Remote Control: At Louisville, Athletic Boom Is Rooted in ESPN Partnership

ARLINGTON, Va. - In defeat, the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls have mostly faded from view, in ways that seem true to type. Mitt Romney is a contented grandfather. Rick Santorum leads a Christian movie company. Michele Bachmann is retiring from the House, although her pants-on-fire oratory is likely to find a new home.

From left, James Carville, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson on the original â€œCrossfireâ€ in 2002.

And what of the 2012 contender with a slashing debate style, who prolonged his primary run seemingly to remain in the media spotlight? Newt Gingrich has also earned his just deserts: he has been named a host of CNN's revived â€œCrossfire,â€ the granddaddy of political debate shows. The appointment will ensure that he remains the most prominent Republican from the presidential class of 2012 to retain influence in the national conversation.

Mr. Gingrich gleefully criticized â€œthe media eliteâ€ as a candidate, but now he is unquestionably a member. â€œYes,â€ he agreed. â€œAnd I hope to move it to the right.â€

Eight years after the original â€œCrossfireâ€ was canceled, its revival is a bet by CNN that there is an audience for an evenly matched, left-right debate show five times a week, in contrast to the partisan conformity that prevails at other cable outlets.

Besides Mr. Gingrich, the hosts will include S. E. Cupp, a conservative columnist and commentator; and the liberals Van Jones, a former adviser to President Obama; and Stephanie Cutter, a deputy manager of Mr. Obama's re-election campaign. The new show, which will start on Sept. 16 at 6:30 p.m. and which is already being heavily promoted by the cable network, will feature two of the four hosts nightly, plus two guests. They will debate one topic for 30 minutes - a counterintuitive gamble in an age of hummingbird attention spans.

Mr. Gingrich, 70, is the marquee attraction. Reviving â€œCrossfireâ€ with him as a host was one of the first ideas that Jeff Zucker floated on becoming president of CNN Worldwide in January, said Sam Feist, CNN's Washington bureau chief.

Mr. Gingrich may be the only Republican in America who believed the 20 primary debates in the 2012 campaign were too few. Twice he brought his candidacy back from the dead through debate performances, most memorably in winning the South Carolina primary by attacking the moderators for daring to question him about a) insensitivity to black Americans and b) his second wife's statement that he asked for an open marriage.

It was all quite calculated. â€œParticularly in a Republican primary, taking on the media immediately resonated with almost half the primary voters,â€ Mr. Gingrich said.

That is a section of voters that CNN is eager to engage. During an onstage interview at the Brainstorm TECH conference in July, Mr. Zucker said: â€œNewt is an incredibly smart, intellectual thinker. I think, frankly, one of the criticisms of CNN that it didn't have enough conservative points of view on the air was probably a valid criticism.â€

The renewed â€œCrossfire,â€ which will displace the final 30 minutes of â€œThe Situation Room,â€ is also an attempt to jump-start CNN's evening ratings. According to Nielsen, â€œThe Situation Roomâ€ averaged 621,000 viewers, compared with 2.1 million viewers for â€œSpecial Report with Bret Baierâ€ on Fox News and 565,000 for â€œPoliticsNationâ€ on MSNBC. CNN did proportionately better among the prized demographic, viewers aged 25 to 54 in the same hour. The numbers were 205,000 for CNN, 329,000 for Fox News and 132,000 for MSNBC. Before he entered the 2012 race, Mr. Gingrich was a paid contributor to Fox News, which chose not to bring him back after the election. â€œI think they were shocked by the results,â€ he said of Fox News, which was widely seen as openly cheerleading for Mr. Romney last year. â€œI think their audience was shocked. I think they've been trying to reassess how they're going to rebuild their programs.â€

As a candidate who peddled his books at stump speeches, Mr. Gingrich was accused of running primarily to polish his brand for future book and television deals.

â€œIf people want to think about that as a business decision, it would have been utterly irrational,â€ he said in an interview at Gingrich Productions, in an office building in Arlington, Va.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the host of a Fox News program that competed with â€œThe Situation Roomâ€ on CNN. He is Bret Baier, not Brett.

A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gingrich Will Be Back in the â€˜Crossfire' on CNN.

N.F.L. Pressure Said to Lead ESPN to Quit Film Project

ESPN was involved with a hard-hitting television series that delivered an unsavory depiction of professional football players. The N.F.L.'s commissioner was so perturbed that he complained to the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ESPN's parent company. Not long after, ESPN stopped promoting the show, then decided to end its run after one season.

The league has denied having any sway in ESPN's decision to pull out from the investigative project it was working on with â€œFrontline.â€

From left, the Hall of Famer Harry Carson; the ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru; an ESPN senior producer, Dwayne Bray; and the filmmaker Michael Kirk on Aug. 6.

The year was 2004, and the TV series was a fictional drama, â€œPlaymakers,â€ which did not even include the words â€œNational Football League.â€ Nearly a decade later, a strikingly similar set of circumstances - though this time with a more serious topic - has left ESPN, the multibillion dollar sports behemoth, again defending its dual existence as a sports platform and a news organization.

On Thursday, ESPN, which has spent heavily in recent years to build its investigative reporting team, abruptly ended its affiliation with â€œFrontline,â€ a public affairs television series that was weeks from showing a jointly produced two-part investigative project about the N.F.L.'s contentious handling of head injuries. The divorce came a week after the N.F.L. voiced its displeasure with the documentary at a lunch between league and ESPN executives, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The meeting took place at Patroon, near the league's Midtown Manhattan headquarters, according to the two people, who requested anonymity because they were prohibited by their superiors from discussing the matter publicly. It was a table for four: Roger Goodell, commissioner of the N.F.L.; Steve Bornstein, president of the NFL Network; John Skipper, ESPN's president; and John Wildhack, ESPN's executive vice president for production.

The meeting was combative, the people said, with league officials conveying their irritation with the direction of the documentary, which is expected to describe a narrative that has been captured in various news reports over the past decade: the league turning a blind eye to evidence that players were sustaining brain trauma on the field that could lead to profound, long-term cognitive disability.

The N.F.L. denied that it had exerted any sway over the project and said ESPN convened the lunch meeting, not the league. ESPN said it ended the partnership with â€œFrontlineâ€ because of misunderstandings about who had editorial control over the documentary, not because of its broadcast deal with the league.

But given the league's immense popularity and the heated demand from broadcasters to acquire rights to its games, few direct requests would have had to have been made, sports media experts said. Leagues know that broadcasters like ESPN are both journalistic and entertainment entities, and they are adept at exploiting the divisions between them.

â€œThis is a conflicted relationship because it's a contractual relationship,â€ said Robert Boland, who teaches sports management at New York University. â€œThe climate right now surrounding all sports and to some degree journalism is muddied because there is so much competition for content, so any dividing line between editorial and content is blurred.â€

These kinds of skirmishes have been around for as long as companies have dabbled in both media and entertainment businesses. But the potential for conflicts are particularly acute at ESPN, which has tentacles throughout the sports world and whose mission is to cover sports that it actively promotes.

Executives in ESPN's newsroom, which includes reporters, commentators and editors recruited from organizations like The New York Times, The Daily News and The Washington Post, are eager to trumpet their successes and editorial independence. ESPN has aggressively covered the recent scandal involving abusive behavior by the former men's basketball coach at Rutgers; the doping case revolving around Biogenesis, the anti-aging clinic in Florida that provided banned substances to professional baseball players; and the issue of traumatic brain injuries in the N.F.L.

In a story by ESPN this month about Elliot Pellman, a longtime medical adviser to the N.F.L., a league spokesman accused ESPN of â€œbeing on a witch hunt.â€

Executives in ESPN's newsroom can get almost defensive about the company's dual mandate, and several years ago the company created an ombudsman position to keep tabs on the news division. John Walsh, the executive vice president and executive editor at ESPN, said in an interview several months ago that it was an â€œinsane propositionâ€ that top journalists would join ESPN if their work would be compromised.

Brian Stelter and Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2013, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: N.F.L. Said to Have Pressured ESPN.

India Ink: Photojournalist Raped in Mumbai

Danish Siddiqui/Reuters A police offer stood guard near an abandoned building in Mumbai where a female photographer, 22, was raped.

MUMBAI- A female photojournalist on assignment in Mumbai was gang raped while her male colleague was tied up and beaten, the police said. Five men were being sought as suspects in the assault Thursday evening.

â€˜â€˜She was taken to Jaslok Hospital with multiple injuries,'' said Rane, a head constable at the N.M. Joshi Marg police station in the Lower Parel neighborhood of Mumbai, where the case was registered. Mr. Rane refused to reveal his full name.

The attack occurred around sunset, as the woman and her colleague were visiting Shakti Mills, an abandoned textile mill complex near the Mahalaxmi train station in Lower Parel. The woman was taking photographs of the area for a magazine story about Mumbai's chawls, tenements for workers employed in the mills.

Lower Parel was the site of many textile mills until the 1980s, as manufacturing moved out of Mumbai. In more recent years, the area has undergone redevelopment and become a hub for media and advertising agencies, upscale restaurants and shopping malls. Several luxury apartment blocks are coming up in the area, but some abandoned mills remain.

The police have released sketches of the five suspects, based on the woman's report. Officials at Jaslok Hospital confirmed that the woman had been admitted Thursday evening, but did not provide details. â€˜â€˜We are doing the needful,'' said Dr. Tarang Gianchandani, a senior hospital administrator told The Press Trust of India. â€˜â€˜She is under strict observation. At the moment we can't say anything.''

â€˜â€˜The case will be investigated very seriously,'' said R.R. Patil, the home minister of Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is located.

Satyapal Singh, Police Commissioner, Mumbai said at a press conference in Mumbai Friday afternoon that one of the accused had been arrested and the police have identified the other four accused. The accused are believed to be between 20 and 25 years old and residents of Lower Parel, where the incident took place.

The attack was reminiscent of the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student last December in a bus in New Delhi. The woman and her male companion were attacked with iron rods, and the woman later died of her injuries. The incident caused public outrage across India. Protesters took to the streets demanding a safer environment for women and heavier penalties for sexual assault. In March, a new sexual offense law was passed imposing stricter punishments for violence against women and making activities such as stalking and voyeurism criminal offenses.

Although Mumbai, India's financial capital, is widely considered one of India's safest cities, recent events have brought that into question. According to statistics released by the Praja Foundation, a non-profit organization in Mumbai, there were 207 cases of rape registered in the city in 2011-12, a 15 percent rise over the previous year.

A version of this article appears in print on 08/24/2013, on page A4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Photographer Is Raped By Five Men In Mumbai.

Remote Control: College Football\'s Most Dominant Player? It\'s ESPN

College Football's Most Dominant Player? It's ESPN

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Film on J. D. Salinger Claims More Books Coming

Weinstein Company

A new documentary on J. D. Salinger, who died in 2010, claims he left instructions to publish at least five more works.

LOS ANGELES - J. D. Salinger may not be done publishing after all, according to claims in a new film and book set for release next week.

This 1953 photo of J.D. Salinger in Cornish, N.H., with Emily Maxwell, the wife of his close friend William Maxwell, is part of a new documentary and book to be released soon.

Mr. Salinger, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, has been known for a distinguished but scant literary oeuvre that was capped by the enormous success of his 1951 novel, â€œThe Catcher in the Rye.â€

But a forthcoming documentary and related book, both titled â€œSalinger,â€ include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books - some of them entirely new, some extending past work - in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.

The new books and stories were largely written before Mr. Salinger assigned his output to a trust in 2008, and would greatly expand the Salinger legacy.

One collection, to be called â€œThe Family Glass,â€ would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family, which figured in Mr. Salinger's â€œFranny and Zooeyâ€ and elsewhere, according to the claims, which surfaced in interviews and previews of the documentary and book last week.

Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, â€œThe Last and Best of the Peter Pans,â€ which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including â€œCatcher in the Rye.â€ The new works are said to include a story-filled â€œmanualâ€ of the Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved; a novel set during World War II and based on his first marriage; and a novella modeled on his own war experiences.

For decades, those in touch with Mr. Salinger have said that he had continued to write assiduously, though he stopped publishing after a long story, â€œHapworth 16, 1924,â€ appeared in The New Yorker. But no one had made so detailed a public claim that Mr. Salinger had left extensive posthumous publishing plans.

Matthew Salinger, who is Mr. Salinger's son, and shares responsibility for the Salinger estate with Colleen O'Neill, the author's widow, declined to discuss plans or the book and film. He said Ms. O'Neill, who did not respond directly to a separate query, would also decline to comment.

In an interview earlier this year, Matthew Salinger said he was skeptical that the planned book and documentary would deepen public understanding of his father, who, he said, for decades had confined his intimate dealings to a small circle of seven or eight people.

The documentary is directed by Shane Salerno, a filmmaker who spent nine years researching and filming the movie that is set for release by the Weinstein Company on Sept. 6, and will air later on PBS in the American Masters series. The companion book, co-written by David Shields, is to be published by Simon & Schuster on Sept. 3.

Speaking in his Los Angeles office on Saturday, Mr. Salerno pointed to tables and shelves filled with previously unpublished photographs, hundreds of letters and even a handwritten World War II diary that belonged to one of Mr. Salinger's lifelong friends, a now-deceased fellow soldier named Paul Fitzgerald.

â€œIf that's not the inner circle, I don't know what is the inner circle,â€ Mr. Salerno said.

His understanding of the publishing plans, Mr. Salerno said, took shape â€œfairly lateâ€ in his research.

The book and film attribute the detailed account of the plans to two anonymous sources, both of whom are described in the book as being â€œindependent and separate.â€ Mr. Salerno declined to elaborate, other than to describe them as people who had not spoken to each other, but knew of the plans.

â€œThe credibility of the last chapter,â€ Mr. Salerno said of a final summary of publishing prospects, entitled â€œSecrets,â€ â€œis in the 571 pages that preceded it.â€ Mr. Salerno noted that he initially had some cooperation from members of the Salinger family, but they later withdrew support.

The book and film have been marketed with the promise of revelations about Mr. Salinger, whose penchant for privacy became a hallmark. Last week, Weinstein and Simon & Schuster began a promotional campaign that includes a poster image of Mr. Salinger with a finger to his lips, beneath an admonition: â€œUncover the Mystery but Don't Spoil the Secrets!â€ The book, a 698-page companion to the film, is written in an oral history style with snippets of text from dozens of people who were interviewed for the project.

Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in an interview on Saturday that the book was â€œa major journalistic feat.â€

A version of this article appears in print on August 25, 2013, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Film on J. D. Salinger Claims More Books Coming.

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Remote Control: At Louisville, Athletic Boom Is Rooted in ESPN Partnership

At Louisville, Athletic Boom Is Rooted in ESPN Partnership

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Film on J. D. Salinger Claims More Books Coming

Film on J. D. Salinger Claims More Books Coming