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Live Nation Entertainment will oust Nathan Hubbard, the president of its Ticketmaster unit, in coming days, as part of a revamping of the division, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
While the company has not announced its plans yet, Mr. Hubbard is expected to be out as early as this week, according to these people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because the plans were private. A spokeswoman for Live Nation declined to comment, and Mr. Hubbard did not return an e-mail on Monday night.
The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The reason for Mr. Hubbard's departure was not clear, but it appeared to be related to the company's move toward a more technology-driven model for Ticketmaster. Mr. Hubbard, 38, joined Live Nation in 2006 when it bought Musictoday, a fan club and merchandising company that had been founded by Coran Capshaw, the enterprising manager of the Dave Matthews Band. Mr. Hubbard had been the chief executive of Musictoday, and became the president of Live Nation's ticketing division in 2008 and the head of Ticketmaster once Live Nation merged with that company in 2010.
According to Live Nation filings, Mr. Hubbard earned $1.5 million in total compensation in 2012, and $4.1 million in 2011. Last month, Billboard magazine named Mr. Hubbard one of its “40 Under 40†most powerful young executives in the music business.
Mr. Hubbard made himself the public face of Ticketmaster, embracing the challenge of turning around the brand's negative image among consumers, who frequently blame it for the high surcharges and other headaches related to buying concert and sporting tickets. A former singer and songwriter, Mr. Hubbard stated in many interviews that his goal was to make Ticketmaster more “fan friendly.â€
But Live Nation has also pushed to integrate Ticketmaster into the lucrative secondary ticketing market, which allows the company to reap additional fees every time a ticket is resold. The company has also expanded its technology to detect and deter scalpers who use automated computer programs, called bots, to take the best seats in Ticketmaster's system for themselves, an effort that has been embraced by Michael Rapino, Live Nation's chief executive.
The first public sign of a weakening of Mr. Hubbard's power came in May, when Ticketmaster named Jared Smith the president of Ticketmaster North America.
The departure of Mr. Hubbard would further solidify control of the company under Mr. Rapino, after the departure of Irving Azoff, its former executive chairman, at the end of last year.
Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, sold 50,000 shares of his company's stock last week, a day after declaring that the family-owned newspaper was not for sale.
According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing released on Monday evening, Mr. Sulzberger sold 50,000 shares at $12 a share on Aug. 8. The filing noted that Mr. Sulzberger continued to own 173,675 Class A shares in company stock.
Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company, said that the stock sale “is part of Arthur's normal estate planning.†She said that the 50,000 shares represented a small percentage of his holdings, which in addition to Class A shares include stock options and shares held in a family trust.
“Personally, he is still very invested in Times Company stock,†Ms. Murphy said.
The Times Company has a dual share structure: Class A stock, which is publicly traded, and a special class of stock, Class B, that allows the Sulzbergers to elect about 70 percent of the company's board.
Mr. Sulzberger's sale followed a week of upheaval in the newspaper industry, in which The Times sold The Boston Globe to John W. Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, and the Graham family announced that after 80 years it was selling The Washington Post to Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.
After those sales, there was speculation among media analysts that Mr. Sulzberger and his relatives would follow suit and consider selling The Times. The Times is one of the last major American newspapers run by a family.
But last Wednesday, Mr. Sulzberger and Michael Golden, the company's vice chairman and Mr. Sulzberger's first cousin, issued a statement stressing that they had no plans to sell The Times. The most recent earnings released by the Times Company show that it swung to a profit in the second quarter, with gains in digital subscriptions, though it still faced a challenging advertising market.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 13, 2013, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Times Chairman Sells a Portion of His Stock.
This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key - allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key - but she didn't think much would come of it.
The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,†the stranger wrote.
Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, “This I can prove.â€
Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,†she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.â€
Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. “I called him out,†Poitras recalled. “I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you're crazy.â€
The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger's name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life would never be the same.
Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.
Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesGlenn Greenwald, a writer for The Guardian, at home in Rio de Janeiro.
Greenwald does most of his work on a shaded porch, usually dressed in a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Over the four days I spent there, he was in perpetual motion, speaking on the phone in Portuguese and English, rushing out the door to be interviewed in the city below, answering calls and e-mails from people seeking information about Snowden, tweeting to his 225,000 followers (and conducting intense arguments with a number of them), then sitting down to write more N.S.A. articles for The Guardian, all while pleading with his dogs to stay quiet. During one especially fever-pitched moment, he hollered, “Shut up, everyone,†but they didn't seem to care.
Amid the chaos, Poitras, an intense-looking woman of 49, sat in a spare bedroom or at the table in the living room, working in concentrated silence in front of her multiple computers. Once in a while she would walk over to the porch to talk with Greenwald about the article he was working on, or he would sometimes stop what he was doing to look at the latest version of a new video she was editing about Snowden. They would talk intensely - Greenwald far louder and more rapid-fire than Poitras - and occasionally break out laughing at some shared joke or absurd memory. The Snowden story, they both said, was a battle they were waging together, a fight against powers of surveillance that they both believe are a threat to fundamental American liberties.
Peter Maass is an investigative reporter working on a book about surveillance and privacy.
Editor: Joel Lovell
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A version of this article appeared in print on August 18, 2013, on page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Snowden's People.
The 11-day old blackout of CBS on Time Warner Cable systems seems to be having a minimal effect on the network's ratings.
Last week, the first full week of blocked service for more than three million Time Warner customers, the network topped its competitors in total viewers and in all the ratings categories important to advertisers.
One reason perhaps: RadioShack reported Monday a “double-digit†increase in sales of high-definition antennas in the three big cities being blacked out - New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. (The company provided no specific numbers.)
Time Warner Cable has been suggesting that customers try watching CBS the old-fashioned way â€" on a broadcast signal to an antenna - since it removed the network from its cable systems on Aug. 2 in a dispute over what are known as retransmission fees.
CBS has maintained that it is seeking fair value for its content, but at the same time said the loss of Time Warner viewers would have minimal impact on its ratings â€" an assertion that was surely meant to reassure its advertisers.
Last week's ratings would seem to bolster that argument. For the week, CBS averaged 5.51 million viewers, which was up 34 percent over the same week a year ago. Two weeks ago, before the blackout, CBS averaged a similar number, 5.78 million viewers; but August weeks traditionally are lower than July weeks.
CBS also ranked first last week among the broadcast networks with a 1.2 rating in viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 (up 20 percent over 2012) and a 1.6 rating among viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 (up 23 percent.) Those age categories are the two most attractive to television advertisers.
Much of the network's improvement this summer has been tied to the drama “Under the Dome,†which continues to win its hour every Monday, though this week it declined to its lowest performances so far.
TOKYO - For years, the two highest-profile chief executives in the advertising business - Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP in London and Maurice Lévy of Publicis Groupe in Paris - had engaged in one-upmanship across the English Channel as they jousted for industry dominance.
A big acquisition by WPP was always swiftly matched by Publicis. And vice versa. Usually with a “take that†kind of rejoinder.
So it was only a matter of time before Mr. Sorrell responded to the recent megadeal between Publicis, the third-biggest advertising company in the world, and Omnicom Group, the second-largest, to create a new No.1 that leapfrogged past WPP in revenue.
Mr. Lévy and Omnicom's chief executive, John Wren, explained their merger as a play on “big data,†the trove of information that Internet companies hold about their users.
The riposte from Mr. Sorrell has been a flurry of smaller deals for agencies involved in digital marketing and, yes, big data. Since the Publicis-Omnicom deal last month, WPP has announced at least five acquisitions or investments - in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
And Mr. Sorrell had another trick up his sleeve: He joined LinkedIn, the social network for professionals. No, he does not appear to be job-hunting. Instead, he is using the platform to sound off, as one of LinkedIn's “Influencers†-the network of business leaders and experts who write for the site.
Sure enough, Mr. Sorrell used his first post on Tuesday to take a swipe at Publicis and Omnicom.
“Others in our industry may take strategic leaps backwards for various odd or inconsistent or contradictory reasons,†he wrote. “We'll remain focused, actually even more focused, on our long-established and consistent strategy, on future developments and on accelerating implementation.
“That's how we'll really add value to our clients' businesses - while others find themselves distracted by internal stresses and strains.â€
Mr. Sorrell said he was raising WPP's five-year targets for revenue from fast-growing emerging markets and digital businesses to 40 to 45 percent each, from current ranges of 35 to 40 percent. New media and emerging markets each produce about one-third of WPP revenue now, he wrote.
He also had a nice line on the news of the acquisition of The Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, referring to the paper as “The Washington Kindle†- a reference to Amazon's e-reader.
Oh, and one other thing: Mr. Sorrell said WPP was hiring.
Tim Armstrong, the chief executive of AOL, issued an unusual apology on Tuesday to his entire staff for the public manner in which he fired an employee during an internal conference call last Friday.
Tim Armstrong
A recording of the firing was leaked to news outlets and caused a firestorm around Mr. Armstrong, who has been trying to turn AOL from a struggling Internet portal into a successful media company.
The four-paragraph statement, sent to AOL employees at 4:30 p.m. and obtained by The New York Times, said, “I am writing you to acknowledge the mistake I made last Friday during the Patch all-hands meeting when I publicly fired Abel Lenz. It was an emotional response at the start of a difficult discussion dealing with many people's careers and livelihoods. I am the C.E.O. and leader of the organization, and I take that responsibility seriously.â€
The firing took place during a conference call with more than 1,000 employees of Patch, the local news service AOL runs for hundreds of towns. Mr. Armstrong had convened the meeting to emphasize the direness of Patch's circumstances and prepare the staff for coming layoffs and management changes.
“If you think what is going on right now is a joke, and you want to joke around about it, you should pick your stuff up and leave Patch today,†Mr. Armstrong told the employees.
But right after that statement he can be heard reprimanding Mr. Lenz, Patch's creative director, who was videotaping the meeting, then firing him.
“Abel, put that camera down right now! Abel, you're fired. Out!†Five seconds later, to stunned silence, he proceeded with his message.
In his letter to the staff, Mr. Armstrong further explained the reason for the firing, saying confidential meetings should not be recorded and that Mr. Lenz had been warned previously not to make recordings. AOL said that Mr. Lenz would not be hired back but that Mr. Armstrong had contacted him to apologize.
AOL has spent hundreds of millions on the Patch service, but has acknowledged being disappointed with its financial performance. During a call with analysts last week Mr. Armstrong said he would sell off or seek partners for as many as 400 of Patch's 900 local sites, a move that could result in hundreds of layoffs.
The extent of the layoffs are expected to be announced internally on Thursday or Friday.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 14, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: AOL Chief Apologizes Over Firing Of Worker.
BMW of North America is revving up its diesel engines again, starting an ambitious effort to encourage car buyers to consider six new diesel-power models for 2014.
A campaign to promote six new BMW diesel models recognizes that consumers in the United States might be skeptical.
In Europe, diesel is a mainstay, but not so in this country, where unpleasant experiences in the 1970s and 1980s led a generation or two to regard diesel as if it were a synonym for “Edsel†and remain uninterested in subsequent diesel engines that were cleaner, quieter and more fuel efficient.
BMW of North America would like to change that, in large part because as an auto company with a German parent, Bayerische Motoren Werke, it already has access to diesel technology. The ability to further amortize the development costs of those engines by changing North American minds about diesel must appeal mightily to the accountants in Munich.
“We have authenticity and credibility when it comes to diesel,†said Dan Creed, vice president for marketing at BMW of North America in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., adding, “You go to Europe, we have markets where 80 percent of what we sell has diesel engines.â€
“I'm 46 years of age, and I remember the stigma of diesel growing up,†Mr. Creed said, so an advertising campaign, which gets under way this week, will seek to dispel the negative perceptions among “those who still hang on to them.â€
The lack of interest in diesel in this country during the last 30 years also means that younger drivers may not be considering it when they shop.
As Mr. Creed put it: “You talk to someone 25 years old, they have no idea about diesel. They look at you and say, ‘Huh?' â€
As a result, the BMW campaign will also have an informational aspect. To achieve its goals without seeming didactic or scolding, the campaign takes a humorous tack. For instance, many of the ads carry the theme “It's time to come clean,†reveling in the double meaning of the phrase.
In one commercial, for the BMW 3 Series diesel, a preppy young man approaches an older man, the father of his girlfriend, and says: “Excuse me, sir, can I talk to you? Jenny and I have thought about this a lot and we decided ... we were thinking ... we bought a diesel.†The father has an uncomfortable look on his face until his future son-in-law gives him a ride in the car.
In a second spot, for the 5 Series diesel, a wife buttonholes her husband, saying, “We need to talk.†She continues: “I don't know how to tell you this. I've been bored lately. I just needed more excitement ... It's just ... Well, I've switched to diesel.â€
In the ride-in-the-car part of the commercial, it is the husband who is driving; when he revs the engine, the wife purrs, “Do that again.â€
Both commercials end with an announcer intoning: “It's time to come clean. BMW, the ultimate driving machine.â€
There is also a brief, cheeky spot for the 5 Series diesel, destined for digital media like YouTube, that shows a BMW revving in place with smoke coming from the tires rather than the tailpipe. “That old diesel smoke problem?†the announcer asks. “Totally optional.â€
The campaign is being created by Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners in New York, part of MDC Partners. Ed Brojerdi, president and co-chief creative officer of the agency, declared himself to be “a huge gear head†before asserting that “diesel is just not what it was†because the new engines provide significantly improved mileage and what he called “head-snapping†performance.
A new BMW diesel “handles like a BMW and feels like a BMW behind the wheel,†he added. “It's like the ultimate driving machine with benefits.â€
It is the goal of the campaign to convey that to “a generation that has not been exposed to diesel†for whom “diesel hasn't been in the conversation,†Mr. Brojerdi said, as well as to “people from back in the '70s and '80s†who associate diesel “with ‘dirty' and ‘smelly' and ‘not that powerful.' â€
The campaign is unafraid to make claims that some might find hard to believe. For instance, one commercial makes the mileage argument by comparing a 3 Series diesel BMW to a gasoline-powered Smart.
“Thirty-eight miles per gallon is impressive,†an announcer says as the Smart appears on screen. When the BMW arrives, he adds: “Until, of course, 45 highway miles per gallon comes along. Forty-five miles per gallon in a car you want to drive.†Ouch.
Some ads acknowledge how skeptical consumers could be. For example, print ads and billboards devoted to the 45 m.p.g. mileage figure follow it with this: “(Yes, you read that right.)â€
“There's a little Missouri there,†Mr. Creed said, referring to that state's “Show me†motto. “Seeing is believing.â€
BMW of North America plans a budget for the national part of the campaign comparable to a budget for a campaign to bring out a new car; those can range in cost from $5 million to $25 million.
In addition to the media spending for the campaign by BMW of North America, there will be additional spending by BMW dealers in local markets, beginning this week.
The national ads are to start next month, Mr. Creed said, and will “gear up through the N.F.L. season and the season premieres†of fall television series.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 14, 2013, on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: BMW Uses Humor to Clear the Air On Diesel's Dismal Reputation.
Updated, 10:32 p.m. | with comment from Michael Cieply.
After looking at box office returns on investment by genre, I got interested in whether children's films generate high returns.
There is no category specifically for such movies in the OpusData numbers I have; they usually seem to fall under the adventure genre, which includes family-oriented films like “Finding Nemo†and “Toy Story 3″ as well as films for older audiences like “Star Trek†and “The Day After Tomorrow.†But I do have the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings for films in this data set, which includes movies made from 2003 to 2012 with at least $2 million in domestic box office returns. That allows a look at how G-rated pictures, a decent proxy for children's films, perform at the box office:
Data shown refer to films with at least $2 million in domestic box office grosses. Most data come from OpusData, with some select entries from Box Office Mojo.As it turns out, G-rated films, on average, book domestic box office returns that are about 2.4 times production budget and global box office returns that are about 5.3 times budget. The domestic box office R.O.I. is almost exactly the same as the average for all films, and the global box office R.O.I. is somewhat better than the average for all films (about 4.5 times budget).
I bet this measure substantially understates how well G-rated films perform relative to other films though, since children's films like “Finding Nemo†offer a lot of opportunities for lucrative merchandising. Or as Yogurt might say, moi-chendizing.
In any case, you may notice from the chart above that the film rating associated with the highest box office R.O.I. is, by a long shot, NC-17. The worldwide box office revenues for NC-17 films average 6.3 times production budget. (Films that were NC-17 and “Not Rated†were disproportionately foreign films, which is probably why such a high share of their ticket sales were abroad.)
Of course, bear in mind that the average production budget for the NC-17 films in my data set is $8.5 million, compared with about $37.5 million for all the films from 2003 to 2012 for which I could find production budgets. And there are only five films in my data set rated NC-17 - out of nearly 2,000 films total - although I did find publicly reported production budget information for all five of them.
For comparison, there are a lot of G-rated films of the last decade for which production budgets are not public. Only 40 of the 68 G-rated movies in my data set had publicly reported budgets.
Addendum: My colleague Michael Cieply, who covers the entertainment industry, writes with this smart point:
A missing variable that would considerably distort the results is marketing expense. Most NC-17 movies are small films, and small films tend to have marketing budgets that are vastly out of proportion to their production budgets. It's not unheard of, for instance, for an Oscar-style film to cost, say, $5 million or $10 million to produce, but $50 million or more to market. Big films, by contrast, tend to have marketing budgets that are closer to their production budgets. A movie that cost $200 million to produce might cost another $200 million to market around the world. If you're spending 10 times the production budget to market a film, the equation, I think, goes tilt.
LOS ANGELES - Hollywood studios will soon begin receiving overdue payments for the distribution of their films in China, the Motion Picture Association of America chief executive Christopher Dodd said in a statement on Tuesday. About $200 million in payments had been withheld by the China Film Group, which oversees the importation of foreign films into China, while the group disputed its responsibility for the payment of a new value-added tax on theater tickets.
Mr. Dodd's statement did not say whether the China Film Group would be required to pay the 2 percent tax, which it had sought to avoid. But the statement said the studios would be “paid in full†under a process that has already begun. People briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, earlier said the film group had been withholding payments due for films released in China over the last year. Those included “Life of Pi,†“Man of Steel,†and other high-profile movies from virtually all of the major studios in the United States.
WASHINGTON - Jack W. Germond, the portly, cantankerous columnist and pundit who covered 10 presidential elections and sparred with colleagues on TV's "The McLaughlin Group," has died. He was 85.
Jack W. Germond in 2007.
Germond died Wednesday morning. He had recently finished his first novel, "A Small Story for Page Three," about a reporter investigating political intrigue, being published Friday. The Baltimore Sun, where Germond worked for many years, reported that he died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at his home in Charles Town, W. Va.
"He went peacefully and quickly after just completing this novel, a tale he had pondered while writing columns, campaign books, a memoir and covering our politics and politicians," his wife, Alice Germond, said in a note to his colleagues. She said Germond "was fortunate to spend his life working at a job he would have done for free during some halcyon times in the newspaper business."
With Jules Witcover, Germond co-wrote five syndicated columns a week for nearly 25 years, most of that time spent at The (Baltimore) Evening Sun until it went out of business and then The (Baltimore) Sun. He was in many ways emblematic of his generation of Washington journalists: He was friendly with the politicians he covered, and he cultivated relationships with political insiders during late-night poker games and whiskey-fueled bull sessions.
"Before politics was fed into computers and moveable maps came out, Jack Germond had it all in his head," said Walter Mears, the former political writer for The Associated Press and a Germond friend and competitor.
"He was a walking encyclopedia on politics and politicians," Mears said. "He worked the telephones - before they were cellphones - and the opening usually was pretty much the same: What do you hear? His style of political reporting was an art form. Sadly, it is becoming a lost art."
Germond, Witcover and Mears were among the "Boys on the Bus" chronicled in Timothy Crouse's seminal account of reporters in the 1972 presidential election.
Later in his career, Germond became arguably the best known of the "Boys," thanks to his irascible appearances on "The McLaughlin Group," where he offered a liberal alternative to conservative host John McLaughlin and fellow panelist Robert D. Novak.
Their dustups were even parodied on "Saturday Night Live," with Chris Farley as Germond and Dana Carvey as a histrionic McLaughlin.
He quit the real show in 1996 after a series of disputes with McLaughlin, sending the host a terse fax that read: "Bye-bye."
He also appeared regularly on TV's "Inside Washington," and was a political analyst for NBC and CNN.
Germond and Witcover's column, "Politics Today," appeared in about 140 newspapers at its peak. The pair launched the column in 1977 for The Washington Star and moved to The Evening Sun four years later when the Star folded.
The dual byline allowed both writers to spend time reporting, and when one was on the road, the other would draft the column and they would confer on it by phone.
Germond and Witcover also chronicled the dumbing down of presidential campaigns and the growing cynicism of the electorate in a series of books with such titles as "Wake Us When It's Over" and "Mad as Hell."
Germond wrote two memoirs, "Fat Man in a Middle Seat" (1999) and "Fat Man Fed Up" (2004). He retired from writing columns after the 2000 presidential election, disgusted with politics.
"I really found this campaign odious. I just couldn't get up for it," Germond told The Washington Post. "The quality of the candidates and the campaign, I just found the whole thing second-rate. I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush."
In "Fat Man Fed Up," he wrote that "after 50 years of exposure to thousands of politicians, I am convinced that we get about what we deserve at all levels of government, up to and including the White House."
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Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times Eva Chen is charged with reviving Lucky, the shopping magazine.
Eva Chen, the latest editor in chief of Lucky magazine, begins many days photographing her accessories while sitting in the back of a taxi on the way from her apartment near Union Square to her large, light-filled sixth-floor office on Times Square. These pictures will be posted on Instagram, where she has 58,173 followers.
Alexis Bryan Morgan, far left, Lucky's executive fashion director, and Eva Chen. Right, Ms. Chen with the makeup artist Bobbi Brown.
Three recent hashtags were #balenciaga shoes, overstuffed #hermes tote and #prada sunglasses.
“I have a bag and shoe addiction,†said Ms. Chen, 33, in a recent interview, clad in a decade-old leather jacket from Topshop and a Proenza Schouler printed dress she bought on sale, part of her hair dyed in rainbow colors. “If I were a doctor or a lawyer, I'd still have it.â€
In fact, she almost became a doctor. After attending the Brearley School in Manhattan, where she wore braces for six years and was, in her words, “delightfully un-self-aware†and “a late bloomer,†Ms. Chen studied pre-med at Johns Hopkins before turning to a career in media.
The question now is whether she can resuscitate the ailing Lucky, the Condé Nast shopping magazine that seemed avant-garde when it was started by Kim France in 2000, but has suffered in recent years.
Circulation has remained steady at around 1.1 million since the previous editor, Brandon Holley, took over in September 2010, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But ad dollars were down over 10 percent in the second quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012, according to the Association of Magazine Media.
Anna Wintour, who hired Ms. Chen to consult on the magazine last spring and appointed her editor in June in one of her first major moves as Condé Nast creative director, declined requests to comment. But many industry observers believe the promotion of Ms. Chen - who is social-media savvy and casually tweets about everything from Jane Austen to the thief who stole her credit card (she tracked him down and was considering calling his mother) - may represent a turning point not just in the history of Lucky, but fashion magazines in general.
Leah Chernikoff, 31, the editorial director of Fashionista.com, called Ms. Chen “the first editor in chief of our generation.â€
“I don't think posting selfies means she's not going to be good at this job,†Ms. Chernikoff said. “She has all of the background you want from an editor in chief. She's paid her dues.â€
Ms. Chen grew up in downtown New York. Her mother is from Taipei, her father from Shanghai, and they own a consulting textile import-expert business. “For a lot of children of immigrants, what happens is your parents want you to do something very linear that they can understand,†she said. “I had an aptitude in sciences and never really questioned it.â€
But, she said, her mother is a “voracious shopper†who would make an annual trip to Milan to stock her wardrobe. “I borrowed my first Chanel bag from her,†Ms. Chen said. Now, following her daughter on Instagram, “My mom will be like, ‘Please tell me you didn't buy that Balenciaga bag.' And I'll say, ‘I got it from you.' â€
In her junior year of college, Ms. Chen applied to 20 summer internships, including ones offered by MTV and the William Morris Agency, and took one at Harper's Bazaar.  Recalling what she wore on her first day there, she said: “I bought my first pair of pointy-toed Miu Miu shoes with a kitten heel from Barneys. They were $200 and it was a big deal. I wore them with a pleated black Benetton skirt and a white shirt. I looked like a waitress.â€
She knew immediately, she said, that she wanted to work in magazines.
In 2000 Lucky arrived on stands, with its then-radical truncated articles and pages of product recommendations that in some ways presaged the argot of the Internet. Ms. Chen, who once e-mailed a Microsoft Word document with columns detailing the merits of a Mulberry Alexa bag and a Proenza Schouler PS1 bag to a friend agonizing over the items, said she was an immediate fan.
“It broke down the barrier between magazine ivory tower, and you felt like you were friends with the magazine,†she said. “It was the first magazine I read where I knew who all the editors were and was the first place I saw street style photographed. What Lucky pioneered, now everybody does.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 15, 2013, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trending Now at Lucky.
A veteran cameraman for the Britain-based news network Sky News was among the hundreds of people killed in Cairo on Wednesday. Other journalists described close calls in the streets, and several were detained by local authorities.
Mick Deane, a cameraman for the Britain-based network Sky News, died Wednesday.
Photographs The Sky News cameraman, Mick Deane, was working with a correspondent in Cairo, Sam Kiley, when he was shot. “Despite receiving medical treatment for his injuries, he died shortly afterward,†the network said in a statement. Sky News declined to elaborate on the circumstances, saying that an investigation was under way.
“In our attempt to show the world the horror at Rabaa today, we lost the heart of our team,†Tom Rayner, the Middle East news editor for Sky News, wrote on Twitter, making a reference to the site of a sit-in. He added: “I can't find more words now. We love you Mick.â€
Mr. Deane was the first Western reporter to die on assignment in Egypt since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping such records in the early 1990s. This summer two local reporters - Salah al-Din Hassan of a news Web site called Shaab Masr and Ahmed Assem el-Senousy of a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper - died there.
On Wednesday, Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz, a reporter for Xpress, a newspaper based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was also killed; the newspaper said she “was not on any official assignment and had gone to her home country on annual leave.†Late Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that Ahmed Abdel Gawad of the state-run newspaper Al Akhbar was also killed.
Several other journalists were wounded by gunfire during the crackdown, including an unidentified A.P. photographer, who was able to resume work, and a Reuters photographer, Asmaa Waguih, who was shot in the foot. Reuters said Ms. Waguih was receiving treatment; a spokesman had no further details on her condition. In an e-mail, Stephen J. Adler, the editor in chief of Reuters, said, “We have the utmost respect for all the journalists who put themselves in harm's way to bring us the news, video and pictures we see every day.â€
It was not immediately clear whether the reporters were targeted. Several others, including the Cairo bureau chief of The Washington Post, Abigail Hauslohner, suggested that the security forces disregarded their status as witnesses, not protesters.
In a first-person account published on The Post's Web site, Ms. Hauslohner said she and two of her colleagues were told by a police officer, “If I see you again, I'll shoot you in the leg.â€
Mike Giglio, a reporter for Newsweek and The Daily Beast in Cairo, said he was assaulted and arrested by the police despite it being evident to them he was a working journalist; once at a detention center, other officers apologized to him and insisted it must have been an accident.
“I think a big part of this is the product of the rabid information wars going on right now: Western journalists, and America in general, are being portrayed as enemies - by politicians, by anti-Morsi activists and in the state and private media,†Mr. Giglio said, referring to the ousted leader Mohamed Morsi. “People are being told not to trust the international press, because what it's reporting doesn't always fit with the government's media narrative, and that narrative is extremely important to them right now. I think this is fueling intense paranoia and anger toward the international media in Egypt, and I think I saw an effect of that today, whatever else may have also been at play.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 15, 2013, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Westerner Covering Turmoil Is Killed.
Sitting in her Manhattan office, swathed in dark Rick Owens leather and with a blond blunt cut, Lara Deam, 46, the founder of Dwell magazine, seemed the living embodiment of a New York kind of Usonia.
Lara Deam in her modern town house in the West Village. “Marin is great but sleepy,†she said of her California home. “I love the energy here.â€
The décor was all straight lines and sleek surfaces, like the modern temples that her magazine celebrates, except for a plate of dried figs and garbanzo beans arranged neatly on her desk. She had just flown in from Marin County, Calif., where she lives in a steel-and-glass house, to attend a furniture show and take some meetings.
Ever since Dwell moved its editorial team to New York from San Francisco in 2011, Ms. Deam has become bicoastal, visiting New York almost every month. When in town, she stays in a glass town house in the West Village, part of an exclusive residence club in the shadows of the Richard Meier towers.
“Marin is great but sleepy,†she said. “I love the energy here.†Though shy and reserved by nature, she lit up when discussing the city's gung-ho networking culture and the reasons Dwell relocated East.
The move has already paid dividends. This fall, Dwell will sponsor its second City Modern tour of Instagram-worthy homes with New York magazine. Dwell also took on its first outside investor, though Ms. Deam would not disclose who or how much. The mystery dollars will go to building an e-commerce site this fall, which will sell furniture and accessories that you might find in the magazine.
It's a noted shift, considering Ms. Deam has self-financed Dwell for the last 13 years. But if the magazine features chimeras, like the 17th-century mill turned private home in Salento, Italy, in the June issue, it's a reflection of Ms. Deam's charmed upbringing.
The youngest of three girls, Ms. Deam grew up in Janesville, Wis., which she said is known for two things: a G.M. factory and United States Representative Paul Ryan. Her parents, Don and Gerry Hedberg, founded Lab Safety Supply, which sold chemistry-class equipment like beakers and Bunsen burners, before it was purchased by Grainger in 1992.
After graduating from Miami University in 1989, Ms. Deam moved to Chicago to run one of her father's side businesses: selling semiprecious rocks like amethyst. It wasn't exactly a career track, she noted with a wry chuckle, and she struggled at the business for three years before striking out on her own.
First, she explored nonprofit work, moving to Washington to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. But she soured on the city's political cynicism. “It just wasn't me,†she said, wrinkling her nose. So after visiting a friend in the Bay Area, she moved to Mill Valley, Calif., in 1994.
There she bought a sunny property in downtown Mill Valley with a dingy house attached, presumably with family money. (Ms. Deam would neither confirm nor deny her source of financing.) “The backsplash was like plastic, a plastic bag over the kitchen sink,†she said.
She ended up renovating the house twice and with unexpected help. Through a mutual friend, she would meet her future husband, Christopher Deam, an architect and designer known for slick Airstream interiors. Mr. Deam opened her to the world of design, bringing her to the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. “I came back, and thought, ‘Oh, my God, I just want to figure out how to replicate that,' †she said of her awakening.
She drew up a business plan for Dwell, based mostly on her catalog experience while working summers at Lab Safety Supply. “I had this aha moment as I was looking through Global Architect - it's a trade magazine - at Chris's loft,†she said. “It had very high-end beautiful projects. I was like, ‘What if we had a magazine in this country that had really great architecture and design but talked about it really accessibly?' â€
Several weeks after Dwell started publishing in 2000, she married Mr. Deam in a geodesic dome on Treasure Island. “It was really over the top,†she said, blushing.
Some of the photographs still feel fresh when you flip through the first issue, including a spread on an updated Brooklyn carriage house. “I do believe that architecture that's done well has a very lasting quality,†she said. While Dwell has generated applause in some circles (it won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2005), it is also the occasional target of satire and derision for its warmed-over interpretation of midcentury modernism. One blog, UnhappyHipsters.com, pokes fun at its unattainable taste, by running snarky captions under the magazine's picture-perfect tableaus.
But Ms. Deam points out there's an audience for design gawking. Besides, she's too busy this month trying to stay off the grid with her husband and their 10-year-old twins at their lakeside property in Saugatuck, Mich.
“There's a real soulfulness when you're just there at night,†she said, her blue eyes widening. “No electricity, no road. We're basically just doing a wraparound porch and two bedrooms.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 15, 2013, on page E6 of the New York edition with the headline: Cool Comfort In Modern Design.
Ursula Coyote/AMC Bryan Cranston, left, and Aaron Paul in “Breaking Bad,†whose premiere on Sunday drew the biggest audience in its history.
NO television show is hotter than “Breaking Bad,†which set a ratings record for the premiere of its final season on Sunday - doubling its previous high - and is headed toward a finale, on Sept. 29, likely to rival any in recent television history in terms of national anticipation.
The last seven episodes will almost assuredly continue the show's viewership streak for AMC, the network that carries it, and they may set another milestone, too - near record advertising rates for cable television for marketers vying for the limited commercial time still available.
Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, said that when the series started five years ago, “Breaking Bad†faced some skittishness from advertisers because of its darkness and violence. That is long forgotten, he said, because of recent ratings and a huge drop in the median age of its viewers (now 38.6, from a high of 47 in Season 2). In particular, he said, the concentration of hard-to-reach male viewers, about 60 percent of the audience, has helped erase those fears, too.
“The ‘Breaking Bad' finale on Sept. 29 could be the biggest original programming cable TV event since ‘The Sopranos' finale in June 2007 - and those unsold units will get premium rates,†Mr. Adgate said.
Without specifying what those prices would be, a senior executive with knowledge of AMC's sales plan said that the commercials remaining in what is known as the scatter market would be sold based on the most recent ratings information, and the expectation that those numbers would grow. (Its viewership in the important 18- to 49-year-old audience bracket, 3.6 million, beat CBS, NBC and ABC combined on Sunday; total viewership was 5.9 million.)
“What's left will reflect the very high end of cable†pricing, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss AMC's private financial plans. The figure would most likely reach the level that broadcast networks ask for hit shows, usually $200,000 to $300,000 for 30 seconds, a level cable shows rarely, if ever, approach, the executive said.
The executive said that “Breaking Bad†had already helped drive AMC's total take in this year's upfront market to record levels, approaching 20 percent above its previous high.
Beyond ratings, the aspect of television programming that has become a point of focus among advertisers is engagement - and few shows have gained the kind of passionate following that now attends “Breaking Bad.†AMC reported that Sunday's episode generated 760,000 Twitter messages.
That all this is happening on a show created for commercial television - rather than for one of the subscription networks widely considered more artistically free - is one of the most remarkable aspects of the show's success, and a huge bonus for AMC.
Vince Gilligan, the show's creator, said he never had a problem with being on a commercial network. “Writing for a network has been a great benefit,†he said, referring to his seven years writing for Fox's “The X-Files.â€
“We learned on that show that you build to every act break, to provide a reason to stay tuned in. I think that's just plain good storytelling,†Mr. Gilligan said. “In some quarters, folks will turn their nose up at that and say that's kind of a craven, for-profit motive. I'm like: first of all, all of this is for profit. And second of all, Charles Dickens did it, too. He would end each installment with a reason to buy the newspaper the next week. Creatively, commercial breaks don't bother me at all.â€
“Breaking Bad†has benefited enormously from exposure on Netflix and in other places where viewers could “binge-watch†earlier seasons (commercial free) and catch up to the story. But for the sake of driving viewer interest (and ratings), nothing has meant more than the steady buildup of new episodes each week, a format Mr. Gilligan said he preferred to the Netflix model of making all the episodes of an original series available at once.
Charlie Collier, the president of AMC, said network executives remained “big believers in the live event,†which he said was validated again by the enormous Twitter activity surrounding this week's episode.
“We saw these numbers and immediately thought, ‘We're going to need a bigger water cooler,' †Mr. Collier said. “You feel these weekly events in the zeitgeist and the live show, again, is the primary event. These last eight episodes seem to be building into a cultural and highly communal television event that will stretch over two months with viewers anticipating, watching, discussing and sharing. It's this type of engagement and passion that everyone is shooting for.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 15, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: With a Hit Series on AMC Approaching Its End, Marketers May Clamor to Buy Commercial Time.
Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times Evgeny Morozov, author of the new “To Save Everything, Click Here,†in Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass., where he is working on a doctorate.
For every revolution, there is a counterrevolutionary. And so the digital one has brought us Evgeny Morozov.
A 29-year-old émigré from Belarus, Mr. Morozov has quickly become the most prominent, most multiplatformed critic of the utopian promises coming from Silicon Valley. His first book, “The Net Delusion,†looked skeptically at the belief that social networks were responsible for fomenting political change across the globe, and in the new “To Save Everything, Click Here†he has expanded that critique to question whether the Internet has improved anything.
With the recent revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, Mr. Morozov is taking a victory lap of sorts. In an essay last month, he finds vindication for his pessimistic views about the Internet, as the world turns on the United States over its spying on overseas digital communications and as oppressive governments are emboldened to crack down: “This is the real tragedy of America's ‘Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.â€
Mr. Morozov has written for a long list of publications, including London Review of Books, The New York Times and The New Republic. In addition to the sheer volume of Mr. Morozov's writings, there is his sheer volume. His style is aggressive and frequently accusatory, with a litany of digital idealists and organizations that he uses as punching bags. These include Facebook, Google, the publisher and writer Tim O'Reilly and the City University of New York professor and new-media guru Jeff Jarvis, whose book “Public Parts†Mr. Morozov savaged in a 6,000-word review in The New Republic, which included the memorable line, “This is a book that should've stayed a tweet.â€
The aggressive, barroom quality of his writing has earned him plenty of admirers, as well as detractors who consider him a childish contrarian. But after becoming such a public, public intellectual by his mid-20s, Mr. Morozov has made a curious decision: to further his education. During the semester you could find him finishing his coffee upstairs at a Starbucks before making the walk across Harvard Yard for his seat at a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis as a first-year Harvard doctoral candidate in the history of science.
“I have more influence than I ought to have,†he said in the train to New York City from Boston, adding that he had a nagging feeling that his criticisms were too shallow. “The idea of the Internet allowed me to cut too many corners, intellectually.â€
His new thinking is evident in “To Save Everything,†released in March. In the book Mr. Morozov puts quotation marks around every reference to “the Internet,†and with that tic he makes a larger point: readers should stop and question everything they have been taught about technology, including that the Internet exists.
Without such skepticism, Mr. Morozov and his supporters say, the public easily succumbs to the slick promises and catchwords of online entrepreneurs or TED talks - “open†or “generative†or “transparent†or “participatory.†And those words lead to real beliefs, with real consequences, he argues - for example, that privacy is just an archaic notion, or that information “wants to be free.â€
Critics have generally welcomed “To Save Everything†for its contrary take, if not always how that take is expressed. Writing in The Times's Book Review, Ellen Ullman, a novelist and former computer programmer, says Mr. Morozov “is taking up the cause of human values against those of the machine,†though she adds that his “polemical tone is wearying.â€
Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor and frequent Morozov target, writes that the book was more of the same and that his attacks appear to be “mainly designed to build Morozov's particular brand of trollism; one suspects he aspires to be a Bill O'Reilly for intellectuals.â€
In person, too, Mr. Morozov can quickly turn adversarial, and not only when he threatens to stop talking because his interlocutor's knowledge “is too limited.†He is as likely to spot a contradiction in his own thinking, saying something like, “You are going to catch me here, but who cares?â€
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 14, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled an example of an Internet intellectual movement. It is cybernetics, not cyberkinetics.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 15, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Internet's Verbal Contrarian.
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Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation Entertainment, has sold $11.7 million of stock in the company in recent days, representing about 38 percent of his direct holdings, the company revealed in a regulatory filing late Tuesday.
The sales, made on Friday and Monday, apparently came as the company was in the process of dismissing Nathan Hubbard, the president of its Ticketmaster division. News of Mr. Hubbard’s imminent departure -- for reasons that are still unclear -- emerged on Monday evening.
According to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Rapino sold 640,000 of the 1.7 million shares he owned, not counting about 3 million stock options.
Jacqueline Peterson, a spokeswoman for Live Nation, said late Tuesday that Mr. Rapino sold the stock for estate-planning purposes. She said the shares represented a small portion of his total equity stake in the company, including options, and that this was the first time in the eight-year history of the company that Mr. Rapino had sold shares. Live Nation was spun off from Clear Channel Communications in 2005.
Since Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster in early 2010, the company’s stock price has mostly remained sluggish. But it has nearly doubled since the end of last year, when Irving Azoff, its former executive chairman and Mr. Rapino’s chief rival, left the company. The stock closed at $18.19 on Tuesday.
Last year, Mr. Rapino earned a total of $28.5 million from the company, including about $21.6 million in grants of stock and options, according to Live Nation’s most recent proxy report, in April.
Live Nation was believed to be close on Tuesday to signing an agreement terminating Mr. Hubbard’s employment, but the company has made no public statement about it.
In a research note on Tuesday, Ben Mogil, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, wrote that the reports of Mr. Hubbard’s departure appeared to be negative for the company because it came in the midst of a revamping of Ticketmaster’s technology platform, and because “it implies that some of the issues at play are personality driven.â€