ABC Networks Will Offer Guarantees to Advertisers Across Platforms

The Walt Disney Company will take a significant step toward equalizing the business of advertising on television and online this spring when three of the networks owned by the company, ABC, ABC Family and ESPN, offer advertisers guarantees for video programming distributed both on television and online.

The ABC networks will announce Tuesday that they have adopted the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings system to measure viewing across both television and online sites, and will base all sales on estimates of what total viewing will be on all those platforms.

Traditionally, television networks guarantee advertisers that they will deliver a certain numbers of viewers in specific demographic groups. When viewing falls short of those numbers, the networks provide free commercial time to make up the difference.

But online viewing has lacked a service that could provide similar information for video streamed online. ABC has been aggressively seeking a way to combine guarantees both on television ad online. Adam Gerber, vice president of sales development and marketing for ABC, said the company gave combined viewing guarantees to some advertisers in last year’s upfront - the sales period in spring when networks made deals with advertisers for future programming â€" but expected “a much more robust demand for those kinds of deals” this year.

“We are seeing a rapidly growing demand for cross-platform deals,” Mr. Gerber said.

The Nielsen service will provide detailed information on online viewing in two ways, said Steve Hasker, the president of Global Products for Nielsen. One is information that will go to the advertisers about the reach of specific ad campaigns. “If an auto maker places ads on all different platforms, on television and online, we’ll be able to measure all the people that see that particular campaign,” Mr. Hasker said.

That will be possible because the commercials will carry a specific tag to identify them, he said.!

But for a network to be able to offer a ratings guarantee, it needs a way to get an accurate measure of total viewing of each program, which may take place on numerous different online sites. Mr. Hasker said the Nielsen system would be able to keep track of how many times people watched the show on any online sight as long as the program contained a tag provided by the network.

Mr. Gerber noted that the problem in the past with online viewing was that a headcount was possible, but not the information on the makeup of the audience that advertisers require. Nielsen is solving that by using data provided by Facebook to identify the characteristics of the online viewers.

In some respects, online advertising enjoys advantages over television advertising because in most cases online commercials cannot be skipped by viewers, and they can be easily swapped: a commercial for a movie opening on Friday that might get out of date if watched on a delayed basis on television can be replaced online witha more up-to-date commercial.

At the moment, advertisers pay only for the commercials watched in a television program within three days of its air date. But Nielsen issues reports on viewing that accumulates over a full week. Mr. Hasker said the combined television and online audience of video would be reported on the basis of a week’s worth of viewing â€" even though online episodes of shows stay active on sites for a month or more.

He credited ABC with being “especially innovative” in its approach to offering guarantees for online advertising as well for television viewing, but he said that Nielsen was in active conversations with numerous other big television companies about adopting the combined ratings service.

‘The Bible’ on History Reaches 13.1 Million Viewers

The record pace being set by cable programming continued Sunday night as “The BIble,” a series on the History network, reached 13.1 million viewers, the biggest audience for an entertainment show on cable television this year.

Even by the standards of broadcast television, that would be an enormous audience, about twice as big as any show on NBC over the last month. Just as impressive was the show’s performance among viewers in the age groups sought by most advertisers.

The Bible stories featured Sunday night, Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Moses, attracted 5.6 million viewers in the 18- to 49-year-old age group, one of the best figures on cable this year. (It tops “Duck Dynasty,” for example, but not “The Walking Dead.”)

The numbers exceeded all expectations, especially the performance among younger adults, because it had been thought that the audience for Bible stories might be heavily tipped toward older viewers.

The New Beltway Icebreaker: “What Episode of ‘House of Cards’ Are You On”

Welcome back to the “House of Cards” recap where Ashley Parker and David Carr chat about the media and political dimensions of the show. This week, episode four is under the microscope. You can catch up on recaps of episode one, two or three, as well, but please know spoilers are everywhere, so watch first, then read.

Episode Four
Representative Frank Underwood organizes a coup â€" though not quite the expected one â€" to get his education bill one step closer to passage. He asks Representative Frank Russo for yet another favor. Zoe Barnes is offered the job covering the White House for hr newspaper and turns it down â€" and she and Frank finally officially begin their affair.

Parker: And finally, in Episode Four, we find Zoe Barnes and Frank Underwood where we knew they were headed all along: With Frank standing in Zoe’s rag-tag apartment, surveying her in a little black dress amid the dark, dank mess (“Do your parents know you live like this” he asks), about to embark on what we imagine will ultimately be a mutually-destructive affair.

I still maintain that no young, up-and-coming female reporter I currently know would sleep with a congressman she was covering. But what interested me more this episode from a journalistic standpoint were some of the grand pronouncements made about our craft. When Zoe’s editor, Tom Hammerschmidt, first complains to the Katherine Graham editor figure that Ms. Barnes has not been obeying his orders, she replies, “Tom, we don’t need people who follow the rules. We need personalities.” This curt directive seems ! to lead to the next plot point, in which Tom offers his truculent charge the White House beat, “promoting” that job’s current inhabitant to Midwest bureau chief.

“People usually don’t have to think about it when they’re offered the White House,” he says, not totally inaccurately, when Zoe asks for a few days to consider the gig.

“The White House is where news goes to die,” she retorts, not totally inaccurately.

The White House is a notoriously tough gig. Many “scoops” are handed to chosen reporters, with true news rarely trickling out of the closed spigot that is the White House press office. The Bush administration was bad, the Obama administration is bad, and I’m sure a Romney administration would have been no different. That’s not to say the White House doesn’t generate real and important news, and our White House team does a terrific job of covering it. But it’s not an easy job to do.

With that said, I can think of few rporters â€" especially few young, up-and-coming reporters whose perpetual strivings seems to be their defining feature, as is the case with Zoe â€" who would turn down the job. But when she does just that, her editor is beside himself and calls her self-entitled and a name that we can’t print here.

“Call me whatever you want, “she warns him, just before sending his verbal missive out to the world from her smart phone, “but remember, these days, when you’re talking to one person, you’re talking to 1,000.”

So, David, how did these pronouncements land on you Do we really need less rule-following reporters and more personalities Is the White House where news goes to die, and if it is, does that make is a less attractive target for an ambitious journalist And when it’s just you and me talking, are we really talking to thousands

Carr: My answers in order: Further down the food chain, personality may help you stick above the clutter, but the people who rule! big beat! s are the ones who get the stories, not a high Q-rating. Doing stand-ups on the White House lawn or filing from the press room there may not be the most action-packed assignment, but covering a man who is arguably the most powerful one on earth is never going to be beside the point.

And just me and you talking, when it’s you and me talking it should be just that, without social media coming along for the ride. Taking shop talk to Twitter or elsewhere is Just. Not. Done. And threatening an editor with a suddenly weaponized cell phone is probably not a great long-term professional play.

In terms of the reporter and the Congressman crossing the line, I think it probably is not the best choice even in dramatic terms. It’s spicy, yes, but pretty far fetched. I had a couple of journalists over to my house for dinner over the weekend â€" including Ta-Nehesi Coates of The Atlantic and Brendan Koerner of Wired â€" and we spent probably too much time talking about the show. And we talked about how muc more interesting it would have been for Zoe and Frank to play each other along rather than actually go there. Maybe we don’t understand television as well as the people who made “House of Cards,” but there’s something so crassly transactional in what they are up to, it clanks.

Generally, “House of Cards” gets so many things right â€" the grubby alliance of money and politics, staffers who see everything in terms of numbers, the blatant horse-trading â€" than I am surprised that the journalism stuff seems to miss the mark. Perhaps I am far too cynical about politics and too idealistic about our craft to be a proper judge.

The folks at our house spent a long time picking the show apart and then pivoted immediately to how quickly they binged on the series and when the second season will come out, so perhaps the people behind the show know exactly what they are doing. Storytelling aimed at the masses often engages in tropes and caricatures to keep things moving and keep people ! intereste! d.

Parker: Well, you’ve stumbled onto part of the brilliance of “House of Cards.” In D.C., especially, the conversation often seems to turn on the stultifying where-do-you-work, what-do-you-do questions.

But as Politico’s Reid Epstein pointed out to me the other night â€" over drinks, at a bar, where we were, naturally, talking “House of Cards” with a group of journalists and Hill types â€" the show has become the new D.C. social crutch, a pick-up line of sorts that guarantees ready-made conversation. Instead of all kinds of awkward and often ineffective gambits, now everyone has a safe place to start a conversation with a stranger: “So what episode of ‘House of Cards’ are you on” As you wrote previously, the show may have let some of the water leak out of the cooler, but I cannot tell you the number of folks inside the beltwaywho have embraced “House of Cards” as a liberating way to (yet again) talk about work, without really talking about work.

Carr: Well, I’m all for something, anything that can help wonks relate to each other. Is there anything more painful than watching two badge-wearing citizens of the Beltway trying to engage in normal social discourse Just kidding, Ashley. I know D.C. has gotten so much hipper and more fun since I used to work there. And now it has its very own show to call its own, or at least its very own show to nitpick and complain about even as the next version is queued up for viewing.

A Boy Saved by Oskar Schindler: Memoir Will Tell the Story

Leon Leyson, one of youngest of the Jews saved by Oskar Schindler from the Holocuast, completed a memoir just before he died in January, and the book will be released in August, his publisher said on Monday.

Atheneum, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, said the book offers a boy’s perspective on the heroic Schindler. Mr. Leyson was 10 years old when the Germans invaded Poland and his family was forcibly relocated to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. Eventually he was assigned work in one of Schindler’s ceramics factories.

He was so skinny and small that he had to stand on a box to reach his machines, the inspiration for the book’s title, “The Boy on the Wooden Box.” Schindler took special care of the boy, calling him “little Leyson.” He often provided him with extra rations of food and took an extraordinary risk in rescuing his mother and sister from Auschwitz, the concentration camp to which they had been sent accidentally.

All of his family but two brother survived the war under Schindler’s care. Mr. Leyson ended up in Los Angeles where he worked as high school teacher for 39 years.

During most of his lifetime, Mr. Leyson preferred not to live in the shadow of his past and preferred not to talk about his Holocaust experiences. That changed, however, with the release of the Steven Speilberg film Schindler’s List in 1993. After that, he frequently spoke at schools and to authors interested in the subject.

Atheneum said that Mr. Leyson passed away the day after they received the manuscript. The book was co-written by Marilyn J. Harran, who holds the Stern Chair in Holocaust Education at Chapman University.

The Breakfast Meeting: How Rodman Wound Up in North Korea, and AMC Lurches Ahead in Ratings

Vice, a print magazine that is producing a TV newsmagazine that will debut on HBO in April, made international news by arranging a basketball game featuring flamboyant former N.B.A. player Dennis Rodman and three Harlem Globetrotters players before Kim Jong-un, in North Korea, Brian Stelter writes. Mr. Rodman and Vice’s film crew are the first Americans to meet the North Korean ruler since he inherited power from his father in 2011. Pundits debated on television and online over who gained more from the interaction, Vice or the North Korean government, and reporters at the State Department wanted to know why Mr. Rodman, who has returned to the United States, was not debriefed about his visit with Mr. Kim, whom he called a “friend.” Vice had no assurance that Mr. Kim would watch the game, but were familiar with his love of basketball, especially the Chicago Bulls.

AMC’s “The Walking Dead” has devoured the ratings, to the consternation of major networks, David Carr reports. The show was the highest-rated program among viewers aged 18-49 last fall, the most coveted demographic for advertisers, and three weeks ago the undead owned Sunday night, attracting 7.7 million viewers in that age range. Even “The Talking Dead,” a spinoff chat show, drew 2.8 million viewers, more than NBC enjoyed in all of February. The show’s popularity presents a different, cable-based model for television success that depends on a steady accrual of fans, edgier programming and the presence of past seasons on streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

Journalists covering crime and other stories in Oakland, Calif., have become the victims of brazen robberies in recent months, Carol Pogash reports. Every major television news station in the Bay Area has become a victim. In the most flagrant episode a group of men punched a KPIX-TV cameraman while he was still filming and then took off with his camera â€"viewers saw the reporter sign off and then an inexplicably wobbly image. The stolen cameras, both video and still, can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000 and do not seem to be turning up locally.

Venerable British newspaper The Guardian has started a new advertising campaign to promote its brand and Web site to American audiences, Tanzina Vega reports. The commercials, a series of graphics created by Noma Bar that can be flipped upside-down, are designed to appear next to one another on billboards and show two sides of a hot-button issue. An ad on internet privacy, for example, shws a person sitting at a laptop above the headline “Keep Out of my Stuff”â€"when flipped it shows a masked face with the headline “Keep Out the Terrorists.” The ads are intended to help The Guardian catch up to The Daily Mail, a newspaper that draws a large American audience with extensive coverage of celebrity gossip.

Disney is taking a great gamble on “Oz the Great and Powerful,” Brooks Barnes reports. The film cost about $325 million to make and market, and stars James Franco, who has never anchored a mainstream production. There are few film properties as beloved as the original “The Wizard of Oz,” so Disney risks alienating audiences every step of the way. The company is under pressure to deliver a hit after flops like “John Carter” and ho-hum releases like “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.” Disney hopes “Oz” won’t fizzle like Warner Brot! hers’ â! €œJack the Giant Slayer,” which brought in just $28 million on its opening weekend.

PBS is close to deciding whether to air a weekend edition of “PBS NewsHour” for the first time since the program began in 1975, Elizabeth Jensen writes. The plan, which calls for a half-hour program on Saturdays and Sundays to be produced in New York, would give PBS a weekend news presence that it has been criticized for lacking.

What Betting Markets Are Saying About the Next Pope

In Vatican City on Monday, the College of Cardinals will gather to decide on when to hold the papal conclave to select the next pope. There are no polls of the 115 cardinals who will vote in the conclave, and FiveThirtyEight is not making any predictions. But plenty of others are â€" notably, bookies and bettors.

Betting on the papal succession goes back centuries. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV forbade Catholics from betting on the election of a pope or the length of pope’s term in office. According to Dr. Edward N. Peters, canonist at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, however, Gregory’s edict was part of an older system of canon law that was abrogated in 1918 (which is not to say the Catholic Church would now recommend wagering on the next pope).

During the last conclave, in 2005, the oddsmakers did wel.. One day before Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Frank Delaney, an Irish novelist and journalist, wrote in The New York Times, “if the smart money is telling it right, the next pope will be one of the following three men” â€" Joseph Ratzinger, Carlo Martini or Jean-Marie Lustiger.

This time around, international bookies like Paddy Power in Ireland have set odds on roughly 90 candidates, according to a list of betting lines compiled by Oddschecker.com (betting on the pope is illegal in the United States). Most of those candidates are long shots, and some are beyond long shots (including Bono, Oprah Winfrey and Lance Armstrong).

But at the top of the list, the bookmakers’ favorites are largely in line with analyses by Vatican experts. Oddschecker.com compiled the odds from 13 bookies. Here is a list of the average of those odds â€" converted into probabilities and averaged â€" for the top 25 contenders as of 10:30 p.m. Sunday.

Source: oddschecker.com (odds converted to probabilities and averaged).

The odds may well change â€" and there is certainly no guarantee that any of the oddsmakers’ favorites will actually become the next pope â€" but currently, four of the top six contenders are from Italy, including Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, who leads the list with an average betting line implying a 23 percent chance o becoming pope. The high ranking of Italian cardinals should not be a surprise. While neither of the last two popes was Italian, before Poland’s John Paul II was elected in 1978 the last non-Italian pope was Adrian VI of the Netherlands, who was elected in 1552.

Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, at 22 percent, is right behind Cardinal Scola. Cardinal Turkson may have hurt hist chances, however, by giving a recent interview to The Daily Telegraph of London that was seen by some as presumptuous.

Still, at a time when the Catholic Church is receding in Europe and expanding in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Cardinal Turkson would fulfill the calls from many Catholics for a pope from the “Global South.” In 1910, according to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Catholics! lived in! Europe. By 2010, Europe’s share of the global Catholic population had shrunk to 24 percent.

Two Americans are in the top 25. Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston ranks at No. 13, with a 4 percent chance of being elected. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York comes in at No. 16, with a 3 percent chance.

The cardinals might also factor the age of a prospective pope into their decision. An examination of the ages of recent popes by Jimmy Akin at the National Catholic Register suggests that the cardinals may prefer a pope in his late 60s. The oddsmakers seem to agree with this; the average age of the contenders in the top 25 is 70, and the average age of the top 10 prospective popes is 68.

Mr. Akin also wrote, however, that the resignation of the 85-year-old Benedict could push cardinals to pick a younger ppe this time. If that does happen, Cardinal Peter Erdo, 60, the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, might be a good bet (No. 8; 7 percent chance). Or the cardinals could be drawn to Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines, who, at 55, is the youngest cardinal in the top 25 (No. 14, 4 percent chance).

On the other hand, the precedent of Benedict’s resignation could spur the conclave to pick an older pope, knowing that â€" should he become unable to do the job â€" he could resign. That would be good news for Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria (5 percent, No. 12) and Cardinal Renato Martino of Italy (3 percent, No. 25), both 80 and the oldest contenders among the bookmakers’ top 25.