Fandango Adds Service Aimed at Hispanics

Hispanics buy a quarter of all movie tickets sold in the United States. But do they need their own place to buy them

Fandango Cine, a collaboration with Telemundo.

On Monday, NBCUniversal will find out. The media company’s movie ticket service, Fandango, in partnership with the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo, will introduce Fandango Cine, a digital movie ticket service aimed at Latinos. The Web site and related app will operate separately from Fandango and will highlight movies, actors and original video clips meant to resonate with Hspanics.

The collaboration comes as box-office data points to Hispanics as a major moviegoing force, even as the industry over all has struggled. Hispanic moviegoers bought 286 million movie tickets in 2011, and they go to an average of seven movies a year, compared with five a year for non-Hispanics, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

At the same time, Hispanics are 68 percent more likely than non-Hispanics to watch video on the Internet, according to Nielsen. Fandango had an average of 41 million unique visitors a month in 2012, a record for the service, which charges users a fee to buy movie tickets in advance.

“We recognized from the data that there’s a unique audience in Hispanics in their affinity for moviegoing and mobile tec! hnology,” said Paul Yanover, president of Fandango. “That’s a pretty important audience segment we thought we could better service.”

In addition to movie ticket sales, Fandango Cine will include a feature highlighting Hispanic actors and directors under the heading “Overlooked by Oscar.” A segment called “Cine Buzz” will provide celebrity scoops on Latinos in Hollywood.

The Spanish-language Web site will also highlight movies â€" like “Snitch,” starring Benjamin Bratt as a Mexican drug lord, and “Bless Me, Ultima,” based on the novel by Rudolfo Anaya â€" that won’t get prominent play on English-language Fandango but are expected to attract heavily Hispanic audiences.

Ever since Comcast took control of NBCUniversal two years ago, the media conglomerate has encouraged partnerships among its previously disparate divisions. Telemundo will provide video clips to Fandango Cine, which will prominently promote Universal Pictures’s “Fast & Furious 6.” A Spanish-speaking Fandango Cine movie critic will have a regular segment on Telemundo’s morning show “Un Nuevo Día.”

The partnership grew in part out of Telemundo’s inroads with Hollywood studios. For years, the network received quizzical glances from movie executives who were asked to advertise their English-language films during Telemundo’s lineup of Spanish-language sports, telenovelas and talk shows.

“Today, every single movie is Hispanic focused,” said Peter E. Blacker, executive vice president for digital and emerging media at Telemundo. “That’s a big change from when I used to go around to studios and they didn’t understan! d the pot! ential.”

Spotify Adapts Its Mobile App for Ford Vehicles

Coming soon to Ford cars: Spotify.

Spotify, the streaming music service, has made its first move into the competitive world of in-car entertainment by adapting its mobile app for Ford’s Sync AppLink system. The system lets drivers operate their mobile apps through voice commands. The companies will announce the development on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Companies like Spotify, which has 20 million users and is available in 23 countries, are eager to embed their services in a range of devices to keep handy throughout a user’s day. In addition to its desktop and mobile versions, Spotify is also available â€" for subscribers to its premium service, at about $10 a month â€" on Roku set-top boxes, Onkyo stereo components, Sonos speaker systems and other electronics.

But for digital ervices of all kinds, the connected car dashboard has become a coveted destination. As radio broadcasters know, the car is often where the most uninterrupted and impressionable listening takes place, and as carmakers develop more sophisticated systems, there is more opportunity for digital media companies to reach customers.

Pandora recently announced that among its more than 1,000 partner integrations are 85 models of cars, and services like iHeartRadio from Clear Channel Communications have struck deals with carmakers to add their apps to the dashboard. Sirius XM Radio is now available in more than 60 percent of new vehicles, the company recently reported.

Ford’s Sync is a programming platform that lets users plug in a mobile device and operate an app by voice, to avoid distractions while driving. Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeartRadio and Amazon’s Cloud Player are already compatible with it, as are other apps including National Public Radio and Major League Baseball.

The system is available in about one million Fords in North America, but Julius Marchwicki, the Sync product manager, said in an interview that the number will grow. And given Spotify’s rapid expansion, deals with more carmakers are likely.

br>

Spotify Adapts Its Mobile App for Ford Vehicles

Coming soon to Ford cars: Spotify.

Spotify, the streaming music service, has made its first move into the competitive world of in-car entertainment by adapting its mobile app for Ford’s Sync AppLink system. The system lets drivers operate their mobile apps through voice commands. The companies will announce the development on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Companies like Spotify, which has 20 million users and is available in 23 countries, are eager to embed their services in a range of devices to keep handy throughout a user’s day. In addition to its desktop and mobile versions, Spotify is also available â€" for subscribers to its premium service, at about $10 a month â€" on Roku set-top boxes, Onkyo stereo components, Sonos speaker systems and other electronics.

But for digital ervices of all kinds, the connected car dashboard has become a coveted destination. As radio broadcasters know, the car is often where the most uninterrupted and impressionable listening takes place, and as carmakers develop more sophisticated systems, there is more opportunity for digital media companies to reach customers.

Pandora recently announced that among its more than 1,000 partner integrations are 85 models of cars, and services like iHeartRadio from Clear Channel Communications have struck deals with carmakers to add their apps to the dashboard. Sirius XM Radio is now available in more than 60 percent of new vehicles, the company recently reported.

Ford’s Sync is a programming platform that lets users plug in a mobile device and operate an app by voice, to avoid distractions while driving. Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeartRadio and Amazon’s Cloud Player are already compatible with it, as are other apps including National Public Radio and Major League Baseball.

The system is available in about one million Fords in North America, but Julius Marchwicki, the Sync product manager, said in an interview that the number will grow. And given Spotify’s rapid expansion, deals with more carmakers are likely.

br>

Fandango Adds Service Aimed at Hispanics

Hispanics buy a quarter of all movie tickets sold in the United States. But do they need their own place to buy them

Fandango Cine, a collaboration with Telemundo.

On Monday, NBCUniversal will find out. The media company’s movie ticket service, Fandango, in partnership with the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo, will introduce Fandango Cine, a digital movie ticket service aimed at Latinos. The Web site and related app will operate separately from Fandango and will highlight movies, actors and original video clips meant to resonate with Hspanics.

The collaboration comes as box-office data points to Hispanics as a major moviegoing force, even as the industry over all has struggled. Hispanic moviegoers bought 286 million movie tickets in 2011, and they go to an average of seven movies a year, compared with five a year for non-Hispanics, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

At the same time, Hispanics are 68 percent more likely than non-Hispanics to watch video on the Internet, according to Nielsen. Fandango had an average of 41 million unique visitors a month in 2012, a record for the service, which charges users a fee to buy movie tickets in advance.

“We recognized from the data that there’s a unique audience in Hispanics in their affinity for moviegoing and mobile tec! hnology,” said Paul Yanover, president of Fandango. “That’s a pretty important audience segment we thought we could better service.”

In addition to movie ticket sales, Fandango Cine will include a feature highlighting Hispanic actors and directors under the heading “Overlooked by Oscar.” A segment called “Cine Buzz” will provide celebrity scoops on Latinos in Hollywood.

The Spanish-language Web site will also highlight movies â€" like “Snitch,” starring Benjamin Bratt as a Mexican drug lord, and “Bless Me, Ultima,” based on the novel by Rudolfo Anaya â€" that won’t get prominent play on English-language Fandango but are expected to attract heavily Hispanic audiences.

Ever since Comcast took control of NBCUniversal two years ago, the media conglomerate has encouraged partnerships among its previously disparate divisions. Telemundo will provide video clips to Fandango Cine, which will prominently promote Universal Pictures’s “Fast & Furious 6.” A Spanish-speaking Fandango Cine movie critic will have a regular segment on Telemundo’s morning show “Un Nuevo Día.”

The partnership grew in part out of Telemundo’s inroads with Hollywood studios. For years, the network received quizzical glances from movie executives who were asked to advertise their English-language films during Telemundo’s lineup of Spanish-language sports, telenovelas and talk shows.

“Today, every single movie is Hispanic focused,” said Peter E. Blacker, executive vice president for digital and emerging media at Telemundo. “That’s a big change from when I used to go around to studios and they didn’t understan! d the pot! ential.”

CUNY Journalism Program to Lose Dean

Another major journalism school is starting a search for a new leader. The City University of New York plans to announce that Stephen B. Shepard, the founding dean of its journalism program, is stepping down at the end of the year.

Mr. Shepard, who joined CUNY in 2005 to help start a journalism school, plans to step down after the commencement in December. He said that he expected to remain a professor there and work on special projects like the university’s journalism book imprint.

The university is expected to announce the news on Monday.

“It just feels like the right time,” Mr. Shepard said of his resignation. “The school is well established now. We’ve had six graduating classes. It just seems like the right time to turn it over to somebody else.”

The announcement comes at a time when Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism is also searching for a new leader. Nicholas Lemann, the dan of Columbia’s journalism school, who led the program through a turbulent decade as digital media forced sweeping changes in the industry, said in October that he was stepping down at the end of the academic year. Columbia has yet to announce his replacement.

Mr. Shepard, a City College graduate, helped start the graduate journalism school after working for many years in magazines, including stints as a senior editor at Newsweek and editor in chief at BusinessWeek. The school opened in August 2006. During his tenure, he raised $25 million in academic programs and student scholarships.

In 2012, he published a memoir called “Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path From Print to Digital.”

As the school establishes a search committee to find a new dean, Mr. Shepard talked about the varied skills needed to run a journalism school in a rapidly changing l! andscape.

“You have to have traditional values of good journalism as we know it,” Mr. Shepard said. “You also have to be conversant with the new media world. And you have to be a fund-raiser and you have to be a manager.” He added that one of the biggest challenges was to find a dean interested in how to make journalism financially sound as well.

Mr. Shepard said, “One additional factor is to get people thinking about new business models, which support quality journalism in the digital age.”

A Campaign to Underscore Risk of War Coverage

Friends of journalists who have died covering the violent Arab Spring uprisings are trying to put their grief to good use. They are putting together an online campaign called “A Day Without News” to persuade the public to pay attention to the sacrifices journalists make.

They’ve received help from organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. But this initiative, they say, is more personal. It was inspired after a United Nations exhibition on press freedom last August, when an executive from Getty Images was talking with media industry friends. “I suggested that we try and create a campaign using the groundswell of emotion and anger at the recent losses,” said the executive, Aidan Sullivan, a vice president of photo assignments at Getty, who subsequently led the effort.

The “Day Without News” name was created by David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair, who said it was meant to convey this situation: “Imagine a war without photographs. Imaine a conflict zone where no correspondent ever dared venture. Imagine a humanitarian crisis that came and went without eliciting a flicker of video, not a second of audio, not a single news story, not a lone blog post. Imagine war crimes without witness â€" atrocities whose perpetrators were held forever unaccountable.”

“That,” he said in an e-mail, “is the situation we may face if journalists in conflict zones continue to be targeted by warring factions.”

The campaign Web site, ADayWithoutNews.com, was unveiled last week. It has signed up dozens of prominent supporters, including the United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, the Getty Images chief executive Jonathan Klein and the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour. Several contributors to The New York Times are among the supporters.

The start of the campaign was timed to the one-year anniversary of the day Marie Colvin, a correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, died while co! vering the conflict in Syria. “Paul Conroy, who had been with Marie and suffered grave injuries, reported that they had been purposely targeted by Syrian forces,” Mr. Sullivan said in an interview.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said that 28 journalists died in Syria in 2012. Most were local people or freelancers. On Sunday, another journalist, a French freelance photographer named Olivier Voisin, was reported to have died there after being wounded by shelling.

Raising awareness of journalist casualties is one goal of the campaign. Another is to discourage the targeting of journalists by encouraging prosecutions of such activities. To that end, Mr. Sullivan said he and the other organizers are lobbying members of the United Nations for changes to the legal language involving war crimes to include journalists.