New York Times Names a New National Editor

The New York Times on Friday named Alison Mitchell, its weekend editor, as the paper’s new national editor.

Ms. Mitchell joined The Times in 1992 as a metro reporter, then moved on to work as a White House correspondent and to cover Congress. She ran the Washington bureau’s Congressional coverage and, as an editor, oversaw the paper’s education desk. She has worked as The Times’s weekend editor since 2008.

She graduated from Harvard University and started her career at The Record in Bergen County, N.J. She joined The Times from Newsday, where she worked for 15 years. She covered politics there, among other subjects, and was a Moscow correspondent in her last assignment.

In a memo to the newsroom, Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said about Ms. Mitchell that “national editor is the job she was born to do.”

Ms. Mitchell is replacing Sam Sifton, who has been asked by Ms. Abramson to spearhead two new digital initiatives. The first is to create an online magazine that focuses on longer, interactive projects like the Snow Fall package that won a Pulitzer Prize this year. Mr. Sifton, a former restaurant critic for the paper who has edited the dining section and led the culture department, is additionally working to create a dining news product for The Times.

Mr. Sifton, a graduate of Harvard as well, came to The Times in 2002. He was a founding editor of Talk Magazine and worked for 10 years at The New York Press, including two years as managing editor.

Ad Veteran’s New Venture Relies on His Friends

A longtime advertising agency executive, art director and designer is looking to his “friends” for a little help with his new venture.

The executive is Marty Weiss, who is changing his most recent offering, Meter Industries, a brand design and marketing consultancy in New York, into what he is calling Marty Weiss and Friends. The new agency joins a list of Mr. Weiss’s workplaces that also includes Chiat/Day; Weiss, Whitten, Carroll, Stagliano; Weiss Stagliano Partners; and TBWA/Chiat/Day.

The “Friends” in the name is intended to suggest the agency’s model, which is becoming an increasingly familiar one in the advertising business; other examples include Co Collective. Mr. Weiss plans to assemble an appropriate team for each project or assignment from a core group of industry people he knows and firms he has worked with â€" they will become his case-by-case collaborators.

“I’m not even sure ‘agency’ is the right word,” Mr. Weiss said, “because it’s a bit of an anti-agency.”

Mr. Weiss is promoting his new venture with a campaign in social media, which includes declarations like this one: “We’re not a big holding company. We’re a big hugging company.”

One ad advising that “Meter Industries is now Marty Weiss and Friends” offers a cheeky explanation for the name change: “My therapist suggested I put myself more front and center.”

Among the collaborators on Mr. Weiss’s list are Jon Bond, of agencies like Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners and Big Fuel; Megan Kent, of agencies that include Bouchez, Kent, JWT and Starfish; and Lance Porigow, of agencies like Profero. The roster of “friends” also includes JSC Consumer Insights, Skimatics Web Works and Thinkers and Makers.

“What Marty is doing is not unusual right now,” Ms. Kent said, because many people who used to work for well-known agencies “have developed such a network of associates that it’s easy to reach out to the best in breed” and form what she described as “merry bands of all-stars.”

There are other factors fueling the trend, she said, as some people on Madison Avenue “don’t want to work for The Man anymore” and others consider themselves to be “more interested in the ideas than the office politics.”

Mr. Bond said the formation of Marty Weiss and Friends was another example of how much looser the business is now than it used to be.

In fact, when asked what his appearance on Mr. Weiss’s roster means, Mr. Bond replied, laughing, “I guess it means if something comes up we can both work on, he’ll call me.”

Mr. Bond said he would work with Mr. Weiss on entrepreneurial ventures in the spirit of Mr. Bond’s own company, Tomorrow L.L.C., which takes stakes in agencies, media companies and other firms. “Don’t be telling people I’m going to work on their advertising,” Mr. Bond said.

A longtime client of Mr. Weiss’s said he approved of the new venture.

“The key to the success of our campaign is really Marty,” said Chester Brandes, president and chief executive of Imperial Brands, for whom Mr. Weiss created a campaign for Sobieski vodka that carries the theme “The truth about vodka.”

“Having worked with a number of big agencies, what that proved to me is that you don’t need a big agency and a team of 40 people to get brilliant creative,” Mr. Brandes said.

Author’s Anti-Gay Views Fuel Call for Boycott of ‘Ender’s Game’

Richard Foreman Jr./Summit Entertainment

Harrison Ford, center, confronting Asa Butterfield in “Ender’s Game.”

LOS ANGELES â€" At last count, 667 people, give or take, have screen credits on “Ender’s Game.”

Orson Scott Card, who wrote the novel “Ender’s Game,” has opposed gay marriage.

One of them turned into a problem this week.

A planned boycott aimed at this science-fiction film, which is to be released on Nov. 1, gained momentum just as Summit Entertainment and its partners were getting ready to introduce “Ender’s Game,” with two of its stars, Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield, at the Comic-Con International fan convention in San Diego next Thursday. At issue is the author of the novel on which the film is based, Orson Scott Card; his views on homosexuality; and his public stance against same-sex marriage.

A book with a futuristic battle story published in 1985, “Ender’s Game” has nothing to do with gay marriage. Indeed, Glaad, a gay-rights organization that tracks media, reviewed the script and found nothing to criticize.

As for Mr. Card’s background and views, they were hardly a secret. A Mormon and a descendant of Brigham Young, he was on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, which has opposed same-sex unions, from 2009 until this year. In March a DC Comics project with Mr. Card as a co-writer fell apart when its illustrator, Chris Sprouse, quit as an online petition called for Mr. Card’s removal.

By Monday evening, Mr. Card was issuing a public plea for tolerance of his views â€" “with the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot,” he noted in a statement to the Entertainment Weekly Web site â€" in response to a planned boycott that had burst into prominence only the day before, when The Huffington Post published an article about a Web site called Skipendersgame.com.

Speaking by telephone on Wednesday, Patrick Yacco and Jono Jarrett, who helped start the Web boycott campaign in conjunction with Geeks Out, an organization that promotes gay-themed pop culture, said they were stunned by the sudden attention to their effort, which had been online since April. “We were really surprised by how this has turned out,” Mr. Yacco said.

He added that their bare-bones boycott site had gathered about 2,000 pledges of support from Sunday to Wednesday. That many boycotters would barely dent the audience of millions that typically shows up for the opening weekend of a heavily marketed science-fiction blockbuster.

Web-savvy individuals and bootstrap organizations for years have been using Internet sites and social media to call for boycotts of movies that somehow offend them. After its release last month, “World War Z,” about zombies, drew a boycott call for supposedly being too favorable to Israel. Perhaps less seriously, “Iron Man 3” and “Star Trek Into Darkness” were targeted for having been released abroad before they were seen in the United States.

Mr. Jarrett attributed the widespread interest in the “Ender’s Game” boycott campaign, which by now has been featured by CNN, NPR and The Christian Science Monitor, among others, to the simplicity of its appeal for a public shunning of Mr. Card.

“It’s very, very clear what he said and what he stands for,” Mr. Jarrett said.

An assistant to Mr. Card said he was abroad and not available for an interview.

Mr. Card has been a force in the science-fiction world since the publication of “Ender’s Game,” which was based on a story he wrote in the 1970s. It eventually spawned a series of books, which began with the recruitment and training of a boy, Andrew Wiggin, known as Ender, as an interplanetary fighter.

Though Hollywood pursued rights to “Ender’s Game” for years, Mr. Card was protective of the property, and at one time intended to write his own screenplay. Eventually he optioned the books to Warner Brothers, which tried to turn them into a film for the director Wolfgang Petersen (“Das Boot,” “Troy”), before giving up. That cleared the way for the current production, which is partly financed by OddLot Entertainment and its owner, the heiress Gigi Pritzker. (The new movie is written and directed by Gavin Hood, who directed “X Men Origins: Wolverine,” and counts Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, both heavily credited fantasy filmmakers, among its key producers.)

Some of the views to which Mr. Jarrett and others object have been posted by Glaad as part of a Web-based “accountability project.” It cites published articles in which Mr. Card argued against the acceptance of homosexuality by Mormons, for instance, and contended that gay behavior often begins with sexual abuse.

Still, not every advocate of gay equality and same-sex marriage is convinced that turning away from “Ender’s Game,” which cost about $110 million to make, is the best way to counter Mr. Card.

“No way am I boycotting,” said Dustin Lance Black, who in 2009 won an Oscar for writing “Milk,” about the gay activist Harvey Milk, and who campaigned against California’s Proposition 8, which sought to ban gay marriage.

Speaking from London on Wednesday, Mr. Black â€" who, like Mr. Card, comes from a Mormon family â€" said he would rather engage with, than shut out, political and cultural adversaries. “We haven’t been getting the numbers we’ve seen by disengaging,” Mr. Black said, referring to a rise in public acceptance of same-sex marriage and other measures of gay equality.

Summit executives declined to be interviewed about the boycott call or Mr. Card’s involvement in the movie.

In a statement, Lionsgate, Summit’s corporate parent, noted that it has released movies with gay themes, including “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” and has long recognized same-sex unions and domestic partnerships in its own corporate benefits programs. It said the company does not agree with Mr. Card’s personal views or those of the National Organization for Marriage.

“The simple fact is that neither the underlying book nor the film itself reflect these views in any way, shape or form,” the statement said. It also said Lionsgate expects to host a benefit premiere for some gay-related cause in connection with “Ender’s Game.”

Mr. Jarrett and Mr. Yacco said they were only beginning to solicit support from larger groups that might lend teeth to their boycott plans. Mr. Yacco said that he would attend the Comic-Con convention but that he had not yet decided whether or how he might extend the Skip Ender’s Game campaign there.

A twist in the debate may be coming in October, when Open Court, a Chicago-based publisher, plans to release “Ender’s Game and Philosophy: Genocide Is Child’s Play,” a book of essays. In an entry titled “How Queer Is Ender,” two writers, Nicolas Michaud and Jessica Watkins, conclude that the novel and its world “aren’t so much homophobic as they are sexist.”

“Ender’s Game” and other books in the series, the authors argue, actually express “the yearning and suffering of a deep unrequited love between men, which can never really be eased by the inferior love of women.”

Owners of Hulu Call Off Sale and Plan to Invest $750 Million

The owners of Hulu on Friday said that they had decided not to sell the pioneering streaming-video Web site, after all.

Instead, the three companies that jointly own Hulu â€" 21st Century Fox, the Walt Disney Company and NBCUniversal â€" said they would make a new investment of $750 million and use Hulu’s technology to compete against other online distributors like Netflix.

Friday’s announcement represented an anticlimactic end to months of speculation about the Web site’s future.

DirecTV and AT&T were among the distributors who in recent weeks submitted bids of about $1 billion for Hulu. But the Web site’s owners concluded, according to a person with close ties to the process, that the “equity value in the long run outstrips the sale value.”

In a statement, Chase Carey, the president of 21st Century Fox, the entertainment part of the media company that was known as News Corporation before a corporate breakup was completed last month, said: “We believe the best path forward for Hulu is a meaningful recapitalization that will further accelerate its growth under the current ownership structure.”

His statement noted that the bidders had “impressive plans and offers,” but that 21st Century Fox and Disney -- which have repeatedly clashed over the future of Hulu -- came away from the process “fully aligned in our collective vision and goals for the business.”

The third owner, NBCUniversal, is a silent partner because regulations prohibit its corporate parent, Comcast, from being involved.

Holder to Tighten Rules for Obtaining Reporters’ Data

WASHINGTON â€" Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who has been criticized for the Justice Department’s aggressive tactics in secretly obtaining phone logs and e-mails of reporters as part of leak investigations, is expected to issue new guidelines on Friday that would significantly narrow the circumstances under which journalists’ records could be obtained, a Justice Department official said.

The new guidelines, which the official said would take effect almost immediately, would prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from portraying a reporter as a co-conspirator in a criminal leak as a way to get around a legal bar on secret search warrants for reporting materials, as an agent did in a recently revealed search warrant affidavit involving a Fox News reporter.

They would also make it harder â€" though not impossible â€" for prosecutors to obtain a journalist’s calling records from telephone companies without giving news organizations advance notice, as the department recently did in obtaining a sweeping set of phone records for reporters with The Associated Press. Notifying news organizations in advance would give them a chance to contest the request in court.

“This is as far as the department can go on its own until Congress passes the media shield legislation,” the Justice Department official said, referring to a bill, which the Obama administration backed amid a furor over leak investigations, that would let judges rather than prosecutors be the ultimate decision-makers about subpoenas for journalists’ phone records, among other matters.