Barnes & Noble Warns of Lower Revenues

More bad news from Barnes & Noble Inc.

The nation’s largest brick-and-mortar book retailer is warning that it will not meet expectations for another quarter.

The company said late Wednesday that it will report results for the third quarter of the 2013 fiscal year before the market opens on Feb. 28, and that the news will not be good â€" particularly for the Nook digital unit.

“Based on current forecasts,” the company wrote in a warning statement, “the company now expects its fiscal year 2013 Nook segment Ebitda loss to be greater than it was in fiscal 2012 and expects fiscal year 2013 Nook Media revenues to be less than $3 billion.”

(The Nook unit includes e-readers, tablets, digital content and accessories. Ebitda refers to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.)

Last year, Barnes & Noble signaled its commitment to a digital future led by Nook by investing heavily in a tablet to compete with products from Google, Apple and Amazon.com.

Manhunt and Obama\'s Address Bolster CNN\'s Ratings

Perhaps aided by its live coverage of the manhunt in California, CNN had a good night Tuesday covering the State of the Union address as well.

Over all, in terms of total viewers, the ratings for the speech were down on most of the networks that carried it. CNN’s, however, were up sharply, gaining 36 percent over the audience that viewed the speech a year ago.

More significantly, CNN was the easy winner among the three cable news networks in reaching viewers in the category that generates the most ad sales for news programming: viewers between the ages of 25 and 54.

CNN was just slightly behind the usual ratings cable news leader, Fox News, in total viewers for the hour of the speech, with 3.635 million, up from 2.670 million in 2012. Fox News had 3.683 million, down 3 percent from 3.812 million; MSNBC averaged 3.034 million, up 8 percent from 2.815 million.

But in the 25-to-54 group, Fox News fell to third place with 957,000 viewers. CNN had big edge with 1.436 million in that category. MSNBC had 1.028 million.

CNN generally does especially well during breaking news stories, and the speech followed closely the coverage of the police shootout with the fugitive Christopher Dorner in the snowy forest near Big Bear Lake in California.

CNN actually continued its coverage of the Dorner situation on the HLN channel during the speech, and directed viewers there for continuing coverage.

The events in California were not covered live all evening by the broadcast networks, and all of them posted sharp declines in viewership from the State of the Union a year ago.

NBC edged CBS in terms of total viewers with 6.469 million (down 22 percent from last year), to 6.4 million for CBS (down 12 percent), and 5.494 million for ABC (down 17 percent.)

Indian Music Service, Taking Page From Spotify, Goes Pro

Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.

But just as interesting, and in the long run perhaps as significant to competition, is the rise of services that serve regional markets intensely. One is Saavn, a Spotify-like streaming service that specializes in Indian music, and has garnered 10.5 million monthly users with advertising-supported free listening. This week it will announce that it has taken another page from Spotify’s book, by offering a premium version at $4 a month that eliminates the ads, lets users listen to songs offline andwill eventually add other features like higher quality audio.

Saavn, which has offices in New York, India and Mountain View, Calif., has a catalog of 1.1 million songs in nine languages and is available in more than 200 countries, with about 70 percent of its consumption within India, said Rishi Malhotra, one of its founders. Like Spotify, iHeartRadio and other Western services, it is an official partner of Facebook. About 80 percent of its use is on mobile devices, Mr. Malhotra said, and when the premium service, Saavn Pro, is opened in March, it will at first be available only for Apple devices.

The pricing is significantly lower than Western services. “We wanted to make it globally acceptable,” said Mr. Malhotra, who is based in New York. “The $10 price point that you see from a lot of music services we use here is way out of reach from what would fly in India or a lot of other emerging markets.”

Saavn believes it can succeed in India n! ot only through its catalog of Bollywood hits, but through technological touches that may be meaningful only to Indian listeners. One example is the ability to search for a Bollywood song based on the actor who lip-synchs it â€" often more memorable to fans than the “playback” singer who actually provided the voice.

If successful, Saavn Pro could give the company an advantage in India’s quickly developing digital music market, which already has a handful of streaming services, like Dhingana, as well as a strong presence in downloads from Nokia. Yet that market is still tiny for a country of India’s size and overall media spending. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, recorded music had only $141 million in trade (or wholesale) value in 2011. A recent report by Ernst & Young said that music and radio combined count for only 2.4 percent of India’s media and entertainment spending, which for 2011 it estimated at $18 billion.

Part of the reason for music’s small proportion of India’s media economy is that popular music in India is dominated by the film industry. But a greater reason is piracy; the federation estimates that 55 percent of Internet users in India go to unlicensed music services on a monthly basis. That is slowly starting to change, music executives say, as courts there crack down on infringement and legitimate digital services proliferate. Apple’s iTunes opened there in December, and Nokia says it sells 1.4 million songs a day at its download store in India.

And Indian record companies are approaching digital business without the baggage that has been complicating deals with Western labels and services for more than a decade, Mr. Malhotra added.

“The labels! in India! are not reluctant about digital,” he said. “It’s not like they are protecting against some established, older revenue stream. It’s all found revenue for them.”

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

Time Warner in Talks to Sell Off Majority of Magazines

Time Warner, the $49 billion media conglomerate built on the foundation of the printed word, is in early talks to sell its publishing division Time Inc., shedding itself of the vast majority of its magazines, according to two people briefed on the discussions who could not comment publicly on preliminary and private conversations.

The deal being discussed would allow Time Warner to hang onto three flagship magazines, Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, while selling the majority of its portfolio, including magazines like Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly, Cooking Light and InStyle. The titles, which amount to essentially a women’s magazine company, led bankers and analysts to speculate that the buyer would be the Meredith Corporation, based in Des Moines, Iowa, and the publisher of such titles as Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. Jack Griffin, a former chief executive at Meredith, served a brief and stormy reign as chief of Time Inc. before Laura Lang took over in January.A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment. News of the talks was first reported by Fortune, a magazine owned by Time Inc.

The talks come weeks after Time Inc. announced it would lay off 6 percent of its global work force of more than 8,000 employees during an industrywide decline in subscription and advertising revenue. Overall revenue at Time Inc. has declined roughly 30 percent in the last five years.

Time Warner’s history is rooted in Time, the weekly news  magazine founded by Henry Luce in 1923 on which the giant media conglomerate got its start. But lately the publishing company’s sluggish performance has stood in sharp contrast to the strong performance at Time Warner’s cable channels like HBO, TBS and TNT.

In the last several years, the company has tried to trim some assets unrelated to the television and movie production business. That included shedding AOL, Time Warner Cable, the Warner Music Group and the Time Warner Book Group.

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief e! xecutive of Time Warner, has denied reports that he would sell Time Inc. He frequently talks about the division’s strongest brands essentially as cable television channels and has aggressively mandated that Time Inc. make its magazines available on digital devices.

“They’re printing pages right now, but they’re also on electronic screens with moving pictures,” Mr. Bewkes said in a previous interview. He added that “a cable channel like TNT or TBS” is “pretty much the same as what People or Time or InStyle should do.”

The company’s exploration of a deal that would allow it to keep male-oriented titles like Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune would let it maintain its name and historical roots.

“Time’s name is on the door. I think Jeff feels it would be better to hang onto it and not sell it for what would be a low price,” said a person briefed on Mr. Bewkes’s thinking who could not discuss private conversations on the record.

Ms. Lang, previously the chiefexecutive of the digital advertising company Digitas, stepped in at a tumultuous time after Mr. Griffin was forced out after less than six months on the job. She hired Bain & Company, a consultancy based in Boston, to assess the business.

Many of  Time Inc.’s magazine titles have been struggling as more readers have been reading material online, and newsstand sales have dropped. Even titles like People, which long helped financially bolster Time Inc.’s less lucrative titles, has suffered. People’s newsstand sales declined 12.2 percent in the second half of 2012 compared to the year before, according to figures released last week by the Alliance for Audited Media. Its advertising pages dropped by 6 percent in 2012 compared to the year before, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Last month, Ms. Lang said she was cutting staff 6 percent, or about 480 people. Magazines like Time and People asked employees to take buyouts and said they would lay people off if they did not me! et those ! numbers. Wednesday is the last day for employees to raise their hands for buyouts.

On a conference call with analysts last week, John K. Martin, chief financial and administration officer at Time Warner, said that “very challenging industry conditions weighed” on the company’s results.

The talks come as News Corporation prepares to sever its publishing assets, including newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, from its more lucrative entertainment division, which includes the cable channels FX and Fox News. The separation is expected to be complete this summer.

Christine Haughney and David Carr contributed reporting.

Scott Brown Becomes a Fox News Contributor

Fox News on Wednesday added the former Republican Senator, Scott Brown, to its contributor ranks, two weeks after Mr. Brown decided against another run for a Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Mr. Brown will make his debut as a paid pundit on Wednesday night’s edition of “Hannity,” the channel’s 9 p.m. program. “I am looking forward to commenting on the issues of the day and challenging our elected officials to put our country’s needs first instead of their own partisan interests,” Mr. Brown said in a statement.

Politico reported last week that Mr. Brown was in talks with the network. His hiring is the latest in a series of contributor changes Fox has made this winter; ast month the network renewed Karl Rove’s contract and parted ways with Sarah Palin and earlier this month it declined to renew Dick Morris’s contract.

Mr. Brown became something of a hero to Republicans in 2010 when he won a special election for the seat formerly held by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby becoming the first Republican Senator to represent Massachusetts since 1972. But his time in the Senate was brief: he lost to a Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, last November.

Another Senate seat in the state opened up when John Kerry was nominated to be Secretary of State, but on Feb. 1 Mr. Brown said he would not seek that seat.

He could instead seek the Massachusetts governorship in 2014, but for now he’ll appear pretty much exclusivel! y on Fox, a powerful platform for anyone in the Republican party.

It’s not exactly a parallel, but on Tuesday, Fox’s competitor on the left, MSNBC, added a contributor to its ranks as well: Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary and a close confidant of President Obama’s. Mr. Gibbs will be a paid pundit for both MSNBC and its parent network NBC.

After Cameo, Poland Spring Uncaps a Response

The phenomenon of brands reacting in real time in social media is fascinating to watch as it changes in real time.

At the moment, it seems there is growing expectation that if a product is involved in a moment in the public eye, it ought to react immediately in social media like Facebook or Twitter. But not just any reaction: it seems that the response needs to be self-deprecating and not too self-absorbed, striking a balance between silly and pompous and, above all, deemed to be timely.

When Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, reached for a bottle of Poland Spring water on Tuesday night during the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address,  social media exploded with mentions of the brand.

Many of those exclamations were humorous, but they soon took an increulous tone when it became apparent that Poland Spring was not commenting in social media on its surprise role in the Rubio response.

In fact, an examination of the Poland Spring Twitter feed indicates that there has not been a post since July 2010.

Poland Spring â€" which is sold by the Nestle Waters North America division of Nestle â€" finally offered a comment in social media on Wednesday morning, with a post on its Facebook page.  The post was accompanied by a photograph of a bottle of Poland Spring in front of the kind of mirror a star would use in his or her dressing room.

“Reflecting on our cameo,” the post read. “What a night!”

By early Wednesday afternoon, the post had drawn more than 300 “likes” and 120 ! “shares.” There were also comments, which ranged from light-hearted (“Congratulations on your prime-time photobomb! Stay thirsty my friends …”) to critical (“The reflection is wrong. Who put this image together”).

Poland Spring also provided a statement to CNBC, which CNBC shared on its Twitter feed:  “We’re glad Poland Spring was close at hand for Sen. Rubio last night at his moment of need for refreshment.”

Executive Steeped in Print Joins Online Ad Venture

A former senior manager at a print industry leader is becoming the chief executive of a company that specializes in one of the most popular trends in online advertising.

Steve Sachs, who held several top posts at the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner until he left almost a year ago,  is joining OneSpot, a start-up based in Austin, Tex.,  as chief executive. Matt Cohen, the founder of OneSpot who had been chief executive, is becoming president.

When Mr. Sachs left Time Inc., he was executive vice president for consumer marketing and sales. His duties included helping to adapt the company’s magazines for devices like tablets and e-readers. Before that, he led Time Inc. magazines that included Cooking Light, Real Simple and Southern Living.

OneSpot works for blue-chip marketers like Dell, Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, Spectrum Brands and Unilever. The company specializes in wht is called content advertising, native advertising or branded content. On online platforms, it offers alternatives to banner ads, which have been losing their potency as an advertising medium because of rapidly declining consumer engagement - that is, falling click-through rates.

What OneSpot does is create, in real time, online ad units that use material like articles, blog posts, white papers, video clips and comments in social media. The automated ads appear in place of banner ads on the marketer’s own Web sites as well as on Web sites that are part of online ad networks.

OneSpot also optimizes the ads in ways that include testing different versions as well as sequencing ads that vary in approach depending on the sites on which they appear.

Content advertising works so well, Mr. Sachs said, because “consumers would much rather click on content than advertising.”

As a result, he added, click-through rates can be “two times to 50 t! imes higher” than banner ads.

A pitfall with content advertising or native advertising is that it can blur the line between editorial content and paid advertising because the goal is for the ad to be perceived by the reader as content, or like content.

“There is no doubt” that is an issue, Mr. Sachs said, adding that in his previous job at Time Inc. there would frequently be questions about the advertising sections styled to look like articles that are known as advertorials.

Advertorials are “thinly disguised advertising,” Mr. Sachs said, whereas content advertising “is not that” because it is “high in value.”

Mr. Sachs, who is 47, said that after leaving Time Inc. in March 2012, he and his family moved to Austin over the summer and he “took a few months off to recharge” before starting to “look at opportunities in technology and marketing and content.”

OneSpot began offering previews to potential clients in March 2012. The company recently received $15 million in funding from RSL Venture Partners and 500 Startups.

The Breakfast Meeting: Comcast Buys Rest of NBCUniversal, and Sites That Appeal to Book Lovers

Comcast agreed to pay General Electric $16.7 billion to acquire their remaining 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal on Tuesday, Amy Chozick and Brian Stelter write. Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chief executive, said that the acquisition was a necessary step given the rapidly changing television business and the necessity of owning content. Comcast bought a 51 percent share in NBCUniversal in early 2011, with the option of buying the rest of the company over the next seven years; the process was accelerated at least in part by a clash in corporate cultures between G.E. and Comcast. The deal will also include 30 Rockefeller Center and the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for about $1.4 billion. Naming rights are included in the deal, so the red G.E. sign atop 30 Rockefeller Center could be replaced with a Comcast logo.

Web sites devoted to reviewing and recommending books ave begun to fill the void left by disappearing bookstores, inconsistent book clubs and potentially suspect reviews on retail sites like Amazon.com. The largest of these sites is Goodreads.com, a social media site devoted to finding and sharing titles that has 15 million members and is exploding in popularity, Leslie Kaufman writes. The theory behind Goodreads and two smaller competitors, Shelfari and LibraryThing, is that people will put more faith in recommendations from a network they construct themselves. Publishers like HarperCollins now consider Goodreads a necessary part of promotion, and U! SA Today features Goodreads reviews on its Web site.

Streaming digital music service Slacker takes aim at much larger competitor Pandora in an online-only ad meant to highlight the differences between their approaches, Ben Sisario explains. The spot features two women in a coffee shop, one of whom opens a blue box bearing Pandora’s “P” logo, unleashing a particularly annoying song on all within earshot. “It plays that over and over again,” one of the women says to her friend, who blames Pandora’s small music library. The commercial points out that Slacker has 10 times as many songs as Pandora. The campaign will also include display ads on sites like CollegeHumor.com that point out the site’s human element, like playlists created by music experts and stations featuring D.J.’s. The ads points to the difficulty in building a following as a digital music service, which often hppens by word of mouth; despite its many features Slacker only has four million monthly users to Pandora’s 65 million.

Jonah Lehrer, the journalist who was fired from The New Yorker for plagiarizing published blog posts and fabricating quotes, was paid a $20,000 honorarium to appear at a journalism conference in Miami on Tuesday sponsored by the Knight Foundation. Mr. Lehrer began with a firm mea culpa, but then tended to describe his troubles as “errors” and “mistakes” rather than deception and lies, Jennifer Schuessler writes on ArtsBeat. Mr. Lehrer vowed to implement “Standard operating procedures” that, he acknowledged, most journalists already follow, if he is ever lucky enough to write again. Dylan Byers also addressed Mr. Lehrer’s talk on Politico.

T! he Oscars! and host Seth MacFarlane are poised to help one another, Michael Cieply explains in The Carpetbagger. Henry Schafer, executive vice president for the Q Scores Company, which rates celebrity appeal among consumers, said that a new Q Score for Mr. MacFarlane was surprisingly high. Though Mr. MacFarlane is mainly known as a television writer and producer, jobs that generally lack the caché of a famous actor, he was ranked as comparable to Sally Field and Matt Damon.