CBS and Time Warner Cable Call a Timeout in Dispute

The two sides in the confrontation between CBS and Time Warner Cable called for a timeout Wednesday night, hours before a deadline that might have removed CBS programs from the cable lineup in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

The two parties announced after 11 p.m. Wednesday night that they had agreed to an extension of the current contract through 5 p.m. next Monday. The deadline had been 9 a.m. Thursday.

CBS had made public statements asking for an extension in the negotiations, while Time Warner Cable was holding off on agreeing to one. But the decision to extend makes a showdown much less likely. In previous standoffs between networks and cable companies over compensation for station signals, extensions have generally meant neither side wants to push the dispute to the point where cable customers lose access to channels.

CBS has been demanding an increase in the fees that the cable company pays to retransmit the signals of network stations to its customers. Time Warner Cable has labeled the CBS demands exorbitant. The two sides have both taken out ads denouncing the other as unreasonable, trying to lay the groundwork to blame the other party if the stations were made unavailable to the cable customers.

But despite many previous fractious negotiations over what is known as retransmission consent, CBS has never reached the point where an impasse led to programming being blocked on a cable system.

Paula Deen’s ‘Soul Sister’ Portrays an Unequal Bond

Dylan Wilson for The New York Times

Dora Charles, a longtime worker for Paula Deen, said Ms. Deen did not treat her fairly, a claim Ms. Deen denies.

SAVANNAH, Ga. â€" Dora Charles and Paula Deen were soul sisters. That’s what Ms. Deen called the black cook from the start, even before the books and the television shows and the millions of dollars.

Cooking for Paula Deen Close Video See More Videos »

Mrs. Charles, third from left, on the cover of one of Paula Deen’s cookbooks.

For 22 years, Mrs. Charles was the queen of the Deen kitchens. She helped open the Lady & Sons, the restaurant here that made Ms. Deen’s career. She developed recipes, trained other cooks and made sure everything down to the collard greens tasted right.

“If it’s a Southern dish,” Ms. Deen once said, “you better not put it out unless it passes this woman’s tongue.”

The money was not great. Mrs. Charles spent years making less than $10 an hour, even after Ms. Deen became a Food Network star. And there were tough moments. She said Ms. Deen used racial slurs. Once she wanted Mrs. Charles to ring a dinner bell in front of the restaurant, hollering for people to come and get it.

“I said, ‘I’m not ringing no bell,’ ” Mrs. Charles said. “That’s a symbol to me of what we used to do back in the day.”

For a black woman in Savannah with a ninth-grade education, though, it was good steady work. And Ms. Deen, she said, held out the promise that together, they might get rich one day.

Now, Ms. Deen, 66, is fighting empire-crushing accusations of racism, and Mrs. Charles, 59 and nursing a bad shoulder, lives in an aging trailer home on the outskirts of Savannah.

“It’s just time that everybody knows that Paula Deen don’t treat me the way they think she treat me,” she said.

The relationship between Mrs. Charles and Ms. Deen is a complex one, laced with history and deep affection, whose roots can be traced back to the antebellum South. Depending on whether Mrs. Charles or Ms. Deen tells the story, it illustrates lives of racial inequity or benevolence.

Jessica B. Harris, a culinary scholar whose books have explored the role of Africans in the Southern kitchen, said Ms. Deen and Mrs. Charles are characters in a story that has been played out since slaves started cooking for whites. “Peering through the window of someone else’s success when you have been instrumental in creating that success is not a good feeling,” Ms. Harris said. “Think about who made money from the blues.”

Ms. Deen ran a restaurant in a Best Western hotel when Mrs. Charles, newly divorced and tired of fast-food kitchens, walked in and auditioned by cooking her version of Southern food. Ms. Deen hired her immediately.

Their birthdays are a day apart, so they celebrated together. When Ms. Deen catered parties to survive until they could open the Lady & Sons, Mrs. Charles hustled right beside her.

“If I lost Dora, I would have been devastated,” Ms. Deen wrote in her 2007 memoir, “It Ain’t All About the Cooking.”

Early on, Mrs. Charles claims, Ms. Deen made her a deal: “Stick with me, Dora, and I promise you one day if I get rich you’ll get rich.”

Now, Mrs. Charles said, she wished she had gotten that in writing. “I didn’t think I had to ’cause we were real close back then,” she said.

That is where the two women’s stories diverge. Ms. Deen, through her publicity team, offered a statement denying all of Mrs. Charles’s accusations: “Fundamentally Dora’s complaint is not about race but about money. It is about an employee that despite over 20 years of generosity feels that she still deserves yet even more financial support from Paula Deen. ”

What is more, the document states, Ms. Deen “provided guidance and support through the many ups and downs of Mrs. Charles’s life.”

Investigators for the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition have spoken to Mrs. Charles. Robert Patillo, a lawyer for the coalition, visited Savannah in June and July to interview Ms. Deen’s restaurant employees, including Mrs. Charles, who still works at the Lady & Sons.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 25, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Deen’s Cook Tells of Slights, Steeped in History .

Advertising: Welcoming a Royal Baby While Trying Not to Steal the Spotlight

Welcoming a Royal Baby While Trying Not to Steal the Spotlight

An ad on Facebook featuring Johnson’s Head-to-Toe Baby Wash, a Johnson & Johnson product. The news fit into an existing campaign for the brand.

When Prince William and his wife, the former Kate Middleton, left the hospital on Tuesday holding their son, Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge, they were greeted by a collective cooing not just from the media and the rest of the nonroyal populace, but from advertisers, too.

Pampers encouraged parents to send pictures of their babies.

Amid the baby frenzy in the news media, advertisers took to Twitter and Facebook to send congratulatory messages to the royal family, with brands including Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and Pampers publishing posts inspired by campaigns the companies had begun before the birth. While the digital media reaction to the campaigns was decidedly mixed, they were examples of how brands are increasingly trying to become part of news-driven cultural moments.

An advertisement for Coca-Cola featured two bottles of the soft-drink with the names “Wills” and “Kate” on them in a congratulatory toast. “Time for a royal celebration,” read the caption, followed by the Twitter hashtag #ShareACoke. The idea came from the company’s “Share a Coke” campaign in New Zealand and Australia, where the bottles were labeled with names common in those countries, said Andra London a global communications manager at Coca-Cola.

“We didn’t want it to be about pushing a product,” Ms. London said. “We wanted it to be about the happiness of the occasion because that’s where our brand values lie.” By Wednesday afternoon, the ad had received more than 10,000 “likes” on Facebook and was shared about 1,700 times.

At Pampers, a Procter & Gamble brand, the social media approach included a short video that was an extension of the “Love, Sleep and Play” campaign the brand announced this month, which encouraged parents to submit photos of their babies to the Pampers Facebook page. “It’s such a no-brainer for us,” said John Brase, the marketing director for Pampers in North America. “We want to celebrate all births, no matter if it’s the royal baby or the mom down the street in Cincinnati.”

By Wednesday afternoon, more than 3,200 people had “liked” the video on Facebook and had shared it 74 times. “It exceeded our expectations,” Mr. Brase said of the response, adding that the video had been viewed thousands of times.

Tom Morton, the head of strategy at the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners in New York, said choosing to focus more on branding and less on product placement was safe for brands that do not want to appear to be crass.

“The truth is there’s very little to say beyond congratulations,” Mr. Morton said, adding that brands that try too hard to sell a product during an occasion like the royal birth can risk appearing out of sync with the event. “The brands that try to insert themselves and insert their sales into the story are going to be called out for it.”

According to data from Twitter, there were six million posts related to the royal baby from the time Ms. Middleton, formally known as the Duchess of Cambridge, was admitted to the hospital through Wednesday and 150,000 posts that mentioned #RoyalBabyBoy. There were more than 25,000 posts on Twitter a minute when the birth was announced and 18,000 tweets a minute when the family made its first media appearance with the baby.

Data from Facebook showed there were 19 million interactions, including “likes,” shares and posts, relating to the royal baby on Tuesday, which peaked at 8:37 p.m. in London with 31,000 mentions.

The trend of so-called real-time marketing took off after a stadium blackout during this year’s Super Bowl, when Oreo and a handful of other brands responded with posts on Twitter referring to the event.

The Oreo ad, which featured a cookie in a darkened space with the tagline “You can still dunk in the dark,” was a success for the brand. Oreo’s royal baby ad, however, drew mixed reactions. The ad was posted on Twitter with the tagline “Long Live the Creme” and showed a baby bottle full of milk on a red pillow. Representatives at Oreo said in a statement that while the world was awaiting the royal birth, “we were thrilled to provide our own Oreo welcome in a way consistent with our brand’s approach.”

On Facebook, an ad featuring Johnson’s Head-to-Toe Baby Wash, a Johnson & Johnson product, featured a baby in a bathtub with a crown made of bubbles with the caption, “Congratulations to the royal couple on their brilliant news.” The ad was posted before the birth announcement and yielded more than 1,500 likes and about 100 shares on the site by Wednesday afternoon.

“While the royal baby ad addresses the joys of a baby being born to a royal family, it’s just another example of how we continue to celebrate all families and babies,” said Ivy Brown, a marketing director for Johnson’s Baby.

An ad for the real estate company Century 21 included a bit of a sales pitch when it said, “Is There a Century 21 Agent in the House?” and made reference to consumers with expanding families needing an agent to help them find a new home. Matt Gentile, the director of social media for Century 21, said the campaign was relevant to the birth.

“Real estate transactions happen for happy reasons and sad reasons, births certainly are one of the most happy moments,” he said. “You have to be careful but at the same time you can’t put out boring content that everyone else is putting out there either.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 25, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Welcoming a Royal Baby While Trying Not to Steal the Spotlight.

Sudeikis Says He Will Leave ‘Saturday Night Live’

Jason Sudeikis, a writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live'’ for 10 years, confirmed Wednesday what had long been rumored: he will not be back on the show this fall.

Mr. Sudeikis appeared as a guest on “The Late Show with David Letterman” Wednesday and told the news to the host, who apparently had not heard the widespread reports of Mr. Sudeikis’s departure.

“I’m definitely done,” Mr. Sudeikis said. “I’m not coming back.”

Mr. Letterman said: “Do they know that? Have you run that by them?”

Mr. Sudeikis said he was leaning toward leaving before this last season, but the show’s longtime leader, Lorne Michaels, prevailed on him to come back. Mr. Sudeikis was the cast member who impersonated Mitt Romney and Mr. Michaels knew the show would be putting on numerous sketches last fall tied to the presidential election.

Mr. Sudeikis was known for many other characters, including the Devil on Weekend Update, and had a reputation on the show for versatility. He also has a growing film career, appearing in comedies like “Hall Pass,'’ “Horrible Bosses'’ and the coming “We’re the Millers,'’ which is scheduled to open next month.

Mr. Michaels has begun his annual hunt for new talent for “S.N.L.” and now faces the task of replacing Mr. Sudeikis as well as Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, who also have left the show. And next year, the show’s head writer and Weekend Update anchor, Seth Meyers, will be leaving to take over as host of NBC’s “Late Night.”

Court Upholds Ruling on Dish Network’s ‘Hopper’

Efforts by television networks to stop the Dish Network from supplying its customers an automatic ad-skipping device were dealt another setback on Wednesday when a federal appeals court declined to issue a preliminary injunction against Dish.

The ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling last fall and lent further support to Dish as it markets the Hopper, a digital video recorder that comes with the ad-skipping feature, which has the potential to undermine the television advertising business. The Fox network, which sought the initial injunction and then appealed, said it was disappointed by the second loss in court and would “review all of our options.”

Fox’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, and the parents of CBS and NBC sued Dish after the distributor came out with the Hopper’s feature, called Auto-Hop, more than a year ago. Dish quickly countersued. With the injunctions now refused twice, the case may move to trial.

Unlike most digital video recorders, which require users to manually bypass ads, Auto-Hop skips right past all the ads in a show without any user involvement. It’s as if the ads are erased, though for legal reasons they are not. When combined with another Hopper feature that automatically records all of the prime time shows on ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, Auto-Hop is a godsend for some Dish customers.

Analysts said that Wednesday’s affirmation of a November district court ruling could compel other distributors to try implementing similar ad-skipping functionality. But at the moment none have, so Dish can continue to promote the Hopper as a reason to subscribe to its service instead of its competitors.

“This decision is a victory for American consumers, and we are proud to have stood by their side in this important fight over the fundamental rights of consumer choice and control,” Dish’s executive vice president and general counsel, R. Stanton Dodge, said in a statement.

Fox’s statement pointed out that “the bar to secure a preliminary injunction is very high.”

Rejecting Dish’s positioning, it said, “This is not about consumer choice or advances in technology. It is about a company devising an unlicensed, unauthorized service that clearly infringes our copyrights and violates our contract.”

In his ruling on Wednesday, Ninth Circuit judge Sidney Thomas seemed skeptical of Fox’s copyright infringement claims, citing the Supreme Court ruling in the Sony Betamax case, which held that home recordings of shows are not infringements on copyright. The judge was more open to Fox’s argument that Auto-Hop breached Dish’s distribution contract with Fox, but was not persuaded to issue an injunction.

Rowling Solves Some Mysteries About Her Mystery

Nearly everything about the publication of “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a detective novel released by Little, Brown & Company in April, has been a little mysterious.

Its real author, it was revealed last week, was not Robert Galbraith, as the publisher originally claimed, but J. K. Rowling. But that disclosure only led to an additional flurry of questions: Why had Ms. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series made her famous, wealthy and widely admired, written a book under a pseudonym? Who had apparently unmasked her against her will? And was it, as the cynics muttered, all a clever marketing ploy to juice sales?

Some of those questions, to the relief of Ms. Rowling’s fans, have now been answered.

Ms. Rowling, never a prolific giver of interviews, has elaborated at unusual length in a new post on a Web site devoted to her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith.

The name she chose to write under, Ms. Rowling explained, is a mash-up of one of her heroes, Robert F. Kennedy, and a fantasy name, Ella Galbraith, that she chose for herself as a girl.

Ms. Rowling wrote the book under a man’s name, she said, to take her writing persona “as far away as possible” from herself. She said she remembered too late that the renowned American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006, shared her initials, and feared that might serve as a clue to her own identity.

To research “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” she interviewed members of the military, both active and retired. Choosing to identify Robert Galbraith as a former military man in his biography, she explained, was the “easiest and most plausible reason” for him to know the inner workings of the Special Investigation Branch, a major element of the book.

She said she intended to continue writing the series as Robert Galbraith, and that she had just finished a sequel that will probably be published next year.

Ms. Rowling posted the answers on the Web site only days after it was revealed that her London law firm, Russells, was the source of the leak of her identity. In a statement last Thursday, the firm said one of its partners, Chris Gossage, had told his wife’s best friend, Judith Callegari, that Ms. Rowling had written the book. Ms. Callegari, for reasons that were not explained, then tipped off a columnist at The Sunday Times of London via Twitter. The Sunday Times identified Ms. Rowling as the author in a front-page story on July 14.

Since then, Little, Brown has rushed to reprint hardcover copies of “The Cuckoo’s Calling” and get them to bookstores. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, said on Wednesday that the publisher had gone to press four times and had 390,000 copies in print. Until Ms. Rowling emerged as the real author of the book, it had sold only about 500 copies in hardcover in the United States.

Several bookstores said they received fresh copies of the book earlier this week and were giving it prominent display space. Ms. Rowling’s first novel for adults, “The Casual Vacancy,” went on sale in paperback on Tuesday.

On the Robert Galbraith Web site, Ms. Rowling reiterated that having her identity revealed so quickly was not her intention.

“If anyone had seen the labyrinthine plans I laid to conceal my identity (or indeed my expression when I realized that the game was up!)” Ms. Rowling said, “they would realize how little I wanted to be discovered. I hoped to keep the secret as long as possible.”