At The New Republic, Even Firings Enter the Digital Age

Just one year after the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, the magazine confirmed it had fired one of its top editors.

Timothy Noah, a former Slate reporter and senior editor at The New Republic, posted a tweet on Friday afternoon that read, “I just got fired from @tnr. Don’t have a clue why. Anybody got a job”

Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, confirmed through a spokeswoman that Mr. Noah had been fired. He added in a statement “Tim Noah has been a strong voice for liberalism and a rigorous columnist for The New Republic. We’ve appreciated his passion and contribution to the magazine over the past two years and wish him the very best.”

Mr. Hughes, who has spent the last year revamping the near century-old publication, started to reconfigure its masthead last May. He lured back Mr. Foer to replace the magazine’s editor at the time, Richard Just. Since then, Mr. Hughes has been courting new writers to the magazine, including Walter Kirn, the author of “Up in the Air,” and Judith Shulevitz, a former editor of Lingua Franca. In January, Mr. Hughes unveiled a redesign that featured an exclusive interview with President Obama. This week, Mr. Foer said the magazine had passed the 50,000 mark for its circulation, which is a 43 percent jump from the year before.

While Mr. Noah did not respond to a request for comment, his friends on Facebook and Twitter voiced their support. One wrote, “You did nice work there. You’ll do nice work in your next gig. There’s no shame in getting fired. It happens to me all the time.”

A ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ Reunion, Via Cleveland

The cable channel TV Land lives on nostalgia for classic television and that will certainly reach a peak this summer in an episode of the sitcom, “Hot in Cleveland.” The show will reunite all of the major female stars from one of television’s most beloved comedies, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

TV Land announced Friday that Ms. Moore would make a second appearance on “Hot in Cleveland,” joining her former cast mates Betty White and Georgia Engel, who are regular characters on the show. This time they will be accompanied by Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman.

The announcement came  two weeks after Ms. Harper announced that she had received a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. The TV Land announcement did not refer to her illness or whether it inspired the reunion. But the episode was most recently put together and will shoot in early April. A broadcast date will be announced later.

“Hot in Cleveland” will begin its new season on June 19 with a live episode.

In the reunion show, the characters played by Ms. White and Ms. Engel will decide to try to get their bowling team back together. Ms. Moore, Ms. Harper and Ms. Leachman will play the former members asked to return as the Glorious Ladies of Bowling.

M.L.B. Turns to Young Stars to Reach New Fans

Trout, Harper, Posey, McCutchen and Price. Sounds like an advertising agency, or a law firm. Actually, the names are those of several of the young stars who will be the face of the effort from Major League Baseball to promote Opening Day 2013.

A commercial that is to begin running on Friday features players who include Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels, age 21; Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals, 20; Buster Posey, 25, of the San Francisco Giants; Andrew McCutchen, 26, of the Pittsburgh Pirates and David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays, who is 27.

The players in the commercial who are the oldest - a relative term - are each 30: Robinson Cano of the New York Yankees, Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers and David Wright of the New York Mets.

The commercial presents each player declaring what he will play for when the 2013 season gets under way. For instance, Mr. Harper says, “I play for nine guys playing as one.” Mr. Trout says, “For the history to be written.”

Mr. Posey says, “For three rings in four years,” referring to the two World Series championships won by his team in the last three years.

The commercial ends with Mr. Verlander asserting, “I play for October” - that is, to make the playoffs and, eventually, the World Series.

Viewers of the commercial will notice that the spot takes a serious, earnest tone rather than the lighthearted tack that Major League Baseball sometimes uses in its promotional efforts. It seems as if the young players are readying themselves to compete in “The Hunger Games” rather than in the American and National leagues.

Major League Baseball executives “challenged us to give the work a different feel and a different energy,” said Karen Kaplan, president at Hill Holliday in Boston, the agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies that is creating the campaign.

The goal was “to demonstrate the passion” the players have, she added, in a way that would seem as if it was “getting inside the players’ heads and giving people a glimpse of what’s going on.”

There will also be subsequent commercials that are focused on the young stars one at a time, including Mr. Harper and Mr. McCutchen. There will also be spots in Spanish with Spanish-speaking players like Mr. Cano.

The follow-up commercials also use the “I play for” template, with Mr. Harper making statements like “I play for the ‘W’ on my hat. And 95 more in the ‘win’ column” and for “the Nationals red pumping through my veins.”

In his spot, Mr. McCutchen says, “I play for the Steel City,” meaning Pittsburgh, and “for those who wore the ‘P’ before me.”

For years, Major League Baseball has sought ways to appeal to younger Americans, concerned that the aging of the fan base for baseball will in the long run have ominous consequences.

Now, M.L.B. has “a maybe once-in-a-decade opportunity” to reach those younger potential fans, said Tim Brosnan, executive vice president for business at the league, through “these blooming assets” - in other words, “this incredible crop of young stars ready for prime time.”

“Younger fans identify with superstars,” Mr. Brosnan said, and also with players “who are more like them.”

This season, it seems those two categories could be one and the same, in that “as a group, you could argue, they are the brightest, largest crop of superstars we’ve had in a long time,” he added.

Asked about the inclusion of 30-year-old players in the commercial, Mr. Brosnan joked that Mr. Wright had “the face of an 18-year-old, a baby face.”

The serious tone of the commercials, Ms. Kaplan said, reflects how the young players share a “commitment to getting to the postseason.”

The message is that “for the players, there is a lot at stake,” she added, “and for the fans, there’s something to watch in every game, in every play, and you don’t want to miss anything.”

The “I play for” theme will be extended into social media, Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Brosnan said. Fans will be asked why they watch or play baseball and why they root for their favorite players and teams. Their answers will be solicited in the form of brief video clips on the new Vine video-sharing feature offered by Twitter.

The commercials will appear on channels and networks that present Major League Baseball games, including ESPN, Fox, MLB Network and TBS. They will also run online and have a landing page on a fan-focused Web site operated by M.L.B., mlbfancave.com.

“House of Cards” No. 9: Alliances Crumbling on All Sides

If you have loyally stayed with us to this point, you know the drill. Ashley Parker and David Carr put the old gimlet eye on “House of Cards” with an emphasis on the optics and verisimilitude of the show’s media and political angles. And if you are just arriving, you can catch up with recaps of episodes one, two,three, four, five, six,seven or eight. Lots of spoilers, so proceed with caution.

Episode 9

Synopsis: Revolt is in the air: Frank Underwood’s carefully crafted bill to prop up Peter Russo’s candidacy comes undone and it’s an inside job. The alliance of convenience between Frank and Zoe Barnes becomes an intimate battle for power.

Carr: This is the episode where the marble rolls off the table for Frank, and part of me really enjoyed watching the comeuppance. The Washington D.C. of “House of Cards” has been a place where women only gain power and salience by their adjacency to men. There is scene after scene in which male politicians come into the shot and there is a phalanx of women traveling in their wake, heels clicking as they follow The Man down the hall. It’s not as if you don’t see that every day in the Congress, but this is also a time in government when the Democratic leader of the House is a woman and the Secretary of State was, until recently, female and arguably one of the leading candidates to be the next president if things go her way. Yet in “House of Cards,” all the women pivot around Frank, or Peter, or the president.

All that bystanding is starting to get under the skin of those women and they strike back. Frank’s wife, Claire, who has watched her own plans fade just to bolster her husband’s, stabs him in the back from a very close distance. And Zoe Barnes begins to exercise all the leverage she has to put Frank on notice that she does not belong to him, that there is a mutuality of interests that must be attained. She is also beginning to sense that Frank is capable of anything, not just playing politics, and begins to regard him with heightened suspicion.

Parker: The Claire Underwood betrayal feels like a real act of defiance, with Ms. Underwood knowingly beating her husband at his own game of manipulative double-dealing. In their partnership, he has not been a very worthy partner, and she plans to let him know as much in the place that hurts the most â€" on the House floor, with the whip count, with a devastating vote.

The Zoe Barnes pushback to Frank, however, struck me as a bit more convoluted. After all, as Frank himself points out, she was the one who elevated their relationship from transactional to sexual. When Janine Skorsky, her world-weary older colleague, tells Zoe that as a young reporter herself, she slept her way “to the middle” and finally “hit a wall” where no one would take her seriously, Zoe seems to heed the warning. Her decision to try to break things off with Frank seems to come down to yet another calculation â€" that it’s bad for business. And then, when Frank turns off the spigot of leaks, Zoe begrudgingly and angrily backs down.

On the issue of not being taken seriously, Janine has a point. In the instances I know of where a female reporter has somehow gotten involved with a source â€" or if there were widespread rumors, fair or unfair, to that effect â€" the reporter’s credibility and reputation instantly plummeted, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen when their male colleagues do the exact same thing. Though for Zoe Barnes, she may already have gone too far down that road for it to matter much.

Carr: “This is what professional feels like,” Frank explains when he cuts Zoe out of inside information. But he has, in fact, lost his professional moorings. Even if he wants to be in the favor-trading business with all kinds of things up for barter, his limping male pride creates an Achilles Heel. It is O.K. for him to go home and smoke ciggies with Claire and talk about Zoe, but when Zoe shows a hint of having a life beyond simply being an instrument of his will, he loses it.

In order for Frank and Zoe to carry on, the subtext must be rendered visible. Once that happens, the game is up. “I can play the whore,” Zoe tells Frank. Of course, to articulate that fact is to own it, and it can’t feel very good to know what business she is in, even if she is now setting the price and the terms.

I love that you point to the floor of the House as the scene of his abasement. As the whip, he is only as good as his counting fingers and when he comes up short, his fundamental value is in question.

Parker: The whip scene is an interesting one, if only because the show, as usual, gets part of it so right and part of it so wrong. Frank, trying to whip his members into voting the way he wants, urges them, “Vote your district, vote your conscience, don’t surprise me” â€" a line right out of the playbook of the actual whip, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. (In fact, in a recent CNN interview, Mr. McCarthy reveals that he gave the show that line, when Kevin Spacey was doing research about Congress).

But then, in the final whip scene, the show gets it so wrong, offering up a tableau of Frank watching the vote on C-SPAN from his office. There, he sips champagne with the president’s chief of staff, and mingles with other friends and colleagues â€" as if he were at a cocktail party, not a crucial floor vote on a tough-to-pass bill. On such a critical vote the whip would never, ever be watching from afar on C-SPAN; he’d be right there on the floor with his members, making sure they were voting the way they’d promised and ready to engage in any last minute cajoling and arm-twisting.

I e-mailed Mr. McCarthy’s office just to be sure that leaving the House floor and watching a vote wind down on television was very un-whip like. The response was swift and decisive: “That is a big no-no,” an aide responded.

The Breakfast Meeting: Hallmark Channels Add Original Content and Sales of Movie Tickets Rise

Crown Media Family Networks’ executives said Thursday that efforts to increase the amount of original programming on their two Hallmark cable channels are already attracting advertisers, Stuart Elliott reports. Hallmark Channel plans to introduce five original prime-time series in July, and Hallmark Movie Channel will present original movies with Christmas themes this fall. Crown Media joins a lengthy list of media companies pursuing original programming rather than rerunning shows from broadcast networks. William J. Abbott, president and chief executive at Crown Media Holdings, said advertising gains will be “strong, strong, strong.”

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that movie ticket sales rose 6 percent around the world, to $34.7 billion in 2012, Michael Cieply reports. China beat Japan to become the second-highest national box office, taking in $2.7 billion to Japan’s $2.4 billion in 2012, and ticket sales rose in the United States and Canada. The number of movies released in 2012 by the association’s members continued to decline, dropping to 128 from 141 a year earlier.

Scottsdale, Ariz., has introduced a borderline surreal campaign to attract the most irascible of commuters, the New York subway rider, Matt Flegenheimer writes. The city of Scottsdale has spent $25,000 on a “full-body wrap” that festoons the 42nd Street Shuttle with images of cowboys cavorting under the sun or in saloons. “We’re embedding that seed of ‘Hey, maybe I’ve never considered Scottsdale before,’ ” Caroline Stoeckel, the vice president of marketing for the Scottsdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, said.

BioShock Infinite, one of the most-anticipated video games of the year, will be released Tuesday, Harold Goldberg reports. The third installment of Irrational Games’s BioShock series took 200 people four years and upward of $100 million to create, not including an advertising budget analysts estimate in the tens of millions. BioShock Infinite, a deep first-person shooter game set in a floating city and packed with cultural references, is in large part the brainchild of Irrational’s creative director, Ken Levine.

It is not a coincidence that inhabitants of the rural town of Dish, Texas, watch Dish Network, Manny Fernandez writes. In 2005 the town, then known as Clark, agreed to change its name in exchange for free basic service, installation and equipment for all residents. A Dish (the network) spokesman said the arrangement has been beneficial to both the company and the town, but many Dish residents said it has done little to put their hamlet on the map and bemoan the costs of premium channels like HBO.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced on Thursday that it would publish a book about Johnny Carson by the late-night host’s former lawyer, Henry Bushkin, Leslie Kaufman reports. Mr. Bushkin and Mr. Carson were close companions for 18 years but had a bitter falling out in 1988.

Site Brings New Way to Connect With Vergara and Other Latino Stars

Sofia Vergara’s 4.2 million Twitter followers have seen the actress post a consistent stream of photos of her family, her friends and her Modern Family co-stars. Soon, many of those photos and posts will take her Twitter fans to a new Web site called NuevoWorld, which will make its debut on Friday.

The site was created by Luis Balaguer, Ms. Vergara’s business partner and the co-founder of Latin World Entertainment, a Hispanic talent agency and media company the two founded in 1998.

Users who click on Ms. Vergara’s Twitter posts will be directed to her NuevoWorld page instead of to Instagram or Yfrog - popular social media photo sites. Some of the photos will be enabled with technology that allows users to purchase items similar to the ones Ms. Vergara might be wearing.

Other content on the site will include videos and branded content from CoverGirl, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi NEXT, the initial sponsors for the site. NuevoWorld “really puts the relationship between brands and talent on steroids,” Mr. Balaguer said. (Ms. Vergara is also a spokeswoman for each of the products.)

Advertisers will also have traditional display ads on the site, but mostly the brands will focus on creating content, said Shiv Singh, the global head of digital at PepsiCo Beverages. “This isn’t a relationship that’s based ad units and banners, it’s a content relationship,” Mr. Singh said.

Digital ads on the site would be a way for visitors to connect to, say, an video series starring Ms. Vergara. “We see ourselves as a content partner to Nuevo World and not just an advertiser,” Mr. Singh said.

Other Hispanic celebrities that will debut pages on the site include Raúl “El Gordo” De Molina, the host of the Univision entertainment show “El Gordo y La Flaca” and Chiquinquirá Delgado, a co-host on the Univision show “Sábado Gigante.”