D. J. R. Bruckner, Columnist and Critic, Dies at 79

D. J. R. Bruckner, a retired book and theater critic for The New York Times who was previously a nationally syndicated political columnist for The Los Angeles Times, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 79.

D. J. R. Bruckner

The cause was complications of cancer, his cousin Steve Langan said.

At The New York Times, where he was on staff from 1981 to 2005, Mr. Bruckner’s official job was as an editor at the Book Review. But his byline appeared hundreds of times during his tenure, not only on book reviews but also on reviews of Off and Off Off Broadway theater and the occasional film.

A polymath and polyglot (the languages in which he was fluent included Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and those were merely the ancient ones), Mr. Bruckner was known for his stylistic prowess.

It was evident in his first article for The Times, an essay about grand-scale publishing projects, which appeared in the Book Review in 1981. In it, he described a series of ecclesiastical volumes issued over the course of a century by a Benedictine abbey in France, “in ivory vellum covers, like a long procession of robed abbots.”

Mr. Bruckner could consign a subject to eternal damnation with a single image. Reviewing an Arnold Schwarzenegger film in 1985, he wrote, “Mr. Schwarzenegger first appears in ‘Commando’ in parts â€" one huge bicep and then another.”

He could praise with the lavish economy of a single word. Reviewing a 1995 production of Edward Albee’s play “Seascape,” which requires actors to impersonate lizards, Mr. Bruckner lauded their “lizardry.”

Donald Jerome Raphael Bruckner was born in Omaha on Nov. 26, 1933. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English from Creighton University and, as a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in classics and English from Oxford.

Mr. Bruckner was a reporter on The Chicago Sun-Times in the early 1960s, covering labor. He joined The Los Angeles Times in the mid-’60s, serving as its Chicago bureau chief before becoming a syndicated columnist for the paper.

In one widely quoted column, from 1972, Mr. Bruckner lamented what he saw as a hardening despair among young black Americans. “There are issues enough,” he wrote. “What is gone is the popular passion for them. Possibly, hope is gone.” He went on: “In the light of what government is doing, you might well expect young blacks to lose hope in the power elites, but this is something different â€" a cold personal indifference, a separation of man from man. What you hear and see is not rage, but injury, a withering of expectations.”

For his liberal positions, Mr. Bruckner was accorded a spot on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

Before joining The New York Times, Mr. Bruckner was a vice president for public affairs at the University of Chicago.

Mr. Bruckner, a Manhattan resident, was the author of several books, including “Frederic Goudy” (1990), about the type designer.

No immediate family members survive.

One of Mr. Bruckner’s most personal articles was an essay on bibliomania published in the Book Review in 1982.

“Two years ago, needing to get rid of 600 volumes, I decided to sell duplicates,” he wrote. “Who needs two sets of Goethe in six volumes? But I’d made different notes in each set: no sale.” He added: “I did cull out duplicates from thousands of pieces of poetry I had bought since the 1950s â€" broadsides, pamphlets, little books bought for 50 cents or $1 years back. When a dealer named his price, I was stunned: If some had appreciated 300 percent in 15 years, what might they be worth when I am old? But I steeled myself and sold them â€" and then fell ill for a day.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2013, on page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: D. J. R. Bruckner, 79, Columnist and Critic.

D. J. R. Bruckner, Columnist and Critic, Dies at 79

D. J. R. Bruckner, a retired book and theater critic for The New York Times who was previously a nationally syndicated political columnist for The Los Angeles Times, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 79.

D. J. R. Bruckner

The cause was complications of cancer, his cousin Steve Langan said.

At The New York Times, where he was on staff from 1981 to 2005, Mr. Bruckner’s official job was as an editor at the Book Review. But his byline appeared hundreds of times during his tenure, not only on book reviews but also on reviews of Off and Off Off Broadway theater and the occasional film.

A polymath and polyglot (the languages in which he was fluent included Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and those were merely the ancient ones), Mr. Bruckner was known for his stylistic prowess.

It was evident in his first article for The Times, an essay about grand-scale publishing projects, which appeared in the Book Review in 1981. In it, he described a series of ecclesiastical volumes issued over the course of a century by a Benedictine abbey in France, “in ivory vellum covers, like a long procession of robed abbots.”

Mr. Bruckner could consign a subject to eternal damnation with a single image. Reviewing an Arnold Schwarzenegger film in 1985, he wrote, “Mr. Schwarzenegger first appears in ‘Commando’ in parts â€" one huge bicep and then another.”

He could praise with the lavish economy of a single word. Reviewing a 1995 production of Edward Albee’s play “Seascape,” which requires actors to impersonate lizards, Mr. Bruckner lauded their “lizardry.”

Donald Jerome Raphael Bruckner was born in Omaha on Nov. 26, 1933. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English from Creighton University and, as a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in classics and English from Oxford.

Mr. Bruckner was a reporter on The Chicago Sun-Times in the early 1960s, covering labor. He joined The Los Angeles Times in the mid-’60s, serving as its Chicago bureau chief before becoming a syndicated columnist for the paper.

In one widely quoted column, from 1972, Mr. Bruckner lamented what he saw as a hardening despair among young black Americans. “There are issues enough,” he wrote. “What is gone is the popular passion for them. Possibly, hope is gone.” He went on: “In the light of what government is doing, you might well expect young blacks to lose hope in the power elites, but this is something different â€" a cold personal indifference, a separation of man from man. What you hear and see is not rage, but injury, a withering of expectations.”

For his liberal positions, Mr. Bruckner was accorded a spot on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

Before joining The New York Times, Mr. Bruckner was a vice president for public affairs at the University of Chicago.

Mr. Bruckner, a Manhattan resident, was the author of several books, including “Frederic Goudy” (1990), about the type designer.

No immediate family members survive.

One of Mr. Bruckner’s most personal articles was an essay on bibliomania published in the Book Review in 1982.

“Two years ago, needing to get rid of 600 volumes, I decided to sell duplicates,” he wrote. “Who needs two sets of Goethe in six volumes? But I’d made different notes in each set: no sale.” He added: “I did cull out duplicates from thousands of pieces of poetry I had bought since the 1950s â€" broadsides, pamphlets, little books bought for 50 cents or $1 years back. When a dealer named his price, I was stunned: If some had appreciated 300 percent in 15 years, what might they be worth when I am old? But I steeled myself and sold them â€" and then fell ill for a day.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2013, on page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: D. J. R. Bruckner, 79, Columnist and Critic.

At NPR, a New Host and a Move Westward

Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times

Arun Rath, hired away from “Frontline,” will host the weekend “All Things Considered.”

CULVER CITY, Calif. â€" The weekend broadcasts of “All Things Considered” are heading West.

At an underutilized NPR office here, the famed afternoon program will reboot itself on Saturday with a new host, Arun Rath, a new time zone and even a rearrangement of its brassy theme music.

NPR officials have billed it as a rare chance for a legacy radio program, previously based in Washington with the rest of the public radio organization, to rethink what it is and does â€" and let listeners decide if the changes sound good.

The timing is somewhat awkward, since NPR is trying to balance its budget by cutting about 10 percent of its work force, initially through voluntary buyouts and, if necessary, through layoffs. The plan, announced last week, has been demoralizing for some employees â€" but the shows must go on, including “Weekend All Things Considered,” for which Mr. Rath was hired away from the PBS program “Frontline” in July.

For NPR, “All Things Considered” is one of its two flagships, the other being “Morning Edition.” NPR says about 12 million people hear at least a part of the weekday program on a typical week; 2 million hear the shorter weekend program.

Guy Raz was the host of the one-hour weekend edition until the end of last year, when he moved over to the “TED Radio Hour.” While Jacki Lyden and others filled in, NPR executives talked at length about how to adjust the show over the long term.

“Geographic diversity was very important to us,” said Ellen McDonnell, NPR’s executive editor of news programming. “Hurricane Sandy focused our attention on how we would broadcast if there was a situation where we were incapacitated at our Washington facility. Brainstorming began and after a few meetings we agreed that moving the show west was central to our editorial and future business continuity.”

These weren’t entirely new thoughts for NPR. The organization opened the cavernous facility it calls NPR West in 2002 and for a while originated two programs from here, including “Day to Day,” a well-regarded newsmagazine. But the programs were canceled amid a round of budget cutbacks in 2008 and 2009. NPR West has remained home to the organization’s Southern California bureau and to a number of “Morning Edition” staff members, including that program’s co-host, Renee Montagne, but the move of “Weekend All Things Considered” has brought more energy.

“It’s good to be out West,” said Mr. Rath, who has yet to unpack all the boxes in his new office.

“We’ll have more stories from the West; more voices from the West,” he said. “But the core values of the program aren’t going to change.”

Kevin Roderick, the founder and editor of L.A. Observed, which covers the city’s media and politics, said: “I’m always a little wary when a national news outlet says it’s going to flavor its usual fare with more L.A. or West Coast ‘perspective.’

“The results tend to be disappointing or at least underwhelming. But it’s good for NPR to strive for more outside-Washington sensibility, and the people involved understand the turf, so in that sense I think it’s a plus for the weekend show to be based here.”

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Emmys Highlight a Changing TV Industry

Ursula Coyote/AMC

Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad,” which is considered a front-runner for the best drama award.

LOS ANGELES â€" The Emmy Awards have witnessed many new players on the red carpet over the years, but there has never been a gate-crasher quite like Netflix.

Kevin Spacey with Robin Wright in “House of Cards.” Both actors are nominated for Emmys.

Its “House of Cards” is nominated for outstanding drama, the first time that a program distributed on the Internet has competed at the Emmys right alongside programs distributed through rabbit ears and satellite dishes. And the prospect that a streaming video service like Netflix could end up a winner at the Emmys ceremony on Sunday night has cast a spotlight on just how profoundly the television landscape has changed.

Still, most television critics and other self-professed Emmys experts suspect that it’s the cable channel AMC, not Netflix, that will have the most to celebrate at the awards show. “Breaking Bad,” which has been nominated for best drama four times before but has never won, is the clear favorite this year. In an e-mail, Debra Birnbaum, the editor in chief of TV Guide Magazine, borrowed a phrase from the series’ meth lord Walter White: “ ‘Breaking Bad’ is the danger this Emmy season.”

And that’s with just the first half of the show’s final season in contention for an Emmy this year. AMC broke the season into two parts, and only the first half was televised before the May cutoff date for Emmy eligibility. But the second half started to be shown in August, just as Emmy voters were receiving their ballots in the mail. What’s more, the reviews have been uniformly glowing, and the ratings have been building as the Sept. 29 finale approaches. Last Sunday’s episode, which generated more than 16,000 Twitter messages a minute at one point, was the most-watched episode yet, with at least 6.4 million viewers.

So it stands to reason that the Emmy results might reflect all the excitement. (Ballots were due on Aug. 30.) This week the Web site Gold Derby, which tracks Hollywood’s horse races, called “Breaking Bad” the “overwhelming front-runner.”

As it turns out, the series will be competing with the Emmys (televised by CBS) on Sunday night. The three-hour backslapping ceremony will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern, while the 75-minute penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” will begin at 9 p.m. Since the drama prize is handed out last, “Breaking Bad” viewers can change channels afterward to see if the show won. (And if it doesn’t, well, the second half of the final season will be eligible again in 2014.)

For AMC, an Emmy for “Breaking Bad” would be a welcome acknowledgment of how it, like Netflix, has changed television. Until 2008, the only winners of the top drama Emmy, the most coveted of all, were broadcast networks and HBO. Then “Mad Men” came along and AMC became the first ad-supported cable channel to win the top drama award. “Mad Men” kept winning, for four seasons in a row, until Showtime’s “Homeland” snapped its streak last year.

This time around, both are nominated again, along with “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

Netflix won’t say how many people have watched “House of Cards.” HBO’s “Thrones” might be the most popular of the six; HBO said the season finale in June attracted nearly 14 million viewers once on-demand viewership was calculated. About 12 million people saw the season finale of “Downton Abbey”; more than seven million saw “Homeland”; and nearly five million saw “Mad Men.”

For the second year in a row, no dramas from the big four broadcast networks were nominated. But the broadcasters were somewhat better represented in the best comedy category, where ABC’s “Modern Family” is vying for its fourth straight win. It is up against NBC’s “30 Rock,” which ended in May and is eligible for the final time; CBS’s “Big Bang Theory”; HBO’s “Girls” and “Veep”; and FX’s “Louie.”

The one Netflix comedy series that some thought would be nominated, “Arrested Development,” was not. But one of the stars of “Arrested,” Jason Bateman, is up for best lead actor in a comedy. Back on the drama side, Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright are both up for lead actor and actress for “House of Cards.”

Bruce Rosenblum, the chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, said that Netflix’s nominations illustrated the evolving nature of TV.

“This is just the beginning,” he said. “If you look at the quantity of product being developed at Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and Xbox, it’s certainly reasonable to expect that this evolution will accelerate. Having said that, the quality of content on broadcast and cable is certainly at an all-time high as well.”

Netflix’s presence at the Emmys is the result of rules that were amended about six years ago to allow some (but not all) Internet shows. Netflix is technically already a winner: it picked up two awards for casting and cinematography last weekend at the Creative Arts portion of the Emmys. But to put that in context, HBO picked up 20, including eight for its TV movie “Behind the Candelabra.” The recorded Creative Arts ceremony will be shown by FXX on Saturday.

The prime-time ceremony on CBS will take stock of what many observers have called a golden age of TV. There remains a wide gulf, however, between the audience for the Academy Awards, which drew about 40 million viewers this year, and the Emmys, which attracted about 13 million in 2012. The Academy Awards have some advantages: namely, movie stars and 10 brand-new films in competition each year. The Emmys, on the other hand, often celebrate returning shows with relatively small audiences.

But Mr. Rosenblum voiced confidence that the ratings for the Emmys would defy trend lines and grow over time. “The industry is accelerating from a quality standpoint and from a buzz and pop culture standpoint,” he said, “and that at some point will be reflected in our ratings.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Emmys Highlight a Changing TV Industry.

Head of NBC Entertainment Extends Contract to 2017

NBC quietly renewed the contract of its chief entertainment executive, Robert Greenblatt, extending his deal with the network until 2017.

Robert Greenblatt, the head of entertainment at NBC, has extended his contract through 2017.

Executives confirmed the deal on Friday, insisting on anonymity because the network did not want to make an official announcement. Still, the decision represents a distinct vote of confidence in Mr. Greenblatt, who was put in place by the new Comcast management of NBC in January 2011, with the specific charge to reverse the long slide that had sunk NBC deep into last place in the networks’ prime-time ratings.

NBC experienced a bit of resurgence last fall, especially with shows like “The Voice” and “Revolution,” then suffered another fallow period in the winter. But this season NBC has high hopes for several new series, including the comedy “The Michael J. Fox Show” and the drama “The Blacklist.”

Probably not coincidentally, NBC did make one announcement on Friday: that it had finished second among the broadcast networks in ratings among viewers between 18 and 49 â€" a prime sales group for advertisers â€" over 52 weeks. It was the first time NBC beat both ABC and Fox in that category for a full year since 2002-03.

Fox Contest Offers 30-Second Super Bowl Pregame Ad as a Prize

From time to time, Super Bowl advertisers have sponsored contests, among them brands like Chevrolet and Doritos. Now, for what may be the first time, the network broadcasting the Super Bowl is planning an ad contest of its own.

The contest is scheduled to be announced Friday by the Fox Sports Media Group, which is part of 21st Century Fox; Fox Broadcasting will present Super Bowl XLVIII on Feb. 2, 2014. The tentative name for the contest is the Social Bowl, although there is already a Web site by that name that tracks the effectiveness of Super Bowl advertising in building value for brands.

The contest is centered on an offer to give away a commercial on Super Bowl Sunday â€" not during the game, which is already about 95 percent sold, with only a “handful” of 30-second spots in the commercial inventory still available, Fox Sports Media Group executives say. Rather, the prize is a 30-second commercial to be broadcast at around 5 p.m. Eastern Time during the pregame show, valued at about $850,000. (The price tag on a 30-second commercial during the game is being estimated at $4 million.)

Marketers will be able to participate in the contest by submitting proposed commercials to the Fox Sports Media Group and paying an entry fee of $150,000. Football fans, ad fans and anyone with access to social media will then vote on which potential spot they believe is Super Bowl Sunday-worthy after watching the entries on online platforms like the Fox Sports Web site or YouTube.

The Fox Sports Media Group plans to promote the voting with an extensive campaign in social media outlets that is scheduled to begin on the first weekend in January. “We’ll be putting a ton of media behind it,” said Neil Mulcahy, executive vice president for sales at the Fox Sports Media Group, a ton being “a few million dollars.”

A winner of the contest will be named close to or on game day; the executives have not decided yet on a date.

“What this is, is a social experiment,” Mr. Mulcahy said, spurred by the fact that in the last few years the hoopla surrounding who is buying ads on Super Bowl Sunday has begun to build earlier and earlier.

“It’s definitely a trend we’ve noticed,” he said, and it is being fed by the ability of advertisers to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs to provide previews of their Super Bowl Sunday ads before Super Bowl Sunday.

Pete Vlastelica, senior vice president for digital at the Fox Sports Media Group, estimated that for Super Bowl XLVII on Feb. 3, 2013, “thanks to the Internet, something like 40 percent of the in-game advertisers were teasing, leaking or running their whole spots” ahead of the game.

Mr. Mulcahy credited Mr. Vlastelica with coming up with the idea for the contest. Mr. Vlastelica said he envisioned the contest as a way to “open to a much larger group of brands the opportunity to advertise on Super Bowl Sunday,” particularly the kinds of “independent, smaller brands that don’t think of participating in the run-up to the Super Bowl because it is beyond their reach.”

There will be, however, nothing to prevent large marketers from submitting entries in the contest. “It will be interesting to see who wins,” Mr. Vlastelica said, “a major brand or a brand you’ve never heard of.”

There will also be prizes in addition to the free commercial time, he added, in categories like funniest commercial or “most viral.”

The commercials to be submitted in the contest must meet broadcast acceptability standards, Mr. Vlastelica and Mr. Mulcahy said, as well as the standards for advertising during National Football League games.

In other words, Mr. Mulcahy said, laughing, “Keep it clean.”

Mr. Mulcahy said he believed that the remaining commercial time in the game, five or so 30-second time slots, would be sold by mid-October. “The last time we had the Super Bowl, they were sold out by Thanksgiving,” he added.

For Super Bowl XLVII seven months ago, which was broadcast by CBS, CBS executives announced about a month before the game was played that they had completed selling all the commercial time in the game.

In another sign of how early the Super Bowl Sunday drum-banging now starts, several marketers have already announced that they plan to buy commercial time during Super Bowl XLVIII, including Anheuser-Busch, Chevrolet, Dannon Oikos yogurt, Hyundai Motor America and Intuit.

The next Super Bowl may become known as the contest Super Bowl. In addition to the Fox Sports Media Group contest, the NFL Films unit of the National Football League introduced on Thursday night a contest called Together We Make Football â€" Your Story, centered on a microsite, or special Web site, togetherwemakefootball.com.

The NFL Films contest asks, “Why do you love football?” and invites fans to submit, through Nov. 5, video clips of up to five minutes, or essays of up to 1,000 words, that answer the question. A panel is to select 10 finalists from among the entries, whose submissions will be turned into shorts by NFL Films and run during games played in December.

Five winners from among the finalists will be selected by the public through votes on the microsite and announced during the playoffs. The winners will receive trips to the game and their stories will be featured in a documentary produced by NFL Films.

Nielsen Will Add Mobile Viewership to Ratings

Nielsen, playing catch-up, has a plan to start incorporating some viewership of television shows on phones and tablets into its industry-standard TV ratings system in the fall of 2014.

The company’s plan, previewed in news reports on Thursday, will be formally announced next week at the Advertising Week conference in New York. It is a response to the requests â€" and sometimes outright pleas â€" from networks for a more complete accounting of viewership.

While most TV consumption still happens through traditional TV sets, more and more people are watching on other screens, like smartphones. Networks have been pressuring Nielsen to include those people in the ratings reports that calibrate advertising rates and influence the perceptions of success and failure.

So Nielsen will, but not until this time next year. The company said that was a reflection of the extensive behind-the-scenes work that is required.

By revealing the timeline now, at the start of the fall season, Nielsen may be trying to calm the nerves of clients.

Nielsen executives were not available for interviews on Thursday afternoon. But in a previously-scheduled interview with Variety, the company’s senior vice president for global audience measurement, Eric Solomon, acknowledged that networks “are starving for a number they can publish that really represents their audience not just on TV but across all platforms.”

Once some mobile viewing is included in the ratings totals, Mr. Solomon said: “I think it will start changing the narrative that people are not watching TV shows. It’s that they’re watching on different platforms.”

Because Nielsen ratings exist mainly for the buying and selling of TV advertising time, the expansion plan does not include ad-free streaming services like Netflix, which mainly carries previous seasons of shows. Nor does the plan initially include Hulu, the streaming service jointly owned by the parent companies of ABC, Fox and NBC, because the ads that are streamed on Hulu differ from the ads on TV.

But Nielsen will measure online streams of shows that have exactly the same ads in the same order as the TV broadcasts of those shows. For example, people who watch “Scandal” via ABC’s streaming app or Time Warner Cable’s app would be newly counted in Nielsen’s TV ratings. People who watch “Scandal” via Netflix or Hulu would not.

Will Somers, the head of research at Fox, was encouraged by Nielsen’s plan. But like his counterparts at other networks, he hinted at a little impatience: he said Fox hoped Nielsen “can bring comprehensive and scalable multiplatform measurement services to market as quickly as possible.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Nielsen Will Add Mobile Viewership To Ratings. \n \n\n'; } s += '\n\n\n'; document.write(s); return; } google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; google_ad_client = 'nytimes_blogs'; google_safe = 'high'; google_targeting = 'site_content'; google_hints = nyt_google_hints; google_ad_channel = nyt_google_ad_channel; if (window.nyt_google_count) { google_skip = nyt_google_count; } // -->

ArtsBeat: Bruckheimer to End Deal With Disney

LOS ANGELES â€" The Walt Disney Company and Jerry Bruckheimer said on Thursday they would end a movie deal under which Mr. Bruckheimer has produced hits like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, and a notable flop in “The Lone Ranger.”

Mr. Bruckheimer, one of Hollywood’s most respected senior producers, has been making movies with Disney since the early 1990’s, when he was executive producer of “The Ref.”

In a statement, Disney and Mr. Bruckheimer said they would end their existing deal when it expires next year. The statement said Mr. Bruckheimer intends to produce “more mature films” than those for which he has been known at Disney, while the studio plans to focus on pictures from its Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilm, and Walt Disney units.

In the Thursday evening announcement, Mr. Bruckheimer said he planned to continue working with Disney on future “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “National Treasure” films. Though he has become known for his work on television series like the “CSI” crime dramas, Mr. Bruckheimer made his mark in the 1980s as a prolific producer, who worked in partnership with Don Simpson, now deceased, on films like “Days of Thunder” and the “Beverly Hills Cop” series.