Joel I. Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s schools, will introduce News Corporation’s Amplify, the company’s fledgling education division coupled with a new tablet of the same name, at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Tex., on Wednesday, Amy Chozick reports. The tablet, a 10-inch Android made by Asus, will run Amplify’s curriculum and provide storage for students’ data. It couples a touch screen with education-specific features, like an “eyes on teacher†warning when attention wanders and quizzes that use sad and smiley emoticons so teachers can ascertain whether students grasp new material. It will also have education-based games for students when they’re not in class, including one in which Tom Sawyer battles the Brontë sisters.
Upfronts, the efforts by media companies to woo advertisers, earned that name because they have traditionally taken place before te fall television season, usually in mid-May. But a proliferation of new, hungry media outlets eager to book new deals has led major players like Google, NBCUniversal, Time Warner and Viacom to front-run the upfronts, Stuart Elliott writes. So far this winter channels like Nickelodeon, Oxygen and Style have held events, and on Tuesday the Gannett Company, CMT and Fox Sports Media Group held events. “Every single day of the year, you can be at an upfront, an ‘infront’ or a ‘newfront,’ †said Wenda Harris Millard, president at MediaLink.
Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the National Security Council, and Jon Favreau, an ex-speechwriter for President Obama, have enthusiastically taken to Twitter after leaving their White House gigs, Mark Landler writes. Each has adopted an open, somewhat irreverent persona they could not take under White House strictures (Mr. Vietor’s Twitter avatar is a photo of himself draped in American flag shorts, shirt and gloves, clutching what appears to be a beer bottle in front of an American flag), and won a good number of followers in the process. Their presence on Twitter allows them to continue supporting President Obama and attacking his critics in an unconventional way, promoting themselves in the process.
Jon Stewart, comedian and host of “The Daily Show,†Comedy Central’s pre-eminent fake news program, is taking a 12-week hiatus to direct a dramatic film to be called “Rosewater,†Brooks Barnes reports. Mr. Stewart adapted the screenplay from the book “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival,†by Maziar Baari and Aimee Molloy. Mr. Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist, was imprisoned for four months in Tehran in 2009, and a comedy segment on “The Daily Show†was used as evidence against him. John Oliver, the show’s “senior British correspondent,†will be the host in Mr. Stewart’s stead.
Marissa Mayer’s announcement last week that she was abolishing Yahoo’s work-at-home policy may have stirred a national debate, but many current and former employees think it was a necessary move, Claire Caine Miller and Nicole Perlroth write. Ms. Mayer, the company’s new chief executive, was not penalizing employees who had to stay home with a sick child, the article says, but was seeking to rein in around 200 workers who worked at home, did little for the company and collected Yahoo paycheck, sometimes while founding start-ups of their own. The move, like providing free foo! d in Yaho! o’s cafeteria, was intended to foster workplace innovation, communication and morale at Yahoo. Another struggling company known for permissive workplace policies, Best Buy, announced on Monday that it would adopt similar rules.
The evaporating number of viewers watching broadcast TV has led to a boom of pilot programs ordered up by the big networks, nearly 100 expected for this fall. They are being cast and shot at a furious pace so that schedules can be announced in May, and a great many of them will be seen by nobody but the people who make them and the programmers who reject them. Mike Hale looks at some of the more promising pitches.
