Advertising: In the World of Content, Web Follows a Trail Left by TV

In the World of Content, Web Follows a Trail Left by TV

IF in real estate, as the saying goes, the three most important things are “location, location, location,” when it comes to wooing viewers and advertisers to online video from television, the corresponding mantra seems to be “content, content, content.”

Seth Meyers was the host of a Hulu presentation on Tuesday, where he promoted a Web series he will help create.

Erin McPherson of Yahoo with the actors Ed Helms, left, and Zachary Levi, who will appear in a yahoo.com series.

As a week of presentations by media companies continues in New York, under the banner of the Digital Content NewFronts, the focus is squarely on efforts to create high-quality, engaging Web series and other programming that can be watched on smartphones and tablets as well as on desktop and laptop computers. Borrowing a page from the broadcast networks and cable channels whose so-called upfronts inspired the week’s events, the media companies are recruiting for their shows stars who will work on both sides of the camera.

AOL, in its presentation on Tuesday, described plans for a number of new projects that featured familiar names like the designer Jonathan Adler, Hank Azaria, the chef Rocco DiSpirito, the Nascar driver Dylan Kwasniewski, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and Nicole Richie.

Also on Tuesday, Hulu, the online video Web site, described at its event several series, planned and potential, involving the likes of Mario Batali, the Tony-winning British actor James Corden, Carson Daly, Eva Longoria, Seth Meyers and Jay Mohr.

And on Monday evening, Yahoo shared a lineup of programs involving Ed Helms, Cheryl Hines, Zachary Levi, Morgan Spurlock and John Stamos.

In the last year, Yahoo has more than doubled the original video programming on yahoo.com, said Erin McPherson, vice president and head of video at Yahoo, who shared the stage with stars like Mr. Helms and Mr. Levi. The actors, in a comedic Web series, “Tiny Commando,” will play a private eye who is 4 inches tall (Mr. Helms) and his arch-nemesis, also in miniature (Mr. Levi).

Other new Web shows for Yahoo include “We Need Help,” with Ms. Hines and Rachael Harris as high-maintenance Hollywood divas who share a personal assistant, and “Losing Your Virginity With John Stamos,” in which Mr. Stamos will interview other celebrities about their tales of loss of innocence; Mr. Stamos and Mr. Spurlock are to be the executive producers.

Marissa Mayer, the new president and chief executive at Yahoo, told the audience that premium content was one of her three goals for Yahoo’s products supported by advertising, along with innovation and performance.

Ads were also a topic of discussion at the Hulu presentation, as Jean-Paul Colaco, senior vice president for advertising at Hulu, declared, “We celebrate advertising at Hulu,” where, he said, executives are “building the world’s most effective video advertising service.”

On television, “brands are just one DVR skip from losing valuable viewer engagement,” Mr. Colaco said, referring to the practice, common among owners of digital video recorders, of skipping commercials when watching shows they recorded. By contrast, he added, commercials on Hulu enjoy high recall of the brands as well as their messages.

Several of the original series discussed by Mr. Colaco and other Hulu executives, including those with Mr. Batali, Mr. Daly and Mr. Mohr, are “brand-contingent” â€" that is, they will be made if advertisers sign up to support them. Such shows would integrate products in the plot lines, a practice known as branded entertainment or content marketing.

Mr. Meyers â€" who also hosted the Hulu presentation in addition to promoting an original animated Web series, “The Awesomes,” that he is creating for Hulu with Michael Shoemaker â€" even spoofed Hulu’s practice of refining its commercial-targeting through user surveys. “Was that joke relevant to you? Click yes or no,” Mr. Meyers said at one point, elaborating on the Hulu entreaty “Is this ad relevant to you? Click yes or no.”

Mr. Colaco and the other Hulu executives spoke confidently, despite it being an uncertain time for the company as two of its owners, the Walt Disney Company and News Corporation, weigh whether to sell. In March, the founding chief executive of Hulu, Jason Kilar, stepped down; one of his top lieutenants, Andy Forssell, is now the acting chief executive and spoke during the presentation, announcing that Hulu doubled the number of subscribers to its paid service, Hulu Plus, in the last year, to four million, with half of them ages 18 to 34.

In the increasingly crowded online environment, commissioning shows is becoming a way to stand out. Hulu, for instance, became this week one of only two places to watch “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the canceled ABC daytime soap operas that were resurrected online by a production company, Prospect Park. (The other outlet is Apple’s iTunes store.)

Stars from each soap appeared during the Hulu presentation, including Erika Slezak of “One Live to Live,” who spoke for the casts of both when she proudly declared the series are “no longer ‘daytime.’ ”

Because they can now be watched “whenever, wherever, however,” Ms. Slezak said, “we are anytime.”

In another sign of the growing prominence of online viewing, Nielsen said on Tuesday that it would begin a pilot of what it called Nielsen digital program ratings, measuring audiences for linear television content watched online. AOL is among the participants in the test, from May through July, along with A&E, ABC, CBS, CW, Discovery Communications, Fox, NBC and Univision.

The Digital Content NewFronts, under the aegis of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, are to run through Friday.

Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

Media Decoder: Chris Matthews Signs Long-Term Extension With MSNBC

Chris Matthews Signs Long-Term Extension With MSNBC

Chris Matthews, who just signed an extension with MSNBC, gave a bear hug to a fellow host at the network, the Rev. Al Sharpton, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner over the weekend.

Chris Matthews, who has been one of the most prominent hosts on MSNBC for more than a decade, has signed a new long-term deal with the network to continue his “Hardball” program, a network executive confirmed on Tuesday.

“Hardball” will continue to fill the 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. weekday hours on the channel. But in the new deal, Mr. Matthews will end his syndicated Sunday talk show, “The Chris Matthews Show,” in July.

The deal was first reported in The Hollywood Reporter.

In a statement, Mr. Matthews said: “I want ‘Hardball’ fans to know that I’m signing a long-term contract with MSNBC to carry on a show we started back in 1997 based on a book I wrote in 1988. To be perfectly truthful, I’d be doing what I do on the show - talking and arguing politics - for nothing even if it weren’t on the air.”

“Hardball” got its start on CNBC in 1997.

Mr. Matthews, who is 67, is also the author of six books, most recently “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.”

Times-Picayune Plans a New Print Tabloid

Nearly one year after The Times-Picayune of New Orleans announced that it would print only three days a week, the paper said it planned to roll out a three-day-a-week tabloid edition.

Starting this summer, a tabloid called TPStreet will be published on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, according to a statement released online by Jim Amoss, editor and vice president for content at The Times-Picayune.

TPStreet will be available on newsstands for 75 cents and not be delivered to subscribers’ homes. At the same time, The Times-Picayune will continue to publish and offer home delivery of its traditional newspaper on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

“We promised to invest in our community, and we’re fulfilling that promise,” said Ricky R. Mathews, president and publisher of The Times-Picayune in a statement posted on the Web site Nola.com

Last May, the paper’s owners, Advance Publications, announced it would cut back printing of The Times-Picayune and would make major cuts to the newsroom. Advance Publications then introduced similar changes at other papers.

Mr. Mathews said in an e-mail that he was still figuring out how many people to hire for the new edition.

But there are no guarantees that any other cities with papers operated by Advance’s Newhouse unit, which lost daily newspaper coverage, also will get tabloids. Randy Siegel, president of local digital strategy for Advance Publications, said in an e-mail about the change in New Orleans “this was purely a local market decision.”

Many New Orleans residents posted comments tinged with sarcasm on Nola.com. One reader of Nola.com named BeignetBob posted on the site, “C’mon guys, just admit it: The grand digital experiment is a big bust. We tried to tell you, but would you listen? Nooooooooo. Next time, listen to the readers.”

Technology Investor Is Reported Choice for F.C.C.

WASHINGTON - President Obama is expected on Wednesday to nominate Tom Wheeler, a venture capital investor and active fund-raiser in Mr. Obama’s presidential campaigns, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, two administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Wheeler, who more than a decade ago led two telecommunications industry trade groups, has prompted concern in recent weeks by some consumer advocacy groups who anticipated his nomination and said his background investing in and lobbying for cable and wireless companies troubled them. Many of them felt that the outgoing chairman, Julius Genachowski, refused to stand up to powerful telecommunications companies during his four-year tenure.

But Mr. Wheeler received cautious approval on Tuesday from Public Knowledge, one of Mr. Genachowski’s harshest critics. Officials at Public Knowledge pointed out that when Mr. Wheeler lobbied for the cable companies and the cellphone industry, those industries were either upstarts themselves or far less concentrated than they are today.

A White House official said that Mignon Clyburn, an F.C.C. commissioner since August 2009, will be appointed to serve as acting chairwoman until Mr. Wheeler is confirmed and sworn in. Prior to joining the F.C.C., Ms. Clyburn served for 11 years on the South Carolina Public Service Commission, including two as its chairwoman.

Mr. Wheeler currently is a managing director at Core Capital Partners, a Washington investment firm with $350 million under management. At Core Capital, he has helped to oversee the firm’s investments in an array of start-ups and small to midsize technology companies, including GoMobo, Twisted Pair Solutions and Jacked. He also is a member of the board of EarthLink, an Internet service provider that competes aggressively with Verizon and AT&T.

In columns on his Web site, www.mobilemusings.net, Mr. Wheeler has voiced strong opinions about some of the issues that he will find on his desk at the F.C.C.

He has strongly supported the voluntary incentive auctions that the F.C.C. has been planning. The agency is aiming to reclaim airwaves from television broadcasters and sell them to wireless phone companies for use in mobile broadband services.

In 2011, Mr. Wheeler criticized the broadcast industry for not moving more aggressively to use their airwaves for mobile digital television, or the broadcast of television signals to smartphones. At the same time, he said, broadcasters have been reluctant to let go of the part of the nation’s airwaves, or spectrum, that they do not fully use. The F.C.C., backed by Congress, is preparing to auction off many of those unused airwaves, potentially for billions of dollars.

“I’ve been mystified why broadcasters have declared jihad against the voluntary spectrum auction,” Mr. Wheeler wrote.

“Getting big dollars for an asset for which you paid nothing while still being able to run your traditional business over cable,” he added, “seems a pretty good business proposition - unless you really are serious about providing new and innovative services and need all that spectrum.”

Telecommunications industry watchers who have expressed misgivings about Mr. Wheeler’s work as a lobbyist point out that he oversaw the National Cable Television Association from 1979 to 1984. That could mean that he would look kindly on companies like Comcast, one of the largest cable and broadband service providers.

Free Press, an advocacy group that often opposes telecommunications industry proposals, said the F.C.C. needs as its chairman “someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest.” “On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person, having headed not one but two major trade associations,” the group said in a statement. “But he now has the opportunity to prove his critics wrong.”

In recent weeks, there has been a fair amount of jostling and lobbying around the chairman’s post. In March, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat, sent a letter signed by 32 senators to Mr. Obama recommending Jessica Rosenworcel, the other sitting Democrat on the five-member commission and a former aide to Mr. Rockefeller, for the top job.

Three weeks later, a group of Washington technology policy advisers sent a letter to Mr. Obama saying that Mr. Wheeler should be the nominee. “He has consistently fought on the side of increasing competition,” the group wrote.

Travelers Increasingly Demand High-Quality Wi-Fi

Craving Wi-Fi, Preferably Free and Really Fast

TRAVELERS hitting the road with their mobile electronic devices have three questions about staying connected away from home: will there be Wi-Fi, how much will it cost and how well will it work?

Southwest Airlines has adopted an $8 charge for a daylong Wi-Fi pass.

Increasingly, it is that last question that matters most.

Hotels, airports and airlines are struggling to keep up with customers streaming movies on their tablets and hosting online meetings on their laptops, with varying degrees of success. While hoteliers and airport authorities have been fighting the bandwidth battle for years, airlines are still installing Wi-Fi on many aircraft and are already confronting challenges.

Travelers who want Wi-Fi in the air cannot always tell if a plane will have Internet service when they book their tickets. Prices for service are still evolving, and the quality of the connection does not come close to matching what most people are used to on the ground.

“No matter what the system is, none of them right now are showing the ability to keep up with passenger demand,” said Mary Kirby, editor in chief of Airline Passenger Experience magazine. “I’ve heard complaints about every single system.”

Acknowledging the technical hurdles involved in delivering Internet service to a plane traveling 500 miles an hour, Ms. Kirby said airlines and their connectivity partners needed to better manage passenger expectations.

“It’s time for the industry to say, ‘Here’s reasonably what you can expect, and it’s not an at-home experience,’ ” she said. “A passenger should expect to be able to use social media and check e-mail. But you’re not going to be able to send e-mails with really big files, and you’re not going to be able to stream video.”

A new Web site, Routehappy.com, is helping travelers find out if a flight has Wi-Fi â€" information many airlines do not reveal until after a ticket is booked. Routehappy lets travelers search for flights on a particular route, like New York to San Francisco, then sort the results based on various “happiness factors,” including whether the flight offers Wi-Fi.

For a weekday in mid-April, Routehappy calculated that 24 percent of domestic flights offered Wi-Fi, 56 percent did not and 20 percent might. John Walton, Routehappy’s director of data, says the “maybe” category reflects the fact that airlines are busy installing this technology, so it is not always possible to determine weeks in advance if a flight will have it or how well it will work.

“You never know how many other people are going to be using Wi-Fi at the same time,” Mr. Walton said.

Airlines and Wi-Fi providers say typical demand is 5 to 10 percent of passengers, but use is often higher on longer flights. On Virgin America, which offers Wi-Fi on all its planes, 20 percent of passengers typically log on, said Abby Lunardini, a company spokeswoman, and more than a third use Wi-Fi on transcontinental routes.

Most carriers use an air-to-ground system provided by Gogo, which relies on a network of ground-based cellular towers to communicate with aircraft flying across the United States. Gogo’s system can deliver Internet speeds of 3.1 to 9.8 megabits per second, usually much slower than a typical home connection.

Looking to address these speed limitations, Gogo and other Wi-Fi providers are moving toward satellite-based systems capable of delivering faster Internet service. Satellite systems also work over the ocean, enabling carriers to offer Wi-Fi on international flights.

American Airlines has international Wi-Fi on its Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, which fly between Dallas or New York and London, and between New York and São Paulo, Brazil. United Airlines also offers Wi-Fi service on some international flights but does not specify which routes.

Delta is considered a leader on the Wi-Fi front in the United States, providing Internet service on more than 800 aircraft, including many regional jets. American has about 450 Wi-Fi-equipped planes, Southwest Airlines more than 400 and United 50. JetBlue plans to introduce a satellite-based Internet service this year, promising faster speeds than its competitors offer â€" and at least basic Wi-Fi free.

How Immigration Reform and Demographics Could Change Presidential Math

A bill to allow unauthorized immigrants to gain citizenship carries electoral risks and rewards for the Republican Party. On the one hand, if the bill were passed, some of those immigrants would eventually vote. Roughly 80 percent of illegal immigrants are Hispanic, and about 10 percent are Asian â€" groups that voted heavily Democratic in the last two elections.

On the other hand, such legislation could plausibly improve the Republican Party’s brand image among Hispanics and Asian-Americans, perhaps allowing the party to fare better among these voters in future elections. Which of these effects would outweigh the other?

The answer is not necessarily obvious. As Harry J. Enten of The Guardian points out, such immigration reform is unlikely to create an electoral “bonanza” for Democrats, as some faulty attempts to analyze the question have concluded. But whether the legislation could be net-beneficial to the Republican Party depends on the assumptions you make.

So, I’ve designed a tool, in the form of an interactive graphic, that allows you to make different sets of assumptions about immigration reform, population growth and racial voting patterns. Although the graphic contains a number of simplifications, we hope it will be useful to experiment with.

The graphic begins with 2012 voting results as a baseline. In each state, and the District of Columbia, I’ve estimated the vote for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the five racial categories (white, black, Hispanic, Asian and “other”) that are tracked in exit polls.

Because the exit poll data is incomplete â€" 19 states did not have exit polls last year, and the polls often did not break down the results where a racial population was small (for instance, Asian-Americans in Montana) â€" I had to rely on various forms of extrapolation and interpolation to fill in the missing data points. My research suggests, for example, that the share of the Hispanic vote going to Mr. Obama in each state was modestly correlated with the share of the white vote he won in those states, while his share of the vote among African-Americans and Asian-Americans was not correlated with the white vote and instead was relatively constant from state to state.

The estimates are slightly more speculative in states where no exit polling was conducted in 2012. But because a complete set of exit polls were conducted in 2008, it was reasonably easy to extrapolate the results forward based on the overall shift in the vote in each state from 2008 to 2012, and the changes in national voting patterns among the different racial groups. The estimates are calibrated, however, so that the whole matches the sum of the parts: if you add up the estimated voting results among the five racial groups in each state, the results should exactly match the overall vote totals for Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney last year.

The interactive graphic then allows you to make three sets of assumptions to consider how the vote might change going forward.

Step 1: Population Growth

Immigration reform is being contested against a background of an increasingly nonwhite electorate. Seventy-two percent of voters were white in 2012, down from 74 percent in 2008 and 81 percent in 2000.

The graphic allows you to consider the effects of further population changes by entering growth rates for the five major racial groups. As a default, it assumes that the number of white voters will grow by 0.5 percent a year, the number of black voters by 1 percent a year, the number of Hispanic and “other” voters by 3 percent a year and the number of Asian voters by 3.5 percent a year. These figures represent a rough consensus of various population growth estimates.

Note that these changes are measured on an annual basis, rather than per election cycle, and that the changes will compound over time. If the number of Hispanic voters grows at 3 percent a year, for example, the total increase in Hispanic voters would be 12 to 13 percent by 2016.

The graphic also allows you to select the year in which the hypothetical election would be contested â€" population growth will have a larger impact the further you go out in time. (As a default, I’ve chosen 2028, which would be the first presidential election after the proposed 13-year path to citizenship.)

The calculation assumes that the growth rate among each racial population will be the same in each state â€" that is, if the Hispanic population grows by 3 percent a year nationally, it will grow by 3 percent a year in California, by 3 percent a year in Alabama, and so forth. However, because fast-growing racial groups represent a larger share of the population in some states, these states may grow faster over all. The graphic will automatically reapportion electoral votes based on these population growth estimates. (We may introduce the ability to make more sophisticated assumptions about population changes in future versions of the analysis.)

Step 2: Unauthorized Immigrants

The graphic also allows you to consider the effects of legislation that would introduce new citizens to the electorate. These changes are assumed to have a one-time effect: that is, they would affect the status of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants who are already in the United States, but not future groups of immigrants. The calculation assumes that this impact is separate from the long-term changes in the voter population evaluated in the previous step.

The graphic requires you to estimate what percentage of that 11 million would become citizens under the new legislation, and what percentage of those new citizens would vote. Based on the research cited by Mr. Enten, we use 50 percent as a default value in each case. That is, half the unauthorized immigrants would become citizens, and half of those new citizens would vote, meaning that 25 percent of unauthorized immigrants would eventually become voters. But these assumptions can be changed.

You can also choose how to allocate the new citizens among the five racial categories. A majority of immigrants here illegally are Hispanic, but not all of them are. Instead, based on a variety of sources, I estimate that 80 percent are Hispanic, 11 percent Asian, 5 percent white, 2 percent black and 2 percent other races. The graphic assumes that once these immigrants became citizens, they would vote Democratic or Republican in the same proportions as other members of their racial group.

Step 3: Changes to Racial Voting Patterns

Finally, the graphic allows you to evaluate the effects of changes in the share of votes going to each party from each racial group. The changes are assumed to be uniform across states. So, for example, if your assumption is that the G.O.P. does five percentage points better with Hispanics nationally than it did in 2012, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote is assumed to grow to 44 percent from 39 percent in Florida, to 23 percent from 18 percent in Illinois, and so forth.

Note that the graphic can be used to evaluate the effects of any of these three steps independent of the others. For instance, if you are interested in seeing how the G.O.P. might have done in 2012 had it performed significantly better among Hispanics, but without considering the effects of population growth or immigration reform, you can set the election year to 2012 and zero out the values for the number of illegal immigrants who would become citizens.

One Potential Scenario

The most interesting application, however, is in seeing how the various positive and negative effects for Republicans might play out against one another.

Suppose, for example, that the voter population grows in accordance with the defaults assumed in the model. This would produce a net of 6.3 million new votes for Democrats by 2028.

And suppose that 25 percent of the immigrants currently here illegally gain citizenship and vote by 2028. The model calculates that this would provide another 1.2 million votes for Democrats.

But suppose also that, as a result of immigration reform, the Republicans go from winning about 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 24 percent of the Asian vote (as they did in 2012) to 35 percent of each group by 2028. That would shift about 4.8 million votes back to the G.O.P. â€" about four times more than it lost from the immigrants becoming citizens and voting predominantly Democratic. However, it wouldn’t be enough to outweigh the Democratic gains from long-term population growth.

Different assumptions, naturally, will yield different results. In general, however, you should find that population growth and changes in racial voting patterns will have much larger effects than how the current group of unauthorized immigrants is treated.

The high-stakes question, in other words, is whether immigration reform would really allow Republicans to improve their vote share substantially among Hispanics and Asians, without costing them too many votes among white voters. If so, that is where the electoral “bonanza” might lie.

CNN Gets a Ratings Boost From Boston

In a Newsy Month, CNN Gets a Big Bounce, Fox News a Little Bounce and MSNBC a Drop

Breaking news is always good news for CNN, and April’s ratings are the latest example.

Total viewership was up nearly 80 percent compared with the same month a year ago; among the viewers news advertisers pay to reach, the increase was more than 100 percent.

By comparison, MSNBC was actually down in viewers from the same month a year ago â€" despite the enormous interest in the Boston bombings â€" which may say something about how viewers see one of CNN’s news channel competitors.

Meanwhile, Fox News, which did not grow nearly as much as CNN, still had plenty of regular viewers to win in all categories.

In total day ratings for April, CNN jumped to an average 638,000 viewers from 356,000 viewers last year. Among viewers 25 to 54, the age group that news advertisers buy, the increase was bigger, to 228,000 from 109,000.

Fox News’s overall numbers were much bigger, with a total average audience for the month of 1.2 million, up from 1.08 million a year ago, a 14 percent increase. In the 25-to-54 group, Fox was up 2 percent, to 278,000 from 273,000.

MSNBC somehow lost viewers, dropping to 407,000 total viewers from 426,000 a year ago. It had no increase in the 25-to-54 group, staying at 139,000.

One reason may have been that MSNBC viewers turn to NBC network coverage when breaking news is on, and the broadcast network did have the most-watched coverage â€" and among the most critically praised â€" for two nights of the breaking Boston story.

But not getting any kind of ratings bump at a time of such intense news interest may also be an indication that MSNBC’s viewers look to that channel for opinion-based reporting instead of straight news reporting.

For example, the network’s flagship morning program, “Morning Joe,” was down 10 percent this April, despite the heavy news. And its strongest prime-time hour, with Rachel Maddow, was down 7 percent in total viewers.

CNN Gets a Ratings Boost From Boston

In a Newsy Month, CNN Gets a Big Bounce, Fox News a Little Bounce and MSNBC a Drop

Breaking news is always good news for CNN, and April’s ratings are the latest example.

Total viewership was up nearly 80 percent compared with the same month a year ago; among the viewers news advertisers pay to reach, the increase was more than 100 percent.

By comparison, MSNBC was actually down in viewers from the same month a year ago â€" despite the enormous interest in the Boston bombings â€" which may say something about how viewers see one of CNN’s news channel competitors.

Meanwhile, Fox News, which did not grow nearly as much as CNN, still had plenty of regular viewers to win in all categories.

In total day ratings for April, CNN jumped to an average 638,000 viewers from 356,000 viewers last year. Among viewers 25 to 54, the age group that news advertisers buy, the increase was bigger, to 228,000 from 109,000.

Fox News’s overall numbers were much bigger, with a total average audience for the month of 1.2 million, up from 1.08 million a year ago, a 14 percent increase. In the 25-to-54 group, Fox was up 2 percent, to 278,000 from 273,000.

MSNBC somehow lost viewers, dropping to 407,000 total viewers from 426,000 a year ago. It had no increase in the 25-to-54 group, staying at 139,000.

One reason may have been that MSNBC viewers turn to NBC network coverage when breaking news is on, and the broadcast network did have the most-watched coverage â€" and among the most critically praised â€" for two nights of the breaking Boston story.

But not getting any kind of ratings bump at a time of such intense news interest may also be an indication that MSNBC’s viewers look to that channel for opinion-based reporting instead of straight news reporting.

For example, the network’s flagship morning program, “Morning Joe,” was down 10 percent this April, despite the heavy news. And its strongest prime-time hour, with Rachel Maddow, was down 7 percent in total viewers.

Maria Shriver to Return to NBC News

Nearly a decade after she left NBC, Maria Shriver is returning to the network as a “special anchor,” covering women’s issues for television and the Web.

Ms. Shriver in September.

The announcement, made on the “Today” show on Tuesday morning, is a significant moment in her move away from political life. Ms. Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, was the first lady of California while her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor from 2003 to 2011. She and Mr. Schwarzenegger separated in 2011 after he admitted that he had fathered a child with a member of their household staff a decade earlier.

Until Mr. Schwarzenegger ran for governor, Ms. Shriver was a familiar face on NBC as a correspondent on the network newsmagazine “Dateline.” Her formal homecoming was foreshadowed last month when she contributed to the network’s coverage of the new pope.

“Through her reports, her books, her events, her activism and the powerful social community that she has built, Maria Shriver has become a leading voice for empowering women and inspiring all of us to be architects of change in our lives,” said Pat Fili-Krushel, the NBCUniversal News Group chairwoman, in a statement on Tuesday. “We are delighted that Maria will play such a key role in our efforts to examine this important topic, and all of us at the NBC family are excited to welcome her home.”

Ms. Shriver is the latest example of NBC hiring â€" in this case rehiring â€" a reporter with political connections and star power. Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush Hager are also correspondents for the network.

In Ms. Shriver’s new role, she will not appear regularly on any one NBC program, but she will produce and anchor prime-time special reports and make appearances on various programs. Her appearances won’t be limited to NBC’s network news programs; they may also come on the cable channels MSNBC and CNBC and on the company’s sports shows. Her other title will be editor at large for women’s issues for the Web sites owned by NBC News, indicating that she will contribute to those, as well.

In a blog post on her own Web site, she said that through her books, conferences and other media outlets, she had come to appreciate “even more how television journalism, paired with digital, can engage and elevate humanity in incredible ways â€" educating, edifying, impacting people’s minds and hearts.”

NBC briefly partnered with Ms. Shriver in 2009 when she published a study titled “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.” When the next such report is released next year, NBC will have “exclusive broadcast access” to it, the network said in a news release.

Ms. Shriver will remain in Los Angeles, and she said that she will not give up any of her outside work.

Digital Subscribers Buoy Newspaper Circulation

The nation’s newspapers suffered a slight decline in total circulation over the last six months compared with the same period the year before, new data showed Tuesday, but they benefited from an increase in digital subscriptions, which now make up nearly 20 percent of all daily circulation.

“Overall circulation industrywide is flat and digital is growing,” said Neal Lulofs, an executive vice president with the Alliance for Audited Media, which released the figures. “Newspapers are engaging with readers in a variety of media types wherever and whenever.”

The 593 daily newspapers that were audited had a 0.7 percent daily circulation decline. The Wall Street Journal has the highest circulation at 2,378,827, a 12.3 percent jump from the same time the year before. The New York Times replaced USA Today in second place with a circulation of 1,865,318 a 17.6 percent rise from a year ago. USA Today circulation was down 7.9 percent, dropping to 1,674,306. The Los Angeles Times and New York Daily News followed in fourth and fifth places.

The figures include both print and digital subscriptions.

For the 519 Sunday newspapers audited, total circulation declined 1.4 percent. The New York Times ranked first with an average circulation of 2,322,429, a 15.9 percent increase from the same time the year before. The Houston Chronicle ranked second, despite a 5.8 percent decline to 1,042,389. The Los Angeles Times was third; its circulation remained flat at 954,010. The Washington Post had a 16.5 percent circulation jump to 838,014, putting it in fourth place ahead of The Chicago Tribune.

Mr. Lulofs cautioned that growth for some newspapers could be attributed to how they have incorporated the community newspapers they own into their figures. For example, The Chicago Sun-Times experienced an 11.6 percent rise in its daily circulation growth, which included 55,241 daily copies sold by its regional papers. The Orange County Register recorded a 26.8 percent increase in its daily circulation, largely from the 84,071 generated by its branded newspapers.

Other papers showed growth because they started to include more varieties of digital editions, Mr. Lulofs said. For example, the Star Ledger of Newark, an Advance Publications paper that has been facing potential cuts in its daily coverage, experienced a 22.2 percent rise in daily circulation, with its digital circulation more than doubling in the past year, according to numbers provided by the Alliance.

Still, these digital figures should not be dismissed as simple maneuvering. Digital growth for The Wall Street Journal grew by 62.6 percent, to 898,012 in March 2013 from 552,288 in March 2012. Last week, The New York Times Company announced during its quarterly earnings call that the number of paid digital subscribers to The Times and The International Herald Tribune had grown to 676,000 by the end of March.

“You’re going to continue to see an evolution and I guess a transformation,” Mr. Lulofs said.

Sirius XM Reports Income and Subscriber Growth

The satellite radio provider Sirius XM Radio on Tuesday reported continued growth for its first quarter and announced that its interim chief executive, James E. Meyer, was taking over the position permanently.

The company said revenue rose 12 percent, $897 million, from the period a year earlier, but came in lower than the $906 million analysts had predicted.

Net income increased 15 percent, to $124 million, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization â€" adjusted to eliminate some charges including the effect of the 2008 merger between Sirius and XM â€" were $262 million, up 26 percent from the first quarter of 2012.

Sirius XM earned 2 cents a share, one cent less than analysts had predicted.

The company’s subscriber growth continued to be a bright spot, even after a rare price increase last year. It was the first time Sirius has ever raised the subscription rate; XM had done it once before. Sirius XM gained 453,000 subscribers in the quarter, bringing its total to 24.4 million. Over the last two years its subscriber ranks have grown 19 percent.

“Sirius XM’s first-quarter results show a continuation of our trend of strong, profitable growth,” Mr. Meyer said in a statement.

One concern for investors, however, is an uptick in the company’s “churn” rate, a measurement of its subscriber turnover. In recent years, that number had been gradually reduced to 1.9 percent, but in the most recent quarter it was back up to 2.0 percent.

Mr. Meyer, who had been Sirius’s president of sales and operations since 2004, was named interim chief executive in December after the departure of Mel Karmazin. He was appointed to the post permanently in a separate announcement on Tuesday by Gregory B. Maffei, who took over as the company’s chairman of the board on April 10.

Mr. Maffei is the president and chief executive of Liberty Media, which since 2009 had been Sirius XM’s largest investor and took over the company last year by acquiring a majority of its shares.

Hulu Says Number of Paid Subscribers Has Doubled

Hulu, the online video Web site that has both free and paid services, said Tuesday that it had doubled its number of paying subscribers in the last year, to four million.

The announcement comes at an uncertain time for Hulu, as two of its owners, the Walt Disney Company and News Corporation, weigh whether to sell the company. Last month, the founding chief executive of Hulu, Jason Kilar, stepped down; one of his top lieutenants, Andy Forssell, is now the acting chief executive.

Hulu was not expected to say anything new about its ownership structure at a Tuesday morning event for advertisers in New York. The event, part of the Digital Content NewFronts this week, was set up to promote several original series that will premiere on Hulu this year.

Among the shows that will be distributed exclusively by Hulu are “Quick Draw,'’ a comedic Western set in 1870s Kansas, and “The Awesomes,” an animated series about superheroes from the minds of the “Saturday Night Live” star Seth Meyers and the “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” producer Michael Shoemaker. They are the third wave of original shows for the service, and the most ambitious to date. The first wave, in 2011, was led by the Morgan Spurlock documentary series “A Day In The Life;” the second, in 2012, included a political sitcom called “Battleground” and a travelogue by Richard Linklater called “Up to Speed.”

That said, Hulu’s most popular shows remain those that it licenses from their owners and from other media companies. Hulu says it has more than 470 such partners and more than 70,000 full television episodes on its free and paid services combined.

Content costs are rising as the online television marketplace becomes more competitive; last week, Yahoo snapped up the exclusive rights to old clips from “Saturday Night Live,” something that Hulu used to feature on its own site.

In this crowded environment, commissioning shows is one way to stand out. Hulu has been in the news this week because it is one of only two places to watch “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the canceled ABC soap operas that were resurrected online by a production company, Prospect Park. The other outlet for the shows is Apple’s iTunes store.

Along with “The Awesomes” and “Quick Draw,” Hulu’s other two original series this year are “Behind the Mask,” a documentary series about sports mascots, and “The Wrong Mans,” a drama about two innocent men tied up in a criminal conspiracy. “The Wrong Mans” is a coproduction of the BBC and Hulu.

At the advertiser event on Tuesday, Hulu will also promote a number of shows that have been televised in other countries, but are exclusive to Hulu in the United States. They include an animated series from Canada called “Mother Up!” as well as “Prisoners of War,” an Israeli drama that inspired Showtime’s “Homeland.”

The company will also describe several ideas for original shows that are “brand contingent,” meaning they will be made only if advertisers sign up to support them. One of these ideas involves the chef Mario Batali in conversation with celebrities; another is a performance series to be hosted by Carson Daly.

In addition to announcing that its paid service, Hulu Plus, had topped four million subscribers for the first time, up from two million in the previous year, Hulu said it had reached a new revenue record in the first quarter, but did not specify what that record was. In 2012, according to the company, it earned $695 million in revenue, up from approximately $420 million in 2011.

DreamWorks to Take Its Characters to Macau Resort

DreamWorks Animation SKG is bringing its “DreamWorks Experience” â€" the chance to play and dine with DreamWorks characters in a themed resort setting â€" to the Chinese gambling haven of Macau.

On Tuesday, the studio joined Sands China to announce the introduction of a DreamWorks Experience package at the Sands Cotai Central at the Cotai Strip Resorts in Macau, beginning on July 1. Various Gaylord hotels in the United States and Royal Caribbean International cruises already offer DreamWorks-themed entertainment, which includes contact with characters from animated films like the “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda” series.

At the Sands Cotai, the new program will include a daily parade, special DreamWorks room packages, opportunities to meet-and-greet characters, and, beginning in late 2013, a DreamWorks-themed light and sound show.

DreamWorks to Take Its Characters to Macau Resort

DreamWorks Animation SKG is bringing its “DreamWorks Experience” â€" the chance to play and dine with DreamWorks characters in a themed resort setting â€" to the Chinese gambling haven of Macau.

On Tuesday, the studio joined Sands China to announce the introduction of a DreamWorks Experience package at the Sands Cotai Central at the Cotai Strip Resorts in Macau, beginning on July 1. Various Gaylord hotels in the United States and Royal Caribbean International cruises already offer DreamWorks-themed entertainment, which includes contact with characters from animated films like the “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda” series.

At the Sands Cotai, the new program will include a daily parade, special DreamWorks room packages, opportunities to meet-and-greet characters, and, beginning in late 2013, a DreamWorks-themed light and sound show.