Advertising: The Madison Avenue Don Draper Never Knew

The Madison Avenue Don Draper Never Knew

JUST as agencies will often bring out a sequel to a well-received ad or campaign, an organization devoted to promoting creative excellence in advertising is bringing out a sequel to a well-received documentary.

An Avis ad from 1962.

A Levy’s rye ad.

The One Club for Art and Copy, which produced the award-winning documentary “Art & Copy” in 2009, is returning with a documentary called “The Real Mad Men and Women of Madison Avenue.”

In contrast to “Art & Copy,” which looked at familiar campaigns like “Just do it” (Nike), “Got milk?” and “Where’s the beef?” (Wendy’s), the new documentary takes a broader tack, examining the industry in the last six decades, with a focus, as the title suggests, on agencies and executives in New York.

“The Real Mad Men and Women of Madison Avenue” begins with a look at the hard-sell tactics that dominated the ad landscape during the postwar years through the 1950s, as promulgated by executives like Rosser Reeves, then covers the so-called creative revolution of the 1960s, which is part of the plot of the AMC television series “Mad Men.”

There are interviews with seminal figures from the ’60s: Jerry Della Femina, Roy Eaton, Amil Gargano, Paula Green, Mary Wells Lawrence, George Lois, Jane Maas and Len Sirowitz. Among the subjects they discuss is the importance of influential agencies of the era like Doyle Dane Bernbach and Ogilvy & Mather, which created groundbreaking ads for brands that included Avis, Dove, Hathaway, Levy’s, Schweppes and Volkswagen.

It is funny that the new documentary uses “Mad Men” as a jumping-off point. Although many of the creative executives of the ’60s say they appreciate the attention the series has brought their careers, they are not, well, mad about it.

In separate phone interviews, Mr. Gargano dismissed “Mad Men” as a “melodrama” that “trivializes the process of ad-making,” while Mr. Sirowitz and Ms. Green both labeled it a “soap opera.”

Ms. Green, of Avis ad fame, went on to say, “Frankly, it isn’t advertising as I knew it.” Still, she added, she can see the value of tying the documentary to the series: “Hitching your wagon to a star like that is important in terms of a reality check.”

The new documentary also explores the digital revolution since the turn of the last century, the effects of social media and trends like the rise of content marketing. Those subjects are discussed by senior executives at some of today’s leading agencies, who include Gerry Graf of Barton F. Graf 9000, David Lubars of BBDO North America, Tham Khai Meng of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and David Sable of Y&R.

Mr. Lubars, in a phone interview, said he would agree that “Mad Men” is a soap opera.

“On the other hand, some things, they get it,” he added, and there are “story arcs that are uncomfortably true.”

Mr. Lubars, who is chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America, praised the One Club for “preserving and furthering the education of the public on the rich history of this industry and this city.”

“You have to know what’s done to know what can be done,” he added. “You have to know the rules to break them.”

“The Real Mad Men and Women of Madison Avenue” is co-produced by the One Club with a PBS television station in New York, WLIW, in association with WNET, the parent of WLIW and the other PBS television station in New York, WNET, called Thirteen to distinguish it from the parent.

There was already a connection between the One Club and PBS: the PBS series “Independent Lens,” which is devoted to documentaries, bought rights to “Art & Copy” and broadcast it in 2010. That made “Art & Copy” eligible for consideration by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which gave it an Emmy Award in 2011 for outstanding arts and cultural programming.

“After we premiered ‘Art & Copy’ in 2009 at Sundance, Neal Shapiro came to me to chat about doing a documentary focusing on New York, yesterday and today, as the advertising hub,” said Mary Warlick, chief executive at the One Club and one of two executive producers of “The Real Mad Men and Women of Madison Avenue.” Her reference was to the president of WNET and Thirteen.

The other executive producer of the documentary, Mary Lockhart, an executive producer at WNET, said that after she researched the creative revolution of the ’60s, she found, “There’s another revolution going on,” which warrants that description even if few people “would call it that” today.

“The Real Mad Men and Mad Women of Madison Avenue” is scheduled to make its debut at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Sunday on WLIW, with an encore at 3 a.m. on July 10. It is also to be broadcast at 8 p.m. on Sunday and midnight on Monday on Thirteen, with an encore at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

The documentary will also become available for viewing online, at thirteen.org/programs/real-mad-men. There are also plans for WNET to offer the documentary to other PBS stations.

Ms. Warlick said she was considering potential sequels to the sequel, documentaries that would chronicle the ad industry in other markets like Chicago and Detroit.

Detroit? Oops, there is another “Mad Men” connection, as anyone who recalls the plotline in the just-concluded Season 6 about the Chevrolet account would attest.

Same-Sex Marriage Availability Set to Double in One-Year Span

The Supreme Court’s rulings on a pair of landmark cases on Wednesday, which overturned the federal Defense of Marriage Act and effectively legalized same-sex marriage in California, are the latest in a recent series of legal and legislative victories for same-sex marriage advocates worldwide.

By Aug. 1, same-sex marriage will be legal in California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington â€" all states where it was not legal one year earlier.

There are about 59 million people living in these seven states, which means that the availability of same-sex marriage in the United States as a percentage of population will have more than doubled within the year. As of early last year, same-sex marriage was legal only in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia, which have 35 million people among them.

The availability of same-sex marriage is increasing almost as rapidly on a global scale. It was legalized in Brazil and France earlier this year and will become legal in Uruguay and New Zealand by August.

A decision last month by a Brazilian judicial panel that is generally seen as legalizing same-sex marriage, but could be subject to appeal, is especially important to this math. Brazil has a population of about 194 million â€" more than the combined 169 million in the nine countries in Europe where same-sex marriage is now legal. The most recent decision followed court rulings that ! had authorized same-sex marriage in more than a dozen Brazilian states.

Earlier this year, France, with a population of about 64 million, became the largest European country to legalize same-sex marriage, and the largest in the world to do so by legislative action.

By August, there will be about 585 million people living in countries or jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is legal. That is roughly double the 289 million people living in such places in August 2012. (These calculations are based on the most recent population estimates and do not account for population growth.)

Still, that represents only about 8 percent of the global population. No country in Asia, which has well more than half the world’s people, has authorized same-sex marriage.

Instead, it’s the New World that has taken the lead. Of the 585 million people living in jurisdictions where same-sex marriage will be legal by August, about 360 million are in the Americas.

With the coming resumption of same-sex marriage in California, where it was legal for a brief period in 2008 before voters passed Proposition 8, the United States will surpass Europe in the availability of same-sex marriage as measured by share of the population. By August, about 95 million Americans out of a population of 314 million â€" about 30 percent â€" will live in states where same-sex marriage is legal. In Europe, that number is 169 million residents out of a population of 736 million, o! r about 2! 3 percent.

OWN to Show ‘All My Children’ and ‘One Life to Live’

“All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the two soap operas that were canceled by ABC and then resurrected on the Internet, are returning to television, at least temporarily, through a deal with Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel OWN.

Episodes of the soaps will continue to be available on Hulu and iTunes, but starting next month they will also be shown on OWN, potentially exposing the shows to a new audience. OWN, a joint venture between Ms. Winfrey and Discovery Communications, described it as a 10-week “limited engagement” for the soaps, but if the episodes perk up the channel’s daytime ratings, they will most likely become a permanent addition to the schedule.

“All My Children” and “One Life to Live” will be shown back-to-back starting at noon Mondays through Thursdays. The test run will start on July 15.

“For two years you posted, tweeted, Facebooked me. … I heard you,” Ms. Winfrey wrote on Twitter in announcing the addition of the soaps to OWN’s schedule.

Some soap fans had pleaded with Ms. Winfrey to help keep the two shows alive after ABC announced that it was canceling them in early 2011. At that time OWN was just a few months old, and some people wondered if the channel could invest in the shows.

In a Web video response to those fans, Ms. Winfrey pronounced herself a soap opera fan but said the declining ratings for “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” made a revival effort on TV untenable. “There just are not enough people who are at home in the daytime to watch them,” she said.

Much has changed since then. Most important, the company that licensed the soaps from ABC, Prospect Park, came up with a much cheaper production model. For the new version of the soaps, the actors are paid under a different structure, the episodes are shorter (a half-hour each, rather than an hour) and they are filmed in a state, Connecticut, which provides a 30 percent tax incentive.

The soaps came online in April on the streaming Web site Hulu and on iTunes, the online store operated by Apple. Almost immediately Prospect Park realized that the TV-like release schedule â€" one new episode of each show each weekday â€" wasn’t working on the Web.

The company needed hundreds of thousands of viewers to watch every episode in order to break even, but the executives there studied Web traffic and concluded that they were “posting too many episodes and making it far too challenging for viewers to keep up,” as they put it in a letter to viewers in mid-May. At that time the release schedule was cut in half.

This week they adjusted the schedule again. “Mondays are now soap days,” Prospect Park said in a statement, explaining a new weekly format. “Now viewers will be able to choose to watch one episode each day or binge view some or all of that week’s shows at once starting each Monday,” the company said.

In essence, Prospect Park is giving soap fans maximum flexibility on the Internet while getting back into a television rhythm with OWN. The terms of the 10-week deal with OWN were not disclosed, but it will almost certainly help Prospect Park recoup some of its production costs.

For OWN, which struggled out of the gate but has been slowly building a loyal audience, the deal provides some fresh daytime programming.

“These shows have proven to be very popular with a significant, loyal fan base, not to mention Oprah herself is a big fan,” Erik Logan, the president of OWN, said in a statement. “Many of our viewers across numerous platforms have expressed their passion for the soaps, so we are especially excited to air this limited engagement on OWN.”

As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused

A popular article by Verlyn Klinkenborg last week in The New York Times Sunday Review lamented the decline of English majors at top colleges and universities. Mr. Klinkenborg is worried about the “technical narrowness” of some college programs and the “rush to make education pay off”â€" which, he writes, “presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring.”

I am sympathetic to certain parts of Mr. Klinkenborg's hypothesis: for instance, the potential value of writing skills even for students who major in scientific or technical fields, and the risks that specialization can pose to young minds that are still in their formative stages.

But Mr. Klinkenborg also neglects an important fact: more American students are attending college than ever before. He is correct to say that the distribution of majors has b ecome more career-focused, but these degrees may be going to students who would not have gone to college at all in prior generations.

In 2011, according to the federal government's Digest of Education Statistics, about 1.7 million bachelor's degrees were awarded by American colleges, roughly double the 840,000 degrees in 1971. The number of Americans of college age has not increased nearly so rapidly. We can approximate the number of Americans who would be at the typical age to receive a bachelor's degree by evaluating the number of 21-year-olds in the United States population. In 2011, there were about 4.6 million 21-year-olds in the United States, compared with 3.7 million in 1971 - only about a 25 percent increase instead of double.

A related calculation is the number of bachelor's degree s awarded per 21-year-old in the United States. In 1971, there were 26.7 bachelor's degrees awarded for every 100 21-year-olds in the United States. By 2011, that figure had increased to 43.4 degrees, about a 60 percent increase.

The relative decline of majors like English is modest when accounting for the increased propensity of Americans to go to college. In fact, the number of new degrees in English is fairly similar to what it has been for most of the last 20 years as a share of the college-age population.

In 2011, 3.1 percent of new bachelor's degrees were in English language or literature. That figure is down from 4.1 percent 10 years ago, 4.7 percent 20 years ago, and 7.6 percent 40 years ago, in 1971.

But as a proportion of the college-age population, the decline is much less distinct. In 2011, 1.1 out of every 100 21-year-olds graduated with a bachelor's degree in English, down only incrementally from 1.2 in 2001 and 1.3 in 1991. And the percentage of English majors as a share of the population is actually higher than it was in 1981, when only 0.7 out of every 100 21-year-olds received a degree in English.

Something of the same story holds for other traditional college majors, including many fields that are grouped under the heading of STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math. Measured as a share of all bachelor's degrees, for example, the number of mathematics and statistics degrees has declined slightly - to 1.0 percent in 2011 from 1.3 percent in 1991. However, it has held steady at about 0.4 p ercent of the 21-year-old population.

The number of engineering graduates, likewise, has decreased slightly as a share of all college degrees. But it has increased slightly relative to the college-age population.

The social sciences abide by a similar pattern. The number of social science majors is lower by any measure since the early 1970s. But whereas the number of social-science graduates is flat since the 1980s as a proportion of degree recipients, it has increased considerably relative to the population of young Americans.

Which majors have experienced the largest increase in graduates? As I mentioned, they tend to be those associated with relatively specific post-college careers. For instance, the number of graduates in what the government calls “health professions and related programs” has roughly doubled since 1991 as a share of the college-age population. The students in this category are not necessarily bound to become doctors. (They enter college with only average SAT scores.) But the heading includes a range of majors, like hospital administration and nursing, that offer strong career prospects as the health care field adds jobs.

Undergraduate majors in business, which like the health professions tend to attract students with average SAT scores, have also become much more popular over the last four decades.

It would have been virtually unheard of 40 years ago for a student to receive a bachelor's degree in criminal justice or a related field. But these have now become fairly common majors, as more employers in these domains prefer - or even require - college diplomas.

Some employers in the visual and performing arts, which were once thought of as crafts or trades that required hands-on experience, might also now prefer or demand college degrees, and the number of bachelor's degrees in these fields has been on a long-term increase.

In short, college attendance has become more of a norm for a broader range of students, including those that might pursue a wide array of careers, like nursing or criminal justice, that are ordinarily associated with the middle class.

Mr. Klinkenborg's experience is at highly selective universities, including Harvard and Yale, where he has taught nonfiction writing. In those environments, he might have some room for concern about the fate of English majors. Since 1996, the average critical reading SAT score for prospective English majors has declined to 580 from 605, among the sharpest declines in any college discipline. And the unemployment rate among English majors was 6.9 percent in 2011 â€" considerably higher than 5.3 percent for bachelor's degree recipients as a whole.

But schools like Harvard and Yale are becoming ever less representative of the whole as more young Americans attend college.

Perhaps the more important moral and policy question is what academic requirements should be in place, whether in English composition or probability and statistics, among students across all majors â€" including those who go to college with a specific career in mind.

I hesitate to generalize too much from my own college experience, at the University of Chicago, but it is a school that emphasizes a broad and general course of study among all its undergraduates. My strategy was to choose a major â€" economics â€" that I expected to offer strong career prospe cts, but then to take as few courses in that field as required, diversifying my curriculum instead.

It won't be the right approach for every student or every university. But perhaps there can be a balance between recognizing two concepts: on the one hand, that college has become more of a necessity for more careers and a wider array of Americans; on the other hand, Americans are now more likely than before to change professions throughout their working lives. Perhaps we should at once encourage or require college students to take coursework in English â€" and tell them to be wary about majoring in it.

Geography, Not Voting Rights Act, Accounts for Most Majority-Minority Districts

The Supreme Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act on Tuesday - which struck down one provision of the law outright, neutered another and set a precedent that could eventually threaten the rest of the legislation - may reduce the pressure on states to create majority-minority districts when they engage in Congressional redistricting after each decennial census.

I've seen a lot of speculation on Twitter about the effects this ruling might have on the partisan composition of Congress, but most of it doesn't get the story quite right, in my view. The problem is that most people are putting too much weight on gerrymandering and not enough on geography.

There's no doubt that the tendency of racial minorities to be concentrated in a group of overwhelmingly Democratic districts hurts the Democratic P arty as it seeks control of the United States House. In the chart below, I've sorted the nation's 435 Congressional districts based on the percentage of the vote they gave to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama last year.

The asymmetry is self-evident. There were 44 Congressional districts in which Mr. Obama won by at least 50 percentage points last year, compared with only eight for Mr. Romney. These hyper-partisan districts are far past the point where a Democratic candidate for Congress could lose under almost any ci rcumstance, so they create wasted votes for Democrats. As a result, Mr. Romney won the majority of Congressional districts (226 out of 435) last year, despite losing the national popular vote by roughly four percentage points. And Democrats gained only eight seats in the House despite winning a (very narrow) plurality of the aggregate popular vote for the chamber.

The districts that create this asymmetry tend to be majority-minority. In the next version of the chart, I've highlighted the nation's 106 majority-minority districts in orange. Mr. Obama won these districts by an average of 40 percentage points, and of the 44 districts over all that he won by 50 percentage points or more, 41 were majority-minority.

But minority populations, especially African-Americans, tend to be highly concentrated in certain geographic areas. In the North, this is generally in major cities; in the South, it may be in both urban areas and some agricultural regions (with minority populations generally low in the suburbs). You'd have to go out of your way not to create overwhelmingly minority (and Democratic) districts on the South Side of Chicago, in the Bronx or in parts of Los Angeles or South Texas, violating nonpartisan redistricting principles like compactness and contiguity.

Moreover, especially outside of th e South, the white voters in cities with high minority populations tend to be quite liberal, yielding more redundancy for Democrats.

A variety of academic analyses of redistricting have found that this geographic self-sorting accounts for much - probably most - of the “skew” of Congressional districts against Democrats. Gerrymandering and other partisan efforts at redistricting do play a role, but it is mostly around the margin. A study by John Sides and Eric McGhee found that redistricting after the 2010 Census, which was controlled by Republicans in many key states, produced a net swing of only about seven House seats toward Republicans.

In this context, the legal requirements of the Voting Rights Act might also have a relatively minor effect on the number of majority-minority districts, most of which arise as a result of the geographic di stribution of minority voters.

To the extent that there would be any effects from abandoning certain requirements, would they help Democrats or Republicans on balance?

The safest answer is that it will tend to help whichever party is in control of the redistricting process in a given state: the fewer legal constraints that party has, the freer it will be to draw Congressional districts as it sees fit. So if Democrats are in charge of the redistricting process in New York in 2020, perhaps they can find a way to squeeze out another Democratic seat or two by splitting up minority voters. And if Republicans are in charge in Texas, perhaps they can avoid giving up as many seats to Democrats by diluting the minority vote in cities like Dallas and Houston.

Thus, legal rulings that weaken the effect of the Voting Rights Act will tend to increase the importance of the 2020 elections, when control of the redistricting process will be at stake. But any of these effect s are likely to be relatively minor compared with the role geography plays.

Media Decoder: The Other Snowden Drama: Impugning the Messenger

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Campaign Spotlight: Marketer Has New ‘Bee\' in Its Bonnet: Frozen Meals

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Media Decoder: High-Wire Canyon Walk Drew 13 Million Viewers

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‘Mad Men\' Season Finale Drew 2.7 Million Viewers

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In Management Shake-Up, Warner Bros. Puts TV and Movie Units Under One Executive

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

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Disney Drags the Beach Blanket Out of the Attic and Gives It a Shake

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‘Under the Dome\' Opens Big for CBS

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BP Challenges Settlements in Gulf Oil Spill

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

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F.T.C. Tells Search Engines to Label Advertising as Such

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Advertising: Commercials With a Gay Emphasis Are Moving to Mainstream Media

Commercials With a Gay Emphasis Are Moving to Mainstream Media

A TV commercial for Expedia about a father who travels to attend the wedding of his daughter to another woman.

WHEN Expedia decided to begin running on television this month a commercial it had introduced online in October, about a father's trip to attend his daughter's wedding to another woman, the media plan was drawn up to include Logo, the cable channel aimed at gay and lesbian viewers. But the commercial is also running on networks watched by general audiences, like CNN, History, MSNBC and the National Geographic Channel.

The Lucky Charms mascot at the Twin Cities Pride Family Picnic in St. Paul.

“As we were making our Web site more personal, we wanted to get back to the idea that travel is really personal,” said Sarah Gavin, director for public relations and social media at Expedia in Seattle, and “equality is a core part of who we are.”

The Expedia decision is indicative of a significant change in how marketers are disseminating ads with so-called L.G.B.T. themes, for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. For the last two or three decades, such ads were usually aimed at L.G.B.T. consumers, placed in media those consumers watch and read, and then supplemented with tactics that included event marketing like floats in Pride Month parades.

Recently, however, L.G.B.T. ads have been getting broader exposure. While targeted media and events remain part of the game plan, they are also running in mainstream media that, in addition to general cable channels, include magazines like Family Circle, newspapers like The New York Times and social media like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube.

One goal is to reach families, friends and straight allies of L.G.B.T. consumers. “I have friends who are gay who said, ‘I sent this to my mother,' ‘I sent this to my father,' ” Ms. Gavin said of the Expedia commercial, which was created by the Los Angeles office of 180, part of the Omnicom Group. “We wanted to start a conversation.”

Another goal is to signal support for L.G.B.T. consumers as they seek civil rights in areas like immigration and marriage.

Although “niche media remain an important part of the mix,” said Billy Kolber, publisher and creative director of Man About World, a gay travel magazine for the iPad, “it's more impactful when you see an ad in mainstream media because it says these companies are willing to offer public support.”

The list of marketers that are casting a wider net with their L.G.B.T. ads reads like a Who's Who of Madison Avenue. In addition to Expedia, they include Amazon, American Airlines, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bloomingdale's, Crate & Barrel, Gap, General Mills, Google, Hyatt, JetBlue Airways, Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Microsoft, J. C. Penney and Redhook Ale Brew ery.

“As society becomes more diverse, there's more inclusive messaging, which reflects what society actually looks like,” said Michael Wilke, executive director of the AdRespect Advertising Educational Program, which works with marketers on L.G.B.T. representation in campaigns.

“It's not about being inclusive to stand out,” he added. “It's about being inclusive to blend in.”

And “it's particularly a no-brainer when you look at younger consumers,” Mr. Wilke said, who, according to polls, are far more accepting of diversity than their elders to the point where they expect to see ads that celebrate acceptance.

A play on words centered on “acceptance” is the focus of a campaign under way from MasterCard Worldwide, which offers a hashtag, #AcceptanceMatters, and includes material on Facebook along with Twitter.

“We think it will resonate with a lot of different people,” said JR Badian, vice president and senior business leader for U.S. digital marketing and social media at MasterCard Worldwide in Purchase, N.Y. “This gives us the opportunity to be targeted as well as bring the message to a larger audience.”

The MasterCard campaign, which is being handled by R/GA in New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, is composed of social media and event marketing. “We'll see how the conversation is liked and shared,” Mr. Badian said, “and if we could extend it out to traditional media.”

Like MasterCard's effort, an L.G.B.T. campaign for Lucky Charms cereal, sold by General Mills, is composed of social media and event marketing. The agencies in the Lucky Charms campaign, which carries the theme and hashtag “Lucky to be,” are McCann Always On, part of the McCann Erickson New York unit of Interpublic, and Street Factory Media in Minneapolis.

“We feel Lucky Charms is a brand of ‘magical possibilities' for everyone and anyone,” said Greg Pearson, marketing manager for Lucky Charms at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn., partly because each box contains three kinds of pieces shaped like rainbows, “one of the universal symbols of acceptance.”

So far, almost all comments about “Lucky to be” have been “really positive,” Mr. Pearson said, without the kind of reaction suffered by a commercial with an interracial cast for another General Mills cereal, Cheerios. That drew so many vituperative remarks on YouTube that the commenting function was disabled.

There are many complaints, along with more than 15,500 “likes,” on the Facebook fan page for Grey Poupon mustard, sold by Kraft Foods, regarding an L.G.B.T. ad posted on Monday depicting two men from a revived version of the brand's signature car commercial holding hands. The negative remarks include “gross,” “sick” and “you just lost another buyer.” The ad was created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners.

For Expedia's commercial, the response has been “mixed,” Ms. Gavin said. “There are a lot of folks who applaud us and a lot of folks who aren't happy.”

That will not deter Expedia, she added, because she believes that time is on the company's side. “In 10 years,” she asked, “is this even a conversation we'll have any more?”

Mr. Wilke echoed Ms. Gavin. Marketers “are increasingly feeling comfortable about being inclusive,” he said. “This will continue to gather steam.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 26, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Commercials With a Gay Emphasis Are Moving to Mainstream Media.

John L. Dotson Jr., Publisher of Beacon Journal, Dies at 76

John L. Dotson Jr., a prominent journalist who became one of the nation's first African-American publishers of a general circulation daily newspaper and who guided the paper, The Akron Beacon Journal of Ohio, to a Pulitzer Prize for a series on race relations, died on Friday at his home in Boulder, Colo. He was 76.

John L. Dotson Jr.

The cause was mantle cell lymphoma, his son, John Dotson III, said.

When Mr. Dotson became president and publisher of The Journal in 1992, he had been a reporter for big-city newspapers, an editor at Newsweek, the publisher of a Colorado paper and a founder of an institute for minority journalists. Two years later The Journal won the Pulitzer for public service for the five-part series “A Question of Color.”

The final installment solicited pledges from readers to fight racism; the names of 22,000 respondents were later published in a special supplement.

James Crutchfield, who succeeded Mr. Dotson as publisher, recalled in The Journal's obituary that he had been concerned that the series might be too inflammatory. Mr. Dotson, who as a reporter covered the Detroit race riots of the 1960s, counseled him not to hold back.

“I felt we were pushing the envelope,” Mr. Crutchfield said. “We ended up pushing it even further.”

In 1977, Mr. Dotson and eight other journalists, including Earl Caldwell, Dorothy Butler Gilliam and Robert C. Maynard, founded a nonprofit organization devoted to training and expanding opportunities for minority journalists. Based in Oakland, Calif., it was renamed the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education after Mr. Maynard's death in 1993.

Mr. Dotson spoke openly about the pressures on a black executive in a predominantly white industry and the guarded way he often dealt with white colleagues early on. “When I came along, I would get up in the morning and I would put on this armor and go to work,” he said in 2000 when interviewed by The New York Times for its series “How Race Is Lived in America,” which also won a Pulitzer.

Some colleagues saw him as cautious and alert to how he was perceived.

“I think it's kind of funny how a lot of people in the newsroom, white people in the newsroom, think he bends over backwards to appease and please the black community and black reporters in the newsroom,” Carl Chancellor, who is black and a former columnist at The Journal, told The Times. “When I think if you polled the black people in the newsroom, they'd probably think that it's the other way around.”

Early in his career Mr. Dotson was a reporter for The Newark Evening News, The Detroit Free Press and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He joined Newsweek in 1965 and became a senior editor there. In 1983, he was named president and publisher of The Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo.

John Louis Dotson Jr. was born on Feb. 5, 1937, in Paterson, N.J., to John Dotson and the former Evelyn Nelson. He served as a lieutenant in the Army and received a bachelor's degree in journalism from Temple University in 1958.

Mr. Dotson served on the boards of The Washington Post and the Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered by Columbia University. He led a Pulitzer committee that studied whether to accept nominations for online journalism. Its proposal to do so was accepted and adopted by the Pulitzer board in 1997. He retired from The Beacon Journal in 2001 and was elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association for Black Journalists in 2007.

In addition to his son John, he is survived by his wife, the former Peggy Burnett; another son, Christopher; a daughter, Leslie Van Every; a brother, Ronald; a sister, Beverly Spidey; and eight grandchildren. Mr. Dotson also had a home in Marco Island, Fla.

Gene Roberts, who as metropolitan editor of The Free Press in the 1960s hired Mr. Dotson, said on Monday that Mr. Dotson's experience as a reporter had shaped his attitudes in the executive suite.

“John was very supportive of the newsroom,” said Mr. Roberts, who was later executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of The Times, “and had a sensitivity and feeling about news and the role of a newspaper in democratic society that you wish more publishers had.”

DealBook: Losing Ground on Nook, Barnes & Noble Ceases Its Own Manufacture of Color Versions

Barnes & Noble has conceded that it cannot compete head-to-head with the iPad and the Kindle Fire.

Reporting a big loss at its Nook e-reader division that dragged down the company's fourth-quarter results, Barnes & Noble said Tuesday that it would no longer make its own color tablets. Instead, it will work with third parties, which will make the devices in exchange for co-branding opportunities.

The announcement is essentially Barnes & Noble's white flag, signaling that it cannot compete in a market dominated by Apple, Amazon.com and Samsung. It will still make and sell the black-and-white versions of the Nook, which generate the majority of the company's digital book sales.

The company plans to discount its remaining Nook tablets through the holidays.

“Our aim is to sell great tablets connected to our best content catalog and high-quality bookstore services we've done, but do so without the sizable upfront risk,” William J. Lynch Jr., Barnes & Noble's chief executive, said on a call with analysts.

The development raises questions about what lies ahead for the embattled bookseller, which remains under pressure from better-financed digital rivals like Amazon. The company's loss of $2.11 a share exceeded the average analyst estimate of 99 cents, according to data from Capital IQ. Revenue decreased 7.4 percent, to $1.28 billion, while the net loss was $118.6 million.

Company executives were silent about talks with Leonard S. Riggio, Barnes & Noble's chairman, who has sought to buy the chain's 675 stores. Nor did they discuss the state of talks with Microsoft, an investor in the Nook business that had shown interest in buying the division's digital assets.

Talks about possible transactions were still continuing, according to a person briefed on the matter, though it was unclear if or when a deal would be reached. Barnes & Noble has indicated that it will not part with its core retail stores for anything less than $1 billion.

Though the company's latest results gave investors heartburn - shares in Barnes & Noble tumbled 17 percent Tuesday, to $15.61 - stopping some of the red ink in the Nook unit may help stabilize the business and make it more attractive to potential suitors.

And the company can still point to its inventory of digital books as its single most valuable asset, which may draw possible buyers.

But the outsourcing of the device manufacturing reflects the difficulties for Barnes & Noble in refashioning itself more in the Apple mold.

Introduced in 2009, the Nook was meant to help usher the company into the Internet media age, allowing it to compete head-to-head with Amazon in both devices and digital books.

The next year, Barnes & Noble took the even riskier step of introducing a color tablet, the Nook Color, that was aimed more at competing with the iPad. The company introduced ever more sophisticated models, including a 9-inch high-definition tablet.

Such was the promise of the Nook that it drew in both Microsoft and the British publisher Pearson, which together bought 23 percent of the business and val ued it at about $1.8 billion. And several Nook tablets have won higher praise from reviewers than their Kindle rivals.

That has not translated into sales, and the division meant to revive Barnes & Noble has instead weighed down the rest of the company. In the fiscal fourth quarter, the Nook unit lost $177 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, more than doubling the loss from the period a year earlier. Sales fell 34 percent, to $108 million.

The company has also had to grapple with the high costs of manufacturing its own devices. Unsold tablets accounted for a $133 million write-down in the fourth quarter and $222 million for the entire 2013 fiscal year.

Mr. Lynch outlined some of the expenses involved in supporting its tablet business to analysts. Not only was the company responsible for the hardware, it also invested in developing the software and in marketing the devices.

Barnes & Noble's physical bookstores have not fared much better. Fourth-quarter Ebitda at the company's retail arm fell 24 percent, to $51 million, while revenue declined 10 percent, to $948 million.

One sign of the company's troubles: the fourth quarter suffered in comparison to the year-ago period, which reaped huge benefits from sales of “The Hunger Games” and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogies.

Mr. Lynch told analysts that while the company opened two retail stores last year, it closed 18. Barnes & Noble will open five locations this year, but will close 15 to 20 existing ones.

One brighter spot for Barnes & Noble was its college bookstore business, which had $3.8 million in Ebitda for the quarter on $252 million in revenue.

A version of this article appeared in print on 06/26/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Losing Ground on Nook, Barnes & Noble Ceases Its Own Manufacture of Color Versions.

An Emerging Hispanic Voice Defends Her ‘Maids'

LOS ANGELES - 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” - as she called the five actresses - 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'.

CNN to Revive ‘Crossfire,' Early Home for Political Shouting Matches

John Harrington/CNN, via Reuters

Crossfire, in 2002, with James Carville, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson trading arguments.

“Crossfire,” the forerunner to so many television debates and shouting matches, is coming back to CNN, the cable news channel announced on Wednesday.

The format will be the same as it was in the 1980s and ‘90s - two hosts each day, one from a liberal perspective and the other from a conservative perspective. But the stable of political pundits exchanging verbal fire will be new.

The conservatives will be Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and presidential candidate, and S. E. Cupp, a television commentator who is joining CNN from MSNBC. The liberals will be Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for President Obama's 2012 campaign, and Van Jones, an activist and former special adviser to Mr. Obama for green jobs.

CNN said the program would return this fall. It did not specify a premiere date or a time slot, but the late afternoon or early evening is most likely. The channel's plan was first reported in April by TVNewser.

More than eight years after it was canceled, “Crossfire” is still one of the most widely known cable news programs, but it has also been widely derided, as evidenced by the mixed reactions online to CNN's announcement on Wednesday morning. Some media critics and commentators have denounced the program for wedging complex arguments into a left-right rubric and promoting political polarization. (In the famous words of Jon Stewart during his 2004 appearance on the program, “It's hurting America.” CNN canceled the show the next year.)

Others have praised “Crossfire” for pioneering a form of televised debate and for presenting multiple points of views about thorny issues. For CNN, the restoration may be intended as a statement that the channel is a television home for all sides, in contrast to Fox News, which is associated with the right, and MSNBC, which is associated with the left.

Jeff Zucker, who took over as president of CNN in January, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Few programs in the history of CNN have had the kind of impact on political discourse that ‘Crossfire' did. It was a terrific program then, and we believe the time is right to bring it back and do it again.”

He added: “We look forward to the opportunity to host passionate conversation from all sides of the political spectrum. ‘Crossfire' will be the forum where America holds its great debates.”

The program will air from CNN's Washington bureau.

“Crossfire” will give Mr. Gingrich, who was a paid contributor at Fox News until he made his unsuccessful bid for president in 2012, a high-profile new perch. In April, when he confirmed that he was in talks with CNN about a job there, he said he was intrigued by the prospect of discussing serious issues.

None of the other co-hosts - Mr. Jones, Ms. Cutter and Ms. Cupp - have run for office, but they have ample experience in and around campaigns. Ms. Cupp was hired away from MSNBC, where she has been a co-host of the political panel discussion show “The Cycle” for the past year. She was the only reliably conservative voice on that show. MSNBC issued a statement on Wednesday thanking Ms. Cupp for her “great work,” and said it would have more to say about her replacement soon.

Ms. Cupp will keep her other job, as a contributor to Glenn Beck's Internet and television network TheBlaze, CNN said.

CNN to Revive ‘Crossfire,’ Early Home for Political Shouting Matches

John Harrington/CNN, via Reuters

Crossfire, in 2002, with James Carville, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson trading arguments.

“Crossfire,” the forerunner to so many television debates and shouting matches, is coming back to CNN, the cable news channel announced on Wednesday.

The format will be the same as it was in the 1980s and ‘90s â€" two hosts each day, one from a liberal perspective and the other from a conservative perspective. But the stable of political pundits exchanging verbal fire will be new.

The conservatives will be Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and presidential candidate, and S. E. Cupp, a television commentator who is joining CNN from MSNBC. The liberals will be Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for President Obama’s 2012 campaign, and Van Jones, an activist and former special adviser to Mr. Obama for green jobs.

CNN said the program would return this fall. It did not specify a premiere date or a time slot, but the late afternoon or early evening is most likely. The channel’s plan was first reported in April by TVNewser.

More than eight years after it was canceled, “Crossfire” is still one of the most widely known cable news programs, but it has also been widely derided, as evidenced by the mixed reactions online to CNN’s announcement on Wednesday morning. Some media critics and commentators have denounced the program for wedging complex arguments into a left-right rubric and promoting political polarization. (In the famous words of Jon Stewart during his 2004 appearance on the program, “It’s hurting America.” CNN canceled the show the next year.)

Others have praised “Crossfire” for pioneering a form of televised debate and for presenting multiple points of views about thorny issues. For CNN, the restoration may be intended as a statement that the channel is a television home for all sides, in contrast to Fox News, which is associated with the right, and MSNBC, which is associated with the left.

Jeff Zucker, who took over as president of CNN in January, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Few programs in the history of CNN have had the kind of impact on political discourse that ‘Crossfire’ did. It was a terrific program then, and we believe the time is right to bring it back and do it again.”

He added: “We look forward to the opportunity to host passionate conversation from all sides of the political spectrum. ‘Crossfire’ will be the forum where America holds its great debates.”

The program will air from CNN’s Washington bureau.

“Crossfire” will give Mr. Gingrich, who was a paid contributor at Fox News until he made his unsuccessful bid for president in 2012, a high-profile new perch. In April, when he confirmed that he was in talks with CNN about a job there, he said he was intrigued by the prospect of discussing serious issues.

None of the other co-hosts â€" Mr. Jones, Ms. Cutter and Ms. Cupp â€" have run for office, but they have ample experience in and around campaigns. Ms. Cupp was hired away from MSNBC, where she has been a co-host of the political panel discussion show “The Cycle” for the past year. She was the only reliably conservative voice on that show. MSNBC issued a statement on Wednesday thanking Ms. Cupp for her “great work,” and said it would have more to say about her replacement soon.

Ms. Cupp will keep her other job, as a contributor to Glenn Beck’s Internet and television network TheBlaze, CNN said.