Actress’s Suit Against IMDb for Publishing Her Actual Age Can Go to Trial

LOS ANGELES â€" Junie Hoang, the actress who sued Amazon and its Internet Movie Database unit for posting her age, can take her complaint â€" or at least some of it â€" to a jury.

Judge Marsha J. Pechman, of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, ruled on Monday that Ms. Hoang, whose legal name is Huong Hoang, can proceed to trial with a breach of contract claim and a request for damages related to her career.

But Judge Pechman excluded Amazon as a defendant, leaving only its IMDb unit in the suit; barred any claim by Ms. Hoang for emotional distress; and granted summary judgment denying a claim that the database had violated the Consumer Protection Act by publishing Ms. Hoang’s age without her consent.

“Anyone who values their privacy and has ever given credit card information to an online company like IMDb or Amazon.com should be concerned about the outcome,” Ms. Hoang said Tuesday in a statement.

A call to Amazon’s media relations department drew no immediate response.

In 2011, Ms. Hoang, who is now 41 years old, filed a complaint that said IMDb.com, a widely used film and television database, had illegally used her credit card information to obtain and post her age. The disclosure, she said, exposed her to age discrimination in an industry that values youth â€" a claim that was bolstered by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which publicly criticized IMDb for posting the ages of performers and others.

In her order on Monday, Judge Pechman described a series of communications in which Ms. Hoang had first omitted her age when subscribing to IMDb, then submitted a false date of birth that made her appear to be seven years younger than her actual age. Eventually, Judge Pechman noted, Ms. Hoang asked IMDb to remove the false birth date, going so far as to submit a fake Texas identification document to show that it was wrong.

Instead of relying on the fake document, the judge said, an IMDb employee gained access to Ms. Hoang’s credit card information, then used that to ascertain her actual 1971 birth date from a public records database called PrivateEye.

Ms. Hoang’s misrepresentations, the judge said, were not sufficient to bar her claim. But whether IMDb had breached its contract with her, or is liable for damages, must be decided at trial, she said.

In an order issued last August, Judge Pechman set the trial date on April 8 of this year.

Nate Silver on the N.C.A.A. Bracket

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver spoke with Megan Lieberman on Tuesday about our forecast for the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, strategies to win your tournament pool and the end of the overwhelming favorite in college hoops.

MSNBC Announces Replacement for Chris Hayes

MSNBC on Tuesday named Steve Kornacki the new host of “Up,” a weekend morning panel discussion program that is about to be vacated by its original host, Chris Hayes.

Mr. Kornacki will take over when Mr. Hayes moves to the 8 p.m. time slot on weekdays, a change that was announced by the cable news channel last week.

MSNBC did not specify a start date for Mr. Kornacki, but the channel has previously said that Mr. Hayes will start at 8 p.m. on April 1.

With the announcement on Tuesday, MSNBC is once again promoting from within. Mr. Kornacki, a senior political writer for Salon since 2010, has been a guest on the channel for years; in fact, as Salon’s editor in chief noted last year, the site actually approached him about the job after seeing him on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Last summer MSNBC made Mr. Kornacki, 33, a co-host of “The Cycle,” a 3 p.m. political conversation with three other young hosts, Touré, Krystal Ball and S.E. Cupp. The ratings for “The Cycle” have pleased MSNBC executives, despite the tough middle-of-the-day time slot, and Mr. Kornacki has been mentioned recently as a rising star at the channel.

MSNBC indicated on Tuesday that he would leave “The Cycle” to take on the new assignment, but did not immediately name a successor.

But the announcement resolves what viewers of “Up” have wanted to know since last week: would the in-depth talk show remain in some form, and if so, who would lead it

“Up,” which was started 18 months ago in an expansion of MSNBC’s progressive-minded programming, is more influential than the Nielsen ratings imply. It had about 139,000 viewers ages 25 to 54 last month, but it attracts a fiercely loyal fan base that typically gets a Twitter hashtag, “#uppers,” trending online during every episode. “Up” also sets a tone for MSNBC’s weekend programming, and the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, often mentions Mr. Hayes when describing the future direction of MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said in a statement on Wednesday, “I give so much credit to the ‘Up’ team who created appointment viewing on the weekends for us and some of the smartest conversations on television. Steve has a great political mind and his ability to connect with viewers made him a natural fit to continue driving that dialogue.”

Mr. Hayes wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, “Psyched to pass the ‘Up’ franchise to Steve Kornacki. #Uppers are in excellent hands.” A few minutes later Mr. Kornacki wrote, Mr. Hayes “and his team have built something pretty amazing. Excited to be stepping in.”

The channel’s chain of dominos started to fall last week when Ed Schultz, the former host of the 8 p.m. hour, announced that he was stepping aside. He will relocate to the weekends starting next month, enabling MSNBC to expand live political programming to the 5 and 6 p.m. hours on Saturday and Sunday. (Currently the channel runs documentaries at those times.)

MSNBC then named Mr. Hayes the new 8 p.m. host. Some at the channel had expected Ezra Klein, an MSNBC contributor and Washington Post columnist, to get the 8 p.m. job or the weekend morning job. The announcement about Mr. Kornacki on Tuesday suggested that the channel has something else in mind for him â€" perhaps a time slot in prime time on the weekends.

MSNBC Announces Replacement for Chris Hayes

MSNBC on Tuesday named Steve Kornacki the new host of “Up,” a weekend morning panel discussion program that is about to be vacated by its original host, Chris Hayes.

Mr. Kornacki will take over when Mr. Hayes moves to the 8 p.m. time slot on weekdays, a change that was announced by the cable news channel last week.

MSNBC did not specify a start date for Mr. Kornacki, but the channel has previously said that Mr. Hayes will start at 8 p.m. on April 1.

With the announcement on Tuesday, MSNBC is once again promoting from within. Mr. Kornacki, a senior political writer for Salon since 2010, has been a guest on the channel for years; in fact, as Salon’s editor in chief noted last year, the site actually approached him about the job after seeing him on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Last summer MSNBC made Mr. Kornacki, 33, a co-host of “The Cycle,” a 3 p.m. political conversation with three other young hosts, Touré, Krystal Ball and S.E. Cupp. The ratings for “The Cycle” have pleased MSNBC executives, despite the tough middle-of-the-day time slot, and Mr. Kornacki has been mentioned recently as a rising star at the channel.

MSNBC indicated on Tuesday that he would leave “The Cycle” to take on the new assignment, but did not immediately name a successor.

But the announcement resolves what viewers of “Up” have wanted to know since last week: would the in-depth talk show remain in some form, and if so, who would lead it

“Up,” which was started 18 months ago in an expansion of MSNBC’s progressive-minded programming, is more influential than the Nielsen ratings imply. It had about 139,000 viewers ages 25 to 54 last month, but it attracts a fiercely loyal fan base that typically gets a Twitter hashtag, “#uppers,” trending online during every episode. “Up” also sets a tone for MSNBC’s weekend programming, and the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, often mentions Mr. Hayes when describing the future direction of MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said in a statement on Wednesday, “I give so much credit to the ‘Up’ team who created appointment viewing on the weekends for us and some of the smartest conversations on television. Steve has a great political mind and his ability to connect with viewers made him a natural fit to continue driving that dialogue.”

Mr. Hayes wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, “Psyched to pass the ‘Up’ franchise to Steve Kornacki. #Uppers are in excellent hands.” A few minutes later Mr. Kornacki wrote, Mr. Hayes “and his team have built something pretty amazing. Excited to be stepping in.”

The channel’s chain of dominos started to fall last week when Ed Schultz, the former host of the 8 p.m. hour, announced that he was stepping aside. He will relocate to the weekends starting next month, enabling MSNBC to expand live political programming to the 5 and 6 p.m. hours on Saturday and Sunday. (Currently the channel runs documentaries at those times.)

MSNBC then named Mr. Hayes the new 8 p.m. host. Some at the channel had expected Ezra Klein, an MSNBC contributor and Washington Post columnist, to get the 8 p.m. job or the weekend morning job. The announcement about Mr. Kornacki on Tuesday suggested that the channel has something else in mind for him â€" perhaps a time slot in prime time on the weekends.

Southwest Broadens Approach in New Campaign

Southwest Airlines, for the first time in many years, is making major changes in how it presents itself to current and potential customers.

In an initiative that is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, Southwest is replacing its longtime humorous approach, as typified by ads with themes like “You are now free to move about the country,” with a smoother, more polished tack that is intended to help burnish the Southwest brand image by playing up the airline’s status as the biggest domestic carrier.

The new effort, which carries the theme “Welcome aboard,” is also the first work for the airline from TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, which Southwest added to its roster of advertising agencies in July. The funny ads for Southwest have been created by GSD&M, an agency in Austin, Tex., that continues to work for the company on other assignments.

Fun is, however, not entirely absent from the new initiative, which uses the song “Some Nights” by the popular rock band Fun. on the soundtrack of the first commercial.

In the first commercial of the campaign, Southwest is likened to entrepreneurs and mavericks who, according to an announcer, “find their own path, chart their own course” and “never stop moving forward and never, ever back down.”

Such people “believe the American dream doesn’t just happen; it’s something you have to work for,” the announcer proclaims, adding that at Southwest, “we never stop looking for a better way.”

“It’s how we’ve grown into America’s largest domestic airline,” the commercial concludes. “We are Southwest. Welcome aboard.”

If the commercial is somewhat evocative of a well-known television commercial for Apple from 1997 called “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” that may be no coincidence. The TBWA Media Arts Lab division of TBWA/Chiat/Day creates campaigns for Apple.

The new approach for Southwest is not without risk in that it leaves behind the airline’s usual jokey pitches for a tack that may seem to many consumers more appropriate for a carrier with a buttoned-down, corporate image than one with humorous on-board safety announcements.

“People enjoy the humor on board, and that we don’t want to change,” Bob Jordan, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Southwest, said in a phone interview on Monday.

But when it comes to the humorous ads, “our advertising in the past, while it’s been effective, has been one-dimensional,” Mr. Jordan said, in that “we’ve been using humor to drive home our points almost exclusively.”

“We haven’t told you enough about the things that make us proud,” he added. “We want to tell people we’re better, we’re innovators, and I don’t think people know or remember how innovative Southwest is.”

Also, the humorous tack, “while it’s very effective, speaks more directly to leisure” travelers, Mr. Jordan said, than to the “combination of leisure and business” travelers Southwest would like to have.

So the new effort is “faster-paced, younger, more energetic,” he added, to convey how “Southwest has really changed in the last five to 10 years” with offerings that include “live TV, video on demand on board, new planes and Wi-Fi.”

“We’re not taking a hard right turn,” Mr. Jordan said, because the ads will continue to “celebrate our customers and our employees.”

But “there is something about putting a more modern face, a fresher look, a fresher style” on the Southwest brand, he added.

Mr. Jordan said he had no doubt that consumers would see the new initiative and recognize that “we’re selling Southwest Airlines” by saying, “We’re like you, we’re innovators, we’re always trying to get better.”

And during the course of the next 18 months, he added, “maybe we’ll push a little further back into the humor” in the subsequent ads, which will be devoted to Southwest trademarks like low fares as well as features like new cabins.

Southwest Airlines spent $156.2 million on advertising last year, according to the Kantar Media division of WPP, less than the $247.8 million spent in 2011, the $198.7 million spent in 2010, the $189.7 million spent in 2009 and the $194.1 million spent in 2008.

The lower amount for 2012 may be because the company was planning to bring out the new advertising this year and spend more on it.

The new advertising is not risky or a gamble, said Carisa Bianchi, president at TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, because “the spot keeps the values and the persona of Southwest and is very much true to its character.”

But it also presents “a grown-up version of Southwest,” she added, reflecting how “Southwest has grown” as it has “democratized the skies.”

“That’s something their existing customers recognize,” Ms. Bianchi said, but is “new information for the business travelers they’re trying to attract.”

John Norman, chief creative officer at TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, said the echo of “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” may be derived from research that the agency did on Facebook.

“We looked at the people on Facebook who ‘like’ Southwest,” he said, “and there’s an extremely high correlation to innovators.”

“Upstart companies treat Southwest as their company plane,” he added. “They’re ‘the Crazy Ones’ of today.”

The new effort is not “quirky ha-ha-ha,” Mr. Norman acknowledged, offering instead “a charm and humanity” to consumers “rather than slapstick humor.”

TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles is, formally, the Playa del Rey, Calif., office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, a division of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group. GSD&M is also owned by Omnicom, as is a third agency with which Southwest works, Dieste.

Southwest also works with two agencies owned by WPP, VML and Wunderman.

The Breakfast Meeting: ABC Works on a Streaming App and British Newspapers Protest Regulations

The Walt Disney Company is working on an app that would stream ABC programming to the tablets and phones of cable and satellite subscribers, Brian Stelter reports. ABC would be the first of the American broadcaster to provide such an app, and it is likely to result in a mixture of awe and fear from other networks. Disney already has streaming apps for content from ESPN and the Disney Channel, but special complexities exist for networks like ABC because of older contracts with companies that produce its shows and local stations, which might feel threatened by the app. It is not yet clear what the app would mean for online streaming services like Hulu, which does not require viewers to subscribe and has grown increasingly marginalized as its parent companies (including Disney) seek more lucrative revenue streams.

An array of British newspapers on Tuesday protested an attempt to impose stricter curbs on them, Stephen Castle and Alan Cowell write. The agreement announced by lawmakers on Monday creates a system under which newspapers would face a tough regulatory body that could order corrections be published prominently and impose large fines on publications that breach standards. The deal enshrines the regulator’s powers in a royal charter, the same document that governs the BBC and the Bank of England. The newspaper society, which represents 1,100 newspapers, said that the possibility of fines of up to $1.5 million would prove “crippling” for their struggling publications.

Much of the entertainment world’s metabolism has sped up, but major film productions often still lurch forward at a zombie’s pace, Michael Cieply reports. A case in point is the forthcoming “World War Z,” a zombie movie to be released in June that seems timely given the success of undead fare like AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” But Paramount Pictures acquired the rights to the novel “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment in 2006, just one example of a Hollywood system that mires its biggest films in an ever-lengthening process.  Whether these delayed releases make films miss the mark is an open question, but it is a fact that this year the release schedules feature at least eight high-budget films that were conceived five to 14 years ago.

Marriott International is using the release of the new movie “42,” about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color line, to promote its loyalty program for African-Americans, Jane L. Levere reports. The campaign involves a Facebook contest, special screenings of the film and promotion of “42” on hotel room TVs, among other initiatives, and marks the first time Marriott has done niche marketing for the program, called Marriott Rewards. Apoorva Gandhi, vice president for multicultural markets and alliances at Marriott International, said that the movie was a good fit because it matches Marriott’s fundamental values (interestingly enough, Marriott Rewards also has 42 million members globally).

The media truism “if it bleeds, it leads,” appears to be undermined by social networks, John Tierney writes. A number of different studies show that social media users are more likely to share uplifting stories, perhaps because they are more concerned with how stories make their friends feel than a traditional media company. One study on the dissemination of thousands of articles from The New York Times Web site found that readers were more likely to share articles they found exciting or funny, or that inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not ones that just left them sad. But the more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared.

The BBC confirmed plans to sell the Lonely Planet travel guidebooks to a reclusive American billionaire on Tuesday, drawing internal scrutiny for losing public money on the sale, Eric Pfanner writes. BBC Worldwide sold Lonely Planet for £51.5 million, or $77.3 million, far below the £130 million that the BBC paid for Lonely Planet. At the time of the purchase the BBC talked about extending Lonely Planet into digital channels, an area where traditional guidebooks face stiff competition from travel Web sites.

Air New Zealand has enlisted Bear Grylls, the bug-eating, urine-drinking adventurer best known for the survival show “Man vs. Wild,” to liven up that pariah of in-flight entertainment, the onboard safety video, Bettina Wassener reports. The airline’s video features Mr. Grylls running, crawling and rappelling. At one point he leaps into a raging river to demonstrate the efficacy of the plane’s life jackets. These attempts to spice up the safety-spiel are a relatively new development, with Virgin America one of the first companies to try in 2007.