Brian McGrory Rises From Boston Globe Paperboy to Become the Paper\'s Next Editor

Suzanne Kreiter Brian McGrory, the new editor of The Boston Globe.

8:44 p.m. | Updated
The Boston Globe announced on Thursday that Brian McGrory, a columnist and former metro editor at the newspaper and a Boston native with deep roots in the area, would be its next editor. The appointment is effective immediately.

Mr. McGrory, who has worked at The Globe for the last 23 years, will succeed Martin Baron, the newspaper's editor for the last decade. Mr. Baron has been named the editor of The Washington Post and officially left The Globe last week.

Christopher M. Mayer, The Globe's publisher, said h e chose Mr. McGrory from a pool of internal and external candidates because of his ties to Boston and his ability to motivate the newsroom. “He's a terrific mentor and leader in terms of inspiring great journalism,” Mr. Mayer said. “It's that ability to inspire the talent and attracting and retaining the talent.”

Mr. McGrory said that he planned to build on “the accountability journalism the paper has been known for” and did not intend to make significant changes.

“After Marty Baron's extremely successful tenure here, we don't need any overhaul,” he said.

Mr. McGrory, 51, grew up in Weymouth, Mass., and had his start at The Globe as a paperboy. In a video posted on The Globe's Web site, he recounted how he started his own newspaper for his fifth-grade social studies class. “It's the only thing I ever wanted to do and, oddly enough, the only place I ever wanted to do it was The Boston G lobe,” he said.

After attending Bates College, and working at The New Haven Register and The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., he joined The Globe in 1989. His career there has included reporting for the metro desk and working as a roving national reporter and as a White House correspondent. He is a second cousin of the longtime Washington columnist Mary McGrory, who died in 2004.

He became a metro columnist in 1998 and later the section's editor.

A statement released by The Globe highlighted his work leading the metro desk on investigating corruption on Beacon Hill and enhancing the section's narrative journalism. In the last couple of years, he wrote a twice-weekly column.

He recently published his first nonfiction book, “Buddy: How a Rooster Made Me a Family Man,” about raising a pet rooster as he adjusted to suburban life with his fiancà ©e and her children from her first marriage.

The announcement was somewhat of a surprise in a search closely watched by local journalists. The Boston Phoenix reported the leading finalists for the job were Caleb Solomon, the paper's managing editor, and David Shribman, a former Washington bureau chief for The Globe and currently the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Mr. McGrory is stepping into a drastically changing job at the newspaper, which is owned by The New York Times Company. The newsroom is staffed with 370 people, a decrease of roughly 40 percent over the last decade.

The paper's circulation has shrunk by nearly half during that time, to 230,351 on weekdays, from 438,621 readers in 2002. The Globe is also battling a struggling advertising market. According to The New York Times Company's third-quarter earnings report, the New England Media Group, which includes The Globe, had a 6 percent decline in advertising revenue.

Mr. May er stressed that he recognized that Mr. McGrory did not have a strong digital background at a time when the newspaper was becoming more dependent on readers who received access to content digitally. As of Thursday, Mr. McGrory had only about 1,000 followers on Twitter.

Mr. McGrory said that while he was just getting into social media, “I've been pretty fascinated by it in the short time I've been doing it.”

He said he read The Globe on an iPhone and iPad each day.

“I don't remember the last time I read the paper by flipping the pages,” Mr. McGrory said. “I'm not a digital guy. But I'm not a printing press guy either.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 20, 2012

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated the size of The Globe's newsroom. After shrinking over the decade, the newsroom's staff i s currently 370 people; it didn't shrink from 370 people.

CNN, Planning New Programming, Hires Jake Tapper From ABC

Fred Lee/ABC Jake Tapper in November on the set of ABC's “Good Morning America.”

8:57 p.m. | Updated CNN said on Thursday that it had hired Jake Tapper, the senior White House correspondent for ABC News, as new programming for the cable news channel was announced.

Mr. Tapper, widely seen as one of the most aggressive reporters in the nation's capital, will be the anchor of an afternoon program for the channel and will be its chief Washington correspondent. The new program will start sometime next year.

Mr. Tapper's talks with CNN predated the hiring of Jeffrey Zucker to be pre sident of CNN Worldwide. But Mr. Zucker, who will start at CNN in January, was instrumental in getting the deal done, a spokeswoman for the channel said.

Mr. Tapper alluded to the prospect of working with Mr. Zucker in a statement on Thursday. “With CNN's impeccable reporting during the elections and the exciting changes in the works for the network, this is a perfect time to join the CNN team,” he said.

CNN did not specify what time slot Mr. Tapper would be given. But the channel is expected to shrink the three-hour “Situation Room” back down to two hours, possibly to 5 and 6 p.m. Eastern, making room for Mr. Tapper's program at 4 p.m.

Mr. Tapper has worked for CNN once before: he was a co-host of “Take 5,” a weekend panel program on CNN, in 2001.

Mr. Tapper has worked at ABC News since 2003, and has been stationed at the White House full time since the presidential election in 2008. His interest in hosting the network's Sunday morning pu blic affairs program “This Week” had been an open secret in Washington for some time. When George Stephanopoulos was renamed the host of the program (after a stint by Christiane Amanpour) in 2012, there was speculation that Mr. Tapper would look elsewhere. Last week, ABC confirmed that Mr. Stephanopoulos would remain the host of “This Week” in the new year.

In a memo about the changes on Thursday, Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, praised Mr. Tapper for building “a reputation as one of the most prolific and multitalented journalists on the beat, scoring scoop after scoop.” He said that Jonathan Karl would succeed Mr. Tapper at the White House. Mr. Karl is currently the senior political correspondent for the news division.

Additionally, the foreign affairs reporter Martha Raddatz, who gained attention in the fall for moderating a vice-presidential debate, will have the title of global foreign affairs correspondent. Ms. Raddatz will also be the p rimary substitute for Mr. Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” replacing Mr. Tapper in that role, ABC said.

Boston Radio Station Switches to Electronic Dance Format

“Dance music just doesn't work on the air.”

For years, that has been an inflexible truism in the radio business. Any record executive with a little experience in the promotions department will have stories to tell of visiting a pop station with a killer dance record - solid gold, baby, I'm telling you - only to be waved away by the program director.

This may be changing, however, as electronic dance music, or E.D.M., continues its surge in mainstream popularity and more media companies look to it as a way to a fun-loving, free-spending young audience. The clearest sign of this changing market emerged in Boston on Thursday, as the radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications introduced what one of its executives called “the first real E.D.M. station in the country.”

Shortly before 6 p.m. on WHBA there, just as Neil Diamond's “Sweet Caroline” faded out, a dance theme churned for a few minutes before the song “Don't You Worry Child” by the E.D .M. stars Swedish House Mafia began to play, and thus was born Clear Channel's new Evolution station, at 101.7 FM.

Evolution began just six weeks ago as an online-only station through the company's iHeartRadio app,with the popular British D.J. Pete Tong as its leading voice.

Tom Poleman, Clear Channel's president of national programming platforms, said the online station was intended partly as a test of the format, and that the reaction to it was so positive - it instantly became the most popular digital-only station on iHeartRadio - that the company decided to give it a go as a terrestrial station, where the investment and risk are, of course, much greater.

“It reaffirmed our gut that this is something that is ready for prime time,” Mr. Poleman said in an interview.

In what could be interp reted as a bit of symbolism about the tides of the music business, Evolution is taking over the former frequency of WFNX, for decades one of the country's most influential alternative rock stations. Clear Channel bought the station in May for $14.5 million, changed its call letters to WHBA, and set it on an “adult hits” format, which is promoted with on-air tagline “We play anything.” (On Thursday afternoon, the songs included Yes's “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and Counting Crows' cover of Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi.”)

Electronic dance music's latest flirtation with the mainstream took root several years ago, as Top 40 began to embrace dance-heavy pop acts like Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas, and artists like David Guetta came to be seen not just as their producers but stars in their own right. (On Thursday, Spotify announced that Mr. Guetta's 2011 album “Nothing but the Beat” was the service's most popular album over the last year.)

Yet dance has struggled to find a hold on the radio. Many broadcasters have dabbled in it; the most recent example is KDHT-FM in Denver, which was briefly a dance station before switching last month to the “Jack” pop format. Billboard monitors only five full-time terrestrial dance stations for its dance/mix show airplay chart.

Boston is the 10th-largest radio market in the country, with an audience of just over four million, as ranked by the ratings service Arbitron.

Discounting stations like WKTU-FM in New York, which play plenty of dance music but technically have a “hot adult contemporary” format - leaning toward pop hits - Boston would be the biggest market in the country with a full-time E.D.M. station like Evolution.

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

Warner Music Adds Robert Wiesenthal, a Top Deal Maker at Sony

Phil McCarten/Reuters Robert Wiesenthal, longtime Sony executive, will be joining Warner Music Group in the new year.

Robert S. Wiesenthal, a top deal maker at Sony for the last decade, is leaving the company to become chief operating officer at the Warner Music Group, the company announced on Thursday, in a move that could help the company expand through acquisitions and compete more handily against the music world's two corporate giants, Universal and Sony.

Mr. Wiesenthal, the former chief financial officer of the Sony Corporation of America, and most recently the president of international at Sony's music publishing arm, wi ll move to Warner at the start of the new year, according to a company statement.

At Warner, he is expected to advise its controlling shareholder, the Russian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, on strategy, and also pursue major deals for the company. The most likely acquisition target are the recorded music assets of EMI, which Universal, its new owner, is being forced to divest by European regulators.

Among the major corporate powers of the music industry, Warner is a distant third after Universal and Sony.

Warner's announcement said that Mr. Wiesenthal would report to Steve Cooper, the chief executive, and that “all other reporting relationships at the company remain unchanged” - an indication that Mr. Wiesenthal's primary brief will be to make media deals to expand the company.

His departure from Sony was announced in an internal memo to employees on Thursday morning by Martin N. Bandier, Sony/ATV's chairman.

M r. Blavatnik's holding company, Access Industries, bought the Warner Music Group last year for $3.3 billion, and Warner has lately undergone a series of top management changes. The appointment of Mr. Wiesenthal is the first major new hire at Warner since Lyor Cohen, the company's chief executive of recorded music, resigned in September.

Mr. Wiesenthal has long been focused on deal making in the music industry. In a story that has become famous in the industry, he negotiated a deal with Michael Jackson in a Dubai hotel room in 2005 which kept Mr. Jackson from filing for bankruptcy; in exchange, Sony took greater operational control of Sony/ATV, the joint venture owned Sony and the Jackson estate. He also negotiated Sony's buyout of Bertelsmann from its 50 percent of Sony BMG in 2008.

Last year, Mr. Wiesenthal led Sony's $2.2 billion deal to acquire EMI Music Publishing, through a complex consortium of investors that included David Geffen, the Jackson estate and ot hers. As a result of that deal, Sony is now the largest music publisher in the world, with control of more than two million songs.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is the editor-at-large of DealBook. Twitter: @andrewrsorkin

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

\'Charlie Rose\' Show Agrees to Pay Up to $250,000 to Settle Interns\' Lawsuit

Charlie Rose and his production company have agreed to pay as much as $250,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a former unpaid intern who claimed minimum wage violations.

Under the settlement, Mr. Rose and his production company, Charlie Rose Inc., will pay back wages to a potential class of 189 interns. The settlement calls for the interns to receive generally $1,100 each - $110 a week in back pay, up to a maximum of 10 weeks, the approximate length of a school semester.

The main plaintiff was Lucy Bickerton, who said she was not paid when she worked 25 hours a week for the “Charlie Rose” show from June through August 2007. Ms. Bickerton said her responsibilities at the show, which appears on PBS stations, included providing background research for Mr. Rose about interview guests, putting together press packets, escort ing guests through the studio and cleaning up the green room.

Ms. Bickerton in an interview described the settlement as “a really important moment for this movement against unpaid internships.”

This is the first settlement in a series of lawsuits brought by unpaid interns who asserted that they had suffered minimum wage violations. Other such lawsuits have been filed against the Hearst Corporation and Fox Entertainment - both companies deny that they failed to comply with wage and hour laws regarding their interns.

The settlement agreement states that Mr. Rose and his production company “do not admit any liability or wrongdoing” and says they agreed to the settlement “solely for the purpose of avoiding the costs and disruption of ongoing litigation and to settle all claims.”

The settlement also calls for $50,000 in attorney fees for Ms. Bickerton's lawyers.

Rachel Bien, a lawyer for Ms. Bickerton, said, “We are very pleased with this settlement, and hope that many former interns will come forward to claim the amounts they are due for their work.”

The agreement covers interns who worked for the Rose show between March 14, 2006 and Oct. 1, 2012. Under the agreement, individual interns will need to file a claim to be part of the settlement.

The 10-week maximum will not apply to those who interned for the show for more than one semester. The $110-a-week settlement payment is based on an average internship day of six hours and an average internship week of 2.5 days.

Ms. Bickerton's lawsuit was brought under New York State law, which allows plaintiffs to seek back wages going back six years, and not under federal law, which sets a three-year limit.

The lawsuit noted that unpaid internships have proliferated among many white-collar professions, including film, journalism, fashion and book publishing.

Workplace experts say hundreds of thousands of young Americans work as unpaid interns each year as they seek to gain experience and get a foothold in with highly desired employers in coveted industries. But some interns and labor advocates assert that many employers who use unpaid interns are violating federal and state laws by using them essentially to do the jobs of other workers and by not providing a true educational experience.

Ms. Bickerton's lawsuit asserted that according to the New York State Department of Labor, “an unpaid internship is only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not perform productive work and the employer derives no benefit.” The lawsuit cites guidance from the state Labor Department that says: “If an employer uses trainees as substitutes for regular workers or to augment its existing work force during specific times or in general, these interns would be tr eated as employees.”

Media Baubles: A Just-in-the-Click-of-Time Gift Guide

Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times Buying a gift subscription to a magazine like Lucky Peach can be done online, with the recipient notified before Christmas.

Andy Anderson Garden & Gun magazine, another possible gift from the world of media.

Not that long ago, someone h ere, we won't say who, came up with the bright idea of doing a media-centric gift guide. There was a fair amount of skepticism, but when the list was produced, it settled everything. Some of the best editorial minds in the hemisphere - well, actually, the dark overlords of the media kingdom at The New York Times - judged it to be ill-considered, dumb, awkwardly executed and full of log-rolling.

Other than that, they loved it.

So, Plan B. We're going to run a couple of suggestions that arrived in response to an e-mail query and hope that you, the group that the journalism professor Jay Rosen at New York University describes as the People Formerly Known as the Audience, will kick in with ideas in comments. There is actual value in the exercise. Media gifts convey intellectual heft and suggest that the both the recipient and the giver are living the life of the mind. And more important, whether said media is in digital or physical form, it can usually be ordered wit h a click of the finger and the gift can be conveyed via e-mail. That way, you can be thought of as thoughtful even though you aren't getting around to shopping until now.

There will be other suggestions today and tomorrow, but we thought we'd start with Clay Shirky, digital storyteller, New York University professor and sensei. Mr. Shirky suggests giving the gift of something that is ephemeral but precious: time.

Set up a Twitter account for someone who has a few subjects they follow passionately - biotech, cricket, fashion, whatever - then follow the people who tweet interesting things about the subject, and then subscribe your friend to the News.me feed of same. They'll end up with the best daily, curated e-mail on the subject anyone can deliver, without having the jump through the hoops you just did.

Great idea, with points for personalization.

Here at Decoder, we're also still interested in things that go plop on the nightstand or coffee table, specifically magazines of oddball beauty and splendor. There are those moments when we want our media to just sit still, quietly, in our lap, and not bark or bleep at us. To that end, you might think about giving Esopus. One guy, Tod Lippy, creates a printed artifact of hand-cut brilliance, a twice-a-year magazine full of mysteries found and conjured, with a CD full of music in each issue and visual features that can't really be explained but only stared at.

You might also want to think about Lucky Peach, a food magazine that treats eating as less of a sacrament than a full contact sport. It's full of brawny chef humor, food thrown against the wall to see what sticks, and a graphic approach that looks forged in some steampunk typography studio. The same goes for Garden & Gun, the so- called Soul of the South whose weaponized name and regional ambitions always seem to scale into something far more universal when it arrives every other month. And did you know that The Baffler is back from the dead? A quarterly journal edited by John Summers, and most notably with help from Thomas Frank and Chris Lehmann, it is a compendium of literary curveballs.

There, see how easy that is? Do the same in comments. Points for creativity, and points off, natch, for self-promotion. The business of media may be in a gulch, but there have never been more splendors - digital, printed, and apped - to pick from. Take a minute to share in comments what you will be looking to give or receive.

To post a suggestion click here.

The Breakfast Meeting: Hollywood Adapts to Gun Violence, and Senators Criticize \'Zero Dark Thirty\'

The massacre of first-grade students at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last week has prompted soul searching among Hollywood executives about the kind of fare they are producing, as well as the more practical question of which TV shows and movie screenings should proceed and which should be delayed, Brooks Barnes and Bill Carter write. In a sad reflection of the prevalence of gun-related violence in recent months, these executives have become expert at quickly assessing exactly how bloody - and potentially offensive - their shows and movies are. For example, USA network can perform a keyword search for “shooting,” “school” and “children” to check scripts of programs about to air.

Three prominent United States senators on Wednesday joined critics of the film “Zero Dark Thirty” over its depiction of C.I.A. interrogations in the ultimately successful hunt for Osama bin Laden, Scott Shane writes. In a letter to Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is releasing the film, the senators called the film “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location” of Bin Laden. The three - Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan; and John McCain, Republican of Arizona - called on Sony to “consider correcting the impression that the C.I.A.'s use of coercive interrogation techniques led to the operation” against Bin Laden, but they do not explain exactly how that could be done.

• The documentary “We Steal Secrets,” about Julia n Assange and the whistle-blower site Wikileaks, will debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and represents the beginning of a boomlet in Wikileaks related filmwork, Michael Cieply writes. The documentary is a collaboration between the producer Marc Shmuger, the former chairman of Universal Pictures, and the Oscar-winning director, Alex Gibney.
• Also in January, DreamWorks Studios and Participant Media plan to begin shooting a dramatic feature film to be directed by Bill Condon. HBO also has had plans for an Assange movie, and Mark Boal, the writer and a producer of “Zero Dark Thirty,” continues to work on a possible Assange drama based on a New York Times Magazine article, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest” by Bill Keller.

An investigation of the sexual abuse crisis within the British Broadcasting Corporation concluded on Wednesday that leadership hampered by “rigid management chains” left the organization “completely incapable” of dealing with the crisis, John F. Burns and Stephen Castle write. The report, written by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, criticized the decision to drop a segment that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a BBC fixture; but it said that confu sion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision. Also, the report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC and current president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation.

Jenni Rivera, the Mexican-American singer and television star who died in a plane crash in Mexico on Dec. 9, experienced a surge in sales, both in CDs and digital downloads, Ben Sisario writes. Taylor Swift remained atop the Billboard album for a fifth week with her al bum “Red” (Big Machine) recording 208,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The 64,000 albums reported on Wednesday represented a 10-fold increase; a compilation album released just two days after Ms. Rivera died, “La Misma Gran Señora” (Fonovisa), reached No. 38 on the overall Billboard album chart.

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