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Karmazin Leaves Sirius XM Earlier Than Expected

In a regulatory filing it was revealed that Mel Karmazin, the former chief executive of Sirius XM, had resigned earlier than expected.Danny Moloshok/Reuters In a regulatory filing it was revealed that Mel Karmazin, the former chief executive of Sirius XM, had resigned earlier than expected.

Sirius XM Radio has appointed James E. Meyer as its interim chief executive officer, the company announced on Wednesday, as Mel Karmazin steps down from the top spot earlier than expected.

Mr. Meyer, who has been Sirius's president of operations and sales since 2004, will serve as its chief while the company, which is in the midst of a takeover by Liberty Media, searches for a permanent replacement. Mr. Meyer, who will also j oin Sirius's board, will receive a base salary of $1.3 million. He will also be eligible for bonuses if another chief executive is named before his contract runs out in October, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Karmazin took over Sirius in 2004, and in October announced that he would leave on Feb. 1. But the filing said that on Tuesday he had resigned as chief executive and also left the board.

Liberty, which began the year with 40 percent ownership of Sirius, has spent much of the year buying up shares on the open market to take over the company. Liberty's chief executive, Gregory B. Maffei, who is also on Sirius's board, is leading a search committee, and has said that it was considering candidates from inside and outside the company.

Google and the Cloud Wars: Google has lobbed the late st volley over access to music collections through the cloud - a fancy name for the Internet, basically - by introducing a free scan and match feature on its Play service in the United States.

Last year, Amazon, Google and Apple rushed to introduce so-called cloud (or locker) systems, which let people store music files on distant servers for streaming or downloading to various devices. Apple was not the first but had the most advanced product with iTunes Match, which for $25 a year matches a user's songs to those in a master database, thus bypassing the often cumbersome process of uploading each file. (To do that you need special licenses from music companies, which Google and Amazon at first did not have.)

Amazon added scan-and-match in July, and this fall Google caught up too, first in Europe and then yesterday in the United States. But Google's version has one advantage: it is free. Apple still charges $25 a year, with a maximum of 25,000 songs; Amazon offers to back up 250 tracks free and then charges $25 a year for up to 250,000 songs (not counting ones bought on Amazon). Google's limit is 20,000 tracks.

Whether the feature catches on with consumers is another question. Google Play, introduced only a year ago, has been slow to gain traction as a music store, and some commentators used Google's announcement on Wednesday to voice their doubts about whether customers care about backing up song files when streaming music has become ubiquitous through s ervices like Spotify and even Google's YouTube.

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



Arthur C. Clarke E-Books for Sale in U.S.

Thirty-five titles by the celebrated science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” among other classics, will be released in digital form for the first time in the United States, the independent e-book publisher RosettaBooks said on Wednesday.

The e-books are on sale now.

The eBook collection will include, of course, Mr. Clarke's two best known works, “2001,” which was the basis of the later Stanley Kubrick film, and “Childhood's End,” about how aliens bring about an evolution in the human race.

RosettaBooks said each work from Mr. Clarke, who died in 2008 at age 90, would sell for $8.99.

Among the other volumes for sale are the rest of the odyssey series: “2010: Odyssey Two,” “2061: Odyssey Three,” “3001: The Final Odyssey” and the novels “Dolphin Island,” about an odd community that studies marine mammals - it also became a video game - and “The Sands of Mars.”

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



Martha Stewart Living C.E.O. to Resign

8:53 a.m. | Updated

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced on Wednesday that its chief executive, Lisa Gersh, a co-founder of Oxygen Media who joined the company last year, will resign.

The company said it would start the search for a new chief executive who would concentrate on building the company's merchandising business. Ms. Gersh will remain in her role until a new chief is found.

“It has been an honor to lead this company with its iconic brands, loyal following and wealth of creative talent,” Ms. Gersh said in a statement. “There is an exciting future ahead for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and I am committed to working with the board to ensure a smooth transition.”

The announcement follows months of financial troubles for the company, which has been struggling to find profits in the financially troubled publishing industry.

In November, Ms. Gersh announced that she planned to cut back two of its four magazines and lay off about 70 employees, or 12 percent of the nearly 600-person company.

Earlier this year, the company cut $12.5 million in broadcasting costs by not renewing its daily programming deal with the Hallmark Channel, breaking its lease on its television production studio and ending its live audience for “The Martha Stewart Show.” In April, it was announced that a new weekly show, “Martha Stewart's Cooking School,” would be distributed on public television.

The company hopes that merchandising will help save the company. Its latest earnings report showed a decline in income in its two other divisions, publishing and broadcasting.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 19, 2012

A previous version of this post referred incorrectly to the revenue Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia earned from merchandising. It increased, not decreased, in the company's third quarter, its latest earnings period.



The Breakfast Meeting: Hollywood Meets Real Violence and Anger at Instagram

What was once unthinkable is now almost routine for studio and network executives as they prepare contingency plans for programming after tragedies like the massacre in Newtown, Conn., write Brooks Barnes and Bill Carter. At USA Network, executives used keywords to search for terms like “children” and “killing” to find and postpone sensitive episodes. The incident has also sparked a discussion about hypocrisy within the entertainment business, which is seen as largely liberal and supportive of gun control but makes its bread and butter on violent images.

After four days of captivity, the NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his crew were freed on Tuesday a fter their hostage-takers, loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, ran into a rebel checkpoint and were attacked. Mr. Engel said he and his crew were not physically harmed, but they were blindfolded and their captors threatened them with mock executions.

Just a month after announcing the closure of two magazines, Lisa Gersh, the chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, will step down today. The company, which has struggled financially, is expected to refocus on its merchandising and licensing division.

As expected, Martha Nelson will take over as editor in chief at Time Inc., with oversight of the company's magazines, including Time, People and Sports Illustrated. Ms. Nelso n, who was Time Inc.'s editorial director, is the first woman to hold the position in the company's 90 year history.

Instagram users have reacted loudly to the company's new terms of service that allows it to use all images in advertising. The change was announced on Monday by Instagram's new owners, Facebook, as the company struggles to find ways of monetizing the vast store of images on its servers.

Still claiming that it did nothing wrong, Penguin announced on Wednesday that it had settled with the Justice Department over allegations that it conspired with other publishers and with Apple to fix the price of eBooks. The company, owned by Pearson, said it made the decision because of its coming merger with Random House.



Piers Morgan Shows Disgust While Interviewing Gun Owners\' Advocate

Anybody who has been watching “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN since the shootings at the Sandy Hook elementary school could discern he is no fan of guns, but on Tuesday night he made it clear that he doesn't much like the people who own them either.

Interviewing Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, he went off on Mr. Pratt in a way that rarely occurs outside some of the more rugged reality shows on television.

Mr. Pratt was making the argument that what America needed was more guns, not fewer, than the 300 million already in circulation, and that schools need serious weaponry on hand to meet the threat of force like the one in Newtown, Conn., last week. When Mr. Pratt digressed into a rather tortured argument to explain away lower murder rates in Europe, where gun ownership is far more restrictive, Mr. Morgan erupted.

“You're an unbelievably stupid man, aren't you?” Mr. Morgan said. (The clip above picks up the action right before then.)

Mr. Pratt did not take the bait, calmly continuing to elucidate his argument. “It seems to me you are morally obtuse,” he told Mr. Morgan. “You seem to prefer being a victim to being able to prevail over the criminal element. I don't know why you want to be the criminal's friend.”

To which Mr. Morgan responded: “What a ridiculous argument. You have absolutely no coherent argument. You don't actually give a damn about the gun murder rate in America.”

It was a bit of a moment, watching a talk show host losing it talking to one of his guests. It's clear that advocates for the rights of gun owners should expect very tough sledding if they agree to a slot on Piers Morgan in the future.



At News Conference, Reporters Skip Past Gun Control and Face Instant Criticism

President Obama, joined by the vice president, spoke with reporters on Wednesday afternoon.Evan Vucci/Associated Press President Obama, joined by the vice president, spoke with reporters on Wednesday afternoon.

The harshest judges of those in news media are often others in the news media, and, with the benefit of Twitter, that intrajournalistic watchdog role can be performed simultaneously with the journalism being criticized.

Case in point was the White House news conference on Wednesday afternoon, when President Obama made a forceful announcement in response to the massacre of children last week in Newtown, Conn. He said he was directing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead an effort “to come up with a set of concrete p roposals” about dealing with gun violence that he would submit to Congress no later than January.

“We are going to need to work on making access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun,” Mr. Obama said. “We're going to need to look more closely at a culture that all too often glorifies guns and violence.”

His words, following five days of extensive news coverage and national debate, were intensely focused on gun violence. He addressed no other topics. Yet judging by the questions that followed his address, most of the members of the Washington press corps had other things on their minds.

“I'd like to ask you about the other serious issue consuming this town right now, the fiscal cliff,” was the first question, from The Associated Press's correspondent, Ben Feller.

Mr. Obama answered. Then came the next question, again about the so-called “fiscal cliff”: “What is your next move?” Then: “You mentioned the $700,000, $800, 000 - are you willing to move on income level?” And so on, for at least 15 minutes, before a question about gun violence was finally asked, by David Jackson of USA Today.

Media watchers on Twitter - mainly other members of the media and some whose job it is to watch it, quickly seized on the questions as a sign that the Washington press corps was out of step with the national agenda.

It wasn't long, however, before the criticism spread throughout the wider Twitterverse and became a meme in itself. People proposed, tongue in cheek, other topics for questions in lieu of gun control under the hashtag #DCPressQuestions.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 19, 2012

An earlier ve rsion of this post incorrectly identified the reporter who was first to ask President Obama about gun violence. It was David Jackson of USA Today, not Jake Tapper of ABC News, who later also asked about gun violence.



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