Assange, Back in News, Never Left U.S. Radar

Jo Straube

Julian Assange and Birgitta Jonsdottir, in the background, working in Iceland in 2010.

In June 2011, Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland’s minister of the interior at the time, received an urgent message from the authorities in the United States. It said that “there was an imminent attack on Icelandic government databases” by hackers, and that the F.B.I. would send agents to investigate, Mr. Jonasson said in a telephone interview.

Julian Assange after a 2011 news conference in London, where he remains holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy avoiding extradition to Sweden for questioning on allegations of sexual abuse.

But when “eight or nine” F.B.I. agents arrived in August, Mr. Jonasson said, he found that they were not investigating an imminent attack, but gathering material on WikiLeaks, the activist group that has been responsible for publishing millions of confidential documents over the past three years, and that has many operatives in Iceland.

Mr. Jonasson asked the agents to leave, he said, because they had misrepresented the purpose of their visit.

The operation in Iceland was part of a wide-ranging investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, for their roles in the release of American military and diplomatic documents in 2010. The investigation has been quietly gathering material since at least October 2010, six months after the arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the army enlistee who is accused of providing the bulk of the leaks.

Until he re-emerged this week as an ally for Edward J. Snowden, the former computer contractor who leaked details of National Security Agency surveillance, Mr. Assange looked like a forgotten man. WikiLeaks had not had a major release of information in several years, its funds had dwindled and several senior architects of its systems left, citing internal disputes. Mr. Assange himself is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he fled to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning on allegations of sexual abuse.

But the United States government had not forgotten about him. Interviews with government agents, prosecutors and others familiar with the WikiLeaks investigation, as well as an examination of court documents, suggest that Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks are being investigated by several government agencies, along with a grand jury that has subpoenaed witnesses.

Tens of thousands of pages of evidence have been gathered. And at least four other former members of WikiLeaks have had contact with the United States authorities seeking information on Mr. Assange, the former members said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a matter they were informed was confidential.

In response to recent questions from The New York Times and others, a Justice Department spokesman confirmed that it “has an investigation into matters involving WikiLeaks, and that investigation remains ongoing,” but he declined to offer any details.

The prosecution of WikiLeaks would put the administration into tricky legal territory. WikiLeaks is an international organization, and, unlike Private Manning and Mr. Snowden, Mr. Assange and the other members did not work for the United States government or its contractors and could not be charged with espionage.

WikiLeaks maintains it was functioning as a publisher by enabling the release of information in the public interest, and it has frequently been a partner with traditional news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian. If the government charged WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange as co-conspirators, it would be arguing that, unlike their partners, they are not journalists.

“Given the government’s aggression in the Snowden case, I would expect that the government will continue to move forward with the Assange case on a conspiracy theory, even though WikiLeaks would seem eligible for First Amendment protections,” said James C. Goodale, a First Amendment lawyer who previously worked for The Times and is the author of “Fighting for the Press.”

He added that no reporter had ever been successfully prosecuted on a conspiracy charge but that recent actions, like the investigation of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, was evidence that the  government was “moving toward criminalizing the reporting process.”

The Times has never been contacted as part of a WikiLeaks investigation said David E. McCraw, its assistant general counsel. “But I would note that the proposed shield law,” he said, describing new legislation that the administration says is an effort to shield journalists from prosecution, “tries to define Wiki-like publishers out of the definition of news organizations.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 25, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Assange, Back in News, Never Left U.S. Radar.

Advertising: In Criticizing Rival Products, a Dove Campaign Is Called Unfair

In Criticizing Rival Products, a Dove Campaign Is Called Unfair

DOVE, the Unilever brand, has been widely lauded for its latest advertising effort, an online video with a forensic sketch artist that compares the negative self-image some women have with the more complimentary impressions of strangers.

But the response to an advertising campaign that Dove Deep Moisture Body Wash introduced in the fall has been decidedly less flattering, and brought a stinging rebuke from the National Advertising Division.

The campaign includes a print ad showing a bottle of Dove body wash next to a bottle, meant to represent competitors, that is wrapped in barbed wire and described with a single word: “Harsher.” The headline asks, “Doesn’t your skin deserve better?”

Online videos pit Dove against other body washes in side-by-side tests. In the videos, an actress places pieces of pinkish paper that she says “were designed to react like real skin” in jars of water containing either Dove or a rival product and shakes them vigorously. In every case, the non-Dove brands strip more color from the paper.

The Dial Corporation, another company in the body wash category, filed a complaint over the campaign with the National Advertising Division, the investigative arm of the ad industry’s voluntary self-regulation system, which operates under the aegis of the Better Business Bureau.

In a written decision released on June 19, investigators ruled that the advertising with barbed wire should be discontinued because “while consumers may not literally believe that body wash is as harsh on skin as barbed wire, such imagery nonetheless communicates an unsupported and disparaging message that competing products can seriously damage the skin.”

The investigation also concluded that Dove lacked evidence “to support its unqualified claim” that competing body washes were harsher, and to assert in advertising and packaging that it had “proven best care,” and should discontinue both practices.

The brand also should withdraw the online videos in which competing washes produced more visibly faded test paper because the demonstrations were neither “sufficiently reliable to demonstrate real-life surfactant damage” nor “accurately reflect how body wash is used in real life,” according to the ruling.

Unilever is appealing the decision to the National Advertising Review Board, which also is administered by the Better Business Bureau. A five-member panel representing advertisers, advertising agencies and the public sector, usually academics, will review the decision.

“We respect the self-regulatory process, but we believe in our methodology and the quality of our science, which is why we’re appealing the N.A.D. decision,” said Rob Candelino, a marketing vice president at Unilever, who declined to discuss specifics of the case while the appeal was pending. “We disagree with the assessment of the evidence and the way it was interpreted.”

The campaign is primarily by Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, owned by the WPP Group, with online videos by Evidently, an online content agency. It will continue to run online and offline while the decision is being appealed, Mr. Candelino said.

The Dial Corporation did not respond to a request for comment.

From 2010 through 2012, 19 of 339 decisions were appealed to the National Advertising Review Board, and none were overturned. The board upheld the decision 16 times (in one case ruling that the decision had not been critical enough) and in three cases upheld some aspects of the decision and overturned others.

“As an industry, we want people to believe that advertising is believable,” said Robin Hafitz, chief executive of Open Mind Strategy, a research company, who previously served on the National Advertising Review Board. She said that advertisers follow the precedents established by the rulings more closely than their advertising agencies, since it is the advertisers themselves that are held accountable.

“It resonates more within the businesses,” Ms. Hafitz said. “Agency work dies all the time because it’s not supported.”

David Vinjamuri, author of “Accidental Branding” and an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, said that naming competitors in advertising was risky because consumers may perceive the advertiser as “meanspirited or petty.”

He added that barbed wire “is very troubling imagery for the category and very jarring to see in this context,” especially in light of the finding that Dove was not on firm footing to make the claims.

“It’s the kind of thing that even if you had all the evidence and you unequivocally knew it was true, you’d still hesitate to do it,” said Mr. Vinjamuri. “It’s like talking about a car’s safety in terms of showing deaths instead of showing healthy children.”

The Dove campaign singles out the Procter & Gamble brand Olay as being comparatively harsh.

Procter has traditionally not named competitors in ads, trumpeting brand benefits rather than “reacting to competitors,” wrote Laura Brinker, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail message. Referring to the ruling against the campaign, Ms. Brinker wrote that Procter & Gamble was “pleased that N.A.D. has reviewed our competitor’s claims to help set the record straight.”

To the detriment of bar soap, the body wash category has been on the rise, growing 10 percent in the United States from 2010 to 2012, according to Mintel, a market research firm. Dove leads the category domestically, with a 13.2 share; followed by Bath & Body Works, from Limited Brands, with a 10.2 percent share; Suave, another Unilever brand, with a 7 percent share; and Dial, with a 6.9 percent share, according to year-end data for 2012 from Euromonitor International, a market research firm.

Dove spent $57.1 million on advertising in 2012, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Dial spent $2.6 million.

High-Wire Canyon Walk Drew 13 Million Viewers

On Sunday, as Nik Wallenda neared the finish of his death-defying high-wire walk across a gorge near the Grand Canyon, he thanked Eileen O’Neill and the other Discovery Channel executives who financed and televised the stunt.

On Monday, they were thanking him. During his 23-minute walk, about 13 million people were tuned to Discovery, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings that were trumpeted by the cable channel. Nothing else on television on Sunday night came close.

Another 300,000 or so watched the Web stream provided by Discovery, according to the channel. The high-wire walk was also televised around the world, but comparable ratings were not available.

The ratings for Mr. Wallenda’s walk across the gorge were more or less equal to the ratings on the night last year when he walked across Niagara Falls. That stunt, televised by ABC, peaked around 13.1 million viewers, setting a nearly five-year record for the broadcast network.

ABC required Mr. Wallenda to wear a safety harness, much to his dissatisfaction. Partly for that reason, Mr. Wallenda signed up with Discovery for his next televised spectacle. His walk on Sunday was produced by Peacock Productions, a unit of NBCUniversal’s NBC News, for Discovery, which is why two co-hosts of the “Today” show, Natalie Morales and Willie Geist, were the hosts of the program, titled “Skywire Live With Nik Wallenda.”

In the lengthy prelude to the event, Ms. Morales and Mr. Geist repeatedly emphasized that Mr. Wallenda would not wear a harness this time. “This was Nik’s decision and we honored it,” Laurie Goldberg, a Discovery spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. Discovery televised the walk on a 10-second delay, so the channel could have cut away had Mr. Wallenda fallen to the canyon floor.

Spurred by chatter on Twitter and Facebook, the audience of “Skywire Live” gradually grew from 8 to 9:30 p.m., then spiked around the time he started to walk at 9:38 p.m. The total audience between 9:38 and 10:01 p.m. was 12.98 million viewers.

Most, but not all, turned the channel after Mr. Wallenda was back on solid ground. Discovery aggressively promoted a new reality show called “Naked and Afraid” during the wire walk. Its premiere immediately afterward garnered an average of 4.16 million viewers, enough to make it the second-highest-rated new show in the channel’s history.

On Monday, Discovery described “Skywire Live” as its “highest-rated live event,” far surpassing its coverage of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from 128,100 feet in October. (It is difficult to draw exact comparisons between the two stunts because Mr. Baumgartner’s jump happened on a Sunday afternoon while Mr. Wallenda’s walk happened during prime time on the East Coast. Furthermore, the jump had a much bigger audience on the Web than the TV-centric wire walk did.)

At the end of Sunday’s program, Mr. Wallenda said that for his next stunt, he hoped to walk “between two skyscrapers in New York City.”

An Emerging Hispanic Voice Defends Her ‘Maids’

LOS ANGELES â€" At a premiere party at the Spanish-colonial-style Bel-Air Bay Club last week for the new Lifetime show “Devious Maids,” the center of attention was not the five actresses who play the lead characters, Latina maids who cook, clean and scheme while looking after wealthy white families in Beverly Hills.

The Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria is becoming a public figure.

“Desperate Housewives,” with from left, Felicity Huffman, Ms. Longoria, Teri Hatcher and Marcia Cross in 2004.

Instead, the spotlight fell on one of the executive producers, Eva Longoria, better known for her own role as the wealthy Gabrielle Solis on “Desperate Housewives.” She worked the room like a politician, making grand introductions punctuated by a bright smile and a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and holding barely audible conversations.

Her biggest priority was to check in on each of “the girls” â€" as she called the five actresses â€" to see how they had fared on the red carpet. Nine years ago Ms. Longoria was a young, relatively unknown actress in the cast of “Desperate Housewives.” But then she changed the script, positioning herself as a Hollywood power player on Latino issues and a highly regarded political advocate.

Now she finds herself in a position of having to defend her latest project against critics who say the show relies too much on the cliché of the Hispanic maid.

“When people talk about stereotypical maids, these maids are anything but,” Ms. Longoria, 38, said over a long lunch at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood two days before the premiere party. She said future plot points would reveal more developed people.

She was eager to counter the negative reactions to the show. “I think it’s important for us to have a dialogue of identity in our culture, and even though this show may not be your experience, it is a lot of people’s experience,” she said. Latinos, she added, “over-index in domestic workers: that is a fact, that’s not an opinion.”

The ratings for the premiere of “Devious Maids,” at 10 on Sunday night, were modest. Going up against the season finale of AMC’s “Mad Men,” the show attracted 2 million viewers, slightly below the Lifetime show that preceded it at 9, “Drop Dead Diva” (2.2 million).

Ms. Longoria’s rise as a media force has been paralleled by her political ascent. She stumped for President Obama in 2012, helping round up critical Hispanic voters, and she was a founder of the Futuro Fund, which raised $32 million for the campaign. She recently spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago; left a few days later for Colombia to film a documentary for the Half the Sky Movement, an international women’s advocacy group; and signed on to a fund-raising drive for the political group Battleground Texas, whose goal is to raise money to “put Democrats back on the map” in the state, in the words of her message on the group’s home page.

And in May she completed a master’s degree in Chicano studies from California State University, Northridge.

“I’m a little in awe in terms of how she’s transformed herself,” said Marc Cherry, an executive producer of both “Devious Maids” and “Desperate Housewives,” who cast Ms. Longoria in 2004. “She was just an actress that had done a couple of prime-time shows and had done some daytime.”

Before its debut, the criticism of “Devious Maids” included an open letter in The Huffington Post from Michelle Herrera Mulligan, the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan for Latinas, who called the show a “wasted opportunity.” (Ms. Longoria had been on the magazine’s spring cover months before Ms. Mulligan’s letter was published online.)

Alisa Lynn Valdes, a former journalist and author of the novel “The Dirty Girls Social Club,” wrote a critical online opinion piece on NBCLatino.com about the show. “It is not wrong to be a maid, or even a Latina maid,” she wrote, “but there is something very wrong with an American entertainment industry that continually tells Latinas that this is all they are or can ever be.”

Most maids, however, don’t sleep with their bosses. The show’s first episode begins with a whopping, albeit campy, dose of classism, with an employer threatening to deport her maid for having sex with the employer’s husband.

“They are five strong, female, Latina characters, so it’s like the three hurdles we had to overcome to get this on the air in Hollywood,” said Ms. Longoria, who added that the show also has two Latina writers out of five. “You’re never the lead, then if you are the lead, you are usually a lead that services the main character, which is a white male actor.”

Ms. Longoria grew up far from Beverly Hills, in Corpus Christi, Tex., a daughter of Mexican-American parents. Her mother was a special-education teacher, and her father was a tool engineer in the Army. “I took out loans to pay for school,” Ms. Longoria told the Democratic National Convention in 2012 during a speech that made much of her working-class roots. “Then I changed oil in a mechanic shop, flipped burgers at Wendy’s, taught aerobics and worked on campus to pay them back.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 25, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Emerging Hispanic Voice Defends Her ‘Maids’ .

Warner Brothers Announces New Studio Leadership

LOS ANGELES â€" Warner Brothers on Monday announced a new leadership team at the studio, while sending employees an e-mail that said Jeff Robinov, who has been president of the motion picture group, “will no longer serve” in that position.

The company’s public announcement said responsibility for the movie group will be divided among Sue Kroll, who will be president of worldwide marketing and international distribution; Greg Silverman, who will be president of creative development and Worldwide Production; and Toby Emmerich, who will continue as president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, while adding responsibility for the Warner theater operations.

The new lineup will report directly to Kevin Tsuijihara, who is chief executive of the studio, which also includes an extensive television and home entertainment operation.

The company’s internal e-mail stopped short of saying that Mr. Robinov would leave the company; his departure has been widely expected since Mr. Tsujihara won the chief executive’s post after an internal competition. But associates of Mr. Robinov said last week that he might surface at another Hollywood studio, if he managed to exit contractual arrangements that tie him to Warner.

The shake-up follows the exit of Bruce Rosenblum as the president of Warner’s television group, and leaves Mr. Tsujihara, who took the chief executive’s post in March, replacing Barry Meyer, with a field that is cleared of his former competitors for the top job. He also has a management structure that is spread, in both movies and television, among lieutenants who had been overseeing operations under Mr. Robinov and Mr. Rosenblum.

Media Decoder: The Other Snowden Drama: Impugning the Messenger

The Other Snowden Drama: Impugning the Messenger

As a pure story, it’s tough to beat the Snowden saga. Man of intrigue? Roger. Crusading reporter? Check. A powerful government in hot pursuit? Yessir. Unclear agendas by foreign countries? Most certainly.

And as Edward J. Snowden made his way across the globe with a disintegrating passport and newly emerged allies, Twitter was there, serving up a new kind of chase coverage, with breathless updates from hovering digital observers speculating about the fleeing leaker’s next move. All day Sunday, it was like watching a spy movie unfold in pixels, except it was all very real and no one knows how it ends.

Almost lost amid the international drama was a journalistic one in which Glenn Greenwald, the columnist from The Guardian, found himself in the gunsights on a Sunday morning talk show. The episode was part of an ongoing story about the role of the press in conveying secrets to the public.

If you add up the pulling of news organization phone records (The Associated Press), the tracking of individual reporters (Fox News), and the effort by the current administration to go after sources (seven instances and counting in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media), suggesting that there is a war on the press is less hyperbole than simple math.

For the time being, it is us (the press) versus them (the feds), which is part of the reason David Gregory ended up taking a lot of incoming fire for suggesting on NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Glenn Greenwald may have committed crimes, not journalism, when he published leaks by Mr. Snowden.

“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” he said in the interview.

Mr. Greenwald responded assertively.

“I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” Mr. Greenwald responded.

“The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence â€" the idea that I’ve ‘aided and abetted’ him in any way.”

Mr. Gregory may have thought he was just being provocative, but if you tease apart his inquiry, it suggests there might be something criminal in reporting out important information from a controversial source.

In using the term “aided and abetted,” Mr. Gregory adopted the nomenclature of Representative Peter T. King, a Republican of New York who has argued that Mr. Greenwald should be arrested, lately on Fox News.

Writing in The Washington Post, Erik Wemple expressed deep skepticism about Mr. Gregory’s assumptions.

“The entire question of Greenwald’s ‘aiding and abetting,’ furthermore, collapses when considering what it would entail,'’ he wrote. “Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency. Over his years of work in intelligence, he developed an exquisite understanding of the government’s eavesdropping activities. Plus, he had passcodes and access privileges that came with his position.”

Mr. Gregory’s position on the show was that as a journalist raising questions he was “not actually embracing any particular point of view.'’

“There’s a question about his role in this,'’ he said, referring to Mr. Greenwald. “The Guardian’s role in all of this. It is actually part of the debate, rather than going after the questioner, he could take on the issues. And he had an opportunity to do that here on ‘Meet the Press.’ ”

The press is frequently accused of giving itself a pass, but the present moment would seem like a good time for a bit of solidarity. The current administration’s desire for control of information is not a new phenomenon, but at this juncture, there is a clear need for a countervailing force in favor of openness.

There will be, as Ben Smith pointed out on BuzzFeed, an attempt to depict the sources of information as rogues and traitors, a process that will accelerate now that WikiLeaks has begun assisting Mr. Snowden. “Snowden is what used to be known as a source,'’ Mr. Smith wrote. “And reporters don’t, and shouldn’t, spend too much time thinking about the moral status of their sources.”

Politicians would like to conflate the actions of reporters and their sources, but the law draws a very clear and bright line between the two in an effort to protect speech and enable transparency. Mr. Greenwald may have a point of view and his approach to journalism is through the prism of activism, but he functioned as a journalist and deserves the protections that go with the job.

At Georgia Restaurant, Patrons Jump to Defend a Chef From Her Critics

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Q. & A. With Stuart Elliott

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Webdenda: Accounts and People of Note in the Advertising Industry

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As Social Media Swirl Around It, Supreme Court Sticks to Its Analog Ways

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Hulu Faces a Nebulous Future as It Seeks a New Owner

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Media Decoder: Tavis Smiley to Be an Anchor for Online Radio Network

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The Media Equation: British Invasion Reshuffles U.S. Media

British Invasion Reshuffles U.S. Media

On Thursday night, the host of “The Daily Show” riffed on Paula Deen's liberal use of both butter and racial slurs, chatted about journalism with Tom Brokaw and parodied the gangster code of honor that has been in the news in the Whitey Bulger trial. Along the way, he did a honey-dripped Southern accent and dropped into a Cagney-esque wiseguy voice.

John Oliver, who is hosting “The Daily Show” this summer, is one of many British imports gaining visibility in American media.

None of that is totally surprising for a talented entertainer raised in Birmingham, except the town that John Oliver grew up in is in England, not Alabama, and he is a big fan of Liverpool Football Club, not the Crimson Tide.

Mr. Oliver is filling in for Jon Stewart, who is directing a film this summer. We could dwell on the oddity of a British comedian replacing the host of a deeply American show, except that everywhere you look in the United States media landscape, you find people from that small island.

Piers Morgan came from Britain to take over for Larry King, The Wall Street Journal is edited by Gerard Baker, a British newspaper veteran, and the chief executive of The New York Times is Mark Thompson, who spent his career at the BBC. Anna Wintour has edited Vogue for more than two decades and, more recently, Joanna Coles took over Cosmopolitan, which defines a certain version of American womanhood.

NBC News recently looked to the mother country for leadership and found Deborah Turness, the former editor of Britain's ITV News. ABC's entertainment group is headed by Paul Lee, also formerly of the BBC, and Colin Myler, a Fleet Street alum, edits The New York Daily News.

The list goes on, but the point is made: when it comes to choosing someone to steer prominent American media properties, the answer is often delivered in a proper British accent.

The observation about the thicket of British talent has been made elsewhere and is hardly a brand new phenomenon - it's Tina Brown's and Nick Denton's world, we just surf it. But something is at work here, beyond the joke about a British accent adding 10 I.Q. points.

The easy answer is the triumph of British charm and politeness set against American brashness and confrontation. I actually think it is exactly the opposite. As Geoff Dyer wrote in The Times in 2009, Americans strive, underneath the loutishness, to be liked, while the British care more about being right.

If that's so, then the renewed British invasion on our shores makes sense because media are becoming more competitive and less mannered with each passing day. Apart from the fact that Mr. Oliver is a very funny man, “The Daily Show” continues to storm along partly because, like Mr. Stewart, Mr. Oliver suspects everyone and everything and says so aloud.

It's a very British way of thinking. The one question all young reporters on Fleet Street are taught to keep foremost in their mind when interviewing public figures can be best paraphrased as, “Why is this jerk lying to me?”

The news that flows from that mind-set is often far more interesting than American media, which frequently bow to power even as they seek to hold it accountable. (Mr. Stewart, so rapacious when annotating video clips, often goes soft when confronted by an actual interview.)

Other dynamics are at play as well. The dividing line between the business and editorial side in British journalism has always been thin, and those who rise to the top have a good grasp of numbers. That's a characteristic that is increasingly prized in corporate America. And an endless supply of talent is seeking to leave the crab pot of British news media because they want to work on a larger scale.

Ms. Coles is a former reporter at The Times of London who came to work in the United States for The Guardian before going to New York Magazine. She went on to More magazine, Marie Claire and now runs Cosmopolitan.

I crossed paths with her when we both worked at New York Magazine, where she stuck out for reasons other than her accent. To wit: while the rest of us would nod assent when senior editors spoke, she frequently argued points to the point of impertinence.

“I was taken aside and asked why I was doing that and I said, ‘Doing what?' ” she recalled when I spoke to her last week. From her perspective, she was doing what all good journalists do, which is pushing back.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: British Invasion Reshuffles U.S. Media.

Chet Flippo, Journalist Who Championed Country Music, Dies at 69

Rick Diamond/WireImage, via Getty Images

Chet Flippo, left, editorial director of CMT, the country music cable channel, with Willie Nelson and Jimmy Carter in 2004 for the taping of “CMT Homecoming: Jimmy Carter in Plains.”

Chet Flippo, one of the deans of pop music journalism, whose profiles of artists like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Tanya Tucker for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s heralded vast new popularity for country music among broader audiences in the United States, died last Wednesday in Nashville. He was 69.

His death, after a long illness, was announced by the country music cable channel CMT, where he was editorial director. No cause was given.

Mr. Flippo covered a range of subjects for Rolling Stone from 1970 to the early 1980s, including John Lennon's legal troubles, the Rolling Stones' bacchanalian tours, Bob Dylan's serial reinventions and Janis Joplin's 10th-year high school reunion, in 1970.

But in an era of rock celebrity mania, he also insisted on writing about a more down-to-earth musical form, still referred to in the early 1970s as “country and western,” which he had grown up with as a boy in Fort Worth.

In 1972, Mr. Flippo wrote about a longtime country singer who had “generally been overlooked,” and who was “probably the most underrated writer in America today,” Willie Nelson. Mr. Nelson had written hits for other singers, but would not have a major hit of his own for a few years more.

The following year, Mr. Flippo wrote about a 36-year-old artist who had been on the verge of stardom for a decade but was still playing four sets a night at roadside joints like Jack Jackson's Fantastic Cow Palace, Home of the Nashville Stars, outside Colorado Springs, Waylon Jennings. Mr. Jennings, he wrote, was finally catching a break, about to hit the road as the opening act for the Grateful Dead.

“The longhaired kids - they like country music too,” he quoted Mr. Jennings saying the day after his last show at the Fantastic Cow Palace. “They just don't feel welcome in some of these redneck joints.”

And while Dolly Parton was already a perennial country star, she was still seeking crossover success in 1977 when Mr. Flippo wrote the first long Rolling Stone article about her, introducing her to the magazine's rock 'n' roll readership as “country music's best-kept secret for years.” Later that year she released “Here You Come Again,” her first million-selling single.

Mr. Flippo, who later became a journalism teacher, wrote a historical primer on country music for American Libraries, the bimonthly magazine of the American Library Association, explaining to those at the furthest fringe of the potential crossover audience why they should care.

“Country and western music is, by turns, simplistic, bigoted, emotional, maudlin, jingoistic, provincial and dominated by male chauvinism,” he wrote in that 1974 article, titled “Country & Western: Some New-Fangled Ideas.” “Why then is it so durable and so popular? Because its above-listed characteristics accurately reflect the concerns and attitudes of roughly one-fourth the population of the United States.”

Bill C. Malone, the author of “Country Music U.S.A.,” considered a definitive history (first published in 1968, and now in its third revised edition), said Mr. Flippo was an important mediator between the rock audience and country fans. He did not create the broad interest in country music that developed in the '70s and '80s, Mr. Malone said “But he got a lot of people listening who wouldn't have before.”

Chet Flippo (known to friends as Flippo) was born in Fort Worth on Oct. 21, 1943, the son of Chet W. Flippo, a minister, and the former Johnnie Black. After graduating from Sam Houston State University in 1965, he served in the Navy until 1969, worked for a small newspaper in Texas and received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 1974.

He became Rolling Stone's bureau chief in New York that year, when the magazine was based in San Francisco, and senior editor in 1977, when the magazine moved its headquarters to New York.

Mr. Flippo left Rolling Stone to write books in the early '80s, moving to Tennessee, where he taught journalism at the University of Tennessee for three years and was the Nashville bureau chief for Billboard magazine. He joined CMT in 2001.

He published six books, including “Your Cheatin' Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams,” published in 1981.

Mr. Flippo's survivors include a sister, Shirley Smith, and two brothers, Bill and Ernest. His wife of 41 years, Martha Hume, also a music journalist, died last year.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2013, on page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Chet Flippo, Journalist, Is Dead at 69; Covered Country Music in Rolling Stone.

Advertising: A Multiplicity of Magazine Covers, and Just as Many Reasons

A Multiplicity of Magazine Covers, and Just as Many Reasons

Miley Cyrus in various moods was on the cover of the March issue of Cosmopolitan - three times, on three covers.

HOW many front covers does a magazine have? The logical answer - one - is outdated.

Time's April 29/May 6 issue had 12 covers worldwide, including Jay Z. Citi ads ran inside the covers of some United States issues.

In an effort to woo readers - and generate additional advertising revenue - magazines are being published with two, three, four or more front covers, typically appearing one after another as if a printing press had run amok.

At first, a magazine with more than one front cover seems like a house with more than one front door. But there are many reasons for readers and marketers to embrace the concept, as evidenced by a growing acceptance among industry stalwarts like Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and Time Inc.

They are expanding front-cover real estate on major publications including Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, Fitness, Food Network Magazine, Fortune, Harper's Bazaar, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, People, Self, Seventeen, Sports Illustrated, Teen Vogue and Time.

“It has become more of a ‘go-to,' ” said Jed Hartman, group publisher for news and business at the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, whose duties include oversight of Fortune and Time.

“It's hard to find something with the power of a magazine cover” to attract attention, Mr. Hartman said, so “when you bring out a surprising version of that cover, it can be very impactful.”

Multiplying the number of front covers - each bearing a different image and, on the inside, a different ad - joins a panoply of nontraditional approaches at magazines. Among them are split covers, bearing a variety of images that readers are encouraged to collect; flip covers, printing a magazine in two sections with a back cover that becomes a second front cover when turned upside down; and gatefold covers, which fold in or out to form exotic shapes.

“Part of our job is to entertain people,” said Paul Fichtenbaum, editor of the Time Inc. Sports Group, who plans to run multiple front covers on the coming issue of Sports Illustrated devoted to the 2013-14 National Football League season.

“And it's an opportunity for us to be really creative,” he added. “You want to take that chance any time you can.”

Multiple front covers are indicative of efforts being made by traditional media like magazines to freshen their offerings - and, frequently, find new places for ads - as competitors in digital media continually come up with innovations, from Facebook's introduction of short-form video built into Instagram to plans by Twitter to provide location-specific ads for retailers.

(Still, in a nod to which century it is, when a magazine has more than one front cover in print, its digital version does, too. “You can always expect more, not less, on the digital editions,” Mr. Fichtenbaum said.)

Although there is apparently no consensus on when magazines began adding front covers, it has been at least a decade. Michael Clinton, president for marketing and publishing director at the Hearst Magazines unit of the Hearst Corporation, said he believed it “started with a few of the editors of the fashion and beauty books, who wanted to show different images of the cover personalities, putting their foot in the water.”

“It allows editors to get more mileage out of a cover shoot,” he added, which is often an expensive part of an issue's total budget, and “for advertisers, it's a bit of a ‘conquest' in the front of the book and gives them a big bang for their buck right out of the gate.”

Mr. Clinton's reference is to a practice by publishers to almost always sell the ad space inside all the front covers to a single advertiser. Often, he explained, “we go to the advertiser that might have had that position secured” - that is, had already bought the ad space inside the front cover.

Typically, an ad inside a front cover sells for more than an ad page in that issue because of the cover's visibility and heavier paper stock. Thus, additional ad revenue could offset higher printing costs.

The Publishers Information Bureau, which tracks ad revenue and ad pages for the magazine industry, includes multiple front covers in its tallies, but there is no bonus for them. “A full-page ad gets counted as a full-page ad,” said Cristina Dinozo, director for communications platforms at the MPA - the Association of Magazine Media, which administers the bureau.

Among brands and marketers that like to buy front covers in bunches are Citigroup, Diageo, Glidden, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Maybelline, Procter & Gamble and Xerox.

“We're interested in new ideas and new approaches, new ways to connect with our broad client base,” said Dermot Boden, chief brand officer at Citigroup.

“Some may not be relevant or practical,” he added. “This particular one, we felt we just couldn't resist.” His reference was to Citigroup's buying ads on the insides of multiple front covers of the April 29/May 6 double issue of Time, devoted to the magazine's annual list of influential people.

Editors and publishers acknowledge that the rewards come with risks.

“If you did it too much, it would dilute the effectiveness and impact,” said Jason Wagenheim, vice president and publisher at Teen Vogue, part of Condé Nast. His December 2012/January 2013 issue carried three front covers celebrating the boy band One Direction.

“There may be some fatigue factor for readers,” said Eric Schwarzkopf, publisher of Fitness magazine, owned by Meredith, which last ran multiple front covers, three, for the July/August 2012 issue. “We don't want to annoy or upset them in any way.”

To help avert that, the magazine executives agree, ideas for multiple front covers ought to originate with editors rather than sales departments.

“If you don't have a story to tell, if you do it for the sake of doing it, it's a gimmick,” Mr. Clinton of Hearst Magazines said.

One idea roundly dismissed as a gimmick is running multiple back covers. “When you start to mess with the back cover, it can create confusion at retail,” Mr. Schwarzkopf said. “That's not something we want.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Multiplicity of Magazine Covers, And Just as Many Reasons.

Media Decoder: Hollywood\'s Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed

Hollywood's Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed

LOS ANGELES - Almost a year after the theater shootings in Aurora, Colo., and a half-year after the killings in Newtown, Conn., one of the things that hasn't changed is Hollywood's enchantment with the gun, at least when it comes to selling the big movies.

The poster for “2 Guns” from Universal, with Denzel Washington, left, and Mark Wahlberg, featuring realistic weaponry.

As the blockbuster film season unfolds, every major studio has firearms of one sort or another in its marketing arsenal. At Sony Pictures Entertainment, Channing Tatum clutches a sidearm the size of Wyatt Earp's as he walks Jamie Foxx to safety on the poster for “White House Down.”

At Paramount Pictures, Brad Pitt, zombie hunter, has an even bigger piece of personal artillery slung across his back in the promotional art for “World War Z.”

Johnny Depp packs a pistol in his pants on the poster for Disney's “The Lone Ranger.” Melissa McCarthy grips what appears to be a full-blown grenade launcher in the advertisements for 20th Century Fox's “The Heat.”

The glowing handguns on the art for Universal's “R.I.P.D.” have a preternatural look; but what really gets your attention are those chillingly real guns being flashed by Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, standing back to back, on the poster for the same studio's “2 Guns.”

Warner Brothers, whose “The Dark Knight Rises” was playing in Aurora during last July's shootings, has been soft-pedaling weaponry on its posters lately (unless you count the robots and helicopters pounding each other in the ads for “Pacific Rim”).

Still, Ken Jeong had some hot handgun moments in the red-band trailer for “The Hangover Part III.”

After the discussion of gun violence and pop culture at a January meeting between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a number of entertainment executives, the Motion Picture Association of America, an industry trade group, bolstered its ratings system with a campaign to remind parents of the content advisories that accompany a movie's letter rating.

But don't look for any move to change the movies, or the high-caliber images used to sell them. “We believe our role is to help parents be informed of a film's content, not to dictate the content in any way,” Kate Bedingfield, an M.P.A.A. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail last week.

MICHAEL CIEPLY

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hollywood's Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed.

News From the Advertising Industry

Accounts

â–  Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, part of Anheuser-Busch InBev, named Energy BBDO as lead agency for the Bud Light beer brand in the United States, assuming duties like strategic planning and creative development from Translation, New York, which will continue to create campaigns for Bud Light line extensions like Bud Light Platinum. Spending was estimated at more than $300 million. Energy BBDO is the Chicago office of BBDO North America, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group; other BBDO Worldwide units create campaigns for Anheuser-Busch InBev beer brands that include Antarctica, in Brazil, and Beck's, in Germany.

â–  Sleepy's, Hicksville, N.Y., the mattress and bedding retail chain, selected Publicis Kaplan Thaler, New York, as its creative agency, the first time that the company has used an outside agency for creative advertising work. Spending was estimated at $75 million. Horizon Media, New York, continues as the media agency for Sleepy's. Publicis Kaplan Thaler is part of the Publicis Worldwide in the USA division of Publicis Worldwide, which is owned by the Publicis Groupe.

â–  Regis University, Denver, named TDA_Boulder, Boulder, Colo., as agency of record, handling the creative and media parts of its account. Spending was not disclosed. Regis had previously worked with Mortar, San Francisco.

People

â–  Brian Powley, president for North America at iCrossing, based in San Francisco, was promoted to a new post, global president, succeeding Don Scales, who had been president and chief executive. Mr. Scales is leaving, the company said; his departure comes three years after iCrossing was acquired by the Hearst Corporation, New York.

■ Connie Anne Phillips rejoined Condé Nast, New York, part of Advance Publications, as vice president and publisher of Glamour magazine, succeeding William Wackermann, who held the title of executive vice president and publishing director; Mr. Wackermann is becoming executive vice president and publishing director of Condé Nast Traveler magazine, assuming duties from Carolyn Kremins, vice president and publisher, who became senior vice president and general manager of the Epicurious unit of Condé Nast. Ms. Phillips had most recently been publisher of InStyle magazine, New York, part of the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner, and before that spent 14 years at Vogue magazine, part of Condé Nast, in posts that included associate publisher and managing director.

Miscellany

â–  WPP, London, announced a reorganization of its retail marketing and shopper marketing agencies, which had been in the works since March. A new unit named Geometry Global, with headquarters in London and New York, will be composed of G2, part of the Grey Group; OgilvyAction, part of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide; and JWT Action, a joint venture in the United States of JWT and OgilvyAction. Toby Hoare will be chairman of Geometry Global, based in London, while continuing as chief executive at JWT Europe and chairman at JWT London. Steve Harding, who had been chief executive at OgilvyAction, becomes chief executive at Geometry Global, based in New York. Matthew Schetlick, who had been chief operating officer and chief financial officer at G2, takes those posts at Geometry Global, also based in New York.

â–  Bitdeli, San Francisco, which specializes in data analytics, was acquired and absorbed by AdRoll, San Francisco. Financial terms were not disclosed.

■ Sid Lee, Montreal, and Cirque du Soleil, which owns a minority stake in Sid Lee, are forming a joint venture, Sid Lee Entertainment, that will specialize in so-called experiential marketing like live events. The initial clients are Absolut vodka, a Sid Lee client, and Lolë, a brand of women's active wear. Sid Lee Entertainment is to be led by Joanne Fillion, as executive producer, and will have offices in Montreal as well as Amsterdam, New York, Paris and Toronto.

â–  The Chevrolet division of General Motors agreed to become a sponsor of the annual Academy Awards broadcast for five years, beginning with the show on ABC on March 2, 2014. Financial terms were not disclosed. Chevrolet's sponsorship will represent a return after a five-year absence; during that time, Hyundai, sold by Hyundai Motor America, was the sole automotive sponsor.

â–  Onex Corporation completed its acquisition of Nielsen Expositions from an affiliate of Nielsen Holdings for $950 million in cash and renamed the business Emerald Expositions. The Jordan Edmiston Group, New York, served as an adviser to Onex.

â–  Grooms Athletic Management and Entertainment, New York, was acquired by French/West/Vaughan, Raleigh, N.C., and becomes part of the French/West/Vaughan sports and entertainment practice. Financial terms were not disclosed. Hayes Grooms IV, founder and owner of Grooms Athletic, joined French/West/Vaughan as vice president for sports and entertainment and will be based in New York.

â–  The musician Will.i.am has become a partner at MemBrain Licensing, Beverly Hills, Calif.

â–  The American Advertising Federation's University of Miami chapter won the federation's 2013 National Student Advertising Competition, which was sponsored by Glidden, part of PPG Industries; a different marketer sponsors the competition each year.

â–  Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, New York, was renamed Marketing Edge.

Correction: A People item on June 10 omitted part of the previous title of Jackson Huynh, who joined Flingo, San Francisco, as chief operating officer. He had been global head of AdMob Ad operations at Google, not global head of AdMob operations.