Jason Kilar, Head of Hulu, Is Moving On

Jason Kilar, the Web wizard who turned Hulu from a punchline into an extremely popular source of online video, said Friday that he would step down as the site's founding chief executive in the next three months.

Mr. Kilar gave no indication about why he was moving on, or about what he might do next. “My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I've ever made,” he said in an email message to employees. He said his departure would take effect sometime in the first quarter of the year, and that he would work with the board of the company “to manage this transition.”

Mr. Kilar was a top candidate last year for the Yahoo chief executive job, but Hulu said he declined to be considered. The job later went to Marissa Mayer, a veteran of Google. Mr. Kilar, a former executive at Amazon, has in the past been mentioned for any number of high-profile jobs in Silicon Valley.

New York Observer Hits Reset Again, Names Ken Kurson New Editor

It will come as something short of a surprise to those who follow the Manhattan media scene that The New York Observer has picked a new editor. After all, the newspaper has already had five editors in the seven years since Jared Kushner, a New York real estate developer, acquired the newspaper at the age of 25 in 2006. But the person who will fill those well-worn shoes? There's a bit of surprise in that choice.

Ken Kurson, who was named editor in chief of The New York Observer and editorial director of the Observer Media Group on Friday morning, has many of the familiar literary qualifications one might expect. He's been a contributing editor at Esquire magazine since 1997 and has written a column the re. He interned at Harper's magazine, started and sold a personal finance magazine, and has written four books.

Still, one of those books was “Leadership,” which he co-authored with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and one-time presidential hopeful. Mr. Kurson has had a long and close association with Mr. Giuliani, having worked at Giuliani Partners in 2002 after completing the book and then joining his campaign for president in 2008. That campaign ended far short of the nomination, and since then Mr. Kurson has worked at Jamestown Associates, a New Jersey political and communications firm, where he ran media operations for a number of Republican House and Senate candidates.

At The Observer, Mr. Kurson takes over from Aaron Gell, who has served as interim editor since Elizabeth Spiers resigned last August. (It was not immediately known whether Mr. Gell would stay on.) Mr. Kurson is a long-time friend of Mr. Kushner's and his father, Charles, the real estate developer with significant holdings in New Jersey.

Mr. Kurson said he has watched with acute interest as the younger Mr. Kushner searched for a durable business model for the storied salmon-colored weekly and its various Web sites, including Observer.com; Betabeat, focused on the New York technology scene; Very Short List, a listing of cultural offerings; and its Politicker sites in New York and New Jersey. (The company also owns a number of other niche real estate publications.)

As Mr. Kushner has churned through editors and financial losses, he has struggled to find a landing place for The New York Observer, which faces increased competition from a revitalized New York Magazine and an y number of Web sites that are staffed by young writers cracking wise and sometimes wisely about current events in New York.

“I took a company that was losing a lot of money and run as a hobby and turned it into a business,” Mr. Kushner said in a phone interview. “If you take a conventional approach in the media business, you are going to get slaughtered. It's true that I've broken some eggs along the way, but in the process I've preserved an important editorial voice, not just in New York but in the rest of the country.”

Mr. Kurson, 44, said in an interview that the timing was right for the move. “We had talked over the years about a role at the newspaper, and the timing seemed good,” he said, alluding to Mr. Kushner. “I am just coming out of an election cycle, and the city is headed into what will probably be the most interesting, complicated mayoral race since 1993.”

Given his close ties to Mr. Giuliani and the former mayor's keen interest in advancing the candidacy of Joseph J. Lhota, the former head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, some eyebrows are likely to be raised.

“People will think what they want,” he said. “I will have to earn their trust. I have had a long and honorable journalistic career, calling it like I see it and being a straight shooter.”

His appointment is another step in a remarkable evolution for the weekly newspaper, which was the center of a certain kind of upper Manhattan liberalism for many years. Now it is owned by a major real estate developer, who is married to Ivanka Trump no less, and will be led by a former Republican operative, albeit someone who has significant editorial credentials.

In a letter to The Observer staff, which was notified on Friday morning of Mr. Kurson's hiring, Mr. Kushner said: “Ken knows the ideas, stories a nd voices that make up New York better than anyone. He is a journalist and an author and through his years as a consultant observed the figures who create the framework of business, politics, media, tech, culture and real estate in our city.”

Mr. Kurson, who continued to write on and off for Esquire while he was working as a political consultant, has always been a little tough to pigeonhole. He created greenmagazine.com, a personal finance site, and Green magazine, both of which were acquired by Bankrate in 1999, but he also was the bass player in Green, a relatively successful indie rock band in Chicago, and performed with two other well-reviewed bands, Circles and the Lilacs.

While he will edit a newspaper and Web site that is of and about New York, he lives with his family in South Orange, N.J. And while many people sought to distance themselves from Charles Kushner after he pleaded guilty in 2005 to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making i llegal campaign donations and was sentenced to two years in prison, Mr. Kurson continued to remain a friend of both father and son.

“I've done a lot of different things, and I think my strongest suit is curiosity and an ability to project an enthusiasm about the stuff that I am interested in,” he said. “I've worked in media, I've worked in politics, and now I'm back in media full time. The Venn diagram intersect of all of those things is to working to engage and interest people.”

Andrew Sullivan on Going Back to Future as an Indie Blogger

On Wednesday, Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneers of the blogging Web, decided to end his relationship with The Daily Beast, and by the way, with advertising as well. His decision made quite a splash, in part because others wonder whether he is pointing a way forward at a time when advertising rates on the Web would not seem to support a gumball habit, let alone professionally produced content.

His site, The Dish, employs five people and two full time interns and he believes it can be supported by a meter model with payments of $20 a year from his fervent readers, an audience he built up over 12 years of mad, two-fingered typing. We headed down to the West Village to watch Mr. Sullivan eat some gluten-free risotto (don't ask) and talk with M r. Sullivan about Angry Birds, free riders, and his hopes and worries as a re-hatched indie blogger. (This interview has been edited and compressed.)

Decoder: So you and your partners all held hands and jumped off a cliff together?

Sullivan: Yes. I guess we just felt, “Why not?” and we also felt the logic of the last 12 years led inexorably to this.

Decoder: So before you came here, did you check the meter to see what kind of money people are sending you?.

Sullivan: I think we could be headed towards $400,00 by the end of the week.

Decoder: You're making money sitting here, right now.

Sullivan: We figured to make this work employing seven people for a year, we needed probably a budget of around $900,000, so we have raised a pretty good chunk of that, which is amazing. Many of the people who subscribed actually gave us more money than we aske d for.

Decoder: So what do you think they're saying? ” You're funny and smart, so I want to send you lots of money?”

Sullivan: I hope they're saying, “We want to be a part of this community and keep this community alive and we understand at some level we'd rather pay for that ”

Decoder: Do you think the economics of advertising on the Web are broken?

Sullivan: We had been through many different peaks and troughs of thought about this. I think advertising could provide us a non-trivial amount of money, but we felt that we'd rather have less money and have a very pure simple concept.

Decoder: You've been analogized to Louis CK, who went direct with his audience on his last comedy special, a Kickstarter campaign that enrolls interested parties for funding, and also The New York Times, which has a meter. So which is it?

Sullivan: I think basically we're a blend of Louis CK, Radiohead and The New York Times.

Decoder: Radioh ead? They put out their record, “In Rainbows” as a pay-what-you-want download, right? Do you have any keyboard skills that I should be aware of?

Sullivan: No.

Decoder: But you can type.

Sullivan: I never learned how to type properly. I grew up writing everything longhand.

Decoder: Well, you must have some significant digital skills.

Sullivan: Well, I'm good at Angry Birds. I'm in the top five percent globally. Me and half the youth population of South Korea are vying to get that final concrete block smashed.

Decoder: How are you doing on the new Star Wars version?

Sullivan: That's been tough. My husband is better, but he has an engineer's mind.

Decoder: That's what you tell yourself anyway. The decision to go back out on your own feels a little bit back to the future to me. I can remember when I was working in Washington 12 years ago and this big time writer-editor - that would be you - turned into this crazy man bl ogger guy. I thought you had lost your mind and I wondered how you would make a living.

Sullivan: I did a couple of pledge drives and then I changed my mind on the Iraq war between the first and second pledge drive. All these fire-breathing right wingers just stopped paying for me so it collapsed.

Decoder: That's what you get for changing your mind.

Sullivan: Becoming your own thing is really what I did 12 years ago and everybody around me was like â€" what's a blog? â€" and I enjoyed that. I love having a direct relationship with my audience, but now their not going to be able to read the whole Dish unless they pay me some money.

Decoder: So the free and open Web is an illusion?

Sullivan: No. The answer is not paid or free, the answer is this messy, leaky mix, with some people paying who read it a lot and others not paying anything at all.

Decoder: So if I sign up, I'm paying for all the free riders?

Sullivan: Yes. We are ju st being honest about that. If people really wanted to, they could spend a lot of time getting around the wall, so it is not so firm a meter.

Decoder: A year from now will be a nervous moment when you start looking at renewals. Maybe some people just wanted to date you, but didn't really want to marry you.

Sullivan: And that's O.K. If we weren't meant to be married, then that's fine. I'm perfectly prepared for this not to work. Our basic principle is we're simply journalism going directly to a reader with nobody - no newsstand, no proprietor, nothing - in between. That is an honest free-market journalism, with journalists offering their wares on the street.

Decoder: You make it sound so tawdry.

Sullivan: There's nothing tawdry about offering your wares on the street. It's how magazines and newspapers started. It is a model where the people decide and no one is in charge of the velvet rope deciding who gets to write or who gets the big writing contract or not. In some ways we're breaking up cartels and creating a true kind of journalistic capitalism. Those sites that readers really want to stay in existence will have to earn that.

Decoder: Journalism has always survived on various subsidies: rich people, legal notices or advertising that might or might not produce the desired result.

Sullivan: Well, it's about time journalism got over it and started earning a living like everybody else.

Decoder: I'm fine with Darwinism until …

Sullivan: You get eaten.

Decoder: True that. Now you're trying to own a piece of the Web, but in reading your site over the years and seeing the amount of work that you post, the Web sort of owns you.

Sullivan: Of course it does, but you let go after a while. It's not writing so much as being a kind of DJ of everything that is out there. I wrote a very serious academic book called “Virtually Normal” and if you are lucky, you sell 20,000 copie s. I reach a quarter of a million people a day on The Dish, so you ask yourself, ‘what's being a writer about?'

And after a while, you realize that all these layers between the writer or the creator and his or her audience are also a fee on the creator. Why can't we get rid of that?

Decoder: Um, because you're a writer and you probably don't know how to count and don't know anything about business.

Sullivan: Well, we don't and that's going to be a big problem. But we think that if we do it openly in front of our readership, if we screw up, they'll help us.

Decoder: Has someone who is smart about the Web told you they are really excited about what you are doing?

Sullivan: Barry Diller. [He owns The Beast and had been paying for Mr. Sullivan and his team.] When I told him I wanted to go independent, he said, “Good for you, go for it.”

Decoder: That might have something to do with the fact that you won't have your hand in his pocket anymore. Now you are your own patron.

Sullivan: In the end we have to be. There's no sugar daddies anymore.

Breakfast Meeting: Victories for Gore and Google, but Not Barnes & Noble

Al Gore used his considerable lobbying and negotiating skills when he started Current TV in 2005, and he used them again last month in arranging the sale of the channel to Al Jazeera, Brian Stelter reports on Friday in The New York Times. He used persuasive legal arguments with cable and satellite providers to convince them that Al Jazeera, like Current, offered news content and that they were obligated to carry the new channel run by the Middle Eastern news organization. In the process, Mr. Gore, already estimated to be worth about $100 million, assured himself some $100 million more from the sale.

Google scored a major victory on Thursday when the Federal Trade Commission ruled that it had not violated antitrust statutes, Edward Wyatt reports. The commission had been looking into whether Google's search results were arranged in a way that favored its own services - a complaint from competitors who feared that the Internet giant was abusing what amounted to a monopolistic position.

Barnes & Noble delivered more sobering news on Thursday, releasing holiday sales figures that were sharply down from the same period a year earlier. Leslie Kaufman writes in The Times that the figures for the company's Nook division were especially disappointing and showed how difficult it will be for the bookseller to shift to a digitally oriented business strategy.

Were the G.O.P. Votes Against Boehner a Historic Rejection?

The holiday season hasn't been kind to House Speaker John A. Boehner. He was sharply criticized by fellow Republicans for failing to pass legislation providing aid to those affected by Hurricane Sandy. Earlier, he was sidelined in the negotiations to resolve the so-called fiscal cliff. And before that, he failed to garner enough support from his own caucus for “Plan B,” Mr. Boehner's own bill to avert the fiscal crisis.

The new year has not started out entirely smoothly for Mr. Boehner, either. He was re-elected as speaker of the House on Thursday, but much of the media's coverage of the vote focused on the number of Republicans who chose not to vote for Mr. Boehner. The headline at Slate read: “Boehner Wins New Term as Speaker, in Maximally Humiliating Fashion.”

But Mr. Boehner received 220 votes out of 232 Republicans in the House, not counting Mr. Boehner himself. (The prospective speaker traditionally does not vote, or votes “present,” although former Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted for herself in the 110th and 111th Congress). Mr . Boehner received the votes of 95 percent of his caucus. Is that really that humiliating?

Judged against recent history, at least, the answer is yes. Mr. Boehner's 95 percent support level might not seem that terrible, but the vote for speaker has historically been a fait accompli. The 12 defections Mr. Boehner suffered are more than in any other speaker's election in over two decades. Our database shows all votes for speaker since 1991 and Mr. Boehner is just the third speaker since then to face more than one defection. And since the 102nd Congress was sworn at the beginning of 1991, no representative elected speaker has received a smaller share of his or her party's vote.

The most recent speaker with more than one defection was former Representative J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois. When Mr. Hastert was voted into his fourth term as speaker, in 2005, five Republicans abstained from casting a ballot.

But the closest parallel to Thursday's vote came at the start of the 105th Congress, in 1997. Newt Gingrich was re-elected speaker with 96 percent of his party's support, with nine Republican defections. Mr. Gingrich's re-election as speaker that year followed a failed attempt to oust him. According to some reports, the failed coup involved Mr. Boehner, then the Republican conference chairman. Mr. Boehner voted for Mr. Gingrich in the end.

The most rebellious vote in recent years actually came on the minority side. At the start of the 112th Congress, just after Democrats had been shellacked in the 2010 midterm elections, 18 Democ rats did not to vote for Ms. Pelosi.

It is unclear how much Thursday's vote will mean for the rest of Mr. Boehner's term as speaker. He may yet win over reluctant members of his conference. But recent history doesn't bode well for him.

Mr. Hastert, the other recent speaker to suffer more than one defection, chose not to seek a leadership post or re-election after Republicans lost their House majority in the 2006 midterm elections.

Mr. Gingrich's tepid re-election as speaker at the start of 1997 presaged a total collapse in his backing and - following the G.O.P.'s subpar performance in the 1998 midterm elections - his res ignation as speaker.

Top Commercial for 2012 Was Really \'Big,\' Ace Metrix Says

The commercial that received the highest average score last year from viewers of national television ads in a closely followed survey was not a glitzy Super Bowl spot or an emotional Olympics spot. Nor was it a commercial that was sexy, snarky or stuffed with celebrities.

Rather, the commercial, for a French-door refrigerator from Samsung with 31.6 cubic feet of space, was straightforward, something in the show-and-tell vein. The spot offered a lighthearted demonstration of the capacity of the fridge by showing a family coming home from a shopping trip and filling it up bucket-brigade style, by tossing oversize packages of food from kid to Dad to kid to kid to Mom.

“It's big,” an announcer says at the end of the commercial as the song “Big Time” plays on the soundtrack. “For your big life.” The commercial was created by Leo Burnett in Chicago, part of the Publicis Groupe.

In the survey, conducted by Ace Metrix, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., the Samsung refrigerator commercial received an Ace score of 697. That was the highest score for any of the almost 6,000 commercials that Ace Metrix evaluated last year, the company says.

Coincidentally, the No. 2 commercial, with an Ace score of 691, was from another appliance brand, Frigidaire, promoting a new oven and a new dishwasher.

Hmmmm. Maybe a lot of people were interested in updating their kitchens in 2012.

The scores, according to Ace Metrix, measure the creative effectiveness of commercials based on criteria like persuasion, attention and watchability.

Samsung had three commercials on the list of the top 20 ads with the highest average Ace scores, which Ace Metrix calls its Top Ads of the Year. The other two spots were for the Samsung Galaxy Note tablet; one finished third and the other was tied for ninth with a spot for Outback Steakhouse and a spot for the Apple iPhone 5.

Apple was the only other marketer in addition to Samsung to have more than one commercial in the top 20. Apple had two spots, both for the iPhone 5.

In addition to compiling the list of Top Ads of the Year, Ace Metrix, which is minority-owned by WPP, also compiles a list of spots in 15 categories, called Brand of the Year, reflecting the highest average Ace scores for a body of work in a calendar year.

Among the category leaders were: Infiniti and Cadillac, tied in the category of luxury automotive; Ford, nonluxury automotive; Blue Moon beer, alcoholic beverages; Ocean Spray, nonalcoholic beverages; M&M's, candies and snacks; Visa, financial services; Kraft dairy products, packaged foods; Pizza Hut, quick-service restaurants; Olive Garden, restaurants; Best Buy, retail; and Samsung, technology.

The results from Ace Metrix for 2012 were similar to what the company foun d in 2011, when, according to the AdFreak blog published by Adweek, the list of leading commercials was “full of the kind of hardworking, unglamorous ads that make snobby creatives squirm.”