Gun-Focused Reality TV Shows Get New Scrutiny After Newtown Killings

The topics of guns and gun use continue to resonate across the media landscape in the days after the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn. One show that may be affected is the popular reality show “Sons of Guns,” which is shown on the Discovery Channel.

The show's third season finished airing in October, but on Tuesday a spokeswoman for the network, Laurie Goldberg, could not state definitively what future, if any, the show might have on Discovery. “All I can say is, it is not on the schedule and it is not on the schedule in the near future,” Ms. Goldberg said.

Asked if the show had been renewed for another season, Ms. Goldberg said she did not know its status. “There is no data that I am aware of” about whether the show had been renewed, she said.

“Sons of Guns” deals with a custom gun-making company in Louisiana, Red Jacket Firearms, and often features customers firing specially made firearms, including assault rifles and sniper rifles. In a clip on the show's Web site, the guitarist Joe Perry, from the rock group Aerosmith, is shown enjoying test-firing a fully automatic M4 assault rifle. (Then his wife gets a crack at shooting the weapon.)

The comments about the now-murky future of “Sons of Guns” come at the same time that Discovery is confirming that its other series about gun manufacturing, “American Guns,” has officially been canceled.

Ms. Goldberg said that decision was unrelated to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, which left 20 schoolchildren and six of their caretakers dead. Rather, she said, Discovery three months ago had quietly decided to drop the series.

Ratings for “American Guns” had fallen off, Ms. Goldberg said. She acknowledged, however, that “Sons of Guns” had had “pretty solid ratings.”

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

Without Any Fanfare, Jennifer Egan Switches Publishers

Pulitzer Prize Board, via Associated Press Jennifer Egan

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan quietly switched publishers this summer, joining Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, from Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.

“I have known and read Jenny Egan for 25 years, and I am ecstatic about working with her on her next books,” said Na n Graham, who was recently promoted to publisher at Scribner and who played a key role in wooing Ms. Egan. “She is as dedicated and brilliant and compassionate as any novelist writing today.”

Ms. Egan only published two books with Knopf: “The Keep” (2006) and “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010). But both were well reviewed, and “Goon Squad” won numerous awards, culminating in the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Yet despite this impressive record under her editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin, Ms. Egan decided it was time to move on.

Both she and her agent, Binky Urban of International Creative Management, said that they did not want to get into why the move was made and that the move was not news because it was widely known within the industry.

Publishing sources pointed out that before she was with Knopf, Ms. Egan had a three-book deal with Doubleday and then moved on. They also said she was offered seven figures for a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster as an extra enticement.

In a sign of the author's sensitivity about the move, the news was not announced publicly by Scribner's at the time.

When asked why she had kept the coup under wraps, Ms. Graham said it was timing. “We had hoped to wait until Jenny had finished a new novel,” she said, “and we could shout from the rooftops about the book we were going to publish.”

Ms. Egan said her next book would be ready in two years at the soonest.

Leslie Kaufman writes about the publishing industry. Follow @leslieNYT on Twitter.

Awaiting Merger With Random House, Penguin Settles E-Book Case

Penguin, trying to ensure a clean slate before its planned merger with Random House, announced on Tuesday that it was settling a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department over the pricing of e-books.

In a statement, the company said, “Penguin has always maintained, and continues to maintain, that it has done nothing wrong and has no case to answer.”

Nevertheless, the company said, it was agreeing to settle because of the impending merger of Random House, a division of the German media company Bertelsmann, and Penguin, a division of the English conglomerate Pearson. That deal, in which Bertelsmann will assume 53 percent control of the new company, was announced in October. The publishing industry is beginning to consolidate to try to better meet the online challenge from Amazon.

The company wrote in its statement, “It is also in everyone's interests that the proposed Penguin Random House company should begin life with a clean sheet of paper.”

In April, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit accusing five major publishing houses and Apple of conspiring to fix the price of e-books. These five had moved from a wholesale pricing model that allowed retailers to charge what they wanted to a system that allowed publishers to begin setting their own e-book prices, a model known as “agency pricing.”

The publishers had looked for a way to prevent Amazon from pricing books below their actual cost, which they said would hurt the industry over time. But the government said the publishers conspired in e-mails, in telephone conversations and at lavish dinners to keep e-book prices artificially high.

Three big publishing houses - HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette - settled with the Justice Department, but Penguin, Macmillan and Apple decided to fight the charges, until Pe nguin reversed course on Tuesday.

In the terms of a settlement that a judge approved in September, the three publishers that settled agreed to end contracts with Apple and with e-book retailers that contained restrictions on their ability to set prices, and agreed not to make such restrictive contracts for the next two years.

In May, when Penguin filed its response in United States District Court in New York, it said that Amazon treated books as “widgets.” It described Amazon as “predatory” and “monopolist,” and said that the government's case was based on “innuendo.”

Penguin said that it still believed that agency pricing was legitimate. “Penguin continues to believe that the agency pricin g model has encouraged competition among distributors of both eBooks and eBook readers and, in the company's view, continues to operate in the interest of consumers and author,” the company said in its statement.

The terms of the settlement were not available, but people with knowledge of the details said that they were the same as those received by the other three publishers.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post carried an erroneous byline.

Vice Purchases i-D, the British Style Magazine

Vice, the multimedia company known for its in-your-face journalistic style, is expanding into fashion coverage by buying the British style publication i-D magazine.

Vice executives said that fashion was a topic that complemented their existing coverage, and that they were looking for a magazine that could benefit from Vice's expertise in multimedia.

“Our readers were fashionable, but we weren't a fashion magazine per se,” said Andrew Creighton, the president of Vice, referring to the company's flagship magazine. “There's a huge opportunity there to create a huge and robust platform for fashion and creativity.”

Mr. Creighton said he knew i-D's brand well because he worked there in the late 1990s, when he handled the magazine's advertising. He said that the magazine's co-founders Terry and Tricia Jones would remain minority partners.

“I actually cut my teeth in publis hing there,” Mr. Creighton said. “Some of the lessons that I learned there have been incredibly valuable to me as I've built Vice up.”

Mr. Creighton said Vice would keep i-D's nearly two dozen London-based staff members and that he hoped to add to the staff. He said that the company planned to make other purchases in the media world in the coming year, with a focus on established brands that could build their digital presence.

“The key for us is to find brand and content companies that we really respect, but haven't really transitioned into the digital marketplace,” Mr. Creighton said.

Arbitron Deal Extends Nielsen\'s Reach Into Consumer Habits

With its $1.26 billion acquisition of Arbitron, announced on Tuesday, Nielsen is buying much more than the most widely followed radio ratings service. It is also extending its already substantial reach into the overlapping forms of media through which people consume their entertainment and news, and spend their money - information that is essential to advertisers.

Nielsen is best known for its television ratings, but its various branches also track an array of consumer product sales, like books and music, as well as consumers' habits online and through their mobile devices. Just on Monday, for example, Nielsen announced a new system with Twitter to rank TV shows by their levels of social-media chatter.

Arbitron, meanwhile, has remained primarily focu sed on radio consumption, which has held surprisingly strong in the Internet age as people stay plugged in to their favorite radio stations, particularly while driving.

According to Arbitron's most recent statistics, more than 241 million people in the United States, or about 92 percent of the population, listen to the radio each week. And unlike television, the vast majority of the ads on broadcast radio are for local businesses.

Through the deal with Arbitron, Nielsen should be able to track even more of consumers' media consumption and buying habits. In a presentation to investors and Wall Street analysts, Nielsen said that by adding Arbitron's radio data to its portfolio, it would be able to increase the total amount of time in a given day it could track the listening and viewing habits of the average American to seven hours from the current five.

“That is a very big deal when your job is to measure how consumers ultimate ly form and change behaviors,” David L. Calhoun, Nielsen's chief executive, said in a conference call. “And it's that linkage of buy and watch that ultimately allows us to provide those insights.”

In early trading, Arbitron's shares shot up by nearly 24 percent, reflecting the premium Nielsen will pay for the shares; Nielsen's stock was up about 1.3 percent. Nielsen is active in more than 100 countries and last year had $5.5 billion in revenue. Arbitron is a much smaller company, but has substantial profit margins; last year it generated $53 million in net income on $422 million in revenue.

As some analysts see it, the challenges for the combined companies will include measuring the growth of online audio and linking Arbitron's value for local advertising with Nielsen's more extensive and national data.

For now, Internet radio services like Pandora are not measured by Arbitron in “apples to apples” terms alongside broadcast radio stations, which P andora has complained puts them at a disadvantage with advertisers and media-buying agencies. But those measurements may become essential as online listening grows and is embraced by even the biggest radio broadcasters, like Clear Channel Communications.

Laura Martin, an entertainment and media analyst with Needham & Company, said that Nielsen's expertise and its aggressive push into online markets could be an advantage in exploiting Arbitron's local radio data.

“It's interesting that they will have the management I.Q. of Nielsen in charge of local advertising possibilities,” Ms. Martin said. “The Internet is moving at the speed of light, and the next big promise of advertising cash is sitting in local. In Nielsen's hands those relationships may turn into something that Arbitron didn't think of.”

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

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New Leader for Pearson Unit That Includes Financial Times

Simon Newman/Reuters John Ridding, the current chief executive of The Financial Times, was promoted to lead the FT Group that includes The Financial Times.

John Ridding will take over as chief executive of the FT Group, a subsidiary of Pearson that includes The Financial Times and half of The Economist, the company said Tuesday.

Mr. Ridding, who has served as chief executive of the Financial Times since 2006, will replace Rona Fairhead. Ms. Fairhead said last month that she wou ld be leaving the London-based media conglomerate in April. Her resignation followed the departure of Marjorie Scardino, who had served as chief executive of Pearson for nearly 16 years.

A long-time newspaperman and Asia hand, Mr. Ridding previously served as editor and publisher of the Asian edition of The Financial Times, and chairman of Pearson in Asia. He spearheaded the development of the newspaper's Chinese language Web site and introduced China Confidential, a source of business intelligence related to Chinese trade.

Pearson's high-level departures have sparked speculation that the company could decide to sell The Financial Times. The FT Group has been slimmed down in recent years to include a handful of core assets.

Mr. Ridding's background and appointment signals that the group is firmly centered on the business daily, with its distinctive bisqu e-colored newsprint, and its prominence in fast-growing Asian markets. Both Bloomberg L.P. and Thomson Reuters have emerged as likely buyers. A Pearson spokesman has said the newspaper is not for sale.

Amy Chozick is The Times's corporate media reporter. Follow @amychozick on Twitter.

The Breakfast Meeting: Nielsen Buys Arbitron, and Instagram\'s New Ad-Friendly Rules

Nielsen Holdings announced Tuesday morning that it would be acquiring Arbitron, the radio ratings company, for $1.26 billion, Michael de la Merced reported. The acquisition price amounts to $48 a share in cash for each outstanding share of Arbitron, or a 26 percent premium to Arbitron's closing price on Monday. The deal was described by Nielsen as part of its effort to track how people view and listen to media programs, which can be delivered in an increasing array of formats.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

NBC News' chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, was freed after being held for five days by gunmen in Syria, an ordeal he detailed on Tuesday morning on the “Today” show. He described how he and his crew were traveling with Syrian rebels and were captured by a group who emerged suddenly from behind the bushes. The release came at the hands of rebels, who stopped the kidnappers at a checkpoint - by the time he and two of his crew members appeared on “Today” they were in Turkey.

• The kidnapping, Brian Stelter and Bill Carter write, once again highlights the perils of reporting from Syria, which is said by the Committee to Protect Journalists to be “the world's most dangerous place for the press.” Mr. Engel has made frequent trips to Syria - on T hursday, NBC News aired a report of his from Syria's commercial center, Aleppo, where the fighting has been intense.

While lacking a breakout hit like last year's biography of Steven Jobs, independent bookstores are reporting that sales are up this year, Leslie Kaufman reports. Rather, they say a range of unexpectedly popular titles, including Barbara Kingsolver's “Flight Behavior” and Chris Ware's complex graphic novel “Building Stories” have made up the slack. The picture was more mixed at Barnes & Noble, the nation's largest book chain, which is investing heavily in digital books, and solid but not stellar growth in digital sales.

The photo-sharing site Instagram announced new terms of service for its users as part of its integration within Facebook, which acquired the company in A pril. The new terms, Jenna Wortham and Nick Bilton write, give Facebook great latitude in using pictures that are shared through the service starting Jan. 16, when they go into effect. They provide a list of the changes, which include: “Instagram can share information about its users with Facebook, its parent company, as well as outside affiliates and advertisers,” and “Ads may not be labeled as ads.” And a final term: “The only way to opt out of the new Instagram terms is to not use the service.”

• The anger at the changes is fast growing, with Instagram users taking to Twitter to vent.

In Gun Ownership Statistics, Partisan Divide Is Sharp

An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs. What are the chances that his family keeps a gun in their home?

The probability is considerably higher than our New York readers might expect: about 40 percent of such households reported having a gun in their home, according to the exit poll conducted during the 2008 presidential election.

But the odds vary significantly based on the political identity of the child's parents. If they identify as Democratic voters, the chances are only about one in four, or 25 percent, that they have a gun in their home. But the chances are more than twice that, almost 60 percent, if they are Republicans instead.

It will come as no surprise to those with a passing interest in American politics that Republicans are more likely to own guns than Democrats. But the differences have become much starker in recent years, with gun ownership having become a powerful predictor of political behavior.

In 1973, about 55 percent of Republicans reported having a gun in their household against 45 percent of Democrats, according to the General Social Survey, a biennial poll of American adults.

Gun ownership has declined over the past 40 years - but almost all the decrease has come from Democrats. By 2010, according to the General Social Survey, the gun ownership rate among adults that identified as Democratic had fallen to 22 percent. But it remained at about 50 percent among Republican adults.

Gun ownership rates are slightly higher among those adults who vote regularly, such as those who were surveyed on the 2008 exit poll. Unfor tunately, the question on gun ownership was dropped from the 2012 national exit poll. So the 2008 exit poll remains perhaps the most comprehensive recent evaluation on the gun-owning habits of Americans, having polled more than 4,000 voters on whether there was a gun in their household, along with a wide variety of demographic and political characteristics.

The poll makes clear that gun ownership is deeply embedded in political identity, and vice versa. Some other variables, such as whether a voter lives in an urban area, also strongly predict gun ownership. But the differences between the parties remain even after accounting for these characteristics.

Gun ownership rates are highest in rural areas, where guns are more likely to be used for hunting along with personal protection. A majority of Democratic voters in rural areas said they had a gun in their home, according to the survey, although the rate was somewhat higher, 65 percent, among rural Republicans.

In urban areas, 40 percent of Republican voters said they had a gun in their home, while 20 percent of Democrats did.

But the differences are most apparent in suburban areas. There, 58 percent of Republican voters said there was a gun in their household, against just 27 percent of Democrats.

Having school-aged children in the household did not significantly affect gun ownership rates, either positively or negatively. The majority of children to Republican-voting parents had a gun somewhere in their homes, while only about one in four children in Democratic-voting households did. What Democratic parents might view as a safety hazard, Republicans may see as providing their families with an extra measure of protection.

In other respects, the profile of gun owners defies some of the stereotypes that urban liberals might assign to them. For example, despite President Obama's comments in 2008 about voter s who “cling to guns and religion,” the two qualities are not strongly related to each other. Slightly more than 40 percent of voters who said they attended church weekly or more often reported having a gun in their home, about the same percentage as among those who attend religious services just a few times a month or a few times a year.

And gun ownership rates are highest among the middle class, rather than the poor. Households making $50,000 to $100,000 per year were slightly more likely to own guns than those that made a little bit less or a little more. (However, gun ownership rates are inversely correlated with educational attainment.)

The partisan differences persist, however, across almost every demographic measure. White voters were substantially more likely to own guns than Hispanics, blacks or Asians. But white Republicans were more likely to own guns than white Democrats, Asian Republicans more likely than Asian Democrats, and so forth.

More elaborate data-mining techniques, such as logistic regression analysis, suggest that gun ownership is a more powerful predictor of whether a voter is Republican than her gender, whether or not she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, or whether she lives in the South, along with many other demographic characteristics.

And based on demographic inertia, the differences seem likely to grow over time. About 35 percent of Democratic voters aged 65 and older reported having a gun in their home, against about 25 percent of those aged 18 to 29. But gun ownership rates bore little relationship to age among Republican voters, and were c onstant at about 55 percent among all age groups. That might suggest that gun ownership will continue to decline among Democrats while holding steady among Republicans, further increasing the partisan gap.

Perhaps last weekend's mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., will serve to partly reverse the partisan split in attitudes toward guns; early polls on Newtown find relatively modest differences between Democrats and Republicans on what they see as the causes of the shooting.

But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo. It might seem strange that ownership of a single household object is so strongly tied to voting behavior and broader political attitudes in America. But America is an outlie r relative to other industrialized nations in its gun ownership rates. Whatever makes this country so different from the rest of the world must surely be reflected in the differences in how Democrats and Republicans see the nation.

For Late-Night Hosts, a Struggle to Confront the News

The school shooting in Newtown, Conn., made for an awkward subject for the usually topical comedy of late-night television, but two hosts did try to engage the subject Monday night, though not in any way that resembled their conventional approach to commenting on the news.

On CBS, David Letterman spent the entire second portion of his show rambling heartfelt musings on the pain of the event and the feelings of futility behind most attempts at solutions to such acts of violence.

On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel opened his monologue with an expression of sympathy for the town and the families of the victims, but he could barely get through his brief comments because his voice was so choked.

Mr. Letterman spent more time on the subject, over six minutes, expressing his own concerns as the parent of a young boy he occasionally brings to school. “What? Are we supposed to be worried about dropping our kids off at school now?” Mr. Letterman said. “I never worried abou t it before; I always thought, well, school is a good place where my son will be free of the idiot decisions made by his father.”

The comedian called the problem multifaceted. “It's not about guns. It's not about mental health necessarily.”

But he questioned the need for assault-type weapons with clips capable of carrying 30 rounds of ammunition. “Why do you need that?” he said. “You can have guns; 50 percent of households have guns, so we're never going to say you can't have guns.”

He ended by praising President Obama for his appearance at the prayer service in Newtown on Sunday night and his promise in the speech to try to contain gun violence. “He's going take some action, so we feel better about that,” Mr. Letterman said. “In a small measure I feel better that he's looking out for us in that regard.”

Mr. Kimmel also cited Mr. Obama's remarks, saying, “The President said what needed to be said.”

But he only barely ma naged to get through a message to the families: “We're thinking about you.”