A Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in the Static

MPI/Getty Images

President Roosevelt delivering a fireside chat for AM radio.

WASHINGTON â€" Is anyone out there still listening?

Ajit Pai, the Republican on the F.C.C., called AM radio “the audible core of our national culture.”

The digital age is killing AM radio, an American institution that brought the nation fireside chats, Casey Kasem’s Top 40 and scratchy broadcasts of the World Series. Long surpassed by FM and more recently cast aside by satellite radio and Pandora, AM is now under siege from a new threat: rising interference from smartphones and consumer electronics that reduce many AM stations to little more than static. Its audience has sunk to historical lows.

But at least one man in Washington is tuning in.

Ajit Pai, the lone Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, is on a personal if quixotic quest to save AM. After a little more than a year in the job, he is urging the F.C.C. to undertake an overhaul of AM radio, which he calls “the audible core of our national culture.” He sees AM â€" largely the realm of local news, sports, conservative talk and religious broadcasters â€" as vital in emergencies and in rural areas.

“AM radio is localism, it is community,” Mr. Pai, 40, said in an interview.

AM’s longer wavelength means it can be heard at far greater distances and so in crises, he said, “AM radio is always going to be there.” As an example, he cited Fort Yukon, Alaska, where the AM station KZPA broadcasts inquiries about missing hunters and transmits flood alerts during the annual spring ice breakup.

“When the power goes out, when you can’t get a good cell signal, when the Internet goes down, people turn to battery-powered AM radios to get the information they need,” Mr. Pai said.

He admits to feelings of nostalgia. As the son of Indian immigrants growing up in small-town Parsons, Kan., he listened to his high school basketball team win a 1987 championship, he said. “I sat in my bedroom with my radio tuned into KLKC 1540,” he recalled. On boyhood family road trips across the wide Kansas plains, he said, AM radio “was a constant companion.”

But that was then. In 1978, when Mr. Pai was 5, half of all radio listening was on the AM dial. By 2011 AM listenership had fallen to 15 percent, or an average of 3.1 million people, according to a survey by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private investment firm. While the number of FM listeners has declined, too, they still averaged 18 million in 2011. (The figures are averages based on measuring listeners every 15 minutes.)

Although five of the top 10 radio stations in the country, as measured by advertising dollars, are AM â€" among them WCBS in New York and KFI in Los Angeles â€" the wealth drops rapidly after that. In 1970 AM accounted for 63 percent of broadcast radio stations, but now it accounts for 21 percent, or 4,900 outlets, according to Arbitron. FM accounts for 44 percent, or 10,200 stations. About 35 percent of stations stream content online.

“With the audience goes the advertising revenues,” said Milford Smith, vice president for radio engineering at Greater Media, which owns 21 stations, three of them AM. “That makes for a double whammy.”

Nearly all English-language AM stations have given up playing music, and even a third of the 30 Major League Baseball teams now broadcast on FM. AM, however, remains the realm of conservative talk radio, including roughly 80 percent of the 600 radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh. Talk radio has helped keep AM alive.

“If it had to rely on music,” said Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, “AM radio would be dead.”

But why try to salvage AM? Critics say its decline is simply natural selection at work, and many now support converting the frequency for use by other wireless technologies. A big sign of AM’s weakness is that one hope for many of its stations may be channeling their broadcasts onto FM.

Not so fast, said Mr. Pai, who has been pushing the F.C.C.’s interim chairwoman, Mignon Clyburn, to put the revitalization of AM high on the agency’s agenda.

“I’m obviously bullish on next-generation technology,” Mr. Pai said. “But I certainly think there continues to be a place for broadcasting and for AM radio.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in the Static .

A Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in the Static

MPI/Getty Images

President Roosevelt delivering a fireside chat for AM radio.

WASHINGTON â€" Is anyone out there still listening?

Ajit Pai, the Republican on the F.C.C., called AM radio “the audible core of our national culture.”

The digital age is killing AM radio, an American institution that brought the nation fireside chats, Casey Kasem’s Top 40 and scratchy broadcasts of the World Series. Long surpassed by FM and more recently cast aside by satellite radio and Pandora, AM is now under siege from a new threat: rising interference from smartphones and consumer electronics that reduce many AM stations to little more than static. Its audience has sunk to historical lows.

But at least one man in Washington is tuning in.

Ajit Pai, the lone Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, is on a personal if quixotic quest to save AM. After a little more than a year in the job, he is urging the F.C.C. to undertake an overhaul of AM radio, which he calls “the audible core of our national culture.” He sees AM â€" largely the realm of local news, sports, conservative talk and religious broadcasters â€" as vital in emergencies and in rural areas.

“AM radio is localism, it is community,” Mr. Pai, 40, said in an interview.

AM’s longer wavelength means it can be heard at far greater distances and so in crises, he said, “AM radio is always going to be there.” As an example, he cited Fort Yukon, Alaska, where the AM station KZPA broadcasts inquiries about missing hunters and transmits flood alerts during the annual spring ice breakup.

“When the power goes out, when you can’t get a good cell signal, when the Internet goes down, people turn to battery-powered AM radios to get the information they need,” Mr. Pai said.

He admits to feelings of nostalgia. As the son of Indian immigrants growing up in small-town Parsons, Kan., he listened to his high school basketball team win a 1987 championship, he said. “I sat in my bedroom with my radio tuned into KLKC 1540,” he recalled. On boyhood family road trips across the wide Kansas plains, he said, AM radio “was a constant companion.”

But that was then. In 1978, when Mr. Pai was 5, half of all radio listening was on the AM dial. By 2011 AM listenership had fallen to 15 percent, or an average of 3.1 million people, according to a survey by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private investment firm. While the number of FM listeners has declined, too, they still averaged 18 million in 2011. (The figures are averages based on measuring listeners every 15 minutes.)

Although five of the top 10 radio stations in the country, as measured by advertising dollars, are AM â€" among them WCBS in New York and KFI in Los Angeles â€" the wealth drops rapidly after that. In 1970 AM accounted for 63 percent of broadcast radio stations, but now it accounts for 21 percent, or 4,900 outlets, according to Arbitron. FM accounts for 44 percent, or 10,200 stations. About 35 percent of stations stream content online.

“With the audience goes the advertising revenues,” said Milford Smith, vice president for radio engineering at Greater Media, which owns 21 stations, three of them AM. “That makes for a double whammy.”

Nearly all English-language AM stations have given up playing music, and even a third of the 30 Major League Baseball teams now broadcast on FM. AM, however, remains the realm of conservative talk radio, including roughly 80 percent of the 600 radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh. Talk radio has helped keep AM alive.

“If it had to rely on music,” said Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, “AM radio would be dead.”

But why try to salvage AM? Critics say its decline is simply natural selection at work, and many now support converting the frequency for use by other wireless technologies. A big sign of AM’s weakness is that one hope for many of its stations may be channeling their broadcasts onto FM.

Not so fast, said Mr. Pai, who has been pushing the F.C.C.’s interim chairwoman, Mignon Clyburn, to put the revitalization of AM high on the agency’s agenda.

“I’m obviously bullish on next-generation technology,” Mr. Pai said. “But I certainly think there continues to be a place for broadcasting and for AM radio.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in the Static .

The Media Equation: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

Nikki Loehr

The journalist Barrett Brown speaking in 2011 in New York.

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges â€" including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts â€" that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas â€" Mr. Brown lives in Dallas â€" are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link.

People Magazine to Offer New Subscription Deals

As magazines have scrambled to find new revenue sources, People has stuck with a model that has worked for nearly four decades: high-paying and loyal subscribers, now about 3.5 million, and advertising. Now the magazine is changing its subscription model, adding a tiered plan to what has long been considered the financial backbone of Time Inc.’s magazine empire.

Those subscribing to People’s V.I.P. package will receive gift boxes designed by the editors.

On Monday, the magazine is introducing four new subscription packages. It is trying to attract younger, tech-savvy celebrity fans with a $10 annual subscription to its new CelebFood and CelebWatch apps. Its current fan base, whose members pay about $112 for an annual print subscription, can pay the same amount for either a print or digital subscription or they can upgrade to a $132 package for both.

For its most devoted celebrity watchers, People is introducing a $200-a-year package that includes both print and digital subscriptions, access to new online material, a six-month gift subscription for a friend and intermittent gift boxes designed by the editors. The kickoff gift box includes designer note cards inspired by this season’s shirtdresses, an animal-print scarf influenced by the styles worn by Heidi Klum and vinyl nail wraps that give subscribers a glimpse at Rihanna’s style.

Larry Hackett, People’s managing editor, said it had to update its approach despite its profitability.

“We need to find change. We are not immune to what is going on in the magazine industry,” Mr. Hackett said. “We are upending our subscription model.”

While People has suffered declines in newsstand sales, it isn’t doing as badly as its rivals. Data tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media show that People’s newsstand sales fell 11.8 percent in the first half of 2013 compared with the year before, but its total circulation held steady at 3.5 million. People still generates the most revenue among the nation’s top 50 magazines, producing $1.4 billion in annual subscription and advertising revenue in 2012, according to data gathered by John Harrington, a magazine consultant. That is roughly equal to the combined revenue generated by four other Time Inc. titles, Real Simple, Time, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly.

“It leads in revenue in every aspect, whether it’s newsstand subscriptions or advertising,” Mr. Harrington said. “It dominates the publishing business.”

Still, Mr. Hackett said, because People’s subscription business remained stronger than newsstand sales, it made sense to nurture these more profitable relationships.

“You had to look and say, ‘O.K., how are we going to get other revenues?’ ” Mr. Hackett said.

In the coming months, more news organizations are expected to follow a similar path. Based on how People’s subscription model fares, Real Simple is expected to offer a more varied subscription model soon. The New York Times Company announced in April that it was working on plans to offer more customized subscriptions at lower prices for readers interested exclusively in specific content, like editorials or food coverage. The Times expects to introduce additional products in 2014, according to a spokeswoman, Eileen M. Murphy.

Mr. Hackett acknowledged that by asking readers to pay for new and arguably more expensive products, People had to rethink the kind of content it offered. Now, Mr. Hackett said, People will act “less like a magazine and more like a credit card” by offering rewards like gift boxes three times a year tied to the “World’s Most Beautiful” issue in the spring and to next year’s fall fashions. It will also offer subscribers monthly raffles that provide access to events, like standing on the red carpet at the Oscar award ceremony.

But People hasn’t strayed too far from its original idea. The magazine hired 20 new employees to expand its online material. During the Web site’s debut on Monday, readers will be able to get more details from People’s latest interview with Alec and Hilaria Baldwin about the birth of their new baby. The CelebFood app also is kicking off with 200 celebrity recipes, like Blake Lively’s chicken and leek pie.

The magazine’s executives hope the new offerings attract readers younger than its current subscribers, who have a median age of 44.6, according to the audience measurement company Gfk MRI.

But the one thing Mr. Hackett said would not change is the magazine’s writing style or overall approach to news. Mr. Hackett quoted Richard B. Stolley, People’s founding managing editor, from his first editor’s note in 1974 as a reason not to become snide like many celebrity titles.

“We hope never to be cruel or awe-struck or gushy,” Mr. Stolley wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2013, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: People Magazine to Offer New Subscription Deals .

To Recount the Financial Implosion, a Magazine Turns to Film

Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

Josh Tyrangiel of Bloomberg Businessweek going over an issue that accompanies the film.

There are a few surprises in the documentary “Hank: Five Years From the Brink, ” a new film about the former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. coming out on Thursday, five years after the financial meltdown on Wall Street.

A promotional poster of the documentary “Hank: Five Years From the Brink.”

We learn that after Mr. Paulson, known as Hank, left office, he found it “painful” that polls showed that the Troubled Asset Relief Program he put together to buy distressed assets was more unpopular than torture. Mr. Paulson also discloses that after the situation had been somewhat stabilized and Citibank suddenly began to wobble, his response was, “Holy moly, although I used a different word than that. How could this be happening?”

The biggest surprise may be who was behind the documentary: Bloomberg Businessweek. Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, approached Mr. Paulson and asked him to consider appearing in a film centered on the anniversary of the crisis and his role in trying to contain it. The magazine then approached Joe Berlinger, the Oscar-nominated director of “Brother’s Keeper,” “Crude” and the “Paradise Lost” series, to direct the project. And once those commitments were made, the magazine was able to sell the documentary to Netflix for exclusive distribution.

The documentary will have its premiere on Thursday at an event that will include a panel with Mr. Paulson and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York â€" his first appearance at an event for the magazine â€" and signals a coup for Businessweek.

Using news clips from that time and recollections from Mr. Paulson, the film tries to invoke the suspense and high anxiety of the summer and fall of 2008 when Lehman Brothers went out of business, Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch in a fire sale and the federal government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mr. Tyrangiel’s pursuit of Mr. Paulson began a year ago, when he took Mr. Paulson to lunch at BLT Steak. “I told him that the first draft of history closes after five years and this was an opportunity to be clear about why he did what he did and discuss the kind of emotions that he went through,” Mr. Tyrangiel said.

“I think that we have done a good job at the magazine of building up credibility, but we wanted to stretch that credibility into other forms of media,” he added.

Mr. Paulson wrote a book about the crisis in 2010, “On the Brink,” that was recently updated and reissued with a new prologue. He said he was initially doubtful about the film project.

“I had no intention of doing a documentary when Josh approached us and was very hesitant, but he was a good salesman,” he said. “I have been concerned that the passage of time would reduce the sense of urgency around reform.”

Eventually, though, he became convinced that a film might convey the story of that period in new and different ways.

Mr. Paulson said that other than his monotone speaking voice, which he makes fun of in the documentary, he was happy with Mr. Berlinger’s finished product. “I believe it does what it set out to do,” he said.

The film, which includes extensive interviews with Mr. Paulson’s wife, Wendy, will do little to satisfy Mr. Paulson’s critics, who believe that he propped up Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.

He did end up persuading one skeptic, Mr. Berlinger, the director, that the extraordinary measures he took were necessary.

“My last movie was ‘Crude,’ ” which was not exactly a pro-business movie,” said Mr. Berlinger, referring to his 2009 documentary about the battle over industrial pollution in the Amazon jungles. “I was very skeptical, but I came to believe that Hank was a national hero for his handling of the crisis.”

Mr. Berlinger said he was taken by the fact that Mr. Paulson got Congress to act not once, but twice, to save the financial system.

Mr. Tyrangiel said the deal with Netflix for the film was not indicative of a whole new line of business for Businessweek, but “the attention economy is so competitive and an anniversary has a way of focusing the mind.”

“By having Hank, who is an authentic guy, look into the camera and tell his story, we brought something significant to the anniversary,” he added.

The film’s premiere will be accompanied by an issue of the magazine that focuses exclusively on the anniversary. Daniel L. Doctoroff, the chief executive of Bloomberg, said the film “is not going to move the needle on the economics of the magazine, but we had a broader purpose.” He added, “The best way to tell a story is not the way that you have always told it and the film, and the partnership with Netflix, will help broaden our audience with business and financial influencers.”

In the film, Mr. Paulson acknowledges that some of the fixes, including further consolidation in the banking industry and the growth of government as the primary insurer of mortgages, may sow the seeds of the next crisis, which he sees as “unavoidable” in a free market. But the documentary did give Mr. Paulson the opportunity to strike back at the Wall Street banks that took bailout money, failed to make loans, but paid their leaders huge bonuses.

Near the end of the film, he said he was “infuriated” by the bonuses.

“Forgetting about whether they were legally entitled to them,” he said, “it just was such a graceless lack of self-awareness.”

Latest Overhaul of the MGM Studio Appears to Be a Moneymaker

LOS ANGELES â€" For much of the last decade, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been troubled by financial turmoil and infuriating production stops and starts, including a debacle in which Tom Cruise helped run its United Artists label.

“Skyfall,” with Daniel Craig as James Bond, took in $1.1 billion.

Is it possible, just maybe, that the studio finally has its act together? It certainly appears that way, even as some questions remain.

Shares of MGM Holdings’ thinly traded over-the-counter stock have risen 50 percent since April, to about $58.50. Revenue almost tripled in the last quarter, to $339 million, according to the company. Helped by repeated Standard & Poor’s upgrades over the last three years, MGM now has access to revolving lines of credit totaling $750 million.

“The company was on death’s doorstep and now has effectively no debt and is generating a ton of cash,” said Kevin Ulrich, co-founder of Anchorage Capital Group, a New York investment firm that is MGM’s largest single owner, with a 30 percent stake. “That’s an outstanding turnaround.”

Most important, new movies are flowing from the studio. A remake of “Carrie” arrives on Oct. 18, while the blockbuster “Hobbit” series returns in December. “RoboCop,” “22 Jump Street” and “Hercules” come next year. MGM’s James Bond franchise returns in 2015 and remakes of “Ben-Hur” and “Poltergeist” are in the works.

MGM’s television business â€" a vital part of its growth strategy â€" is also showing momentum. “Vikings” had its debut on the History channel and was an instant hit. “Teen Wolf” continues on MTV, while “Paternity Court” arrives in syndication on Sept. 23 and a series adapted from “Fargo” chugs toward FX.

“The MGM name had become pretty toxic, both in the financial community and the creative one, and that’s certainly not the case anymore,” Gary Barber, MGM’s chief executive, said last week in a wide-ranging interview. He added, “I feel that MGM is fully rehabilitated.”

Hollywood is not entirely convinced. Some movie executives dismiss the studio as little more than a 4,000-movie library that has already been aggressively exploited on DVD and in cable reruns. The studio’s library generated about $558 million in revenue in 2007, when the DVD market was strong. The total had plunged to $228 million by 2010.

MGM has in recent years declined to disclose how much revenue its stockpile of old films generates, leading to suspicion that sales are weak. All Mr. Barber will say is that library revenue is “substantial.”

MGM has blown the comeback trumpets before only to have its owners cash out and leave the studio reeling anew. The billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian, for instance, bought and sold the studio three times between 1969 and 2005. By that measure, the studio’s long-term future is far from clear. In addition to Anchorage, shareholders include hedge funds like Highland Capital Management and Davidson Kempner. Many initially bought MGM debt, which was converted to equity in 2010 as part of a prepackaged bankruptcy. Hedge funds are not known as patient caretakers.

“It’s one thing to say the company is doing great, but it’s another thing to successfully sell out a position,” said Steven Azarbad, co-founder of Maglan Capital, a small hedge fund that owns about 1 percent of MGM. “This thing should either be sold or I.P.O.’d. I’d like to see that happen by the end of the year.”

Selling is a potential option. (Lions Gate Entertainment is seen as the likeliest bidder.) MGM could also potentially expand through an acquisition of its own. As for an initial public offering, the studio last year filed a registration statement for one, but never moved forward with it. Because the studio has since grown, that filing is void.

“An I.P.O. will continue to be an opportunity,” Mr. Barber said. “We’re carefully evaluating all of our options. Quite frankly, we don’t need that capital right now.”

Are his hedge fund shareholders restless? “No, no, no,” Mr. Barber said. “The board of directors is strongly supportive of the business strategy we have developed â€" and that’s not for tomorrow but for long-term value growth. That’s a critical difference from the past.”

Mr. Ulrich, of Anchorage, said, “As long as the return profile remains very strong we will remain a key shareholder.” Using standard financial comparisons, Anchorage and others believe that MGM is sharply undervalued compared to other independent studios like DreamWorks Animation and Lions Gate.

Advertising: A Reinvented Condé Nast Traveler Sets a New Course

A Reinvented Condé Nast Traveler Sets a New Course

A TRAVEL magazine is using a campaign to signal an embarkation on a trip of its own to a land that is becoming increasingly popular among print publications, Reinventionstan.

A $1.5 million marketing campaign for the revamped Condé Nast Traveler carries the theme “I am a Traveler.”

The campaign, for Condé Nast Traveler, part of the Condé Nast division of Advance Publications, carries the theme “I am a Traveler” with a subtheme, “Every Journey Begins Here.” The new theme will be personified by achievers in fields like fashion, food, design and the arts, offering confident assertions in this vein: “Travel sparks my imagination. I like to picture the world as a home â€" London is the living room and Rio is the bedroom.”

The campaign, which is being created internally, is part of a revamping of the Condé Nast Traveler brand that includes a changing of the guard atop the business and newsroom sides of the magazine. The budget for the campaign, in print and social media, is estimated at $1.5 million, which includes the value of the ad space in the magazine’s own pages and the pages of Condé Nast siblings that include Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, The New Yorker and Wired.

Condé Nast Traveler was introduced in 1987 as a self-proclaimed alternative to travel publications that played up fluff and fantasy at the expense of providing well-traveled, well-heeled readers with realistic information about potential destinations. The approach was embodied by a theme, “Truth in Travel,” which has continued to appear on the magazine’s cover each month.

“Truth in Travel” remains “a valuable part of the brand,” said William Wackermann, who in June left the top business-side post at Glamour, another Condé Nast magazine, to become executive vice president and publishing director at Condé Nast Traveler. The theme is, however, emblematic of what he called “the old model, when the travel expert was the editor of the magazine and there was one point of view, of the expert.”

“Today, I don’t think it’s one viewpoint because there are so many experts, especially the travelers themselves,” Mr. Wackermann said, many of them “tastemakers like designers, stylists, chefs” who look for ideas and advice online as well as in print.

“I think our job is to be a filter,” he added. “That doesn’t mean we abandon any of our heritage; we just expand our lens.”

When asked whether the “Truth in Travel” philosophy would be retained as the magazine is made over, Mr. Wackermann deferred to Pilar Guzmán, who last month was named editor in chief. “As Pilar spends more time at the brand, she’ll be discussing her vision of what the magazine should be,” he said.

Audrey Siegel, president at TargetCast TCM in New York, part of the Maxxcom Global Media unit of MDC Partners, said she liked “the new positioning because it’s smart, it’s differentiating.”

“Certainly, in today’s market, when it comes to ‘Truth in Travel,’ that information can be obtained on many, many Web sites, all the reviews and ratings systems,” said Ms. Siegel, whose agency handles media services for travel marketers like Expedia and Hotels.com. “It’s not ownable; you don’t need Condé Nast Traveler for that.”

By contrast, “it’s not a bad idea to raise the level of interest in fine travel, and I think it will be believable from Condé Nast, as they do for fine dining and fine fashion,” she added.

However, “to be successful,” Ms. Siegel said, “it has to be aspirational but achievable and coupled with an effective Web experience where the reader can find e-commerce or a ‘travel concierge.’ ”

Ms. Siegel pointed to the revisions Condé Nast had made at Bon Appétit, among them a new publisher, a new editor in chief and a refocusing that “took the best of the Bon Appétit positioning, offering recipes you’d actually cook and adding coverage of a lifestyle you might aspire to.”

Mr. Wackermann also referred to the changes at Bon Appétit, which began when he was its publishing director. “I can only hope we’ll be as successful as Pam and Adam,” he said, referring to Pamela Drucker Mann, vice president and publisher, and Adam Rapoport, editor in chief. “I’m excited to work with Pilar to reimagine what Condé Nast Traveler can look like.”

The first four people declaring, “I am a Traveler” in the campaign are the fashion designer Nicholas Kunz, the photographer Anne Menke, the chef Seamus Mullen and the interior designer Miles Redd. They all appear with various kinds of balloons, symbolizing the delightful experiences that await travelers.

In addition to appearing in the campaign, Ms. Menke photographed it, making her ad, on a beach in Sayulita, Mexico, perhaps the year’s most stylish selfie.

“This is the first time I ever did that,” Ms. Menke said. “I’m really the worst subject.” A donation that Condé Nast made to the Costa Verde International School, which she and her husband founded, helped overcome her dislike of being in front of a camera, she added.

Condé Nast Traveler plans to formally introduce the campaign at an event on Sept. 18 at Tertulia, a New York restaurant owned by Mr. Mullen. Guests will be asked to bring their passports because five will win trips, leaving the next day. (Coincidentally, Expedia has been sponsoring a Trip-a-Day Giveaway.)

In a Condé Nast touch, the ads include credits for not only Ms. Menke as the photographer but also for some clothing and accessories worn by the subjects. For instance, Mr. Redd wears a Tom Ford dinner jacket, priced at $3,280, and a Zenith watch, at $11,000.

Whoever said “time is money” must have been well traveled.

Harder Edge From Vanity Fair Chafes Some Big Hollywood Stars

For years, the relationship between Vanity Fair and Hollywood was like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: the magazine gave the movie business class and Hollywood gave Vanity Fair sex.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and Jennifer Lawrence, the actress, at the magazine’s Oscar party in February.

Mr. Carter and the magazine he edits still hold great influence in Hollywood.

But even the best relationships can hit a rough patch. Recently, Vanity Fair has toughened its coverage of Hollywood with articles about the troubles plaguing the making of Brad Pitt’s movie “World War Z” and the intrusiveness of Scientology in Tom Cruise’s romantic life and marriage to Katie Holmes.

Some celebrities and their handlers, accustomed to more control over coverage, are not pleased. In May, Gwyneth Paltrow, who recently cooperated on cover articles for People and Good Housekeeping, asked friends not to deal with Vanity Fair.

“Vanity Fair is threatening to put me on the cover of their magazine,” Ms. Paltrow wrote by e-mail, according to someone who had seen the message. “If you are asked for quotes or comments, please decline. Also, I recommend you all never do this magazine again.”

The magazine still has enormous influence in Hollywood. Graydon Carter, its editor, remains a figure to be reckoned with, and the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party remains the hottest ticket in town. But Ms. Paltrow’s move has prompted other Hollywood insiders to push back.

“Everyone grovels to Graydon and other writers there and covets invitations to their parties,” said Leslee Dart, a publicist whose clients include Tom Hanks, Woody Allen and Meryl Streep. “They’re going to be in for a rude awakening.

“I don’t think people care the way they used to anymore,” Ms. Dart said. “It’s not important to them to grovel as they once did.”

As early as last year, a cover story about Tom Cruise attracted not only the usual denials from the Church of Scientology but also an angry denunciation from Bert Fields, Mr. Cruise’s lawyer and a longtime Hollywood fixer. “Anyone associated with this sleazy story should be ashamed of themselves â€" not just for publishing lies, but also for being unoriginal, sloppy and dull,” he told E! Online.

In response to the criticism, Vanity Fair released a statement from Mr. Carter: “We wouldn’t be doing our job if there wasn’t a little bit of tension between Vanity Fair and its subjects. In any given week, I can expect to hear from a disgruntled subject in Hollywood, Washington, or on Wall Street. That’s the nature of the beast.”

The chill between the magazine and Hollywood is one indication of how much the relationship between celebrities and the media has changed. Celebrities and their publicists can now circumvent traditional media outlets and communicate with their fans directly through Twitter and Facebook. “Magazines are less relevant,” Ms. Dart said.

Vanity Fair remains one of the most thoroughly reported and written magazines in the industry. As enterprise journalism has been under siege and however soft their celebrities covers may have been, the magazine aggressively covers business and scandal, including in Hollywood.

Since Mr. Carter took over the magazine in 1992, it has won 14 national magazine awards. Apart from its Hollywood features, the magazine publishes articles on subjects as various as dating habits in Silicon Valley and the journalist Richard Engel’s experience as a hostage in Syria. While it features plenty of slender actresses like Fiona Shaw, it does not hesitate to print in the same issue a portrait of the stouter titans of Watergate, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

“Vanity Fair’s influence is still enormous,” said Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios, who in recent years has hosted an annual dinner honoring Mr. Carter the Thursday before the Oscars.

Because Vanity Fair must plan covers months in advance, it can stumble, as happened in July when the magazine featured Channing Tatum for an article on his latest film, “White House Down,” which bombed at the box office. The magazine is on surer footing with celebrities from bygone eras. The July issue also featured recollections about the actress Ava Gardner and an essay about Mary McCarthy’s 1963 book “The Group” about young women from Vassar, even though the college began admitting men 44 years ago.

The magazine has been mockingly called “Kennedy Fair” for its steady coverage of a president who died a half-century ago. The September issue features Princess Diana on the cover.

Alain Delaqueriere contributed research.

Media Decoder: Roman Polanski Lends Voice to Documentary About Him

Roman Polanski Lends Voice to Documentary About Him

LOS ANGELES â€" Those who remember “Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out” from the Toronto International Film Festival last year may wonder if memory is playing tricks, should they happen to see the documentary on Showtime, where it is scheduled for a television debut on Sept. 23.

In the festival film, Mr. Polanski’s open letter 2010 plea against his extradition to the United States to face a sexual assault charge was read aloud by Paul Rachman, a friend of the movie’s director, Marina Zenovich.

Now, the voice sounds distinctly like that of Mr. Polanski. Because it is.

“There was one thing I didn’t like,” Ms. Zenovich recalled Mr. Polanski telling her after he watched the documentary after it was shown at the festival.

“Really, what’s that?” Ms. Zenovich said.

“That person reading the letter,” Mr. Polanski said.

Ms. Zenovich suggested he could fix the matter by reading it himself, which he did, in an audio file that arrived in her e-mail shortly afterward.

The change, said Ms. Zenovich, was quietly slipped into a version of the film for video-on-demand this year. With the movie’s arrival on Showtime, however, Ms. Zenovich decided she should explain Mr. Polanski’s sudden voice appearance in a film for which he had otherwise declined to be interviewed.

“It brought a creative closure to the whole project,” said Ms. Zenovich, who spoke by telephone last week. “It meant a lot to me; it meant I could move on.”

But not everyone has moved on, despite the decision by the authorities in Switzerland not to extradite Mr. Polanski to the United States. In Los Angeles, the Polanski sex case remains open.

And Atria Books is prepared to publish, on Sept. 17, “The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski,” by Samantha Geimer, whom Mr. Polanski was accused of having raped in 1977, when Ms. Geimer was 13.

‘PBS NewsHour’ Begins Its Overhaul

The 38-year-old “PBS NewsHour” began a new era this weekend, adding Saturday and Sunday newscasts for the first time and preparing for the debut on Monday of Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff as the new weeknight anchor team and the first female co-anchors at any network.

With the new weekend edition, viewers got a different program than they perhaps expected. Stories were mostly shorter, at about four minutes â€" still downright leisurely compared with those on commercial networks, but half the length of many on the weekday PBS program.

On Saturday, the weekend program, anchored by Hari Sreenivasan, had proportionately more video and more field reports, including a story on medical marijuana and another from the longtime NBC News Tel Aviv correspondent Martin Fletcher about Israel’s discovery of offshore natural gas reserves. In a few cities, but not New York, two minutes of local news were inserted. And not least, the “NewsHour” was a half-hour.

The goal for “PBS NewsHour Weekend” is a balance of “continuity and change,” said Marc Rosenwasser, its executive producer, adding: “I’m not sure that ‘NewsHour’ viewers are particularly looking for change. So that’s the line to walk, which is to respect their esteemed brand and at the same time, every weekend show is a kind of a laboratory for change.”

The weeknight edition, in addition to its new anchors, is to undergo other changes on Monday, including a new set that has room for the anchors to sit side by side. The old system put dual anchors at separate desks so viewers “didn’t see them ever talking to each other, looking at each other, relating to each other,” said Linda Winslow, the weekday program’s executive producer.

Thought they are longtime colleagues, Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff, who are also receiving managing editor titles, rehearsed their “relationship” last week, Ms. Winslow said, because “you don’t want it to look simpering or local newsy, but you do want it to have some informality once in a while and some ability to talk to each other.”

The “NewsHour” Web site will also be revamped on Monday, with a greater emphasis on constantly updated news. Still, the biggest change is on weekends, where PBS’s lack of a newscast has been seen as a public television shortcoming. The new program is running in most major markets nationwide, at varying times, although some stations will not begin broadcasts until October.

Mr. Sreenivasan has turned to social media in an effort to attract not only an audience that has never thought to turn to PBS for weekend news, but also younger viewers. He is conducting Google hangouts, or group conversations, and what he calls online “anchor hours” â€" soliciting viewer questions in advance, rather than waiting for after-broadcast comments. “We’re trying to put the public back in public media,” he said.

On a recent Saturday, the weekend staff was practicing in its Midtown Manhattan production offices on the 12th floor of WNET, where the show is based; Mr. Sreenivasan headed uptown by subway to a Lincoln Center studio whenever it was time to pretape an interview, applying his own makeup while looking into a monitor.

The weekend show’s New York base is another change; the weekday program is produced in Washington, by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions and WETA. WNET, the New York station, is producing the new program because it was able to raise the necessary $7 million annual budget at a time when the weekday “NewsHour” was running a major deficit.

After layoffs in June, its first in nearly two decades, the weekday “NewsHour” is in better shape financially, Ms. Winslow said. She did not provide specifics.

The two “NewsHour” teams are coordinating reporting trips and cross-promoting each other’s work on the air. But not surprisingly, with production staffs in different cities, kinks remain, including potential interview guests being contacted by both shows.

“We’ve already had a couple of experiences,” Ms. Winslow said. “We do need a way to make sure we’re not stepping on each other.”

Likewise, the two are trying not to commission the same stories. Mr. Sreenivasan, for one, is both anchoring the weekend show and reporting for the weekday program, but even that has its complexities: a recent report he did on aging in New York was shot by the New York team, written and produced in Washington and â€" because it was paid for by a grant to the weeknight “NewsHour” by the SCAN Foundation â€" out-of-pocket expenses were picked up by that program, Ms. Winslow said.

Assad Denies Attack in Interview With Charlie Rose

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has denied that his government attacked civilians with chemical weapons on Aug. 21, reiterated that denial to the American people on Sunday morning via the television interviewer Charlie Rose.

“He denied that he had anything to do with the attack,” Mr. Rose said on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” hours after interviewing Mr. Assad at the presidential palace in Damascus. “He denied that he knew, in fact, that there was a chemical attack, notwithstanding what has been said and notwithstanding the videotape. He said there’s not evidence yet to make a conclusive judgment.”

No clips from Mr. Rose’s interview were released on Sunday. The interview, which was arranged in the last few days amid a Congressional debate about whether to authorize a limited military strike against Syria, will be broadcast on Monday by CBS and PBS, the same day that President Obama is scheduled to make his case for the strikes in interviews with anchors for six American networks.

CBS described Sunday’s interview with Mr. Assad as his first with an American television network since December 2011, about nine months into the Syrian uprising and civil war, when he spoke with Barbara Walters of ABC. By agreeing to speak to Mr. Rose, Mr. Assad all but assured that his remarks would receive widespread attention from the American news media.

Mr. Rose, who was unavailable for interviews on Sunday because he was traveling back to the United States, said on “Face the Nation” that he read Mr. Assad a paragraph of a front-page New York Times article about Syria’s large stockpile of chemical weapons, and that Mr. Assad responded, “I can’t confirm or deny that we have chemical weapons.”

Mr. Assad also “had a message to the American people,” Mr. Rose said: “That it had not been a good experience for them to get involved in the Middle East, in wars and conflicts in the Middle East; that the result had not been good, and that they should not get involved.”

Mr. Rose previously interviewed Mr. Assad in 2006 for “The Charlie Rose Show,” which is broadcast on PBS stations. He and many other Western journalists have been lobbying Mr. Assad for an interview since the Syrian uprising started in early 2011.

“Charlie has been working on this for a long time,” said David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, who confirmed that Sunday’s interview “came through only this week.”

Mr. Rose drove to Damascus after flying into neighboring Lebanon. In a sign of the significance of the interview, he was accompanied by Jeffrey Fager, the chairman of CBS News and the top producer of “60 Minutes.”

“It’s not normal to send the chairman to produce an interview. It’s also not normal to have an interview like this at a time like this,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Portions of the interview will be shown on CBS’s morning and evening newscasts on Monday, Mr. Rhodes said. Then the interview will be shown in its entirety in prime time at 9 p.m. Monday.

Familiar Night Bird Reclaims a Perch

‘Arsenio Hall Show’ Returns After a Nearly 20-Year Hiatus

Robert Yager for The New York Times

From left, Neal Kendall, executive producer; Arsenio Hall; and Leon Knoles, director. Mr. Hall intends to emphasize music and to bring back stand-up comics.

LOS ANGELES â€" Arsenio Hall is on his feet, juking his hips back and forth in a steady rhythm.

Arsenio Hall and Gov. Bill Clinton, who was a guest in 1992.

“You ever seen little black girls doing double Dutch?” he says as he swings to the beat of the invisible double ropes. “There’s always one little girl standing, waiting to get in. And you’ve got to get your rhythm. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing this: waiting to get back in.”

It’s been a long wait. Mr. Hall’s well-remembered late-night talk show, a phenomenon in the early 1990s, encompassing moments as varied as the candidate Bill Clinton playing saxophone and Magic Johnson revealing he had contracted AIDS, has been gone since 1994. But after several false starts, when the rhythm wasn’t quite right, he is ready to jump back in, starting Monday night.

“If I was a guy who had never done a talk show before, you could say, ‘What’s this show going to be?’ ” Mr. Hall said. “But this is going to look like Arsenio took a long hiatus â€" a long, long hiatus â€" but I came back, and redid the set.”

A few things have happened while Mr. Hall has been away. Late-night hosts have proliferated like Starbucks franchises, with their desks and couches seemingly on almost every television corner; and the Internet has changed the way new late-night hosts inveigle their ways into the hearts of fans.

Is there room for Arsenio Hall again? At the age of 57? Is there an audience for his brand of hip party, mixing comedy and music more evenly than any host before or since? One long-experienced late-night hand, Robert Morton, gives him a shot.

“He’s got his finger on pop culture, sports and politics, and he seems to be a guy that knows what he wants and has figured out a way to get it,” said Mr. Morton, the longtime producer for David Letterman and most recently for George Lopez. “Will America buy it? Anyone’s guess. He and his team are aware of an older audience” that is “hungry for a show that’s aimed at them. If he can capture that segment solidly, he could be a contender.”

“The Arsenio Hall Show” will be available on about 180 stations, reaching virtually the entire country, according to CBS Television Distribution, which is syndicating the show. In New York, it will seen on WPIX.

At least, with the late-night landscape so carved up, Mr. Hall doesn’t need nearly as big a rating as he once scored.

“I’m not going to take people from Jay, from Kimmel, from Conan,” he said. “My audience is going to come from iPads, from radios. It’s going to be coming from people who don’t have a talk-show host.”

Some of them may have been fans of the “Arsenio” show that began in 1989. That show thrived until CBS hired Mr. Letterman and knocked Mr. Hall off some of his better stations. Mr. Letterman and the “Jay” Mr. Hall often refers to, Jay Leno, then staged a heavyweight brawl that sucked up most of the attention in late night.

Mr. Hall, who had famously dismissed Mr. Leno before that comedian replaced Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” seemed to disappear for a time, resurfacing as a frequent guest of Mr. Leno, whom Mr. Hall now cites as a close friend.

But, of course, Mr. Hall has many friends. Characteristically, he sprinkles their names throughout a conversation about his plans for the new show: “Eddie” (as in Murphy) had suggestions for writers. “Jerry” (Seinfeld) offered advice. “C K” (Louis, that is) will come on and perform stand-up. “Prince” (no other name necessary) asked for a date to come in and sing.

In person, Mr. Hall is effusively his old self, brimming with ideas for the new show, while underscoring the similarities to the old. “I do have a previous persona,” he said. “My challenge is how to blend in the new a little bit.”

The show will still eschew a desk, going with a couch-centric set. The Dog Pound of whooping audience members will be back, “slightly different this time,” he said. The band will still be the Posse, though with new members, led by the drummer Rob DiMaggio (grandson of Dom, the other baseball star in the famous family).

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Familiar Night Bird Reclaims a Perch .

PAC Backed by Billionaire to Broadcast Ads for Lhota

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The TV Watch: Parrying at the Top, and Lunging Below

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Hercule Poirot to Return in a New Christie Mystery

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State of the Art: No Strings on a Piano, but the Tone Is Grand

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Green Eggs and E-Books? Thank You, Sam-I-Am

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Irving Azoff Starts New Entertainment Business

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Judith Daniels, Editor of Savvy Magazine, Dies at 74

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Britain to Examine Why BBC Severance Payments Exceeded Contract Terms

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Acxiom Lets Consumers See Data It Collects

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Bezos Is a Hit in a Washington Post Newsroom Visit

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Advertising: GoDaddy Steps Away From the Jiggle

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Advertising: New Ad Campaign Targets Childhood Hunger

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Live, From Atlanta, an Unusual Hire

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Alec Baldwin to Host TV Interview Show on MSNBC

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Jolie Among 4 Recipients of Honorary Oscars

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Networks Get a Victory in Court Over Streaming Service

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A Newspaper in Las Vegas, at Risk of Closing, Divides a Family

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Talk: Glenn Beck Wants to Know: Why Can\'t We All Just Get Along?

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Knopf Acquires New Paolo Bacigalupi Novel

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Judge Sets Restrictions for Apple on E-Books

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Hamish Bowles, He Was Born Dandy

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Hamish Bowles is taking over the Vogue editorial space once reserved for the columnist André Leon Talley.

When Hamish Bowles was a toddler walking down the street with his mother near their home in the leafy north London neighborhood of Hampstead Garden Suburb, an elegant Indian woman came toward them dressed in an elaborate sari. “Hamish rushed up to her and plucked at it,” his mother, Anne Bowles, recalled recently. “ ‘Mummy, mummy, look, it has gold threads,' ” she remembers her small son saying.

Hamish Bowles with Anna Wintour.

“It was a wake-up call, definitely, that Hamish was interested in fashion,” Mrs. Bowles said.

Threads of all colors were not a passing fancy for Mr. Bowles, the dapper international editor at large for Vogue who has been tapped to fill the shoes (if not the billowing caftans) of André Leon Talley, the longtime columnist who left the magazine last February to edit Numero Russia.

“We wanted to fill that void with another compelling voice that could bring you into the world of fashion, travel and all the extraordinary places Hamish goes and all the people he sees,” said Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor.

For the daylong celebration that Ms. Wintour arranged last June for Mr. Bowles's 50th birthday, Ralph Lauren made a three-piece suit in sherbet pink, to which the guest of honor added an antique fob chain and a diamond and emerald Art Deco pin. “Long live the lilac queen,” the writer Christopher Mason toasted Mr. Bowles (known for his love of that color) in song, who can “find in piles of schlock, some Balenciaga frock.”

That is an understatement. If Mr. Talley was Vogue's resident peacock, swooping about in capes and issuing edicts, Mr. Bowles is more its professor, with one of the largest private collections of vintage clothing in the world, which he stores in the Bronx and Queens. At the invitation of Oscar de la Renta, he curated the “Balenciaga in Spain” exhibition that showed in New York and San Francisco two years ago. He also curated “Jacqueline Kennedy and the White House Years” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001. His new Vogue column began with a visit to Chatsworth, home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

But Mr. Bowles has also displayed a comical side, reveling in unlikely immersive journalism like a stint at the Boulder Survival School, surfing with Blake Lively and, at the suggestion of Ms. Wintour, auditioning for “The X Factor.” (He has been known to sing Broadway show songs by heart at Marie's Crisis in Greenwich Village.)

“Those experimental stories I have been given are coming from Anna and my fellow editors,” he said the other day, sitting in his chic, small East Village duplex, decorated by friends Roberto Peregalli and Laura Rimini, protégés of the Italian design master Lorenzo Mongiardino. “The ideas spring from their fiendish minds,” he said, only half-joking.

With his back to the double-height window in the living room, Mr. Bowles looked the perfect gentleman in a blue Dries Van Noten suit, a purple, magenta and lilac Charvet tie and loafers made for him “in a little cubbyhole in the medina in Tangiers,” he said, running his hand periodically through light brown hair and speaking in a British accent.

The living room was covered with pediment-topped bookcases crammed with works carefully organized into biographies, fashion and decorating. “We were going for something Proustian,” he said. “Upstairs, we wanted more of a Madeleine Castaing look,” he added, alluding to the French decorator famous for mixing French, Russian, British and junk pieces.

One might expect Mr. Bowles to be uncomfortable in any other world but that of the aristocratic grandeur he loves to study. But Ms. Wintour said that would be a misapprehension. “We have this vision of Hamish being this special person who lives in a special world, and he is not that at all,” she said. “He can be at home anywhere.”

An editor at a rival publication, who did not want to be identified commenting on the competition, suggested that giving Mr. Bowles wacky assignments has been a conscious strategy on Ms. Wintour's part to make him more accessible. “His focus was too Mandarin,” the editor said. “I think Anna wanted to expand his brand to something more readers could relate to. If you are part of Twitter and the social media, you can't be the person who can only talk about the French flea market.”

Mr. Bowles did not entirely disagree. “The new mandate brings a sense of range to what might have been perceived as a sequestered gilded Vogue life,” he said.

Yet Charlie Scheips, a former Condé Nast archivist who helped research photos for the Kennedy exhibition, believes that Mr. Bowles has “helped burnish Anna's image, too,” he said. “His knowledge of fashion and the history of Vogue has been very good for her. She was mainly interested in contemporary fashion. She is not a fashion historian. I think he helped her realize that she was historically important.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 8, 2013, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: He Was Born Dandy.