Publisher Drops Book Deal With TV Chef Paula Deen

Sponsors have cut ties with Paula Deen, who has admitted using racist language. But some fans have rallied to her side.

Paula Deen got a rare bit of good news on Thursday: Her new cookbook hit No. 1 on the best-seller list at Amazon.com, as thousands of fans â€" many of them springing to her defense as she faces accusations of racism â€" ordered the book months before its October release.

But on Friday, its publisher, Random House, said it would not publish the cookbook, and would cancel a five-book contract it signed with Ms. Deen last year.

The book deal was one of the last remaining lucrative business relationships for the embattled celebrity chef. Its cancellation came on a day when Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney announced that they would stop selling products, including cookbooks, branded with her name.

Since last week, the Food Network, Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, Caesars Entertainment, QVC and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk have decided to suspend or sever ties with Ms. Deen after her admission in a legal deposition that she had used racist language in the past and allowed racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes in one of her restaurants. Ms. Deen was deposed on video as part of a discrimination lawsuit filed last year by a former employee.

Her frantic efforts to stanch the flow of negative opinion by defending herself on the “Today” show and posting apologetic videos on YouTube have rallied many of her admirers. They have threatened boycotts of Walmart, created a “We Support Paula Deen” Facebook page that has well over half a million “likes,” and started a campaign to flood the Food Network offices with empty butter wrappers, a symbol of Ms. Deen’s indulgent cooking style.

But these efforts have not, apparently, made a difference to Ms. Deen’s corporate partners.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, said in a statement Friday afternoon, “After careful consideration, Ballantine Books has made the difficult decision to cancel the publication of ‘Paula Deen’s New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up.’ “

The book, co-written by Melissa Clark, a dining columnist for The New York Times, was to feature lighter fare than the fat- and sugar-laden recipes Ms. Deen has promoted in previous books and on her television shows.

A person with knowledge of Random House’s decision to cancel the contract said, “When Walmart, Target and J. C. Penney all announced they are discontinuing their Paula Deen business, including books, it is awfully tough to stay the course of a publication. It was a business decision.”

Ms. Deen has published 14 cookbooks, starting in 1998 with “The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook.” Together, they have sold more than eight million copies.

But many of the sales outlets that normally sell thousands of Ms. Deen’s books â€" like Walmart, Target, Kmart and QVC â€" would have refused to carry the new one.

Random House would not disclose the amount Ms. Deen was to be paid, but a person with knowledge of the contract said it involved millions of dollars. It is unclear whether Ms. Deen will have to return any of it, or whether a clause in the contract would allow the publisher to cancel the pact because of Ms. Deen’s behavior.

“That’s why God invented lawyers,” said Mr. Applebaum.

On Thursday, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it was suspending its use of Ms. Deen as a spokeswoman for the drug. The company, which has the top-selling portfolio of diabetes medications in the United States, has reached out vigorously to black Americans in its marketing and medical sponsorships.

Ms. Deen began a multiplatform campaign to promote the drug on the same day last year she revealed she had Type 2 diabetes. That set off public criticism that she had misserved her audience. She had received the diagnosis two years earlier, yet had continued to promote recipes high in sugar and fat.

Didra Brown Taylor, the executive director of the Beautyshop Project, a national diabetes screening initiative that offers free blood tests in hair salons in low-income neighborhoods, said that Ms. Deen’s conflict of interest was noted by program participants at the time, and that the current crisis had confirmed many in their beliefs that Ms. Deen might be more opportunistic than honest.

“She was cooking food that a diabetic would not eat,” Ms. Taylor said. “And to profit from that and then to profit from a diabetes drug, that’s hypocrisy.”

She said African-Americans were unlikely to forget Ms. Deen’s more recent admission that she used racial epithets. “It’s more than a rumor,” Ms. Taylor said. “She can’t say that she didn’t say it.”

Leslie Kaufman contributed reporting.

No One’s Seen It, but Netflix Renews It

Barbara Nitke for Netflix

Taylor Schilling in “Orange Is the New Black,” an original Netflix series about an unlikely prisoner that goes online July 11.

Netflix, unlike so many of its rivals on cable and broadcast, doesn’t share any ratings, so we won’t know how popular “Orange Is the New Black” is after the show has its debut on the service. But we can surmise that it is already pretty popular inside Netflix.

The company announced on Thursday that it had ordered a second season, two full weeks before subscribers get to see the first season. Such an early pickup is a rarity in television.

“It is unusual,” Cindy Holland, the company’s vice president for original content, acknowledged on Friday, but it was motivated by a practical matter: Netflix wanted to shorten the wait time between the first season and the second. In Season 2, she said, “our hope is that we can launch in late spring to early summer, rather than midsummer.”

The one-hour series, which comes online July 11, has both dramatic and comedic elements. It comes from Jenji Kohan, who created “Weeds” for Showtime, and stars Taylor Schilling as an unlikely new inmate at a women’s prison and Jason Biggs as the fiancé waiting for her release.

“Orange” has received raves from those who have seen the first episodes (The New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum called it a brilliant cross between “Oz” and “The L Word” on a podcast last week) but it doesn’t have the same name recognition as other original Netflix offerings, like “House of Cards,” the political thriller that came online in February, or “Arrested Development,” the revival of the Fox comedy that came online one month ago. Renewing the show so early may boost interest in the first season’s worth of episodes.

“To the industry, an early renewal is a vote of confidence in the show’s creators,” said Diane Gordon, the television editor for Studio System News, an industry Web site. “To fans, it encourages them to watch a show because they know it won’t disappear after two or three episodes, as often happens on broadcast networks. ”

Earning the loyalty of fans is critical for a service like Netflix, which depends on monthly subscriber fees. “Orange” continues the company’s push to compete with traditional sources of entertainment and, along the way, alter the definition of television.

Television executives could recall only a few other occasions when additional episodes were ordered ahead of a premiere â€" some prophetic and others, well, not. The premium-cable channel Starz did so with “Boss,” a drama led by Kelsey Grammer, only to have that series wind down after two seasons. More successfully, Starz renewed “Spartacus” a full month before viewers saw the first episode in 2010.

“Even the best of shows take more than one season to fully develop,” Chris Albrecht, the chief executive of Starz, said in an e-mail. “While we are always mindful of the audience, we are not slaves to ratings, which offers the creative teams we have confidence in the luxury of time to develop the stories and characters.”

HBO, the category leader, has a tendency to renew shows within weeks, and sometimes within days, of their start dates. In these cases, the network executives have already seen many of the coming episodes, so they have a good sense of what to expect.

Because Netflix releases all the episodes of a season at the same time, the executives there have already seen all 13 episodes of “Orange Is the New Black.” “We don’t have the benefit of having viewing information from our subscribers yet, but we do know creatively everything about the season,” Ms. Holland said.

Ms. Kohan alluded to that when she spoke at the New York premiere of the series at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. “I feel like I’m at the end of a pregnancy and I just want it out,” she said.

The announcement means that Netflix has renewed all of its original series to date, with one exception, “Arrested Development.” (While the company would like more episodes, it has warned that reassembling the cast would be very difficult.) It committed to two seasons of “House of Cards” from the get-go (the second is in production now); it long ago ordered more episodes of “Lilyhammer; and this month it renewed the horror series “Hemlock Grove.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 29, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: No One’s Seen It, but Netflix Renews It .

Motion Picture Academy Seeks to Expand Membership

LOS ANGELES â€" Reversing a policy that has more closely restricted membership in the last decade, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday invited an unusually large group of film professionals â€" 276 in total, including the actors Milla Jovovich and Joseph Gordon-Levitt â€" to join its ranks.

The invitation list represents a sharp increase from last year, when 176 new members were invited. That number was roughly calculated to maintain the size of the group, which annually awards the Oscars, and was generally consistent with the practice since 2004, when the Academy moved to tighten its rolls by focusing heavily on credentials, including any recent Oscar nomination, in deciding whether to extend an invitation.

This year, however, the Academy â€" which has been concerned about a lack of diversity within its ranks, and is searching for new connections to emerging aspects of cinema â€" dropped a system by which each of its branches was held to a quota.

It particularly encouraged the expansion of its documentary branch, which had been one of its smallest. That branch has only 173 members, but this year it invited 42 documentarians to join, compared with just 11 last year. Among those invited were Marcel Ophuls, whose work includes “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and both Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who directed “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

Other actors on a list of 22 invitees â€" actually fewer than the 25 invited last year â€" include Michael Peña, Lucy Liu, Jennifer Lopez, Charles Grodin and Jason Bateman. Among the 15 directors invited to join, an increase from last year’s 11, were Paul Feig, Benh Zeitlin and Steve McQueen.

Kevin Tsujihara, recently named chief executive of Warner Bros., was perhaps the best-known of the 17 executives invited to join. In a twist, Neil Meron, who was a producer of this year’s Oscar telecast and whose film credits include “Hairspray” and “The Bucket List,” was invited to join as a member at large rather than as a producer.

Jason Blum, whose credits include “The Purge” and “Paranormal Activity,” was among nine producers invited to join, a decline from the 12 who were invited to join last year.

The short films and features animation branch sharply increased its invitations, to 19 from 11. Among those invited this year was Matt Groening, whose feature film credits include “The Simpsons Movie.”

Sony Begins ‘Upfront’ Sales of Ads for PlayStation 3

Sony has already taken part in the upfront market for the sale of commercial time ahead of the 2013-14 season, for properties like the GSN cable channel and the Crackle digital video Web site. Now, the company is expanding the upfront selling process to the PlayStation 3 video game system.

Sony is selling advertising in an upfront market for its PlayStation Network, including ads that cover the entire welcome screen like this one for the TNT television series "Falling Skies."

The Sony Pictures Television division of Sony Pictures Entertainment is selling ad units in advance, like those that fill the welcome screen of the PlayStation Store, which game players see when they switch on the console. Instead of going by the fall-to-spring calendar of the television business, these sales are being made on a calendar that runs from July 1 through June 30.

The welcome-screen pitches, which are being called Mosaic Zero ad units, have already been sold to the Walt Disney Company, to advertise the coming movie “The Lone Ranger,” and the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner, to promote the TNT television series “Falling Skies.”

In addition to entertainment marketers, who seem natural advertisers for a video game system, other buyers of Mosaic Zero ad units include packaged-goods makers like ConAgra Foods, for Slim Jim jerky and meat sticks; the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, for Dr Pepper soft drinks; Mentholatum Brands, for Rohto eye drops; and Reckitt Benckiser, for Clearasil.

Sony Pictures Television estimates that it will sell about $10 million worth of ads in this PlayStation upfront market, which would represent about 90 percent of the available Mosaic Zero ad units and about 50 percent of the regular ad inventory. There is a $300,000 minimum on ad buys to take part in the upfront.

Because there is limited availability of the Mosaic Zero ad units, said Amy Carney, president for advertiser sales, strategy and research at Sony Pictures Television, a decision was made to sell them “in an upfront kind of way.”

One reason the television upfront market operates the way it does is that there is limited availability of commercial time in the shows that viewers like to watch.

There are 60 million registered users for PlayStation 3, Ms. Carney said, and 80 percent are men ages 18 to 49. Because men tend to watch less television than women, they are an elusive target audience that is “still difficult to reach even with the other upfronts,” she added.

During the 2013-14 period that the PlayStation ads are being sold for, Sony will bring out PlayStation 4; the timing is likely to be in the fall, ahead of the Christmas shopping season. PlayStation 4 will face off against the next generation of Xbox from Microsoft, Xbox One.

“PlayStation 4 is getting a lot of interest,” Ms. Carney said, “and it’s creating buzz around what we’re doing.”

There have been more upfront markets and upfront presentations this year than ever before. In fact, the Time Warner Cable Media unit of Time Warner Cable hosted an upfront presentation Thursday evening at the Time Warner Center; the event followed upfront events sponsored by Time Warner Cable Media in Dallas and Los Angeles.

Sony Begins ‘Upfront’ Sales of Ads for PlayStation 3

Sony has already taken part in the upfront market for the sale of commercial time ahead of the 2013-14 season, for properties like the GSN cable channel and the Crackle digital video Web site. Now, the company is expanding the upfront selling process to the PlayStation 3 video game system.

Sony is selling advertising in an upfront market for its PlayStation Network, including ads that cover the entire welcome screen like this one for the TNT television series "Falling Skies."

The Sony Pictures Television division of Sony Pictures Entertainment is selling ad units in advance, like those that fill the welcome screen of the PlayStation Store, which game players see when they switch on the console. Instead of going by the fall-to-spring calendar of the television business, these sales are being made on a calendar that runs from July 1 through June 30.

The welcome-screen pitches, which are being called Mosaic Zero ad units, have already been sold to the Walt Disney Company, to advertise the coming movie “The Lone Ranger,” and the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner, to promote the TNT television series “Falling Skies.”

In addition to entertainment marketers, who seem natural advertisers for a video game system, other buyers of Mosaic Zero ad units include packaged-goods makers like ConAgra Foods, for Slim Jim jerky and meat sticks; the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, for Dr Pepper soft drinks; Mentholatum Brands, for Rohto eye drops; and Reckitt Benckiser, for Clearasil.

Sony Pictures Television estimates that it will sell about $10 million worth of ads in this PlayStation upfront market, which would represent about 90 percent of the available Mosaic Zero ad units and about 50 percent of the regular ad inventory. There is a $300,000 minimum on ad buys to take part in the upfront.

Because there is limited availability of the Mosaic Zero ad units, said Amy Carney, president for advertiser sales, strategy and research at Sony Pictures Television, a decision was made to sell them “in an upfront kind of way.”

One reason the television upfront market operates the way it does is that there is limited availability of commercial time in the shows that viewers like to watch.

There are 60 million registered users for PlayStation 3, Ms. Carney said, and 80 percent are men ages 18 to 49. Because men tend to watch less television than women, they are an elusive target audience that is “still difficult to reach even with the other upfronts,” she added.

During the 2013-14 period that the PlayStation ads are being sold for, Sony will bring out PlayStation 4; the timing is likely to be in the fall, ahead of the Christmas shopping season. PlayStation 4 will face off against the next generation of Xbox from Microsoft, Xbox One.

“PlayStation 4 is getting a lot of interest,” Ms. Carney said, “and it’s creating buzz around what we’re doing.”

There have been more upfront markets and upfront presentations this year than ever before. In fact, the Time Warner Cable Media unit of Time Warner Cable hosted an upfront presentation Thursday evening at the Time Warner Center; the event followed upfront events sponsored by Time Warner Cable Media in Dallas and Los Angeles.

Facebook to Shield Ads From Offensive Content

Facebook said on Friday that it would remove ads from pages that contain controversial content, as it tries to protect advertisers from appearing next to offensive material beyond their control.

In a message posted on its Web site, the company wrote: “Our goal is to both preserve the freedoms of sharing on Facebook but also protect people and brands from certain types of content.”

“We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously. While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action.”

Facebook said it would begin the manual review for pages containing sensitive content next week with a team of hundreds of employees in offices around the world.

The action comes a month after feminist groups campaigned for an improvement in Facebook’s process for identifying and removing pages that glorify violence against women. At the time, Facebook acknowledged that its procedures had not worked effectively. Activist groups sent more than 5,000 e-mails to Facebook’s advertisers and elicited more than 60,000 posts on Twitter, requesting the removal of pages featuring women who had been abused.

The protests caused Nissan and a number of smaller advertisers to temporarily withdraw their ads from the site. Other advertisers, including Zappos, Dove and American Express, stopped short of removing their ads but issued statements on digital media saying they did not support violence against women.

“The way you allocate your resources identifies what your priorities are,” said Soraya Chemaly, a writer and activist who was involved in the digital media campaign.

Ms. Chemaly said that since the protests in May Facebook had been “great” about removing content the groups flagged as offensive but that the procedure for removing such content had not been systematic. “Before you can remove the ads, you need to have an accurate assessment of what counts as controversial and that’s not happening now systemically,” she said.

Elisabeth Diana, a Facebook spokeswoman, said dealing with offensive content was something the company handled on a daily basis. “We take it really, really seriously,” she said, adding that the goal of the new procedure “won’t be as much content policing as there will be advertising policing.”

Removing the ads from such pages also removes a pressure point that activist groups have used to get media companies and advertisers to listen to their concerns. “They are hoping to dismantle the leverage,” Ms. Chemaly said. “From a business perspective that makes perfect logical sense.”

The company expects to automate the process of identifying such content after a manual review of thousands of its pages.

DealBook: S.E.C. Begins an Inquiry of Thomson Reuters Data

Federal securities regulators have opened an inquiry into the media company Thomson Reuters and how it releases closely watched manufacturing data to its trading clients, a move that highlights the government’s continued effort to understand the high-speed trading systems that have transformed Wall Street.

Officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating why certain clients of Thomson Reuters received and traded on the Institute of Supply Management’s manufacturing data ahead of its official release earlier this month. Thomson Reuters has an agreement with the institute, which is rivately held, to release the influential survey.

On June 3, as traders were waiting for Thomson Reuters’s 10 a.m. release of the often market-moving I.S.M. manufacturing number, a small group of traders received the data milliseconds before the rest of Wall Street and, because it was disappointing, made rapid-fire, aggressive bets against the market. The traders used sophisticated computer trading systems to process and trade on the information.

The incident speaks to the increasing importance of speed in the nation’s stock markets. More than half of all American stock trades are now executed by firms that rely on high-speed connections to place and withdraw thousands of orders a second. In order to compete, these traders look for any leg up, including quicker ways to receive market data.

Most providers of market data, including the exchanges, now charge premimums for faster delivery of information. Regulators have been grappling with how to respond to the recent changes in th! e market and are considering whether, by selectively disclosing data to people who pay more money, the playing field has been unfairly tilted in favor of an elite group of traders. The current inquiry into the relationship between Thomson Reuters and I.S.M. adds to similar issues related to the release of market data and high-speed trading that regulators have been investigating.

Lemuel Brewster, a spokesman for Thomson Reuters, said that the company received a phone call from the S.E.C. regarding the premature release and explained to the agency that the early release was due to a “clock synchronization issue.”

“As part of this conversation, the S.E.C. requested a copy of the contract with I.S.M.,” Mr. Brewster said. “After obtaining I.S.M.’s consent, Thomson Reuters voluntarily provided a copy of the contract with the pricing details omitted.”

Thomson Reuters has not been subpoenaed for the information nor has it been notified of a formal S.E.C. investigation, a person brieed on the matter said. CNBC earlier reported on both the premature release of the I.S.M. data and the S.E.C.’s inquiry.