NBCUniversal Tells Madison Avenue Another Story From Curve Films

A nontraditional effort to reach out to advertising and media agencies in new ways is embarking on its second chapter.

The effort, called Curve Films, was introduced in April by the integrated media group unit of NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast.

The goal of Curve Films - the name is meant to evoke “ahead of the curve” - is to find more interesting and engaging methods by which to provide Madison Avenue with demographic data that would, in the end, lead to decisions to buy commercial time and advertising space on NBCUniversal networks, channels, Web sites and related properties.

The first initiative from Curve Films was composed of a book on trends in consumer culture, “The Curve,” and a film, “Y Now,” about the so-called millennials,or Generation Y. Next up is a second film, which is being released on Thursday, titled “The Indie Women,” about women in their late 20s and older who are independent - on their own, not married or living with a significant other and without children.

There are more than 30 million American women who fit that description, said Linda Yaccarino, president for advertising sales at NBCUniversal, and they “overindex in the consumption of certain products: fashion, travel, household products, health and nutrition.”

Of course, NBCUniversal offers advertisers properties that can reach “indie women,” among them the Bravo cable channel, “Chelsea Lately” on the E! cable channel and the Daily Candy Web site.

Among those who are interviewed during “The Indie Women” are some familiar faces from NBCUniversal, including Megan Hilty, a star of the NBC series “Smash,” and Alex Wagner, the host o! f “Now With Alex Wagner” on MSNBC.

Others who appear in the film include Kate Bolick, who wrote an article for The Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies”;  Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University;  and Claudia Cahill, chief content officer at OMD, a leading media agency that is part of the Omnicom Group.

“You can thank my agent and managers for that,” Ms. Cahill said of her appearance, laughing.

The demographic group of independent women is an appealing one to many advertisers, Ms. Cahill said, and she praised “The Indie Women” for being able to “stitch together a nice, compelling story, something that a lot of advertisers will want to know more about.”

The film, which runs eight minutes, is being sent by e-mail to about 5,000 people who make media decisions at agencies and clientcompanies, said John Shea, chief marketing officer and executive vice president at the NBCUniversal integrated media group.

Those e-mails will be followed up, Ms. Yaccarino said, “with a lot of one-on-one meetings to discuss activating” - that is, turning potential interest in the demographic group of independent women into ad buys.

For Music Industry, a Story of Two Googles

When it comes to the music industry, there are two Googles. And the difference between them leads to a complicated and fraught relationship.

One Google is represented by its suite of entertainment media services like YouTube and Google Play, which have licensing agreements with the major labels and music publishers, along with movie studios and other media companies. That side is slowly becoming integrated into the fabric of the entertainment industry, through deals like the one announced by Billboard magazine this week that it would start incorporating YouTube play counts into its chart formulas.

The other side of Google is its mighty search engine, the road map to the Internet, which people use to find content of all kinds â€" some of it preferred by the entertainment industry, but a great deal of it not. This is the side of Google that has the most frequent and public fights with he entertainment industry (though, to be sure, media companies have had no shortage of conflict with YouTube over the years).

The latest incarnation of Big Media vs. Google search is a report issued on Thursday by the Recording Industry Association of America, or R.I.A.A., accusing Google of failing to make good on its own promises to punish pirate Web sites. In August, Google said it would take into account notices of copyright violation â€" of which the music industry files thousands each week â€" in determining a site’s search rank. The implication was that infringing sites would fall into obscurity and consumers would â€! œfind legitimate, quality sources of content more easily,” as Amit Singhal, a senior Google executive, wrote in a company blog post at the time.

But the recording industry association, which is controlled by the major record companies, said that after testing Google’s searches, it still found plenty of infringing sites. “Six months later, we have found no evidence that Google’s policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy,” the report said.

At one point in the 15-page report, for example, the R.I.A.A. says that for many popular music searches, sites for which Google had received more than 1,000 copyright complaints were “almost eight times more likely to appear in the top 10 search results than a well-known, authorized music download site.” The report also shows, however, that sites for which Google has received moe than 10,000 copyright removal requests appear less frequently than those which have received more than 1,000.

In response to the report, a Google spokesman said in a statement: “We have invested heavily in copyright tools for content owners and process takedown notices faster than ever. In the last month we received more than 14 million copyright removal requests for Google Search, quickly removing more than 97 percent from search results. In addition, Google’s growing partnerships and distribution deals with the content industry benefit both creators and users, and generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the industry each year.”

The second part of that statement is where the two sides of Google collide, at least as far as the music industry is concerned. At the same time that the record labels are accusing Google of failing to deal with piracy, Google is also eagerly pursuing licensing deals to use and sell the labels’ music. Those deals frequently need to be updated to ke! ep up wit! h industry trends, an area in which Google has lagged behind competitors. It introduced a download store only in 2011, for example, and a licensed “locker” service â€" a way to store music and other files online â€" late last year, well after Apple and Amazon had done the same.

There are many reasons why licensing negotiations between technology and media companies take a long time â€" just ask Spotify, which took nearly two years to enter the American market. But as long as the search side of Google causes friction with the music industry, its other side â€" the one that is trying to compete with Apple, Amazon and every other digital music service out there â€" will face some rough patches.

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

How Brill’s Health-Care Opus Jumped From The New Republic to Time

As Time Magazine’s 36-page cover story “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us” started to attract a storm of attention online and on television on Thursday, so did the story about how the article’s author Steven Brill came to write it for Time magazine.

In recent weeks, it was well-known in journalism circles that Mr. Brill’s comprehensive look at the health care industry was scheduled to be the cover story for the relaunch of The New Republic on Jan. 28th. Mr. Brill who has been reporting the story since June said he had agreed to work with The New Republic because he said he was promised by The New Republic’s new owner Chris Hughes that he would invest a lot in promoting that issue and ultimately Mr. Brill’s story.

“When I realized all the good stuff I had, I said ‘Listen this piece is going to be a big deal,’” said Mr. Brill about his cnversations with Mr. Hughes about publishing the article. “Chris Hughes said ‘It’s absolutely going to be the cover. We’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.”

But when Mr. Brill learned that his story was going to be bumped to The New Republic’s second issue because Mr. Hughes had landed an interview with President Obama, Mr. Brill pitched the article within hours to four other magazines. While The Atlantic, The New York Times and The New Yorker considered the article, Mr. Brill said he ultimately worked with Time because the magazine’s editors agreed to publish the article as a single story, rather than partly online and in print.

Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time Magazine, said he that while he first had some reservations about Mr. Brill’s story pitch because he thought the article would be “a tough story to read”, he was quick to snap it up once he read it. Mr. Stengel also used the story as a way to experiment with presenting and prom! oting stories. He said that it was the first time he dedicated an issue to one article and promoted the articles across platforms, like CNN.com and Anderson Cooper 360. He noted that during lunchtime 32,000 people were reading the article at one point.

“This is going to be a famous piece for Steve Brill, a famous piece for Time and nobody is going to care about the provenance,” said Mr. Stengel.

As Mr. Brill managed television interviews and letters from readers on Thursday afternoon, he still questioned the benefit of featuring an article with President Obama on a relaunch issue. Mr. Brill said that when Mr. Hughes described the interview with Mr. Obama, “he must have said Oval Office nine times.” Mr. Brill also remained disappointed that Mr. Hughes promised to place his story on the cover and said “no way” when asked if he would write for The New Republic again.

“No editor needs to make a commitment to someone that your rticle is going to be on the cover of that magazine. But he made that commitment,” said Mr. Brill. “He did because he wanted to get me to write this for them.”

Franklin Foer, The New Republic’s editor, wrote in an e-mail, “It’s a great piece. I’m sorry that we weren’t able to run it and I’m glad that it ultimately found a home.”

David Gregory Renews ‘Meet the Press’ Contract

David Gregory has renewed his contract with NBC News to serve as the anchor of television’s most venerable Sunday morning political discussion show, “Meet the Press.”

NBC made no announcement of Mr. Gregory’s new deal, but he revealed the news in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. NBC confirmed that Mr. Gregory has agreed to a new contract, described only as “long term.”

That would also describe his previous deal, which ended in December. That was a four-year contract which began six months after the death of the previous permanent anchor of the program, Tim Russert. (Tom Brokaw served as a temporary host in the interim.)

Mr. Gregory’s tenure - he is the 10th anchor in the show’s 66-year history â€" has been considered successful, though he has not enjoyed the position of ratings dominance that Mr. Russert achieved on the show.

Over the last year or so, “Meet the Press,” which averages just under three millionviewers, has often ranked behind CBS’s “Face the Nation” in the rankings of the Sunday morning shows. NBC always points out that the CBS show continues to count only its first half hour in the ratings, while the programs on the other networks are all rated for a full hour. “Face the Nation” has less than a full complement of national stations for its second half hour and so eliminates those numbers from the competition.

Mr. Gregory has conducted several news-making interviews in recent months, including one with President Obama in December. He was highlighted in several clips last week when he engaged in a briefly contentious exchange on the show with Sen. John McCain, who was making his 76th visit to “Meet the Press” - more than any other figure in its history.

CNBC to Purchase ‘Nightly Business Report’

“Nightly Business Report,” the pioneer public television series that has struggled financially in recent years, is getting a new deep-pocketed commercial owner, the 24-hour business cable channel CNBC, a unit of Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

CNBC announced Thursday afternoon that it will purchase the rights to the show, available in 96 percent of U.S. television homes, from investment firm Atalaya Capital Management, for an undisclosed price. CNBC will begin producing the program â€" which today originates from Miami, with bureaus in New York and Washington, and has been sold twice in recent years â€" from its Englewood Cliffs, N.J., headquarters on March 4.

The show will keep its format and be anchored by CNBC’s Tyler Mathisen and Susie Gharib, the current co-anchor; CNBC officials said Ms. Gharib is under contract through the end of the year. Her co-host, Tom Hudson, will depart, as will the rest of the current staff of 18 full time employees.

In a telephone interview, Rick Schneider the president and chief executive of Miami public station WPBT, where the show is based, called the new owners “a good thing for the program and for the public television system.” He said the deal not only will ensure the show’s survival, but “it will likely be enhanced. NBR has always lacked having a major news-gathering organization behind it.”

The purchase is the third change of hands for “Nightly Business Report” since August 2010, when Mykalai Kontilai, an entrepreneur and former mixed martial arts manager, bought it from WPBT, where the program originated in 1979, before the era of 24-hour cable business news.

Atalaya Capital Management, which had backed Mr. Kontilai’s purchase, took over the program in November 2011, after few of Mr. Kontilai’s ambitious plans to expand were achieved. In recent months, Atalaya has been searching for a buyer.

In a telephone interview, Nikhil Deogun, CNBC’s senior vice president and edito! r in chief for business news, called “Nightly Business Report” “a great brand with a long tradition of business news.” He said that the show’s audience “has very little duplication, as best we can tell” with the CNBC audience, adding that the program will provide additional opportunities for CNBC’s roster of journalists.

PBS withdrew its financial support of “Nightly Business Report” in 2011 and stopped distributing it. Ratings have been drifting lower and the show’s sole financial underwriter, Franklin Templeton Investments, ended its support in August. In December, the program closed its Chicago bureau and laid off several employees, in its second round of layoffs since 2010.

Mr. Deogun said CNBC will seek new underwriters, adding that parent NBCUniversal “has a great sales team.”

American Public Television, an alternative program delivery service, distributes the show to 180 public television stations nationwide and will continue to do so.

In a Thursday mmo to staff, Mr. Schneider wrote, “This is a difficult day in the history of WPBT,” given the staff layoffs. But, he added, “It has been clear for months, even years, that the existing business model for NBR was unsustainable as national production underwriting dried up. Atalaya deserves credit for funding the series since Franklin Templeton sponsorship ended last August.”

Ms. Gharib, in a telephone interview, called the news “bittersweet” because the rest of the staff will be departing, but said, “finally NBR is getting the resources that we needed so badly. I feel good that CNBC sees value in ‘Nightly Business Report.’ It’s a testament to the high level of the program.”

Soledad O’Brien to Take on New Role at CNN

Soledad O’Brien will leave CNN’s morning show in the spring, but she won’t be leaving the cable news channel altogether.

Ms. O’Brien, who is well-known for CNN documentaries like “Black in America,” said Thursday that she will form a production company and continue to supply documentaries to CNN on a nonexclusive basis. She’ll also make them for other television channels and for the Web.

“There’s so many great stories to tell,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is preparing two new installments of the “Black in America” franchise for CNN.

The deal is an unusual one for CNN. In effect, Ms. O’Brien will go from being an anchor to an outside producer. She may have had little choice in the matter: the new head of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, decided even before he started the job in January that he wanted to replace Ms. O’Brien’s morning show, “Starting Point,” with a brand new one.

The hosts of the new, as-yet-untitled show hae not been named, but Mr. Zucker hired Chris Cuomo from ABC last month with the intention of pairing him with Erin Burnett, who presently hosts the 7 p.m. hour on CNN.

After Mr. Zucker took over, “we had conversations in general about my role at CNN,” Ms. O’Brien said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “What we ended up with was, they wanted to partner with me, and I wanted to partner with them.”

So she will be a free agent, hosting documentaries for CNN part-time, but able to take hosting and reporting jobs elsewhere at the same time. She could go the syndication route, as Katie Couric has. On Thursday, Ms. O’Brien appeared on “The Wendy Williams Show,” a syndicated daytime talk show.

However, “at this moment, I really want to work on projects,” she said.

Her new production company, called the Starfish Media Group, will distribute those projects, as well as past CNN documentaries like “Gary and Tony Have A Baby,” “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Doorâ! € and “Don’t Fail Me: Education in America.” That means they could show up on other channels in the future.

“We can take some of the discussions around these issues and carry them to new audiences,” Ms. O’Brien said. She has a number of ideas for new documentaries, some of which “wouldn’t necessarily be right for CNN,” she said, like ones about sports.

Citing another example, she said she has been pitching “Poverty in America” “for a long time.” Under the terms of the new agreement, she could take the idea to another channel if CNN passed on it.

Ms. O’Brien’s identity is so wrapped up in these documentaries that it was a surprise to some people when she was given the morning anchor job in January 2012. Her morning show was, in retrospect, probably destined to fail; it was scarcely promoted by CNN and was the subject of internal feuding over its eitorial sensibility.

“Under the previous regime, we did not have a ton of support,” Ms. O’Brien said Thursday. While she and her colleagues “tried to get a sense of what people wanted” â€" she meant people up the corporate ladder at CNN â€" “it was never very clear.”

Referring to Mr. Zucker, she added, “One of the great things about Jeff coming into CNN is that he has a very clear vision of what he wants.”

Ever since Mr. Zucker’s plans for the new morning show emerged last month, fans of Ms. O’Brien’s have complained that she wasn’t part of that vision. But she had nothing negative to say about CNN on Thursday.

Despite low ratings â€" “Starting Point” had just 234,000 viewers on a typical day last year, CNN’s smallest audience in the mornings in a decade â€" Ms. O’Brien said she was proud of the show, and in particular its reputation for tough interviews. “We became relevant in an important election,” she said.

She said she would not miss the 2 a.m. wake-up calls that “Starting Point” necessitated.

“To do the thing that you’re really passionate about,” she said, “is a very nice luxury, and that’s what I am getting to do now.”

Soledad O’Brien to Take on New Role at CNN

Soledad O’Brien will leave CNN’s morning show in the spring, but she won’t be leaving the cable news channel altogether.

Ms. O’Brien, who is well-known for CNN documentaries like “Black in America,” said Thursday that she will form a production company and continue to supply documentaries to CNN on a nonexclusive basis. She’ll also make them for other television channels and for the Web.

“There’s so many great stories to tell,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is preparing two new installments of the “Black in America” franchise for CNN.

The deal is an unusual one for CNN. In effect, Ms. O’Brien will go from being an anchor to an outside producer. She may have had little choice in the matter: the new head of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, decided even before he started the job in January that he wanted to replace Ms. O’Brien’s morning show, “Starting Point,” with a brand new one.

The hosts of the new, as-yet-untitled show hae not been named, but Mr. Zucker hired Chris Cuomo from ABC last month with the intention of pairing him with Erin Burnett, who presently hosts the 7 p.m. hour on CNN.

After Mr. Zucker took over, “we had conversations in general about my role at CNN,” Ms. O’Brien said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “What we ended up with was, they wanted to partner with me, and I wanted to partner with them.”

So she will be a free agent, hosting documentaries for CNN part-time, but able to take hosting and reporting jobs elsewhere at the same time. She could go the syndication route, as Katie Couric has. On Thursday, Ms. O’Brien appeared on “The Wendy Williams Show,” a syndicated daytime talk show.

However, “at this moment, I really want to work on projects,” she said.

Her new production company, called the Starfish Media Group, will distribute those projects, as well as past CNN documentaries like “Gary and Tony Have A Baby,” “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Doorâ! € and “Don’t Fail Me: Education in America.” That means they could show up on other channels in the future.

“We can take some of the discussions around these issues and carry them to new audiences,” Ms. O’Brien said. She has a number of ideas for new documentaries, some of which “wouldn’t necessarily be right for CNN,” she said, like ones about sports.

Citing another example, she said she has been pitching “Poverty in America” “for a long time.” Under the terms of the new agreement, she could take the idea to another channel if CNN passed on it.

Ms. O’Brien’s identity is so wrapped up in these documentaries that it was a surprise to some people when she was given the morning anchor job in January 2012. Her morning show was, in retrospect, probably destined to fail; it was scarcely promoted by CNN and was the subject of internal feuding over its eitorial sensibility.

“Under the previous regime, we did not have a ton of support,” Ms. O’Brien said Thursday. While she and her colleagues “tried to get a sense of what people wanted” â€" she meant people up the corporate ladder at CNN â€" “it was never very clear.”

Referring to Mr. Zucker, she added, “One of the great things about Jeff coming into CNN is that he has a very clear vision of what he wants.”

Ever since Mr. Zucker’s plans for the new morning show emerged last month, fans of Ms. O’Brien’s have complained that she wasn’t part of that vision. But she had nothing negative to say about CNN on Thursday.

Despite low ratings â€" “Starting Point” had just 234,000 viewers on a typical day last year, CNN’s smallest audience in the mornings in a decade â€" Ms. O’Brien said she was proud of the show, and in particular its reputation for tough interviews. “We became relevant in an important election,” she said.

She said she would not miss the 2 a.m. wake-up calls that “Starting Point” necessitated.

“To do the thing that you’re really passionate about,” she said, “is a very nice luxury, and that’s what I am getting to do now.”

TVs Connected to the Internet to Be Counted by Nielsen

Americans who have spurned cable, but who have a television set hooked up to the Internet, will now be counted as a “television household” by The Nielsen Company, potentially adding to the sample of homes that are rated by the company.

The change, Nielsen said in a statement, was necessary to “more completely reflect media consumption.” It comes nearly two years after Nielsen said it was thinking about redefining the term “TV household” to include those that stream shows. The industry’s collective sense of urgency has increased as new Web services like Aereo have allowed people to watch TV channels, ads and all, without a cable subscription or an antenna.

The new definition “will include those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set,” sid Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen. Currently a “television set” is the flat-screen kind, but in the future a tablet computer like an iPad could also be considered a TV set.

Six-tenths of one percent of households in the United States meet the description of households that have TV sets hooked up to the Internet but have no other source of TV. Some of these may be “cord-cutters,” people who have chosen to stop paying for cable. Others may be people who have never subscribed to cable. Nielsen says it believes the number will increase in the future, so it’s trying to get ahead of the change.

There isn’t likely to be a sudden change to the Nielsen ratings that govern billions of dollars in advertising decisions, however. Right now most Internet views of TV shows aren’t counted in the TV ratings that this blog and others write about, either because there are no ads attached (see Netflix) or because! the ads aren’t exactly the same as the ones that appeared on the original TV broadcast (see Hulu). The ratings exist for the advertisers, after all.

But new services are popping up that stream TV shows and ads without the need for cable.

Aereo, which is available in New York and is expanding to other cities, is one. NimbleTV, which is in a test phase, is another. Further into the future, Intel is planning to start a cable-like subscription service that would be delivered over the Internet, and a bevy of other companies are interested in doing the same thing. If and when these services steal customers away from cable, advertisers will need to know if their spots are being seen and Nielsen will need to track it.

Alternatively, cable companies and the owners of cable channels are trying to keep customers by streaming shows in a manner known as TV Everywhere. In some cases, these services need to be rated, too.

Ms. McDonough said in a telephone interview Thursday that viewing on Aereo will now be included in the Nielsen ratings sample. Theoretically, a cable-like service from Intel would be included, too.

The changes emanated from a measurement committee comprised of Nielsen executives and two dozen representatives from networks and advertising firms. The committee met in New York on Tuesday and approved the changes. The Hollywood Reporter described a source at one of the big broadcast networks as being “ecstatic at the prospect of expanded measurement tools.”

There is intense anxiety within those networks because, in some cases, their ratings are slipping rather dramatically. The culprits include digital video recorder usage, delayed viewership thanks to the existence of Net! flix and ! other online sources of catch-up TV, and increased competition overall from other channels and the Internet. Counting the small sliver of homes that have Internet-connected TVs, but not cable, won’t make a big difference.

Then again, as Ms. McDonough put it, “It’s up to the networks to decide how best they want to monetize their content.”

If a network like ABC decided to run the same commercials with “Modern Family” on TV and on Hulu and on ABC.com and on its app, Nielsen would count all those views equally. Then again, some commercials on TV are out of date in a matter of hours. Commercials on the Web can be tailored to the minute they’re viewed and to the man or woman viewing them. That’s the clash between old-fashioned TV and the on-demand world â€" one that no measurement tool can solve.

Another problem: tablet computers like the iPad. Some cable companies have created apps that turn tablets into fully functioning TV sets, but viewership on these devices does not count oward Nielsen’s totals. Ms. McDonough said Nielsen is conducting tests of iPad TV measurement and expects to be able to add it to the ratings sometime in the future.

New Episodes of ‘For Better or Worse’ Planned for OWN

Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network is putting the sitcom “For Better or Worse” back into production, deepening the network’s relationship with the creator, writer and director of the series, Tyler Perry.

OWN is also buying the library of 45 old episodes from TBS, which televised the episodes in 2011 and 2012. “For Better or Worse” will resume production in April with the original cast members, including Michael Jai White and Tasha Smith, who play the husband and wife at the center of the show.

The deal, announced Wednesday, came four months after Mr. Perry took a small equity stake in OWN and agreed to shift all his future TV production to OWN from TBS. At the time, TBS said it would keep televising repeats of “For Better or Worse” and two other Perry productions, “House of Payne” and “Meet the Browns.”

By snapping up the repeats and the future rights to “For Better or Worse,” OWN will further be able to promote itself as a destinaion for Mr. Perry’s fans. The channel pointed out in a news release on Wednesday that “For Better or Worse” was the highest-rated sitcom on cable when it started two years ago.

OWN could use the help. While Ms. Winfrey’s interview with Lance Armstrong last month shined a bright light on the channel, and its ratings are on an upward trajectory, it is perceived to need more nights of must-see programming.

OWN is planning to turn Tuesdays and Wednesdays into its “Tyler nights” beginning in May, when his first two series for the channel, “Love Thy Neighbor” and “The Haves and the Have Nots,” are scheduled to have their premieres.

After the first season of “Love Thy Neighbor,” a sitcom, ends in the ! fall, OWN will be able to fill the time slot with the new seasons of “For Better or Worse.”

The other new series, “The Haves and the Have Nots,” is a drama that has been compared to “Downton Abbey.”

Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Perry’s decision to lock arms came only after he decided against creating a cable channel of his own. For OWN, which has only had talk shows, interviews and other unscripted fare since its inception two years ago, the arrangement with Mr. Perry was a way into the scripted TV business.

Now Ms. Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Studios, is setting up its own scripted television division, suggesting more sitcoms and dramas are in OWN’s future.

Return of Robin Roberts Brings Higher Ratings to \'Good Morning America\'

“Good Morning America” had its best morning in the ratings in three months when Robin Roberts returned to the show on Wednesday after a medical leave of absence, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings.

About 6.1 million viewers tuned in for Ms. Roberts’ much-touted comeback, giving the show its biggest audience since the morning after the presidential election in November.

The second-place network morning show, NBC’s “Today,” had somewhere between 4.9 million and 5.0 million viewers. (ABC and NBC shared slightly different sets of Nielsen numbers with reporters.) For “G.M.A.,” the ratings on Wednesday represented a bump of about 12 percent from its recent averages. For “Today,” the ratings were about flat.

What both networks care more about is the 25- to 54-year-old demographic, because advertising rates can rise and fall depending on the “demo,” as they call it.

The two shows remained basically tied in that demographic, ith “G.M.A.” reporting an advantage of just 36,000 viewers ages 25 to 54. “Today” was slightly ahead on Wednesday in a younger demographic, that of viewers ages 18 to 49. (The show’s main anchor, Matt Lauer, is on vacation this week.) The competition between “G.M.A.” and “Today” will be fierce for the next few months because the upfront advertising sales period starts in the spring.

Ms. Roberts, who is beloved by millions of “G.M.A.” viewers, left the show last August and underwent a bone marrow transplant in September to treat a rare blood disorder she contracted as a result of treatment for breast cancer in 2007.

She has described herself as eager to get back to work, and she was back on “G.M.A.” for a second day on Thursday. But concerns about her health persist, and both her doctors and her producers at ABC have said that her re-entry will take some time. To that end, she said on ABC’s “The View” on Thursday that the “G.M.A.” producer Tom Cibrowski ! had told her to “take tomorrow morning off.”

“It’s easing my way back in,” she said of her re-entry.

Though she won’t be on “G.M.A.” on Friday, Ms. Roberts does have an interview to tape with Michelle Obama. The interview will be televised next Tuesday.

Over the weekend Ms. Roberts will fly to Los Angeles, where she will appear on ABC’s coverage of the Academy Awards and co-host “G.M.A.” before dawn on Monday morning â€" a busy schedule for anyone, let alone a person still recovering from a bone marrow transplant.

The Breakfast Meeting: The Times Co. Plans to Sell The Boston Globe, and Robin Roberts Returns

The New York Times Company announced Wednesday that it had retained Evercore Partners to manage the sale of the New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe, Boston.com, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Globe Direct, a direct-mail marketing company, Amy Chozick and Christine Haughney write. The Times Company paid $1.1 billion for The Globe in 1993, and for years the daily brought prestige and profits to the company, but the paper’s circulation has diminished by nearly half in the last decade. The Times Company is expected to seek a buyer in an auction, but there is no assurance that one will appear.

Robin Roberts made a television comeback unlike any other when she hosted “Good Morning America” for the first time since she left the show in August to battle a life-threatening illness, Brian Stelter reports. “Good Morning America” is the top-rated morning show, and Ms. Roberts is the most-liked host by a wide margin, so her return is good news for executives at ABC, who hope they can continue to beat NBC’s “Today” in the ratings. Ms. Roberts’s case is unusual â€" she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndromes, a rare blood disorder, and had to undergo a bone-marrow transplant. ABC made Ms. Roberts’s condition and treatment a part of the show, even while she was in the hospital recuperating from her transplant, which may be part of the reason that “Good Morning America” continued to beat “Today” over the last few months.

Madison Avenue may be anticipating the Oscars as much as Hollywood this year, Stuart Elliott explains. Advertisers are paying ABC the highest prices since 2008 for advertisements during th! e network’s broadcast of the awards, between $1.65 and $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime. A recent trend of advertisers treating the Oscars like the Super Bowl, as a platform for new ads that will elicit an audience response, seems to be intensifying, with brands like Chobani, Grey Poupon, Hyundai, Neutrogena and J.C. Penney planning to show new campaigns or new commercials in existing campaigns.

YouTube has officially become a hit maker, Ben Sisario reports. This week the Billboard Hot 100, the magazine’s 55-year-old singles chart, has incorporated YouTube plays into its formula. Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” a bass-heavy hip-hop track with no lyrics beyond a few samples that has become the latest viral video sensation, will make its debut at No. 1 this week because of the change. “The notion that a song has to sell in order to be a hit feels a little two or three years ago to me,€ Bill Werde, Billboard’s editorial director, said.

Rob Morrison, a news anchor for WCBS-TV in New York, resigned from his job on Wednesday after his weekend arrest on charges of choking his wife during a domestic dispute, Marc Santora reports. Mr. Morrison anchored the morning and noon news programs, and his wife, Ashley Morrison, works as a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch. Mr. Morrison’s decision came one day after he was arraigned and charged with strangulation, threatening and disorderly conduct. He was released on bail, but a Connecticut judge ordered him to stay at least 100 yards away from his wife, except at work.