‘Sesame Street' Widens Its Focus

Kassie Bracken/The New York Times

‘Sesame' Science: In a Sesame Workshop lab, preschoolers play physics and engineering games with Grover and Elmo. It's the newest effort in a mission to teach science concepts to children. But is it working?

On “Sesame Street,” a distressed cow has a big problem. She made it up the stairs to the beauty parlor but now, her bouffant piled high, she's stuck. Cows can go up stairs, she moans, but not down.

Murray Monster, shown here attending Robo Fun School, appears in science-focused segments with children.

Enter Super Grover 2.0. Out from his bottomless “utility sock” comes an enormous ramp, which, as the cow cheerily notes before clomping on down, is “a sloping surface that goes from high to low.”

Simple ABCs and 123s? So old school. In the last four years, “Sesame Street” has set itself a much larger goal: teaching nature, math, science and engineering concepts and problem-solving to a preschool audience - with topics like how a pulley works or how to go about investigating what's making Mr. Snuffleupagus sneeze.

The content is wrapped in the traditional silliness; these are still Muppets. But the more sophisticated programming, on a show that frequently draws an audience even younger than the 3- to-5-year-olds it targets, raises a question: Is there any evidence that it is doing anything more than making PBS and parents feel good?

Officials at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that produces the show, believe the new approach has succeeded in introducing children - at least, the target-age audience - to scientific ideas and methods.

“This is working,” said Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president, curriculum and content. Still, they acknowledge there are challenges in measuring a young child's scientific understanding, and experts are only just beginning to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Each new season of “Sesame Street” starts with a curriculum, drawn up by educational consultants and a research staff, laying out concepts and ideas to be taught. The show's writers incorporate these into scripts acted out by the beloved Muppets. The science curriculum began in 2009 with new programming that tried to capitalize on children's natural interest in the world around them, an effort inspired by Richard Louv's 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder,” Dr. Truglio said.

Bigger words, like “pollinate,” “hibernate” and “camouflage” were added to the “Word on the Street” rotation. In one episode, Jimmy Fallon played a “wild nature survivor guy,” who found water in leaves and shunned a coat in favor of warm feathers.

After the program's educational consultants requested more emphasis on urging children to investigate, as opposed to simply explore, the show introduced the “Super Grover 2.0” segments. A blue Muppet known for confidently getting things wrong, Grover uses magnets, springs and “superpowers” of investigation, observation and reporting to solve problems through trial and error. Before settling on a ramp for the stuck cow, for instance, he tries a trampoline.

Elsewhere on the show, Murray Monster conducts mini-experiments on the streets of New York with children, discovering what bridge design holds the most weight and how a boat's shape helps it float. Last season, Elmo began starring in a daily musical of his imagination that sneakily incorporates math; in “Guacamole,” he quizzes the “Rhombus of Recipes” and adds up the avocados on two trees.

On Sept. 24, the material - as well as new videos, online and mobile games, and parent and teacher resources - will find a new home online when Sesame Workshop unveils a hub on the “Sesame Street” Web site called “Little Discoverers: Big Fun With Science, Math and More.” In one game, little fingers manipulate a virtual spring to launch pieces of trash into Oscar the Grouch's trash can, a “Sesame Street” version of “Angry Birds.”

“Sesame Street” is just one of many television programs trying to teach math and science to preschoolers. Even young children can learn basic scientific concepts, experts in educational development say. Most children are already curious about everything from weather patterns to what sinks and floats in the bath.

“They actually are already thinking about these things,” said Kimberly Brenneman, assistant research professor at Rutgers University's National Institute for Early Education Research and an education adviser for PBS's “Sid the Science Kid.” Educators, she said, can “create a show that is likely to meet kids where they are, and go a little further.”

Results of two studies with nearly 600 children conducted by the Workshop “demonstrate that children can learn sophisticated vocabulary and valuable science concepts from ‘Sesame Street,' ” according to a presentation by Dr. Truglio and her colleagues at the International Communications Association in May 2011.

A just-completed third study with 337 children confirmed the results, said Jennifer Kotler, the Workshop's vice president for research and evaluation. Ms. Kotler's team tested elements of the show's programming with children in low- and middle-income day care centers. Through one-on-one interviews, the researchers assessed what the children knew before watching the programming and what they retained afterward.

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2013, on page D8 of the National edition with the headline: ‘Sesame Street' Widens Its Focus.

Bertelsmann Joins Venture for New Music by Established Acts

Bertelsmann, the German media giant, has expanded its recent efforts to return to the music business through a $150 million deal with Primary Wave Music, an American company that handles music publishing rights, artist management and marketing, the companies plan to announce on Tuesday.

In the deal, signed over the weekend, BMG Rights Management, Bertelsmann's music arm, will buy the bulk of Primary Wave's publishing assets, including rights to songs by Hall & Oates, Nirvana, Aerosmith and Earth, Wind & Fire. The companies will also form a venture, BMG/Primary Wave Artist Services, to release and market new recordings by established acts.

“This strategic alliance with Primary Wave, one of the most respected independents in the business, gives us control of some of the greatest copyrights in popular music in one stroke, while also strengthening our marketing resources in promoting new recordings,” Hartwig Masuch, BMG's chief executive, said in a statement.

Founded in 2008, BMG Rights Management was Bertelsmann's fresh start in the business after the company sold most of its music assets over the previous years to Sony and Universal. The new BMG focused on music publishing rights, which cover songwriting and composition. It built a catalog of more than one million songs, making it one of the largest publishers in the world.

In March, Bertelsmann bought out its partner in BMG, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, in a deal that valued the music company at $1.4 billion and signaled its eagerness to return to music full throttle.

Primary Wave, which is based in New York, started in 2006 when the company paid $50 million for half the publishing rights of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana. Its publishing catalog has grown since then, but the company has also expanded into artist management, branding and television. Among its most successful acts is the singer CeeLo Green, who is a judge on the NBC talent show “The Voice” and has made product endorsement deals.

As part of the deal with BMG, Primary Wave will be the marketing agent for the songs it is selling, and will retain a small number of publishing assets, including songs by Def Leppard. Primary Wave, which recently raised $125 million in financing from Credit Suisse and SunTrust Bank, will also pay off $90 million in debt in conjunction with the BMG deal.

BMG/Primary Wave Artist Services, the new venture, will release new recordings, with Primary Wave doing marketing and promotion and BMG handling royalty accounting and contracts, Lawrence Mestel, chief executive of Primary Wave, said in an interview on Monday. The label will concentrate on artists who have already built followings, to capitalize on their existing popularity and avoid the risk of trying to break in new acts.

“The signing and marketing of new and developing artists is a very bad business,” Mr. Mestel said. “But the signing and marketing of stars and artists with a track record is a good business.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bertelsmann Joins Venture for New Music by Established Acts .

Advertising: With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers

With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers

AS the country marches toward a new health insurance system, insurance companies have spent millions on consumer advertising to position themselves as health care companies.

But because a majority of Americans are insured through their employers, the insurance companies have to reach several audiences. Speaking to human resources professionals, health care providers and policy makers is still an important part of many insurance companies' marketing plans.

Aetna, one of the largest of the companies, will introduce a new campaign on Tuesday aimed at those groups. It will highlight the company's goal of cutting billions of dollars of expenditures through so-called Big Data, electronic health records and other technologies as well as encouraging better coordination among health care providers. The campaign, called “Our Healthy,” will run online, in print and on mobile devices through the end of 2013.

“We believe that the health care system is desperately in need of improvement,” said Robert Mead, the senior vice president of marketing, product and communications at Aetna. Mr. Mead cited a report by the Institute of Medicine that tallied more than $760 billion in health care “waste” created annually as a result of consumer fraud, unnecessary procedures and excessive administrative costs.

The campaign was created by OgilvyOne in New York and is an extension of a consumer campaign called “What's Your Healthy?” that Aetna began earlier this year. Both “What's Your Healthy?” and “Our Healthy” are part of a $50 million advertising and marketing strategy for the company.

“If you're a consumer, you don't know what things cost,” Mr. Mead said. “You don't know what things are worth. You don't always know how to get the most value out of the health system. We have to bring everybody to the table.”

Mr. Mead said the campaign also stressed the need for health care providers to shift to a model known as “accountable care,” which shifts their reimbursement models for health care professionals from being paid for the volume of services they perform to being paid based on the outcomes of patient care. Accountable care systems are usually linked to technologies that help health care providers measure performance and manage patient data. Aetna has 27 accountable health care agreements with hospitals and other health care providers around the country.

A video for the “Our Healthy” campaign features Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, explaining the company's goals. “Unless you fix that health care system, you cannot fix the economy,” Mr. Bertolini said in the video. “If we fix just 20 percent of it, we could pay for the Affordable Care Act. We could insure everyone without increasing taxes.”

Like other insurance companies, Aetna has over the last few years been ramping up its technical products and services. It created Healthagen, a division of the company that sells health technology services to consumers and providers, like a mobile application that helps patients assess their symptoms and find doctors.

“The fee-for-service model is broken,” Mr. Mead said. “The Affordable Care Act encourages the system to move to accountable care,” he added. “The challenge with that is that doctors and hospitals need technology and support to make that work.”

But more technology and more data may not solve the problem of waste in health care, said Robert S. Huckman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty co-chairman of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Initiative. “When you're talking about having to manage waste in the system, most would agree that a lack of coordination rests at the heart of a lot of it,” he said. “Data without an educated way of querying that data is not helpful. It is a start.”

While insurance companies like Aetna have access to vast amounts of patient data that could be used to manage costs, according to Mr. Huckman, the economic impact of even widely adopted technologies like electronic health records is still unclear. “Within providers and within a hospital, the electronic records have made greater inroads. But the question of moving toward greater coordination and greater interoperability is an issue we are still grappling with.”

The cost of health care, however, is something everyone can agree is too high, Mr. Huckman said: “I think the cost issue is most salient right now for most Americans. It hits you front and center when you look at some of the prices.” He noted how costs could vary widely depending on where a person lived and who their insurer was. “It shouldn't vary that much,” Mr. Huckman said. “The cost of a product on Amazon is the same no matter where I buy it from. It does defy a little bit of explanation.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers .

CBS Returns, Triumphant, to Cable Box

CBS and Time Warner Cable ended their protracted contract dispute Monday evening with CBS winning not only a significant financial increase for its programming, but also its stake in the digital future.

Tennis fans watch CBS broadcast from the United States Open on Saturday. CBS was unavailable to millions for a month.

The agreement between the two sides restored the CBS network and its related channels, including Showtime, to millions of cable subscribers largely in three major cities: New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. The outcome underscored the leverage that the owners of important television content, especially sports like N.F.L. football, retain over distributors like cable systems. The looming National Football League season, which starts this week, includes key games every week on CBS.

“It was hugely important,” an executive involved in the negotiation said Monday night. (The executive asked not to be identified because the participants agreed not to offer details on the agreement beyond the official announcement.) Indeed, Time Warner Cable executives had said earlier that a reason the company decided to remove the CBS stations in early August was because of the recognition that it would lose leverage the closer it got to the N.F.L. season.

David Bank, a media analyst for RBC Capital Markets said, “With the content, especially the N.F.L. and CBS being the No. 1 network in the ratings, you just have to believe they are going to win every time.”

The two sides did not release any specific information on the terms of the agreement. They had battled for exactly a month over an increase in fees CBS was seeking for the right to retransmit CBS stations in the three major cities and some other locations on Time Warner Cable systems. Another crucial issue was whether CBS would retain the digital rights to its content, which it wanted to sell to Web-based distributors like Netflix and Amazon.

Executives on both sides acknowledged early in the talks that CBS was seeking an increase to about $2 per subscriber, up from about $1. Separate statements from the chief executives of each company indicated that the outcome apparently tipped heavily toward CBS. Its president, Leslie Moonves, said in a memo to the company staff that the network had secured virtually all of what it was seeking.

“We are receiving fair compensation for CBS content,” Mr. Moonves said. He specifically included not only additional fees for CBS content, but also the retention of the digital rights.

Glenn A. Britt, Time Warner Cable's chairman and chief executive, conceded that “we certainly didn't get everything we wanted.”

CBS did make “some minor concessions” to get the deal settled, the executive involved in the negotiation said. The talks extended until 3 a.m. Monday.

In his statement, Mr. Britt said Time Warner Cable ultimately “ended up in a much better place than when we started,” though he did not specify how. He also again pushed for some kind of change in the rule that granted networks the rights to compensation from cable companies for their programming

“The rules are woefully out of date, are the primary reason cable bills are rising,” Mr. Britt said. “We sincerely hope that policy makers heed that call and take action to prevent these unfortunate blackouts soon.”

Time Warner Cable pressed throughout the monthlong impasse after it removed CBS's stations from its systems for some form of government intervention, from either the Federal Communications Commission or Congress, but none materialized.

While the acting F.C.C. chairwoman, Mignon L. Clyburn, said on Aug. 9 that she was distressed at the standoff and was “ready to consider appropriate action if this dispute continues,” it continued for another three weeks without her intervening. Several media analysts said early in the dispute that the commission's options were limited because the right of a station owner to seek retransmission compensation was granted in a law passed by Congress in 1992.

Monday evening, Ms. Clyburn issued a statement saying: “I am pleased CBS and Time Warner Cable have resolved their retransmission consent negotiations, which for too long have deprived millions of consumers of access to CBS programming. At the end of the day, media companies should accept shared responsibility for putting their audience's interests above other interests and do all they can to avoid these kinds of disputes in the future.”

Both sides hurled accusations during the standoff. CBS executives said Time Warner Cable removed their stations unnecessarily (including Showtime, which requires a separate fee from subscribers) and negotiated in a dysfunctional manner, and Time Warner Cable accused CBS of making exorbitant demands and performing a disservice to all Time Warner Cable subscribers by blocking the CBS.com Web site. But the settlement was ultimately a financial arrangement between two partners, one of which had content the other needed to satisfy its customers.

Mr. Bank said that, if anything, the deal may make it easier for networks to press cable and other distributors like satellite systems to squeeze out more favorable fees, without all the noise and recriminations this dispute inspired. CBS quietly renegotiated a deal with the FiOS bundled Internet phone and television service owned by Verizon in the midst of its conflict with Time Warner Cable.

“I think the Verizon deal happening when it did was not helpful to Time Warner,” Mr. Bank said. “It was probably really damaging.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: CBS Returns, Triumphant, To Cable Box .

‘Sesame Street’ Widens Its Focus

Kassie Bracken/The New York Times

‘Sesame’ Science: In a Sesame Workshop lab, preschoolers play physics and engineering games with Grover and Elmo. It’s the newest effort in a mission to teach science concepts to children. But is it working?

On “Sesame Street,” a distressed cow has a big problem. She made it up the stairs to the beauty parlor but now, her bouffant piled high, she’s stuck. Cows can go up stairs, she moans, but not down.

Murray Monster, shown here attending Robo Fun School, appears in science-focused segments with children.

Enter Super Grover 2.0. Out from his bottomless “utility sock” comes an enormous ramp, which, as the cow cheerily notes before clomping on down, is “a sloping surface that goes from high to low.”

Simple ABCs and 123s? So old school. In the last four years, “Sesame Street” has set itself a much larger goal: teaching nature, math, science and engineering concepts and problem-solving to a preschool audience â€" with topics like how a pulley works or how to go about investigating what’s making Mr. Snuffleupagus sneeze.

The content is wrapped in the traditional silliness; these are still Muppets. But the more sophisticated programming, on a show that frequently draws an audience even younger than the 3- to-5-year-olds it targets, raises a question: Is there any evidence that it is doing anything more than making PBS and parents feel good?

Officials at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that produces the show, believe the new approach has succeeded in introducing children â€" at least, the target-age audience â€" to scientific ideas and methods.

“This is working,” said Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president, curriculum and content. Still, they acknowledge there are challenges in measuring a young child’s scientific understanding, and experts are only just beginning to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Each new season of “Sesame Street” starts with a curriculum, drawn up by educational consultants and a research staff, laying out concepts and ideas to be taught. The show’s writers incorporate these into scripts acted out by the beloved Muppets. The science curriculum began in 2009 with new programming that tried to capitalize on children’s natural interest in the world around them, an effort inspired by Richard Louv’s 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder,” Dr. Truglio said.

Bigger words, like “pollinate,” “hibernate” and “camouflage” were added to the “Word on the Street” rotation. In one episode, Jimmy Fallon played a “wild nature survivor guy,” who found water in leaves and shunned a coat in favor of warm feathers.

After the program’s educational consultants requested more emphasis on urging children to investigate, as opposed to simply explore, the show introduced the “Super Grover 2.0” segments. A blue Muppet known for confidently getting things wrong, Grover uses magnets, springs and “superpowers” of investigation, observation and reporting to solve problems through trial and error. Before settling on a ramp for the stuck cow, for instance, he tries a trampoline.

Elsewhere on the show, Murray Monster conducts mini-experiments on the streets of New York with children, discovering what bridge design holds the most weight and how a boat’s shape helps it float. Last season, Elmo began starring in a daily musical of his imagination that sneakily incorporates math; in “Guacamole,” he quizzes the “Rhombus of Recipes” and adds up the avocados on two trees.

On Sept. 24, the material â€" as well as new videos, online and mobile games, and parent and teacher resources â€" will find a new home online when Sesame Workshop unveils a hub on the “Sesame Street” Web site called “Little Discoverers: Big Fun With Science, Math and More.” In one game, little fingers manipulate a virtual spring to launch pieces of trash into Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, a “Sesame Street” version of “Angry Birds.”

“Sesame Street” is just one of many television programs trying to teach math and science to preschoolers. Even young children can learn basic scientific concepts, experts in educational development say. Most children are already curious about everything from weather patterns to what sinks and floats in the bath.

“They actually are already thinking about these things,” said Kimberly Brenneman, assistant research professor at Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research and an education adviser for PBS’s “Sid the Science Kid.” Educators, she said, can “create a show that is likely to meet kids where they are, and go a little further.”

Results of two studies with nearly 600 children conducted by the Workshop “demonstrate that children can learn sophisticated vocabulary and valuable science concepts from ‘Sesame Street,’ ” according to a presentation by Dr. Truglio and her colleagues at the International Communications Association in May 2011.

A just-completed third study with 337 children confirmed the results, said Jennifer Kotler, the Workshop’s vice president for research and evaluation. Ms. Kotler’s team tested elements of the show’s programming with children in low- and middle-income day care centers. Through one-on-one interviews, the researchers assessed what the children knew before watching the programming and what they retained afterward.

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2013, on page D8 of the National edition with the headline: ‘Sesame Street’ Widens Its Focus.

Advertising: With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers

With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers

AS the country marches toward a new health insurance system, insurance companies have spent millions on consumer advertising to position themselves as health care companies.

But because a majority of Americans are insured through their employers, the insurance companies have to reach several audiences. Speaking to human resources professionals, health care providers and policy makers is still an important part of many insurance companies’ marketing plans.

Aetna, one of the largest of the companies, will introduce a new campaign on Tuesday aimed at those groups. It will highlight the company’s goal of cutting billions of dollars of expenditures through so-called Big Data, electronic health records and other technologies as well as encouraging better coordination among health care providers. The campaign, called “Our Healthy,” will run online, in print and on mobile devices through the end of 2013.

“We believe that the health care system is desperately in need of improvement,” said Robert Mead, the senior vice president of marketing, product and communications at Aetna. Mr. Mead cited a report by the Institute of Medicine that tallied more than $760 billion in health care “waste” created annually as a result of consumer fraud, unnecessary procedures and excessive administrative costs.

The campaign was created by OgilvyOne in New York and is an extension of a consumer campaign called “What’s Your Healthy?” that Aetna began earlier this year. Both “What’s Your Healthy?” and “Our Healthy” are part of a $50 million advertising and marketing strategy for the company.

“If you’re a consumer, you don’t know what things cost,” Mr. Mead said. “You don’t know what things are worth. You don’t always know how to get the most value out of the health system. We have to bring everybody to the table.”

Mr. Mead said the campaign also stressed the need for health care providers to shift to a model known as “accountable care,” which shifts their reimbursement models for health care professionals from being paid for the volume of services they perform to being paid based on the outcomes of patient care. Accountable care systems are usually linked to technologies that help health care providers measure performance and manage patient data. Aetna has 27 accountable health care agreements with hospitals and other health care providers around the country.

A video for the “Our Healthy” campaign features Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, explaining the company’s goals. “Unless you fix that health care system, you cannot fix the economy,” Mr. Bertolini said in the video. “If we fix just 20 percent of it, we could pay for the Affordable Care Act. We could insure everyone without increasing taxes.”

Like other insurance companies, Aetna has over the last few years been ramping up its technical products and services. It created Healthagen, a division of the company that sells health technology services to consumers and providers, like a mobile application that helps patients assess their symptoms and find doctors.

“The fee-for-service model is broken,” Mr. Mead said. “The Affordable Care Act encourages the system to move to accountable care,” he added. “The challenge with that is that doctors and hospitals need technology and support to make that work.”

But more technology and more data may not solve the problem of waste in health care, said Robert S. Huckman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty co-chairman of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Initiative. “When you’re talking about having to manage waste in the system, most would agree that a lack of coordination rests at the heart of a lot of it,” he said. “Data without an educated way of querying that data is not helpful. It is a start.”

While insurance companies like Aetna have access to vast amounts of patient data that could be used to manage costs, according to Mr. Huckman, the economic impact of even widely adopted technologies like electronic health records is still unclear. “Within providers and within a hospital, the electronic records have made greater inroads. But the question of moving toward greater coordination and greater interoperability is an issue we are still grappling with.”

The cost of health care, however, is something everyone can agree is too high, Mr. Huckman said: “I think the cost issue is most salient right now for most Americans. It hits you front and center when you look at some of the prices.” He noted how costs could vary widely depending on where a person lived and who their insurer was. “It shouldn’t vary that much,” Mr. Huckman said. “The cost of a product on Amazon is the same no matter where I buy it from. It does defy a little bit of explanation.”

Bertlesmann in Joint Venture to Release New Recordings by Established Artists

Bertelsmann in Joint Venture to Release New Recordings by Established Artists

Bertelsmann, the German media giant, has expanded its recent efforts to return to the music business through a $150 million deal with Primary Wave Music, an American company that handles music publishing rights, artist management and marketing, the companies plan to announce on Tuesday.

In the deal, signed over the weekend, BMG Rights Management, Bertelsmann’s music arm, will buy the bulk of Primary Wave’s publishing assets, including rights to songs by Hall & Oates, Nirvana, Aerosmith and Earth, Wind & Fire. The companies will also form a venture, BMG/Primary Wave Artist Services, to release and market new recordings by established acts.

“This strategic alliance with Primary Wave, one of the most respected independents in the business, gives us control of some of the greatest copyrights in popular music in one stroke, while also strengthening our marketing resources in promoting new recordings,” Hartwig Masuch, BMG’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Founded in 2008, BMG Rights Management was Bertelsmann’s fresh start in the business after the company sold most of its music assets over the previous years to Sony and Universal. The new BMG focused on music publishing rights, which cover songwriting and composition. It built a catalog of more than one million songs, making it one of the largest publishers in the world.

In March, Bertelsmann bought out its partner in BMG, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, in a deal that valued the music company at $1.4 billion and signaled its eagerness to return to music full throttle.

Primary Wave, which is based in New York, started in 2006 when the company paid $50 million for half the publishing rights of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana. Its publishing catalog has grown since then, but the company has also expanded into artist management, branding and television. Among its most successful acts is the singer CeeLo Green, who is a judge on the NBC talent show “The Voice” and has made product endorsement deals.

As part of the deal with BMG, Primary Wave will be the marketing agent for the songs it is selling, and will retain a small number of publishing assets, including songs by Def Leppard. Primary Wave, which recently raised $125 million in financing from Credit Suisse and SunTrust Bank, will also pay off $90 million in debt in conjunction with the BMG deal.

BMG/Primary Wave Artist Services, the new venture, will release new recordings, with Primary Wave doing marketing and promotion and BMG handling royalty accounting and contracts, Lawrence Mestel, chief executive of Primary Wave, said in an interview on Monday. The label will concentrate on artists who have already built followings, to capitalize on their existing popularity and avoid the risk of trying to break in new acts.

“The signing and marketing of new and developing artists is a very bad business,” Mr. Mestel said. “But the signing and marketing of stars and artists with a track record is a good business.”

CBS and Time Warner Cable End Contract Dispute

CBS and Time Warner Cable ended their protracted contract dispute Monday evening with the announcement of an agreement that restored CBS and its related channels, like Showtime, to millions of cable subscribers largely in three major cities, New York, Los Angeles and Dallas.

The two sides did not release any specific information on the terms. They had battled for exactly a month over an increase in fees CBS was seeking for the right to retransmit CBS stations in those cities and some other locations on Time Warner Cable systems. Another key issue was whether CBS would retain some digital rights that it wants to sell to Web-based distributors like Netflix and Amazon.

In a memo to the CBS staff, the corporation president, Leslie Moonves, said, “The final agreements with Time Warner Cable deliver to us all the value and terms that we sought in these discussions. We are receiving fair compensation for CBS content and we also have the ability to monetize our content going forward on all the new, developing platforms that are right now transforming the way people watch television.”

Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement: “We’re pleased to be able to restore CBS programming for our customers, and appreciate their patience and loyalty throughout the dispute. As in all of our negotiations, we wanted to hold down costs and retain our ability to deliver a great video experience for our customers. While we certainly didn’t get everything we wanted, ultimately we ended up in a much better place than when we started.”

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Advertising: E-Cigarette Makers\' Ads Echo Tobacco\'s Heyday

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Common Sense: Long Odds for Authors Newly Published

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New Ad Organization to Promote Cross-Cultural Marketing

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For News From Syrian Battleground, a Reliance on Social Media

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Cumulus Media Will Buy a Radio Syndicator

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The TV Watch: ‘Spiral\' and 3 Other French Shows Worth Seeking Out

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Matthew Shear, Book Publisher, Dies at 57

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U.S. Open Fans Affected by Coverage Blackout Have Options

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News Corp.'s Tight Grip on Australia's Papers Shapes Its Politics

SYDNEY, Australia - A lot has happened since Col Allan, the editor in chief of The New York Post, returned to Sydney to provide “extra editorial leadership” for Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspapers.

Rupert Murdoch, left, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Murdoch papers have had a central role in the race between Mr. Rudd, left, and Tony Abbott.

Since then, the chief executive of News Corporation Australia has resigned, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was shown on the cover of Sydney's leading tabloid in a Nazi uniform and the ruling Labor Party earned bipartisan jeers for accusing Mr. Murdoch of plotting to subvert the election.

It has been a busy three weeks.

News Corporation is the largest newspaper publisher in Australia, with a total audited circulation of 17.3 million newspapers, according to company figures - a 59 percent market share. (Its next closest competitor, Fairfax Media, had total audited distribution of 6.3 million papers, for 22 percent of the market.) Given the reach of News Corporation papers - particularly The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the flagship paper, The Australian - they are often credited with having an outsize role in the country's politics.

They have been front and center in the current national election pitting Mr. Rudd and the Labor Party against the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott. The papers have run a string of scathing front-page editorials since Mr. Rudd called for elections last month. The decision to portray Mr. Rudd on the front page of The Daily Telegraph as Colonel Klink from the 1965-71 television comedy “Hogan's Heroes,” sporting a Nazi uniform and a monocle, raised eyebrows and led Mr. Rudd to publicly call out Mr. Murdoch over the coverage.

Mr. Murdoch has made it clear, Mr. Rudd told reporters last month, “that he doesn't really like us, and would like to give us the old heave-ho,” adding that “I'm sure he sees it with crystal-clear clarity all the way from the United States.”

Although several Murdoch papers endorsed Mr. Rudd during his first successful run for the leadership in 2007, they quickly soured on his positions toward big business, like a proposed tax on mining profits and an emissions trading plan. The company was seen as instrumental in the media campaign that saw him ousted in a 2010 party coup amid record low approval ratings. Mr. Rudd returned to government in June after upheaval in the Labor Party.

One of the Labor government's plans calls for a National Broadband Network that would deliver high-speed Internet access to wide swathes of the country, a service that would broadly compete with News Corporation's subscription TV service, Foxtel, which remains the company's most profitable Australian venture.

Polling data from a number of leading firms suggests that Mr. Rudd is trailing Mr. Abbott's opposition Liberal-National coalition in the contest by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin.

Jonathan Holmes, a prominent media commentator on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, says that the kind of tabloid treatment given to Mr. Rudd and the election has a greater impact because a single company's papers are so dominant. They can effectively become, he said, a “political battering ram.”

“Behavior that would be completely O.K. in a genuinely pluralistic media environment is very much less O.K. in a market where you have such a dominant position,” he said in an interview.

But the politics are not restricted to the front pages of News Corporation's papers. Less than two weeks after Mr. Allan arrived, Kim Williams, who was a senior executive at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Australian Film Commission before joining News Corporation more than a decade ago, resigned from his position as the company's Australia chief executive after just 18 months.

In a statement, Robert Thomson, the global chief executive, said that “Kim feels now is the right moment to leave the company, which he has served for two decades, following the successful implementation of the first stage of News Corp. Australia's strategy to drive integration and improve efficiency, to invest in its editorial products and publishing system, and secure a path of growth in a multiplatform world.”

Mr. Williams was widely seen as a smart executive but one whose emphasis on data put him at odds with the brash, tabloid style of Australia's papers. “They're all running around saying, ‘This is a fantastic victory, we've saved newspapers,' ” said a onetime News Corporation employee speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing former bosses. (News Corporation is so dominant among Australia's newspapers that even some media analysts decline to speak publicly about the company.)

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: News Corp.'s Tight Grip on Australia's Papers Shapes Its Politics.

Huge Summer for Hollywood, but With Few Blockbusters

Peter Mountain/Walt Disney Pictures

The Lone Ranger,” with Armie Hammer, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, was the summer's top bomb. Disney expects a write-down of $160 million to $190 million on the film.

LOS ANGELES - Here in Hollywood, the land of false-front movie sets and business-has-never-been-better studio spin doctors, summer ticket sales are being summed up with a single word: blockbuster.

“Turbo” the animated snail was squished, taking in $80 million at North American theaters - one of the smallest totals in DreamWorks Animation history.

Ticket revenue in North America for the period between the first weekend in May and Labor Day totaled $4.71 billion, a 10.2 percent increase over the same period last year, according to analyst projections. Attendance rose 6.6 percent, to about 573 million. Higher ticket prices contributed to the rest of the growth.

But behind that rosy picture lurk some darker realities.

Ticket sales rose in part because Hollywood crammed an unusually large number of big-budget movies into the summer, a period that typically accounts for 40 percent of box office revenue. Studios released 23 films that cost $75 million and up (sometimes way up), 53 percent more than in the same period last year.

The audience fragmented as a result, leaving films like “The Wolverine” and “The Hangover Part III” wobbling when they should have been slam dunks.

“Turbo” the animated snail was squished, taking in $80 million at North American theaters - one of the smallest totals in DreamWorks Animation history. (Only the unfortunately titled “Flushed Away” from 2006 did worse.)

“We're very pleased with the overall strength of the summer,” said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, “but there was almost too much product. Some of these individual movies would have made more money if studios had spread them out a little more.”

Mr. Fithian noted that the $4.71 billion in total summer ticket sales represents a new high-water mark for the industry, not accounting for inflation, and the growth comes after several years of largely flat sales or declines.

It is not surprising that more films sold more overall tickets, but the total does demonstrate a resilience for cinema as competition for consumer attention continues to spike.

“To keep the exhibition business alive, we have to give people a darn good reason to put down all their electronics and get in their cars and get into theaters, and this summer we did it,” said Nikki Rocco, president of distribution at Universal Pictures, which printed money with “Despicable Me 2” and “Fast & Furious 6,” both of which took in roughly $800 million worldwide.

Still, appearances can be deceiving. “Pacific Rim,” for instance, has taken in more than $400 million worldwide - no small feat. The picture's price tag, however, made it an everyone-or-nothing enterprise. Legendary Entertainment and Warner Brothers spent about $330 million to make and market the film, which could end its run in the red since theater owners take roughly 50 percent of ticket revenue.

With the notable exception of Paramount, which released just two films, “Star Trek Into Darkness” and the surprisingly successful “World War Z,” every studio suffered at least one major dud. In many cases, big hits were offset by big flops.

Disney, for instance, had the summer's No. 1 movie in “Iron Man 3,” which took in $408.6 million in North America, for a global total of $1.2 billion. Disney's Pixar also scored with “Monsters University,” a prequel that generated more than $700 million in global ticket sales.

But Disney also had the summer's No. 1 box office bomb: “The Lone Ranger,” which cost at least $375 million to make and market, and has taken in about $232 million worldwide. After theater owners take their cut, Disney is looking at a write-down of $160 million to $190 million on the film.

Higher-priced 3-D tickets took another tumble, at least in the United States and Canada, as more consumers decided the visual gimmick was not worth paying a $2 to $5 premium per ticket. Family films fared the worst - those glasses don't fit little faces very well - with “Turbo” setting a new industry low for the format, according to analysts: 3-D screenings accounted for only 25 percent of its opening-weekend results. (Last summer's low was 35 percent.)

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lost in the Summer Crowds.

Arts, Briefly: Another Judge for ‘American Idol\'

Another Judge for ‘American Idol'

After appearing on Fox's “American Idol” a number of times as a performer and mentor, Harry Connick Jr. will join Keith Urban and Jennifer Lopez on the judging panel for the show's 13th season, in January, according to The Hollywood Reporter. No announcement has been made by Fox, but Mr. Connick has apparently stepped in at the last minute to replace the producer and songwriter Dr. Luke, who dropped out because of a conflict with his imprint at Sony Music.

Harry Connick Jr.

The move is part of many changes for the program, both in front of and behind the camera, including the exit of three judges, Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Randy Jackson, and two executive producers, Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick. Three new producers have been hired, and Ms. Lopez is returning after one season away. Mike Darnell, the executive who supervised reality programming at Fox, also left the network in May.

Ratings for “Idol” have declined in recent years, but that singing competition still averaged 14.8 million total viewers during its 12th season.

A version of this brief appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Another Judge For ‘American Idol'.

The Media Equation: Campaign Journalism in the Age of Twitter

Campaign Journalism in the Age of Twitter

In Timothy Crouse's seminal campaign book, “The Boys on the Bus,” the crusty political reporters settle on the story that they will tell the world at the end of the day.

The candidate Mitt Romney on his campaign airplane last November, surrounded by young, digitally assimilated reporters.

For modern political reporters, the end of the day never arrives. There is no single narrative, only whatever is going on in the moment, often of little consequence, but always something that can be blogged, tweeted or filmed and turned into content.

In a study he did while at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard last spring, Peter Hamby, a political reporter at CNN, writes about the extent to which reporters in the bubble - on the bus, on the plane, at the rope line - have become “one giant, tweeting blob.”

Mr. Hamby is not some old geezer pining for the good old days. At 32, he is deeply immersed in the digital frontier of modern journalism - with a somewhat provocative presence on Twitter - and would never argue for going back to the good old days, which he and others say weren't all that good anyway.

But there are implications to the new world, some of which go beyond the hermetic confines of the campaign media bubble. Because of the relentlessness of the schedule, the limited access and the multiplatform demands, many of the boys and girls on the bus are in fact boys and girls. And the bus they ride is Twitter.

According to Mr. Hamby, Mitt Romney's campaign never came to terms with the new dynamic. Instead, his organization responded with a defensive crouch that fenced off the candidate from the very people he needed to reach.

“With Instagram and Twitter-primed iPhones, an ever more youthful press corps, and a journalistic reward structure in Washington that often prizes speed and scoops over context, campaigns are increasingly fearful of the reporters who cover them,” he writes in the report. (And sometimes the threat doesn't come from the credentialed press - the “47 percent” video that nearly tipped over the Romney campaign was shot by someone who was on the catering staff at a fund-raiser.)

Zeke Miller, the very talented reporter for BuzzFeed (now of Time) was 2 years old when Bill Clinton was first elected president, and 22 when he was tasked with covering Mr. Romney.

“I never thought that age and talent were mutually exclusive, and Zeke did a great job,” Mr. Hamby said in a phone call from South Carolina where he was doing some reporting for the 2016 presidential campaign (speaking of things that are out of control) as the governors and potential candidates Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal wheeled through. “But campaign reporters are incentivized for speed and feeding the beast,” he said.

The reporters and editors Mr. Hamby spoke to for his 95-page report said that the Romney campaign's decision to fence off its candidate and to staff its press effort with equally young people was a grievous tactical error. Because the staff on the bus or plane would not really confirm or deny anything, that left many idle hands that created much mischief. In an attempt to exercise total control over the message, the campaign lost all control in bits and pieces, so when things went wrong, as they did during Mr. Romney's European visit, they went very, very wrong.

In his report, Mr. Hamby wrote that the growing role of so-called embeds, or television reporters attached to the campaign, had infuriated the Romney staff. Previously restricted to support roles for broadcast and cable news networks, the young journalists were suddenly weaponized by Twitter, their own blogs and video posts. In his report, Mr. Hamby calls the embeds “anthropomorphic satellite trucks.”

“If I had to pick three words to characterize the embeds, it would be young, inexperienced and angry,” an unnamed Romney adviser told Mr. Hamby.

Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, told me, echoing remarks she had made to Mr. Hamby, that “the Romney campaign had a natural mistrust of the press, in part because he had seen his father savaged in the press decades ago.” She continued, “Beyond the mistrust, there was an outright hostility. They simply did not deal with reporters, and sometimes it was nasty, and I think they paid a price.”

And they often did so at a very high velocity. The death of the hallowed political reporter Jack Germond a few weeks ago served as a vivid reminder that the hallowed day story - a totemic representation of How It Was - has given way to a mosaic of posts on Twitter and blogs that form a running, constantly updated feed.

According to the report, the Obama campaign did a much better job of adapting to those realities than the Republican opponent. Rather than just waiting to see what bad tidings Twitter might bring, the campaign was often in the thick of things.

“A negative story or provocative Web video could fly from the desk of an Obama staffer to BuzzFeed and onto Twitter in a matter of minutes, generating precious clicks and shares along the way,” Mr. Hamby wrote in the report.

David Axelrod spent a fair amount of time as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign watching things blow up on Twitter and pushing back and promoting agendas there as well.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Campaign Journalism In the Age Of Twitter.

David Frost, Interviewer Who Got Nixon to Apologize for Watergate, Dies at 74

United Press International

David Frost with former President Richard M. Nixon, left, in San Clemente, Calif., on the first day of their interview sessions in 1977.

David Frost, the British broadcaster whose interviews of historic figures like Henry Kissinger, John Lennon and, most famously, Richard M. Nixon often made history in their own right, died on Saturday aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth, where he was scheduled to give a speech. He was 74.

Mr. Frost pictured in 2008 at the London premiere of the film “Frost/Nixon.”

The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

Mr. Frost's highly varied television career mirrored the growth of the medium, from the black-and-white TV of the 1960s to the cable news of today.

He knew how to make his guests “make news,” as the television industry saying goes, either through a sequence of incisive questions or carefully placed silences. He showcased both techniques during his penetrating series of interviews with President Nixon, broadcast in 1977, three years after Mr. Nixon was driven from office by the Watergate scandal, resigning in the face of certain impeachment.

Mr. Frost not only persuaded Mr. Nixon to end a self-imposed silence, he also extracted an apology from the former president to the American people.

The sessions, described as the most-watched political interviews in history, were recalled 30 years later in a play and a film, both named “Frost/Nixon.” In the film, Mr. Frost was portrayed by Michael Sheen and Mr. Nixon by Frank Langella.

Since 2006, Mr. Frost's television home had been Al Jazeera English, one of the BBC's main competitors overseas. Mr. Frost brought prestige to the news network, while it empowered him to conduct the kind of newsmaker interviews he most enjoyed.

“No matter who he was interviewing, he was committed to getting the very best out of the discussion, but always doing so by getting to know his guest, engaging with them and entering into a proper conversation,” Al Anstey, the managing director of Al Jazeera English, said by e-mail.

He was “always a true gentleman,” Mr. Anstey added, alluding to the charm that others said made Mr. Frost so successful in securing such a wide array of guests.

Among those guests in recent years were Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, the actor George Clooney and the tennis star Martina Navratilova. A new season of Mr. Frost's program, “The Frost Interview,” began in July with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The season was to continue through mid-September.

One of his first interviews for Al Jazeera made headlines when his guest, Tony Blair, agreed with Mr. Frost's assessment that the war in Iraq had, up until that point in 2006, “been pretty much of a disaster.” In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Blair said, “Being interviewed by him was always a pleasure, but also you knew that there would be multiple stories the next day arising from it.”

David Paradine Frost was born April 7, 1939, in Tenterden, England, to Mona and W. J. Paradine Frost. His father was a Methodist minister.

While a student, Mr. Frost edited both a student newspaper and a literary publication at Cambridge University, where he showed a knack for satire - something on which the BBC soon capitalized. In 1962, Mr. Frost became the host of “That Was the Week That Was,” a satirical look at the news on Saturday nights. While it lasted only two seasons in Britain, “TW3,” as it was known, was reborn briefly as a program on NBC, and it is remembered as a forerunner to “The Daily Show” and the “Weekend Update” segment on NBC's “Saturday Night Live.”

After “TW3,” Mr. Frost was the host of a succession of programs, from entertainment specials (“David Frost's Night Out in London”) to more intellectually stimulating talk shows. While most of these were televised in Britain, Mr. Frost crossed the Atlantic constantly; he once said he had lost count of the number of times he had flown on the Concorde.

He filled in for Johnny Carson twice in 1968, and was subsequently offered a syndicated talk show, which premiered on a patchwork of stations across the United States a year later. That series came to an end in 1972.

His most memorable work happened several years later, when his interview with Mr. Nixon was broadcast around the world. At one point Mr. Frost asked about Mr. Nixon's abuses of presidential power, prompting this answer: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

“Upon hearing that sentence, I could scarcely believe my ears,” Mr. Frost wrote in a 2007 book about the interview, published to coincide with the “Frost/Nixon” movie. Mr. Frost said his task then “was to keep him talking on this theme for as long as possible.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: David Frost, Interviewer Who Got Nixon to Apologize for Watergate, Dies at 74.