â€˜Steve Harvey\' Talk Show Gains an Extension

That is the thinking behind a surge of consolidation in local television that crested on Thursday when the Gannett Company agreed to buy the Belo Corporation for about $1.5 billion in cash. Analysts said the deal was the biggest deal in local television in more than a decade.

For Gannett, best known for owning USA Today and a batch of smaller newspapers from coast to coast, the addition of Belo will nearly double its number of stations, to 43, from 23. It is the latest step in a yearlong strategy by Gannett to diversify its media operations amid continued struggles in the print industry.

In announcing the acquisition on Thursday morning, Gannett said that after the Belo transaction closes, revenue from digital and broadcasting operations will make up two-thirds of its earnings. Investors were thrilled; Gannett's stock closed at $26.60 on Thursday, up 34 percent from Wednesday.

â€œThere is doubtless more to come,â€ said Robin Flynn, a senior analyst with SNL Kagan. â€œThe next round of TV station consolidation is coming fast and furious, and the larger deals are getting done faster than most people expected.â€

Station owners like Gannett have several strategic reasons for wanting to grow. Along with obvious efficiencies, bigger companies tend to have more leverage when they negotiate with cable and satellite distributors over retransmission fees - the broadcast equivalent of the per-subscriber fees that cable channels receive. These fees, although a relatively new revenue source, have become vitally important to stations as they try to offset audience and advertising declines.

In many cases, Gannett's stations earn higher fees than Belo's, and because of contractual clauses â€œwe will be able to move them to our rates shortly after we close the transaction,â€ Gracia C. Martore, Gannett's chief executive, said in an interview.

Being bigger is also better when stations negotiate with the networks that provide them with programming. Networks like CBS have been aggressive about receiving a slice of retransmission fees, something known in the industry as reverse compensation. â€œScale has become much more importantâ€ in those discussions, Ms. Flynn said.

Having a presence in more markets across the country - Gannett will have 21 stations in the nation's top 25 markets when the Belo deal closes - can also help on the advertising front. Local stations in states with competitive elections have looked particularly valuable to investors as a result of the tremendous surge in political advertising every two years.

â€œEven though campaigns are doing more online with digital and social media, they're still spending a ton at the local station level to get their messages out,â€ said Mark Fratrik, a vice president and chief economist for BIA/Kelsey.

His company's research found that the Belo acquisition would vault Gannett past one of its chief rivals, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, to become the No. 3 local station owner in the United States, by revenue. The No. 1 owner is News Corporation, which owns 27 stations as well as the Fox broadcast network; No. 2 is the CBS Corporation, which owns 29.

Sinclair has been on a buying spree in the last 18 months, spending a combined $2 billion on smaller groups of local stations. Executives at Sinclair have cited many of the same reasons that Ms. Martore did on Thursday.

Belo had been concentrating on the broadcast sector. In 2008, the company was separated from its newspaper properties, including The Dallas Morning News, which became a publicly traded entity known as the A.H. Belo Corporation.

News of the deal heightened interest in other media stocks on Thursday, including Sinclair, which rose nearly 13 percent, and another rival, Nexstar, which rose more than 10 percent.

Ms. Martore said Gannett was open to â€œother broadcast or digital opportunities,â€ but that the Belo case was unique. She began talking with her counterpart at Belo, Dunia A. Shive, some time ago. The two eventually concluded that a combination made sense, and began exclusive talks. Under the terms of the deal, Gannett will pay $13.75 a share in cash, 28 percent above Belo's closing price on Wednesday. Gannett will also assume $715 million of Belo's debt. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

In several cities, the combined company will own multiple television stations; in St. Louis, it will own the top two, KSDK and KMOV, which usually would violate government rules. It will avoid that by using a tactic that has become common in local television: a shared services arrangement. The affected stations formerly owned by Belo will be structured so that they will not technically count as part of Gannett, but they will share resources like satellite trucks with the Gannett stations.

The public interest group Free Press, which calls this tactic â€œcovert consolidation,â€ lamented the Belo deal.

â€œThis increasing concentration of ownership - coupled with covert consolidation that combines formerly competing newsrooms - is failing local communities,â€ the group said.

A version of this article appeared in print on 06/14/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: In the Glow Of Television, Many Messages .

After 14 Years, Murdoch Files for Divorce From Third Wife

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European Trade Ministers Debate Terms of U.S. Talks

European Ministers Clear Trade Deal

LUXEMBOURG - European Union ministers thrashed out a deal to begin trade negotiations with the United States late Friday after bowing to French demands to protect state-sponsored film and television industries.

Nicole Bricq, France's trade minister, with Karel De Gucht, the European trade commissioner, at the European Union talks.

The breakthrough, which came after 13 hours of tense talks, should enable Britain to hail the start of the trans-Atlantic trade discussions when the leaders of the Group of 8 biggest economies hold a summit meeting on Monday in Northern Ireland.

â€œThe formal launch of negotiations between the world's two largest trading blocs is now imminent,â€ Vince Cable, the British business secretary, said in a statement shortly after the deal was announced. â€œAchieving an agreement is in all our interests and would deliver a much-needed boost to the economies of all involved.â€

The divisive issue of shielding films, TV shows and other audiovisual services from competition could be debated again at a later stage, and that promises more wrangling ahead between European nations over what to offer the United States in exchange for lower tariffs and streamlined regulations.

Although the French position could be scaled back, the fact that the other 26 trade ministers in the European Union acceded to France's demand could make negotiations with the United States that much more difficult, given the protectionist impulses on both sides of the Atlantic that are likely to come into play.

A trade pact would aim to lower barriers between the world's two biggest trading partners. But before formal talks can start, the European Union's 27 trade ministers needed to reach a unanimous deal to give the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, the formal authority to start the negotiations.

The decision in Luxembourg was a preliminary victory for France, which fought hard for months to protect Europe's so-called cultural exception, which is, in practice, a thicket of quotas and subsidies for audiovisual productions that promote locally and regionally produced content.

â€œWe are satisfied because we have the exclusion from the mandate for everything that is to do with audiovisual,â€ Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, told a news conference. The guarantee was â€œwritten in black and whiteâ€ in the agreement, she said.

The European Union, which is plagued by low growth and high unemployment, broadly favors a trade pact with the United States to bolster the economy and generate new jobs. But the drawn-out negotiations in Luxembourg were a stark reminder of how the bloc's members still are reluctant to set aside national priorities and to make collective decision-making a reality.

The main sticking point on Friday was France's demand to exclude audiovisual services, including future digital services, from the talks.

Britain, along with countries including Spain and the Netherlands, was concerned that such an exclusion would prompt the United States to require protections of its own.

The exclusion of audiovisual material from a trade deal would especially disappoint American technology and media companies, including the online movie distributor Netflix, which want easier access to European markets.

The deal that emerged was a classic European accommodation allowing a flagship initiative - a trans-Atlantic trade pact - to move forward while leaving decisions on the thorniest questions, like how to manage digital services, for a later date.

The compromise leaves the European Commission with the option to make a proposal, once the talks with the United States are under way, to use audiovisual services as a bargaining chip so long as all 27 member states agree that the advantages are sufficiently attractive.

â€œThere is no carve-out on audiovisual services,â€ Karel De Gucht, the European Union trade commissioner who will lead the negotiations with the United States, told a news conference.â€œWe are ready to discuss it with our American counterparts and to listen to their views on this issue.â€

In a sign of the bitterness that nearly led to the collapse of the talks on Friday, Ms. Bricq, of France, accused some member states of pandering to American demands to keep the audiovisual industries as a bargaining chip.

And, earlier in the day, in a thinly veiled reference to the European outcry over recent disclosures that the National Security Agency in the United States had gained access to online data from many of the biggest Internet companies, she added that â€œcurrent events unhappily remind usâ€ of American influence over the online world.

How much progress Europe and the United States can make is an open question. Tariffs are already low, and the main goal - harmonizing regulations - is likely to pose a huge challenge for negotiators.

There are also questions about their differences over regulations on a host of industries, including new technologies, car safety, pharmaceuticals and financial derivatives.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 15, 2013, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: European Ministers Clear Trade Deal.

Greek Broadcaster Fights Closure

ATHENS - The Greek government might come under pressure to reopen the state broadcaster, ERT, as one of the country's highest courts weighs an appeal by a union representing more than 2,600 of the broadcaster's employees.

The administrative court, the Council of State, is expected to rule on the appeal Monday.

A decision in favor of the workers, who have been operating underground broadcasts of Greek news through satellite streams since ERT was pulled off the air in a surprise government decision on Tuesday, could lead to ERT's signal being restored temporarily, until the decision could be reviewed in a hearing by the Council of State that would be scheduled for September.

Meanwhile, a Greek prosecutor, acting at the behest of the country's finance minister, has begun an investigation into ERT's finances, looking for signs of mismanaged funds.

Whatever the court verdict on the workers' appeal, Monday will be a critical day for the country's conservative prime minister, Antonis Samaras. He is to meet in the afternoon with the leaders of the two junior partners in his increasingly fragile coalition, socialist Pasok and the moderate Democratic Left. They have vehemently opposed his decision to shut down ERT as part of a broader cost-cutting drive imposed by Greece's international creditors, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Although a court decision vindicating the laid-off ERT employees might be considered an embarrassment for Mr. Samaras, political analysis on Greek blogs and news Web sites on Friday suggested that such an outcome might less damaging to his image than if he were forced to reverse his decision under political pressure.

In a speech before members of his conservative New Democracy party's youth arm on Friday, Mr. Samaras suggested a compomise in an apparent bid to head off a government crisis. His proposal - for the "immediate creation of a cross-party committee to hire a small number of staff so that public television can immediately resume broadcasting" - was rejected within minutes by Pasok, which said the proposal "does not constitute a response to what Pasok has said."

The political upheaval came amid reports from Brussels that the disbursement of the next tranche of rescue funding for Greece, a sum of about $4.4 billion, was expected to be released next week.

Earlier on Friday, a Greek Finance Ministry official said that European officials had approved the disbursement, subject to a final endorsement by euro zone finance ministers. That decision, the official said, had been largely influenced by the government's decision to save money by closing ERT.

The state broadcaster, condemned by Mr. Samaras earlier this week as â€˜'an emblem of lack of transparency and waste,'' is to be the focus of a criminal investigation ordered on Thursday by the finance minister, Yannis Stournaras. Greece's corruption prosecutor, Eleni Raikou, on Friday assigned two deputies to review all the employment and procurement contracts issued by ERT over the past decade for signs of mismanagement and waste.

The scale of suspected misuse of money within ERT over the years remains unclear. But, addressing Parliament on Friday, Mr Stournaras said the broadcaster's â€˜â€˜finances and viewing figures were very poor.''

â€˜'I don't want to raise tensions in the current climate,'' he said, â€˜'but when the time comes I will present the statistics.''

Dismissed ERT workers, who have occupied the broadcaster's headquarters in a suburb of Athens since ERT's signal was cut on Tuesday night, continued to operate underground broadcasts of Greek news on Friday. Those streams were picked up Thursday evening by the the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service media organizations in 56 countries, and re-transmitted via satellite link to Greece. The move had symbolic, rather than practical, value as only a few hundred thousand out of some 11 million Greeks have satellite connections; most have been following ERT's pirate broadcast via online news Web sites.

The head of the European Broadcasting Union, Jean-Paul Philippot, who was in Athens on Friday, said he would ask the Greek government to restore the ERT signal. â€˜'The reason we are here is because this has never happened before,'' he told a media conference in the old headquarters of ERT. â€˜'No European country has ever cut its broadcaster's signal.''

Mr. Stournaras had warned Thursday that any other television channel retransmitting the pirate broadcast of former ERT employees would be prosecuted. The announcement was apparently aimed at the Communist Party's channel, called 902 TV, which had been carrying the underground broadcast but reverted to normal programming after the ministry's warning. â€˜'This is not a country where everyone does whatever they want,'' Mr. Stournaras said.

Ecuador Legislature Approves Curbs on News Media

When President Rafael Correa of Ecuador won re-election this year, and for the first time captured a majority in the National Assembly, he vowed to push forward with major proposals that had been stalled in his earlier terms. On Friday he gained a victory that he had long coveted when the Legislature passed a law regulating the news media, which he says will force news organizations to act fairly and which opponents say will quash freedom of expression.

â€œThe perspective for the media and the practice of journalism is very difficult,â€ said JosÃ© HernÃ¡ndez, an adjunct director of Hoy, a newspaper in Ecuador's capital, Quito. â€œIt has been turned into a field full of land mines where no one can work with freedom and confidence.â€

But Gabriela Rivadeneira, the president of the National Assembly and an ally of Mr. Correa, said the law would promote more balanced news coverage.

â€œLet there be no doubt that there are rights for everyone and not just for a privileged group, which is what is wanted by some opposition legislators or the mercantilist press that has commercialized information,â€ Ms. Rivadeneira said.

Mr. Correa, a leftist who has promoted social programs, was re-elected by a wide margin in February when voters also gave him his first legislative majority, with 100 of the 137 seats in the National Assembly. Mr. Correa began his new term last month, and one of his priorities was to pass the so-called Communication Law, which had been stalled in the previous Legislature because his party, Alianza PaÃs, was in the minority.

On Friday the Legislature took up the law without debating its contents and it passed easily. It is packed with controversial measures. The law creates a Superintendency of Information and Communication, with the power to regulate the news media, investigate possible violations and impose potentially hefty fines. It creates a five-member Council for the Regulation and Development of Information and Communication, led by a representative of the president, to oversee the news media.

The law prohibits â€œmedia lynching,â€ which it defines as the repeated publication or broadcast of information intended to smear a person's reputation or reduce one's credibility. And it bans content that incites violence or promotes racial or religious hatred.

Carlos LaurÃa of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a group that promotes press freedom, said the wording of such measures was vague enough that it left ample room to define a variety of content as being in violation of the law, opening the door to censorship.

â€œThis is the latest step in the deterioration of press freedom in this country that has occurred under Correa,â€ Mr. LaurÃa said. â€œThis law, if it's put into practice, is not only going to undermine the ability of journalists to report critically, but it also threatens the rights of citizens to be informed on issues like corruption or other sensitive issues.â€

Mr. Correa has long campaigned against what he says is a biased news media. He has clashed with reporters, sometimes suing them for what he has called biases or errors. His government has been known to interrupt critical news coverage on television by forcing stations to broadcast rebuttals.

William Neuman reported from New York, and Maggy Ayala from Quito, Ecuador.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 15, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Ecuador Law Places Limits On Reporters.

Player in Leaks Case, Out From Behind Camera

The filmmaker Alex Gibney recalled bumping into his fellow documentarian Laura Poitras at the airport last year, when they both happened to be taking the New York-to-London flight.

Laura Poitras makes films about a world changed since 9/11.

â€œShe warned me that she was on a watchlist, and that she would be pulled out of the line,â€ he said Tuesday in an interview. â€œAnd sure enough, she was.â€

Last week, Ms. Poitras, 49, emerged as the pivotal connection between the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden and writers for The Guardian and The Washington Post who published his leaked documents about government surveillance. She also got a byline on two of the papers' resulting articles. But she has a much longer history as a filmmaker trying to show on screen how the world has changed since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Her first two films in that project - â€œMy Country, My Country,â€ set in Iraq after the American invasion, and â€œThe Oath,â€ about a former GuantÃ¡namo Bay prisoner and his brother-in-law, who once worked as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard - garnered critical praise and apparently the attention of the United States government.

In an interview Wednesday from a hotel in Hong Kong, she described herself as an unexpected player in the Snowden leak. â€œThis is not something I was seeking out,â€ she said.

Mr. Snowden first contacted her in January, she said, telling her that he had read about her regular border scrutiny and saw it as â€œan indicator that I was a person who was â€˜selected,'Â â€ that is, someone who would be familiar with what it is to be watched by the government. â€œHe knew it was a subject that would resonate with me.â€ (He had also seen a short film about domestic surveillance, â€œThe Program,â€ she made for The New York Times.)

Ms. Poitras, who won a MacArthur â€œgeniusâ€ grant last year and was nominated for an Oscar for â€œMy Country,â€ was already living and working outside the country. After six years of being questioned at the border - â€œupwards of 40 times, probably more, I lost countâ€ - and having her laptop seized, her notes copied, she relocated to Europe.

â€œIt was good timing in that way,â€ she said Wednesday.

But in addition to her tense relations with her government, there was another, more practical reason Mr. Snowden connected with her, she said. Because of her experience reporting on national security matters, Ms. Poitras said, she had the technical ability to hold an encrypted online conversation with Mr. Snowden from the start, which he insisted on.

â€œThe number of journalists who know how to use it is very small,â€ she said. â€œYou wouldn't have been able to communicate with Snowden without encryption.â€

Still, the way Mr. Snowden's leaked document about Prism - the National Security Agency program that collects data from online providers of e-mail and chat services - was published is hardly typical. Both The Guardian and The Post wrote about a top-secret slide presentation on Prism at roughly the same time; for the Post article, Ms. Poitras shared a byline with Barton Gellman, whom she knew from their time together on a fellowship at New York University and contacted in February.

Later, for a profile on Mr. Snowden in The Guardian, Ms. Poitras shared a byline with Glenn Greenwald, a civil liberties writer she knew from the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Ewen MacAskill, a Guardian reporter.

In the interview, Ms. Poitras declined to elaborate on how the two articles came about. According to the Guardian's account of how the news broke, Mr. Snowden tried during the winter to contact Mr. Greenwald directly, then Ms. Poitras interceded with Mr. Greenwald and â€œconvinced him that he needed to take this more seriously.â€

She also shot the 12-minute video in which Mr. Snowden explains his motivation for leaking. It has been viewed 2.5 million times, according to The Guardian, since it was posted over the weekend on the newspaper's Web site.

Ms. Poitras also sought to deflect attention from herself and her role. â€œI have received a zillion e-mails,â€ she said.

â€œWe are in the middle of an unfolding story, we don't know where it is going, there are real stakes, real dangers, and my bio is just not that important,â€ she said, citing the recent government investigations of journalists at The Associated Press and Fox News.

But, as a struggling documentary filmmaker who has had to generate interest in her films, she has given plenty of interviews about her life.

Born in Boston, Ms. Poitras told the Web site Still in Motion that she started out as a chef. â€œI did French food for about 10 years, working at very, very fancy places in San Francisco,â€ she said. She learned film in the avant-garde tradition at the San Francisco Art Institute and later came to New York to study at the New School.

While her work today is much more realistic, she told Still in Motion what she had retained from her avant-garde teachers: â€œYou were the artist and you made your own film - as the cinematographer, the director, the producer, the way you cut it, etc., but, totally noncommercial.â€

Cara Mertes, the director of the documentary film program at Sundance, where â€œThe Oathâ€ had its premiere in 2010, cited a number of documentaries, including the recent â€œThe Invisible War,â€ about sexual assault in the United States military, that are driving public interest and ultimately the news coverage.

Speaking of Ms. Poitras, she said, â€œIn a lot of ways, the news has caught up with the story she is trying to tell.â€

Ms. Poitras now finds herself amid the hustle and bustle of a global breaking news event, but still has her camera out and a personal vision of the story she wants to tell - and, she says, it will be very different from the way a newspaper would tell it.

The Snowden interview will be part of her next work, â€œa film, which is not coming out tomorrow, or next week,â€ she said. â€œIt is going to take awhile.â€

A version of this article appeared in print on June 15, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Player in Leaks Case, Out From Behind Camera.

Uli Seit for The New York Times

Paula Pecorella, the managing editor of the student newspaper at West Islip High School, and Nicholas Krauss, the features editor, were prosecuted for trespassing while working on an article on the school's security procedures.

â€œAs the cold metal cuffs were tightened around our wrists,â€ the article began, â€œit was clear that we were in way over our heads.â€

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