The International Herald Tribune blog wrote over the weekend.  “Their blood and tears demand no delay for U.S. gun control,” said a commentary published by the news agency, Xinhua. “However, this time, the public feels somewhat tired and helpless. The past six months have seen enough shooting rampages in the United States.”
• As if to back up the emphasis on guns, China itself experienced an attack on Friday in a primary school, The Associated Press reported. But in this case, the attacker was wielding a knife â€" he wounded 22 students and one adu lt. There were no deaths among the nine students treated at a hospital, though two had serious injuries; the attacker was captured by the police.

La Comay, a big-haired, free-speaking puppet whose popular talk show in Puerto Rico can drive the discussion there, whether in politics or entertainment, appears to have crossed a line, Tanzina Vega reports. The puppet provocateur, whose name means roughly “The Godmother,” has gained a measure of respectability, with candidates for governor or Puerto Rico appearing on the show the night before the election. But in commenting on a murder of a publicist by noting that he was in a sketchy neighborhood and may have been asking for it, he offended his audience and advertisers.

After years of churning out copy on technology for the blog Gizmod o, where he was editor, Brian Lam decided he needed to get away, David Carr writes. For awhile, that meant taking up a life of surfing in Hawaii; but recently Mr. Lam returned to the online technology journalism game, but determined to do it on his terms. His solution is the site Wirecutter, which researches a field of products and recommends one, say a robot vacuum or earphones. The publication schedule is a more manageable six to 12 posts a month, and the business model isn't advertising based: rather, it is based on “affiliate” income - that is, fees from Amazon if readers click to buy the product it recommends.

 

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

More Evidence of Strong 3rd Quarter for U.S. Ad Spending

A second service that tracks advertising spending is reporting a relatively strong increase in the United States in the third quarter.

American ad spending climbed 7.1 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period a year ago, according to a report that is being released Monday morning by Kantar Media, part of WPP.

The report comes days after the other principal tracker of ad spending, Nielsen, reported that ad spending in the United States rose 7 percent in the third quarter compared with the third quarter of 2011.

The 7.1 percent increase is the most robust one to date for the year. The gain in the first quarter was 2.6 percent compared with the first quarter of 2011, and the gain in the second quarter was a scant 0.9 percent compared with the second quarter of 2011.

The increase in the third quarter also marks the t hird quarter in a row of gains in Kantar reports, after the company reported a 1 percent decline in ad spending in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the same period of 2010.

For the first nine months of 2012, Kantar reported, American ad spending has increased 3.8 percent compared with the first nine months of 2011. By comparison, the Nielsen report showed growth in the first nine months of 2.5 percent. (The companies use different data for their reports, which accounts for diverging numbers.)

Kantar, like Nielsen, attributed the growth in the third quarter to spending for ads related to the 2012 Summer Olympics and the November elections. Those events “delivered their expected bonanza in the third quarter,” Jon Swallen, chief research officer at Kantar Media North America, said in a statement.

Looking at the Kantar report by media categories, television, as is typical, led the way, with a 15.3 percent increase in ad spending, fueled by a 29.9 percent increase in the subcategory of network TV, because of the Olympics, and a 19.8 percent increase in the subcategory of spot TV, because of political ads.

Of the other six media categories Kantar reports on, three were on the plus side:

• Free-standing inserts, up 17.3 percent, benefiting from what Kantar described as “a 13-week quarter that had 14 Sundays, a prime day for the distribution of printed coupons”;
• Outdoor advertising, up 4.9 percent;
• Radio, up 4.2 percent.

There were three media categories with ad spending declines in the third quarter, according to Kantar:

• Internet display ads, down 4.3 percent;
•  Magazines, down 2.9 percent;
•  Newspapers, down 1.5 percent, fueled by a downturn of 17.2 percent in the subcategory of natio nal newspapers.

Kantar also offers each quarter a list of the Top 10 marketers by ad spending. The leader was Procter & Gamble, which increased spending 4.7 percent compared with the same period a year ago.

The rest of the Top 10, in descending order, were:

• General Motors, which was up 24.6 percent â†';
• Comcast, up 5.8 percent â†';
• < strong>AT&T, down 5.8 percent â†";
• Berkshire Hathaway, up 26.6 percent â†';
• Verizon Communications, down 12.4 percent â†";
• L'Oréal, up 7.7 percent â†';
• Toyota Motor, up 41.8 percent â†';
• News Corporation, up 14.4 percent â†';
• General Mills, down 0.6 percent â†".

This means that seven of the Top 10 marketers in the third quarter increased outlays for advertising compared with the same quarter a year ago. By comparison, in the first quarter, five increased spending, and in the second quarter, four increased spending.

Looking at the ad spending by type of marketers, retail was the largest category in the third quarter, Kantar reported, up 8.1 percent from the same period a year ago.

The rest of the Top 10, in descending order, were:

• Automotive, up 20.7 percent â†';
• Local services, up 3.7 percent â†';
• Telecommunications, up 9.9 percent â†';
• Financial services, down 2.3 percent â†";
• Food and candy, up 9.2 percent â†';
• Personal-care products, up 6.2 percent â†';
• Drect response, up 7 percent â†';
• Restaurants, up 12.1 percent â†';
• Insurance, down 0.1 percent â†".

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 newsletter.