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With the worldwide concert business shaping up to have one of its best summers in years, the music and ticketing company Live Nation Entertainment on Tuesday reported strong earnings for its second quarter.
Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promoter and the owner of Ticketmaster, had $1.7 billion in revenue for the three months that ended in June, up 8.3 percent from the same period last year. The company’s net income was $59 million, or 30 cents a share, about 20 cents above analysts’ expectations.
Live Nation’s division that puts on concerts, its biggest business segment, had $1.2 billion in revenue, up 11 percent. In a conference call with investors, Michael Rapino, the chief executive, called the results “a set-up for what looks to be a record summer.†Concert ticket sales for the first six months of the year were up 26 percent from the same period of 2012, propelled by tours by Beyoncé, Rihanna and Kid Rock.
Closing at $16.32, Live Nation’s stock declined 1.86 percent for the day, but was up about 6 percent in off-hours trading. Since the beginning of the year, its stock price has grown more than 70 percent.
Live Nation profits from nearly every segment of the concert business, and is poised to capitalize on improved consumer discretionary spending. As a promoter, the company makes money when attendance is high at concerts and festivals, as well as from advertising and ancillary sales like food and parking; as a ticketer, it also collects a portion of the surcharges added to each ticket.
After years of steady growth, the concert industry was badly hit by the recession in 2010, but it has gradually recovered. Pollstar, a trade magazine, said that ticket sales for the top 50 tours was up 23 percent, to $1.8 billion, for the first half of the year.
One area of the music business in which Live Nation has been particularly aggressive is in the popular electronic dance genre. The company has bought several concert and festival promoters over the years, and says that it now has 17 festivals across the United States and Europe, which this summer it expects will draw 2.5 million people.
In the conference call, Mr. Rapino also confirmed one of the most closely watched deals in the concert business: Live Nation’s investment in Insomniac, the promoter behind the Electric Daisy Carnival series of dance festivals. When news of a possible deal emerged earlier this year, Live Nation was reported to have bought a 50 percent stake in Insomniac for somewhat less than $50 million.
Mr. Rapino did not give details about the transaction on the call. But in a filing on Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Live Nation reported a good will charge of $48.1 million “primarily associated with the May 2013 acquisition of a controlling interest in a company that promotes festivals.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 7, 2013, on page B6 of the National edition.
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Peter Mountain/Walt Disney Pictures Disney said it would take a write-down on “The Lone Ranger†of as much as $190 million.
LOS ANGELES â€" “The Lone Ranger†rode away with the Walt Disney Company’s growth in the last quarter and will force the entertainment conglomerate to take a write-down of up to $190 million in the current quarter.
The film, released on July 3, cost about $400 million to make and market but has taken in only $175.6 million worldwide, roughly half of which goes to theater owners. While other studios have also had flops this summer, “The Lone Ranger†is by far the biggest: Disney on Tuesday said losses from the film would total $160 million to $190 million, depending on how well it does overseas.
For the fiscal third quarter that ended on June 29, prerelease marketing expenses for “The Lone Ranger†contributed to a 36 percent decline in operating income at Walt Disney Studios. That decline offset growth from Disney’s cable television and theme park units, and Disney reported an overall profit of $1.85 billion â€" essentially flat from the same period a year ago.
That profit translated to $1.01 a share. In the year-ago quarter, net income was $1.83 billion or $1.01 a share. Revenue climbed 4 percent, to $11.58 billion.
Speaking to analysts in a conference call, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive and chairman, did not point fingers at “The Lone Ranger,†starring Johnny Depp, directed by Gore Verbinski and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
“We still believe that a tent-pole strategy is a good strategy,†Mr. Iger said, referring to big-budget movies. “You still have to make really strong films.â€
The full write-down for “The Lone Ranger†will be taken in the current quarter, the fourth in Disney’s fiscal year.
As usual, the Disney division that includes ESPN drove the company’s financial performance; operating income at the Media Networks unit rose 8 percent, to $2.3 billion. ESPN benefited from contractual rate increases from cable providers and higher advertising sales, although programming costs also climbed. In particular, ESPN had to pay more for Major League Baseball rights.
Even though the Easter holiday fell in a different quarter this year, operating income at Disney’s theme parks increased 9 percent, to $689 million. The company said growth came from higher spending at Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California, both of which set attendance records.
In addition to trouble at its live-action Disney movie label, the entertainment giant faced trouble in the gaming and broadcast television divisions.
As expected, Disney’s video game and Web unit continued to struggle before the release later this month of a major gaming initiative called Infinity. Interactive operating losses widened to $58 million from $42 million.
Operating income at the ABC broadcast network and a string of local television stations fell 21 percent, to $213 million, because of higher prime-time programming costs, lower sales of reruns and a decline in advertising revenue tied to a decline in ratings.
Mr. Iger said he is “bullish†on the new programs ABC plans to introduce in the fall, but added, “until the season unfolds, you can never quite tell.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 7, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: TV Unit’s Gains Help Disney Make Up for a Film Flop .
Who Just Bought The Washington Post?: Jeffrey P. Bezos is the founder of Amazon.com. He has spent his career relying on steady growth but says he is ready to push The Post to compete in a changing online world.
The big news in newspapers â€" that Jeffrey P. Bezos is buying The Washington Post â€" was not even 24 hours old when shock and wisecracks about the unexpected $250 million deal began to give way to acceptance and even envy.
What, many are asking, does Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, see in a 135-year-old newspaper that others do not?
If Mr. Bezos’s business history is any indication, don’t expect a quick answer and don’t expect any short-term fixes for The Post, which has suffered from years of sliding revenue and circulation. While terms like disrupter and innovator are often used to describe Mr. Bezos in his years at Amazon, he has also proved to be a long-term thinker, someone willing to buck Wall Street demands for big profits in order to invest in his company’s growth.
Now that he is the private owner of The Post, it would not be surprising to see him worry little about turning a quick profit and instead push to upend the often ossified world of newspaper publishing, just as he did with books more than a decade ago.
Indeed, Mr. Bezos, who declined a request for an interview, hinted in a letter to employees that he felt a “need to invent, which means we will need to experiment,†and that “there will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years.â€
But just what those experiments will be is anyone’s guess.
“Jeff Bezos doesn’t need The Washington Post to make money tomorrow or even in five years,†said Glenn Kelman, the founder and chief executive of Redfin, a real estate site that, like Amazon, is based in Seattle. “He’s proven that he’s able to think over a geological time scale.â€
In recent years, newspapers large and small have experimented with concepts aimed at capturing elusive online revenue to make up for losses in print circulation and advertising. The Post, for example, has dabbled in some experimental news products, including the creation of a social reader for Facebook and a recommendation engine called Trove.
Other news organizations have toyed with various strategies, most with limited success. The Daily, an iPad-only news app developed by News Corporation, shuttered after less than two years. The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Post have adopted various pay models for digital readers. The Guardian started a United States-based operation in 2011 to experiment with a digitally focused newsroom.
All of these companies have created mobile apps and made significant investments in online video, where advertising revenue is expected to grow, but no paper has cracked the code on how to replace steep declines in print advertising. Other traditional print magazines, like The New Yorker and Vogue, have digitized and sold portions of their archives.
They have also dabbled with new ways to make money through Amazon, particularly through the Kindle Singles, which are shorter e-books. Amazon’s biggest influence has been disrupting the economics of newspapers through millions of its Kindle mobile devices.
Mr. Bezos said The Post would be run separately from Amazon, but there is little doubt that he will bring what he has learned over the years to the newspaper world.
“He’s done an amazing job of bringing e-books to reality,†said Matt Galligan, the co-founder of the mobile news start-up Circa. “There’s a strong likelihood that a similar transition could happen at The Post.â€
Though Mr. Bezos demurely noted in his letter that he had no history in newspapers, that he is an outsider not steeped in the old ways of newspaper management has excited some.
“Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos?! I’d actually return to the journalism world if I could work for him,†wrote Adrian Holovaty on Twitter after the news broke.
Six years ago, Mr. Holovaty held the title “editor for editorial innovation†at The Post, but left in 2007. The co-creator of the popular Web framework Django, he thinks Mr. Bezos will bring “fresh, baggage-less thinking.â€
No baggage â€" and deep pockets â€" means room to try new things. Might Mr. Bezos apply tech industry concepts like frictionless payments, e-commerce integration, recommendation engines, data analytics or improved concepts for mobile reading?
Nick Wingfield contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 7, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Thinking Outside The Newspaper Box.
BERLIN â€" The publisher Axel Springer’s role in Germany’s postwar history â€" from building its high-rise headquarters close to the Berlin Wall to antagonize the Communist authorities on the other side to denouncing the student movement in 1968 â€" has earned it respect and disdain in equal turns.
What has never been disputed since the company’s namesake, Axel Springer, founded the company in 1946 with a daily newspaper and a program guide, is the publisher’s role as a bastion of print media in Germany, and more recently, Europe.
So when the publisher announced on July 25 that it was selling off two regional newspapers and several magazines to focus on digital products, the news was met with howls of outrage and accusations of betrayal from German commentators and reporters.
“The company is in the process of transforming itself from one of Europe’s most renowned publishers to a conglomerate concentrated on digital media,†the German Journalists’ Association said in a statement.
“Journalism? Not with us,†the left-leaning daily Taz, a longstanding rival of the more conservative Springer publications, wrote in a headline about the sale.
The print media in Germany have been largely immune to the upheavals that have racked the newspaper industry in much of the world, retaining more than 45.5 million readers, or slightly more than half of the population in 2012, according to the Frankfurt-based group Media Analysis.
So that a leading publisher could divest itself of several of its most traditional printed publications in the name of an electronic future was as shocking for many here as the Graham family’s decision to sell The Washington Post to Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, the online retail behemoth.
Springer said its decision to sell the regional newspapers Hamburger Abendblatt and Berliner Morgenpost, the popular Hörzu TV program guide and several women’s magazines was very different from the Grahams’ decision to sell The Washington Post.
“We sold moneymaking publications to a traditional publisher,†said Tobias Fröhlich, a spokesman for Axel Springer. “For us, it was a question of where we saw the potential for growth."
The sale of the Springer publications to the Funke MedienGruppe, previously the WAZ Gruppe, for about 920 million euros, or $1.2 billion, still requires approval from Germany’s antitrust authorities.
For Springer, the growth lies in digital media. The company operates several online portals, including the real estate site ImmoNet.de, the StepStone online employment market and a shopping site.
Springer insisted that journalism would remain at the heart of its business. The sale, the company said, would allow its two main publications, Bild and Die Welt, to grow, partly by expanding its presence online through multimedia and digital storytelling. Together, those publications made 514 million euros in profit for the company in 2012 and accounted for about 15 percent of total sales.
The company’s actions increasingly reflect the shifting focus on the digital world.
Last year, Bild sent its editor in chief, Kai Diekmann, to Silicon Valley to make contacts with the heads of major digital media firms. He even exchanged his tie and slicked-backed hair for a much more tech-friendly look, complete with hoodie and a beard.
The company announced its plans in May to build a Media Campus near its Berlin headquarters to house its digital subsidiaries and to attract and train young reporters in digital media.
Last week, several Springer publications allowed Google to display parts of articles on its news search pages, despite a new copyright law that took effect Aug. 1.
But the bankruptcies of the news service DAPD and the daily Frankfurter Rundschau last year, as well as the closure of The Financial Times Deutschland, has raised concerns among the German news media.
“They are worried about their own future,†The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote about journalists in an article that explained the hopes that had been pinned on Axel Springer’s chief executive. “With Springer’s split from its newspapers and print magazines, an illusion has also burst: the illusion that Mathias Döpfner and his company could show the industry the way in how to bring old newspapers and print magazines successfully into the digital era.â€
On Tuesday, while German publications were more muted in their lamentation over the sale of The Washington Post, Die Welt lauded the move. In an editorial published online, it compared Mr. Bezos to the leaders from the Industrial Revolution.
“Today customers want to be participants, they want to have control and make decisions for themselves,†Die Welt wrote. “Now, Bezos is beginning to review structures in the news business that date from the 19th century. The decision is not premature.â€
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Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images PBS said that Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff would take over as co-anchors of the “NewsHour†in September.
The PBS “NewsHour,†which was co-anchored for decades by the two men who created it, will soon be co-anchored by two women.
PBS announced on Tuesday that Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff would take over the nightly newscast in September, putting an end to the rotating anchor format that has been in effect for several years. Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff will also share the managing editor responsibilities for the program.
The appointments are another milestone for women on television and in journalism, seven years after Katie Couric became the first solo anchor of a network nightly newscast. PBS noted in a news release that “this will mark the first time a network broadcast has had a female co-anchor team.â€
The co-anchor arrangement harks back to the 1970s, when Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil founded the nightly newscast that was later named “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.†The two men jointly presented the program until 1995, when Mr. MacNeil retired. Mr. Lehrer continued to anchor until 2011, when he retired. Their company, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, remains in charge of the “NewsHour,†and they were involved in the discussions that culminated in Tuesday’s announcement.
“If Gwen and I can be the team that Jim and Robin were, we will consider that a success,†Ms. Woodruff said in a telephone interview.
Asked what advice the two former co-anchors had given them, Ms. Ifill said in a separate interview, “They told us to stick close together and to stay friends.â€
Ms. Woodruff and Ms. Ifill already are close, having crossed paths in Washington, where they both live, countless times, and having “appeared on endless panels together discussing women in journalism,†as Ms. Ifill put it.
Ms. Ifill, who is black, said she and Ms. Woodruff were conscious of the gender context of their appointment.
“When I was a little girl watching programs like this â€" because that’s the kind of nerdy family we were â€" I would look up and not see anyone who looked like me in any way. No women. No people of color,†she said.
She continued, “I’m very keen about the fact that a little girl now, watching the news, when they see me and Judy sitting side by side, it will occur to them that that’s perfectly normal. That it won’t seem like any big breakthrough at all.â€
Ms. Ifill, 57, a veteran of newspapers including The New York Times, was a Washington correspondent for NBC before becoming the moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week†and a senior correspondent for the “NewsHour†in 1999. Ms. Woodruff, 66, was the chief Washington correspondent for the “NewsHour†in the 1980s. After a dozen years at CNN and some outside work, she rejoined the program as a senior correspondent in 2007.
Tuesday’s announcement was, among other things, an admission that a rotating anchor format is not preferable for a long period of time. At the end of 2009, as Mr. Lehrer neared retirement, Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff and three other correspondents â€" Jeffrey Brown, Ray Suarez and Margaret Warner â€" started to take turns anchoring the “NewsHour†with him. After he retired, this format remained in place, with two of the five anchoring each weeknight. “It was a way to give each of them a chance,†said Linda Winslow, the program’s executive producer, praising the team of “really powerful people.â€
But the arrangement made production of the “NewsHour†unwieldy at times, and it confused viewers, at least some of whom expect to see the same face or faces every night.
Last year, Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff were tapped to anchor PBS’s coverage of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. “You never know until you’re elbow to elbow how well it’s going to work,†Ms. Ifill said. “It worked really well for us. We sat next to each other and had a ball.â€
They were teamed up again on election night. Ms. Winslow said the campaign-year anchor work was noticed by “NewsHour†producers and PBS executives, and “it just struck us that we were able to promote our product better when we had identifiable anchors.â€
“It wasn’t, to be frank, an unattractive feature that they would become the first female co-anchor team of a nightly newscast,†Ms. Winslow added.
The anchor change was completed last week. It might have happened sooner, but the “NewsHour†faced a serious financial shortfall earlier this year, which culminated in a round of layoffs and the closure of its two bureaus outside the Washington area, where the program is produced. Ms. Winslow said the changes at the anchor desk were unrelated to budget issues.
Mr. Brown, Mr. Suarez and Ms. Warner will remain with the “NewsHour,†now as “chief correspondents,†each with an area of expertise “that will also help define the program,†Ms. Winslow said.
PBS also announced on Tuesday that Hari Sreenivasan, the anchor of the forthcoming “PBS NewsHour Weekend†program, would be a senior correspondent, reporting several times a week from New York, where the weekend program will be produced.
A specific start date for Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff has not been determined, but PBS hopes for it to coincide with the premiere of “PBS NewsHour Weekend†on Sept. 7.
Ms. Woodruff will anchor all five nights a week, while Ms. Ifill will anchor Monday through Thursday, peeling away on Friday for “Washington Week.â€
The two women seemed realistic about the challenge ahead of them: to not just maintain the nightly audience for the “NewsHour,†but to somehow expand it.
“This show is not going to be overhauled. We think it’s a treasure the way it is,†Ms. Woodruff said. “But we do want to do some tweaking. I think we have the freedom to do some experimenting.â€
Both women said they saw opportunities to more fully integrate the Web and social media into the program, as virtually all news programs have sought to do in recent years. “We want to go where the viewers are,†Ms. Ifill said, “not think that they’re going to come find us.â€
A short story by the 17-year-old Stieg Larsson will be published in English for the first time next year, possibly enticing fans of the best-selling Millennium trilogy that was released after Mr. Larsson’s death in 2004.
Stieg Larsson, the Swedish writer who died in 2004, is shown in a 1998 photograph. An early short story of his is set to be published.
The unpublished story is part of a new anthology of crime fiction, “A Darker Shade of Sweden,†scheduled for release in February. Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, announced on Tuesday that it had acquired the collection.
“Sweden’s most distinguished and best-loved crime writers have contributed stories to an anthology that promises to sate the desire to read about the dark side of Sweden,†the publisher said in a statement.
The anthology collects stories from 20 Swedish writers, including Henning Mankell, Asa Larsson, Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo and Sara Stridsberg. Eva Gabrielsson, Mr. Larson’s companion, has also written a story that will be published in the collection.
John-Henri Holmberg, a writer and close friend of Mr. Larsson, edited the anthology.
Mr. Larsson’s series, which began with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo†and chronicles the adventures of the computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is one of the most successful ever published.
HONG KONG â€" American officials on Tuesday criticized the Vietnamese government for its new limits on political dissent on the Internet, citing a decree that appears to restrict people from sharing news stories on social media and personal Web sites.
The decree, announced last Wednesday and due to go into force on Sept. 1, states that personal blogs and social media sites “should be used to provide and exchange information of that individual only.â€
In a statement, the United States Embassy in Hanoi said that the new rule, called Decree 72, “appears to be inconsistent with Vietnam’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as its commitments under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.â€
Vietnam has received some praise over the last year from human rights activists as it has begun drafting a new constitution that addresses civil liberties and religious tolerance. But like other Asian nations, particularly China, it is grappling with how to handle the widespread adoption of social media by its citizens and its ability to broadly disseminate stories critical of the government.
It was unclear how the government would enforce the new ruling. In neighboring China, stories critical of the government are routinely disseminated on social media but then often swiftly removed, and searches for certain sensitive words or phrases are often blocked, creating a game of cat and mouse in which users try to outsmart the censors.
Hoang Vinh Bao, head of Vietnam’s Department of Radio, TV and Electronic Information, was quoted by the state-run VNExpress news site as saying that under the new decree, individuals would not be allowed to quote general information “from newspapers, press agencies, or other state-owned Web sites.†But he later calibrated the remarks to suggest the decree would only limit the way information from other sources was reposted.
Reporters Without Borders, a free-press advocacy group, has assailed Decree 72 as a “gross violation of the right to inform and be informed.â€
In its report this year on civil liberties in Vietnam, the group Human Rights Watch credited Vietnam by noting, “On the surface, private expression, public journalism, and even political speech in Vietnam show signs of enhanced freedom.†But it added that “there continues to be a subcurrent of state-sponsored repression and persecution of individuals whose speech crosses boundaries and addresses sensitive issues such as criticizing the state’s foreign policies in regards to China or questioning the monopoly power of the communist party.â€
The embassy also raised alarms Tuesday about new requirements that could force companies like Google and Facebook to comply with Vietnam’s censorship laws, banning them from “providing information that is against Vietnam, undermining national security, social order and national unity.â€
The embassy said such a requirement would “limit the development of Vietnam’s budding IT sector by hampering domestic innovation and deterring foreign investment.â€