Interpreting Dylan, Always Treacherous, Was Lehrer\'s Undoing

By BEN SISARIO

As the news spread on Monday that the writer Jonah Lehrer had fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan for his most recent book, there was a common, dumbfounded reaction: Bob Dylan? Of all people?

The idea that someone would invent quotations by one of the most famous musicians alive would seem incredible. Mr. Dylan's every word, after all, in lyrics as well as in the relatively small body of interviews he has granted, has been scrutinized in extraordinary detail, by admirers and students ranging from ordinary fans to Oxford dons. Surely the misrepresentation of such a famous figure would eventually be found out. And indeed it was, by a writer for the magazine Tablet, whose exposé on Monday quickly led to Mr. Lehrer's resignation as a staff writer at The New Yorker.

But for anyone writing about the creative process, as Mr. Lehrer did in his book “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Dylan is a problematic subject in other ways . The oracular, mysterious voice in his songs is often reflected in Mr. Dylan's words about himself, and some described his memoirs “Chronicles: Volume One” as the work of an unreliable narrator.  Over the decades he has frustrated many an interviewer who wanted to penetrate his mind and method.

“Dylan has never been at all revealing about those kinds of issues,” the music critic and author Anthony DeCurtis said in an interview on Tuesday.

“He has always been dismissive,” Mr. DeCurtis said. “He has certainly said things that have minimized his lyrics in the attempt to fend off or downplay any attempt to see him as a prophet. So he'll say, ‘Oh, I just wrote what came to my mind.' Whatever kind of offhand thing you could say to try to deflate someone who is trying to inflate your lyrics with meaning.”

So did Mr. Lehrer put words into Mr. Dylan's mouth that he never would have said, making him a straw man to support an argument about neurosc ience and creativity? Or did he forge some quotations that are not far from things Mr. Dylan might have said anyway? Or is Mr. Dylan such a sphinx that a few words - genuine or not - could never really provide a reliable guide to his own thought process?

Perhaps this is one reason that Mr. Dylan is so endlessly fascinating. Not only is his music brilliant, but you can spend a lifetime trying to figure him out and you never will.

Mr. Dylan has hinted at this in the past. In 2004, he was interviewed by Ed Bradley for “60 Minutes,” and when asked about how he wrote a song like “Blowin' in the Wind,” he echoed a theme about the creation of art that goes back at least to Socrates, who once asked poets where they got their inspiration; they said they had no idea.

“It just came,” Mr. Dylan said, answering Mr. Bradley's question about about the source of the song. “It came from, like, right out of that wellspring of creat ivity.” He added, “I don't know how I got to write those songs.”

There's a book in there somewhere.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Defense of Ridiculed Vogue Profile of Assad Leads to More Ridicule

By AMY CHOZICK

“Syria. The name itself sounded sinister, like syringe or hiss.”

That's what the author Joan Juliet Buck wrote in the Aug. 6 edition of Newsweek in an article describing why she felt uneasy profiling Syria's first lady, Asma al-Assad, in Vogue last year.

In her article - “How I Was Duped by Mrs. Assad” - Ms. Buck explains how she ended up reluctantly writing the flattering Vogue profile that brought the magazine scrutiny amid the Assad government's reign of violence in Syria. But some of her explanations as to why she felt “Syria gave off a toxic aura” have set off fresh criticism.

On Tuesday, a Twitter meme with the hashtag  #countriesbyvoguewriters circulated. Messages included: “Chad. The name itself sounded like my Lehman Brothers ex-boyfriend.” And “Bahrain. Sounds like the expression of disappointment someone going to a picnic makes when the weather changes.”

Ms. Buck also wrote tha t she felt “uneasy” in Damascus. “Mustached men stood in our path, wearing shoes from the 1980s and curiously ill-fitting leather jackets over thick sweaters,” she said.

Even though Ms. Buck has severed her relationship with Vogue, to many readers the description just felt so, well, Vogue.

Doug Saunders, European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail of Toronto posted to Twitter: “Newsweek gave the author of the infamous Asma-al-Assad Vogue profile about 3,000 words of rope. She used every inch.”

Britain's Guardian said “somehow the mea culpa is almost as disastrous as the initial interview.”

In the 3,200-word Vogue story (“A Rose in the Desert”), Ms. Buck called Mrs. Assad “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies” and described her walking through Damascus as “a determined swath cut through space with the flash of red soles,” a reference to her Christian Louboutin shoes. (The article, whi ch was taken down from Vogue's Web site in the spring, can still be found online here. )

In June, Vogue's editor, Anna Wintour, issued a statement to The New York Times deploring the actions of the Assad government. “Subsequent to our interview, as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue,” Ms. Wintour said.

Ms. Buck has spent much of her time since the dust-up over the Vogue story denouncing the Assad government, to Piers Morgan on CNN among others. In April, she told National Public Radio - by way of explaining why Mrs. Assad was a good candidate for a profile - that she was “extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore qualified to be in Vogue.”

Ms. Buck declined to comment. A spokesman for Newsweek/Daily Beast said: “Joan Juliet Buck's revealing and candid Newsweek magazine piece on her time spent with Mrs. Assad speaks fo r itself.”

Amy Chozick is The Times's corporate media reporter. Follow @amychozick on Twitter.

Amazon Revamps Its Cloud Music Player to Compete With iTunes

By BEN SISARIO

It has taken more than a year, but Amazon is finally ready to compete with iTunes in the cloud.

On Tuesday, Amazon introduced a new version of its Cloud Player music service, which first arrived last year in a limited form because Amazon did not have licenses from record companies and music publishers. Now, after many months of negotiations, it has gotten those licenses.

So Cloud Player - which, like Apple's iTunes Match and other so-called locker services, stores users' songs so the users can have access to them on any device - now has more extensive and convenient features, like the ability to scan a user's computer to match songs to a master database. That is a valuable shortcut around the laborious process of uploading each and every track, but one that requires a license from copyright holders.

The new Cloud Player is available in two tiers, including a free version that gives Amazon a slight advantage over Ap ple. Users can store up to 250 songs free on Amazon's servers, or 250,000 songs for $24.99 a year; those limits do not count songs bought directly through Amazon's MP3 store, which has long trailed iTunes as the second-biggest download shop but has been marketing itself aggressively with deep discounts.

Some more detail:

• Like iTunes Match, Amazon's Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity.
• It will not, however, upload songs coded with D.R.M. copy protection, which includes virtually everything that iTunes sold until early 2009.

Amazon's revised cloud service also puts pressure on Google, whose cloud music and media service, Play, has been stymied by licensing issues.

Play sells downloads from three of the four major music labels, but it lacks a deal with the Warner Music Group, whose acts include Green Day, Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And while Google also has an unlicensed cloud locker system, its attempts to get licenses for that service have been hampered by the music industry's longstanding complaints that Google has not been doing enough to prevent piracy.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Washington Post to Use Ford Foundation Grant to Pay for Four New Reporters

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

In yet another sign that even the nation's most robust newspapers continue to struggle to stay profitable, The Washington Post has turned to the Ford Foundation to finance four new reporters.

Editors at The Post announced the $500,000 foundation grant in a memo to the staff on Monday, saying that the money would be used to develop “special projects related to money, politics and government”; the journalists would report to the head of the paper's investigative unit, according to the memo.

A Ford Foundation spokesperson confirmed that this one-year grant had the potential to be renewed for two more years.

“The Foundation's support enables us to build on one of our central missions, and the terms of the grant give us complete editorial independence,” according to the memo.

In May, The Los Angeles Times announced that the Ford Foundation awarded the paper a $1 million, two-year grant to support f ive new reporting slots. The Times announced in a memo at the time that it planned to use the money to support coverage of immigration, the prison system and a slot in Brazil.

A Ford Foundation spokesman would not discuss future announcements about other papers receiving grants. But he did say that the foundation was having conversations with other media outlets about providing financing - and that those outlets were not only newspapers.

Digital Notes: Spotify Offers a Bit More Information About Its Users

By BEN SISARIO

So, how many people actually pay to use Spotify?

That question has been critical for the music industry, which sees Spotify's model - streaming an unlimited number of songs for a small monthly fee - as representing a potentially huge shift in the way people listen to music. But it's a model that still gives many artists and record labels the willies because of the way it pays royalties.

Spotify, which is four years old and is now available in 15 countries, has been slow in revealing detailed user information, but on Tuesday it updated its stats. At an industry conference in London, a Spotify executive said that the service had 15 million monthly users around the world, and that four million of them are paying subscribers.

That is an increase of one million paying users since the company's last update in January, although, as Billboard points out, it appears to have taken Spotify longer to gain this most recent mill ion subscribers than it did the million before. (The subscription price varies from country to country, but is generally between $5 and $15 a month.)

There are still plenty of aspects of Spotify's usage that the company is not so transparent about, however. It has not said how many of its users are located in the United States, and it also does not reveal precise numbers about how it pays royalties, although earlier this year Daniel Ek, its co-founder, said the service has paid $200 million to rights holders.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Pennsylvania Flaunts Its Importance

By NATE SILVER

As The New Republic's Nate Cohn has observed, the presidential campaigns - especially Mitt Romney's - have spent conspicuously little in advertising in a state that is traditionally regarded as one of the keys to the election, Pennsylvania.

This could reflect some tactical quirk - one campaign trying to lull the other into a false sense of security, for instance.

But assume for the moment that Mr. Romney's campaign has decided that Pennsylvania is not a fruitful path to electoral victory. Is this a sensible conclusion? Personally, I don't think so.

Pennsylvania won't be the easiest state for Mr. Romney to win. As of Monday, our forecast model gave him only about a 20 percent chance of doing so. And there are some disadvantages to his trying to compete there.

First, it's hard to move votes in Pennsylvania. Between blacks (and college students) in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on the one hand, and the culturally conservative voters in central Pennsylvania on the other, a lot of the votes there are preordained. There are certainly some swing voters in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs, but in general the demographics of the state make turnout there a bit more important than persuasion.

Second, the polls have been more consistent in Pennsylvania than in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Mr. Obama has led each of the last 16 polls in Pennsylvania, but his margin was in the single digits in all but one of them. Greater consistency in polling also reduces the uncertainty in the forecast.

Nevertheless, our model classifies Pennsylvania as a “tipping point state,” which could conceivably be decisive in the electoral outcome. In fact, it ranked Pennsylvania as the second-most important state as of Monday.

There are two cases in which Pennsylvania could be an important state for Mr. Romney. One case is if he loses Ohio - and th e other if he wins it.

Each day, our model runs a series of Electoral College simulations. Typically, we run 25,001 (the odd number is so that there are no exact ties), but I ran 50,001 on Monday to explore all the different permutations in a bit more depth.

The simulations evaluate the uncertainty in the outcome in each state, and how the states are related to one another. They consider the fact that some states are more similar to one another demographically, and therefore are more likely to move in tandem. They also consider that other factors, like a rising or falling economic tide, is likely to have some effect in all states.

From our set of 50,001 simulations, I looked for cases in which the following conditions held:

1) Mr. Romney won the Electoral College;
2) And, Mr. Romney won Pennsylvania;
3) However, it was close enough that Mr. Romney would have lost the election had he lost Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes.

That is, thes e are cases where Mr. Romney won with somewhere between 269 electoral votes (an exact tie, but the model resolves most of these cases for Mr. Romney since Republicans are likely to control more delegations in the incoming Congress in the event that the 12th Amendment is invoked) and 288 - and with Pennsylvania in hand.

How often did these cases come up? Not very often - only about 450 times out of the 50,000 simulations, or just shy of 1 percent of the time.

But it's important to consider the context. First, the model sees Mr. Romney as an underdog, albeit not an overwhelming one, to win the election. Second, some of the time that Mr. Romney does win the election, it will be in a blowout.

So, this might seem like a marginal case - but the electoral math matters only at the margin as well. There were only about 4,000 simulations in which Mr. Romney won the Electoral College by such a narrow margin. Compared to that, the 450 cases out of 4,000 in which Pennsy lvania proved to be decisive are not trivial.

I then looked up the most common permutations of wins and losses in each state among these 450 cases. The three most common situations all involved Mr. Romney winning Pennsylvania as a substitute of sorts for Ohio:

How plausible is it that Mr. Romney could lose Ohio but win Pennsylvania? It isn't all that likely: Ohio is typically just slightly Republican-leaning, and Pennsylvania is normally Democratic-leaning by two or three points.

Moreover, the two states have broadly similar demographics - it's hard to move votes in one state without affecting them in the other - something which the model considers.

Still, there's enough uncertainty in the forecast that the case of Pennsylvania proving decisive should not be ruled out.

It's plausible, for instance, that Mr. Romney's opposition to the auto bailout will be more of a disadvantage in Ohio than in Pennsylvania, since the former state relies more on a uto industry jobs. Meanwhile, the new voter identification laws in Pennsylvania could give Mr. Romney an extra point or two there, if they're upheld by the courts.

Mr. Romney will be in fairly bad shape if he loses Ohio. But conditional upon that, Pennsylvania might be his least-bad alternative to pick up the requisite number of electoral votes. Wisconsin and Michigan, for instance, might seem like compelling alternatives - but they are typically a bit more Democratic-leaning that Pennsylvania, and Mr. Romney's polls have been no better in them on the whole.

If Mr. Romney's standing rebounds in Ohio - or if the polls suggesting he's in trouble there are wrong begin with - he could rely on a Keystone-Buckeye parlay. For instance, if Mr. Romney won both Ohio and Pennsylvania, that might suffice for him to win the election despite being swept in the competitive states of the Mountain West, like Colorado and Nevada.

In fact, if Mr. Romney won both Pennsylvania and Ohio, he could afford to lose not just Colorado and Nevada (and New Mexico), but also Virginia. The map you see below is a winning one for Mr. Romney, 273 electoral votes to 265.

In other words, the best defense could be a good offense. If Mr. Romney locks down both Ohio and Pennsylvania, then Mr. Obama obviously has few winning maps.

To be sure, the question of how a campaign ought to allocate its resources is not straightforward. Our model's simulations, I hope, do a reasonably good job of articulating the uncertainty in the forecast, and the relationship in the vote in different states. But they are built from historical data. If the campaigns adopt different tactics than past ones did (for instance, concentrating on a narrower range of states), they could make its empirical analysis less meaningful to the 2012 election.

Still, even if Mr. Romney's campaign has reason to believe that Pennsylvania is not quite at the electoral tipping point, that doe s not necessarily mean that they should pull out of it. Expending some resources there would force Mr. Obama's campaign to do the same. The state is certainly close enough - and it has been important enough historically - that neither campaign can really afford to call the other's bluff.

Interestingly, in the waning days of the 2008 campaign, John McCain's campaign concluded that Pennsylvania was its best shot of defusing Mr. Obama's path to victory, and concentrated many of its resources there. Whether this was a good strategy is hard to say - the McCain campaign had a lot of bad options.

But we're still in July - at least for a few more hours. Adopting such triage strategies is premature, especially in a state that has normally been so important to winning elections.

The Breakfast Meeting: Social Media as Focus Group, and a North Korean Fantasy

By NOAM COHEN

The comments relayed by social media are offering retail stores the kinds of insights about consumer demand that in the past would have required assembling focus groups and conducting other kinds of research, Stephanie Clifford reports. Companies like Frito-Lay and Estée Lauder poll the public via social media about what products they would like to see introduced; Wal-Mart, through its acquisition of a social-media company Kosmix, is looking for trends as they emerge - where and when to stock products, whether a certain video game is being talked about, if that talk is positive.

• CNET reports that the rapper Eminem has more Facebook fans than any other living person, surpassing 60 million Facebook Likes, adding an average of 24,000 likes a day. Even so, Rihanna is fast on his tail, adding 26,000 likes a day.

The title character on the Disney animated TV series “Doc McStuffins” is 6-year-old African-American girl who emulates her mother, a doctor, by opening a clinic for dolls and stuffed animals. The series is part of Disney's effort to leave a racially charged past behind, including the racial stereotyping in much earlier films like “Dumbo” or “Song of the South,” Brooks Barnes reports. The Doc McStuffins character has touched a chord with African-American parents, filling a niche among children's animated series. Mr. Barnes writes:

Black cartoon characters in leading roles are still rare. It's considered an on-screen risk to make your main character a member of a minority, even in this post-“Dora the Explorer” age. Networks want to attract the broadest possible audience, but the real peril is in the toy aisle. From a business perspective, Disney and its rivals ultimately make most of these shows in the hope that they spawn mass-appeal toy lines. White dolls are the proven formula.

The production of “Comrade Kim Goes Flying† would seem as unlikely as its title being literally true. It is the first fictional film with an entirely Korean cast co-produced with Western partners and shot inside North Korea, Jonathan Landreth writes. The film, about a coal miner turned trapeze artist, is the brainchild of Nicholas Bonner, an Englishman based in Beijing who runs a company that takes tourists into North Korea. A challenge, he said, was to steer his North Korean co-writers toward comedy and away from a straightforward triumph through hard work; it will premiere in September at the Pyongyang International Film Festival.

With \'Today\' Promo, NBC Spoils a Golden Ending

By JEREMY W. PETERS

It was a touching, made-for-television moment. There was the newest American gold medalist, the 17-year-old Missy Franklin, reflecting on her triumph with her parents.

There was only one problem. Her gold-winning race hadn't been broadcast yet.

NBC, which has endured withering criticism online for its decision not to broadcast Olympic events live, mistakenly showed a preview of a “Today” show segment about Ms. Franklin and her winning spring in the 100 meter backstroke before televising the actual race on Monday night.

Olympic events are often broadcast on a time delay. But this year, in the real-time complaint-box culture that social media has spawned, angry sports fans have taken to Twitter to denounce NBC's coverage. The network streams events live online as they happen in London - five hours ahead of East Coast time - but holds the most popular events like swimming off the air until prime time in the U nited States.

This has resulted in more than a few spoilers for major events like Michael Phelps's failure to medal in his first Olympic event since 2004. Meanwhile, NBC has had no problem leading its evening newscasts with word of the day's winners and losers in London, well before the prime time broadcasts begin.

But no spoiler was quite as embarrassing as the “Today” slip-up. The short commercial shown on Monday night promoted to viewers of Tuesday's “Today” that they would be given the exclusive “live from London” - one of the few instances when “live” actually means it in this Olympics.

Bitter Charges in Shangri-La Hotel Trial

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - It was a sunny day on Monday at the Hotel Shangri-La, a much-restored art deco palace that likes to call itself “Hollywood's Oceanfront Hotel.”

Not so sunny were the proceedings nearby at the Santa Monica division of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, where the Shangri-La and its owner, Tehmina Adaya, are the defendants in a California civil rights lawsuit now being tried before a jury.

The claim is one of anti-Semitism, something of a shocker, given the hotel's reputation as a hang-out for denizens of a movie industry that includes many Jews. And the charge is being fiercely disputed by the defendants - hence the jury trial, which is likely to continue through the week.

The suit arises from an incident on July 11, 2010, when young supporters of a nonprofit organization, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, organized a pool party at the hotel through a promotional firm, Plati num Events, which for months had been collecting commissions from the Shangri-La for setting up similar gatherings.

In the middle of the party, the suit alleges, Ms. Adaya abruptly shut it down, claiming it was unauthorized.

On Monday, Scott Paletz, the promoter who runs Platinum Events - and one of the suit's plaintiffs - was on the stand. He testified to having spoken six or seven times at the gathering with a distressed hotel employee who, he said, apologized profusely for ending the party. But Ms. Adaya, the employee said, insisted it be halted, and “was acting out with anti-Semitism against the group,” as Mr. Paletz recalled his words.

“It had to end, it had to end,” Mr. Paletz recalled the employee telling him. “If Ms. Adaya's investors,” who are Muslims, found out about the pro-Israeli event, “they would cut her off,” Mr. Paletz testified being told. Another employee, said Mr. Paletz, told him that hol ding the event at the Shangri-La “was like bringing the Bloods and the Crips together.” The order to end the event, Mr. Paletz said, had been accompanied by a particularly harsh epithet ordering the Jews out of the hotel.

“Being that I'm Jewish, it absolutely shocked me,” Mr. Paletz testified. “I felt really small.”

A lawyer for Ms. Adaya spent the late afternoon cross-examining Mr. Paletz, with an eye toward showing that he had never been authorized to book the event in the first place, and had peppered his testimony with errors and omissions. A plaintiffs' lawyer, meanwhile, presented evidence that Mr. Paletz and his Platinum events regularly booked events into the hotel with the cooperation of its employees, and were paid a commission on food and beverage sales.

The proceedings ended for the day without Ms. Adaya's lawyer cross-examining Mr. Paletz about the testimony regarding anti-Semitic attitudes and remarks; but the trial resumes and Tu esday, and the jury is likely to hear more before deliberations begin.

July 30: Forecast Stays Steady With 99 Days to Go

By NATE SILVER

We crossed the 100-day barrier over the weekend. Americans will decide on their next president on Nov. 6, 99 days from Monday.

Though there have been some interesting developments in polls at the state level, the overall condition of the race remains about the same. President Obama is clinging to a lead of about two points in the average of national surveys, with perhaps a slightly greater advantage in some key swing states.

The national tracking polls continue to be mediocre for Mr. Obama, but on the other hand, some surveys from polling firms that measure the race on a more occasional basis show stronger numbers for him. A Democracy Corps poll released on Monday, for instance, gave him a four-point lead over Mr. Romney nationally, tying Mr. Obama's largest lead in that particular survey. We think that most of the apparent movement in national polls toward or against Mr. Obama in recent weeks likely reflects little more than statistical noise. According to our model, his chance of winning the Electoral College is 66.9 percent as of Monday, little changed from 67.4 percent on Saturday.

Digital Notes: A Metal Label Makes Amends With Spotify

By BEN SISARIO

When Spotify came to the United States last year, not everyone in the music business was pleased with its economics. But slowly there has been a détente.

From the beginning, some artists and record companies have worried that Spotify's royalty system, in which fractions of  a penny are paid each time a song is streamed, would cannibalize more profitable download sales. Last year, Coldplay and Adele withheld their full albums, and some companies, like the independent metal label Century Media Group, pulled their catalogs entirely.

Announcing its decision least year, Century, whose acts include Andrew W.K., Lacuna Coil and Krisiun, said that Spotify's payment system “accelerates the downward spiral” of the music industry, “which eventually will lead to artists not being able to record music the way it should be recorded.”

There are still some prominent holdouts, like the Black Keys. But lately more and more acts have been shaking hands with Spotify. Coldplay and Adele have both put their full albums up, and on Monday, Century said it was reversing its stance and would license its music to the service.

“We respect that music fans wanted to have instant access to our catalog via Spotify,” Don Robertson, Century's president of North America, said a joint statement with Spotify. “But we also have to consider the rights of our artists. After practicing some due diligence, we're moving ahead confident that both the artist and the fan are being fairly served by this developing platform.”

U.S. Indies Pressure Universal: A few days after the Universal Music Group made sweeping concessions in Europe as part of its $1.9 billion bid to take over EMI, an American group representing independent labels has called the Federal Trade Commission to block the deal on the grounds that no such remedies have been proposed in the United States.

The trade group, the American Association of Independent Music, or A2IM, has made brief statements opposing the merger. But on Monday its president, Rich Bengloff, condemned the deal in strong terms, noting that none of the $440 million in EMI divestments that Universal proposed to the European Commission were for assets in the United States:

With no divestitures or operating remedies proposed for the U.S. - the world's largest music market and home to the vast majority of the technology companies who work with the music community - the negative impact on music consumers and emerging technology companies is clear. Such market concentration will diminish healthy competition, providing one dominant market leader damaging clout in terms of both consumer pricing and the means with which music is made available. The effect on both promotional access and monetization for independent music labels and artists is equally clear.

Universal's proposed divestments represent about a quarter of EMI's annual revenue around the world and two-thirds of its sales in Europe. The European Commission must rule on the deal by Sept. 27; the Federal Trade Commission has given no indication when it would make its decision.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Louisiana: Democrats in Registration Only

By NICK CORASANITI

Today, we continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Today's stop: Louisiana, the Pelican State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Wayne Parent, a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, and Robert Mann, a professor of mass communication at L.S.U.

When 26-year-old Walker Hines announced that he was switching his party affiliation to Republican from Democrat in 2010, he gave the Republican Party a majority in a Louisiana chamber for the first time since Reconstruction.

The young Mr. Hines's decision was emblematic of Louisiana's political transformation: it had become as red as its famous crawfish.

Much like its Gulf Coast brethren, Louisiana has flipped to a solid red state from a solid blue state over the past 20 years. The most recent FiveThirtyEight projections give Mitt Romne y a 99.7 percent chance of carrying the state, and Republican presidential candidates have carried Louisiana easily since George W. Bush. In 2008, Louisiana was one of four Republican states in the country to vote more in favor of John McCain (58.6 percent) than Mr. Bush in 2004 (56.8 percent).

But while Louisiana votes consistently with the Deep South, its conservative engine is made up of slightly different parts, some of which, when viewed in isolation, falsely appears to make Louisiana more pink, or purple, than red.

Of the roughly 2.9 million registered voters in the state, 1.4 million are registered as Democrats, while about 789,000 are registered Republicans and another 694,000 registered as “other.” Even if every “other” voter sided with the Republicans, it would appear that Louisiana is a hotly contested state. So how is every major state office held by a Republican?

The answer to the deceptive voter regis tration numbers lie, in part, with Louisiana's unique “jungle primary” system used in local, state and congressional elections, but not presidential elections. As in the presidential electoral system in France, all candidates for an office in Louisiana run at once without a separate party-specific primary. If any one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the election is over. If not, the top two face off in a runoff election a month later. Voters are not required to register with a party to participate in these elections, removing a main incentive for registering with either the Democrat or Republican parties.

“The minimal effort it takes to register with a party just isn't worth it in Louisiana,” Mr. Parent said. “And a lot of older voters who once registered as Democrats, and I'm talking those 50 and over, now vote nearly exclusively Republican.”

In 2008, older voters showed up strong for Mr. McCain, with 65 percent of those in the 50 -64 age range and 69 percent of those 65 and over casting a Republican ballot.

The “jungle primary” system also has the potential to depress voter turnout, which in turn can lead to misleading exit polls and even some occasional surprise upsets. When voters are forced to return to the polls in the case of a runoff, many won't come back if the issues that had initially drawn them to the polls were already decided.

“Say there was a hotly contested congressional primary that was decided in the first election, and then a lot of local bills and state races went to a runoff, I don't think many people would be coming back out to the polls,” Mr. Parent said.

Electoral system aside, Louisiana became a Republican stronghold because of one main demographic that has shifted through the years: the Catholic vote.

Louisiana has a large Catholic population, setting it apart from its Gulf Coast neighbors. In the 2012 Republican primary, Catholics made up 36 pe rcent of the voters in the primaries. While Catholics weren't tallied in Mississippi or Alabama exit polls in 2012, they accounted for only 8 percent in Mississippi and 5 percent in Alabama in 2008.

The Catholic vote is strongest in the predominantly Cajun southwestern part of the state known as Acadiana. Catholic voters once made up a large part of the “swing” vote in Louisiana, before social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage became part of the political conversation. In 1992, 41 percent of all voters in the state identified themselves as Catholics, and 47 percent of Catholics voted for Bill Clinton. By 2008, the vote had switched, with 70 percent of Catholics voting for Mr. McCain.

“Cajun Catholics are no longer moderately swing votes at all,” Mr. Parent said. “They are becoming as reliably Republican as Southern Baptists.”

However, this is not to say that the other regions of Louisiana hold no sway over elections. As FiveThirtyEight explained in its primary breakdown of Louisiana's political geography, the northern region of Louisiana is regarded as the most conservative region of the state, essentially behaving electorally as an extension of the states it borders: Arkansas to the north and Mississippi to the east. The southeastern part of the state tends to be evenly matched. While New Orleans and Baton Rouge are the state's Democratic strongholds, the surrounding suburbs are some of the most consistently Republican areas in the state.

The Bellwether: De Soto Parish

In the northwest corner of the state, south of Shreveport, De Soto Parish best reflects the current and continuing shift to the right of Louisiana. It has voted within three percentage points of the state margin in each of the last three presidential elections. It has a slightly larger black population (40 percent) than the state as a whole (32 percent), and with its proximity to Shreveport, has a blend of suburban Republican i deologies with Southern Baptist social conservatism.

The Bottom Line

Mr. Romney doesn't need to pick Gov. Bobby Jindal as a running mate to win Louisiana's eight electoral votes. The state will be called for the Republican candidate mere seconds after polls close on Nov. 6. Any Democratic hopes for winning the state disappeared in the 1990s.

And major disasters in the state have only kicked the Democrats further down. In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, President Obama placed a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which created a sense of resentment toward the president in Louisiana, said Mr. Mann, a professor of mass communication at L.S.U.

“I don't hear anyone talk as bad about BP as they do about the moratorium,” he said. “People in Louisiana, Democrats and Republicans, saw it as an intrusion into their way of life.”

Where the oil spill brought resentment, Hurricane Katrina brought devastation. New Orleans lost 14 0,845 residents, a drop of 29 percent from 2000 to 2010. The majority of that loss can be attributed to the storm. The decrease in population was also a reason for Louisiana's losing a Congressional seat and an electoral vote in 2012.

“Katrina really did accelerate a lot of the changes that we have seen come about, like the Republican control of every statewide elected office,” Mr. Mann said. “The shift to the right was already occurring, but Katrina may have been the tipping point.”

Reporter Is Banished From Twitter After Post on NBC\'s Olympics Coverage

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

It all started with a little unbridled Olympic enthusiasm. Guy Adams, a Los Angeles-based correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, started posting on Twitter how frustrated he was that NBC was delaying TV coverage of many of the most popular events of the Olympics until prime time.

He wrote, “Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?” He continued with his gripes: “America's left coast forced to watch Olympic ceremony on SIX HOUR time delay. Disgusting money-grabbing by @NBColympics http://t.co/bQxKCCdj”

Then Mr. Adams filed a post to Twitter that was heard throughout social media.

“The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think!” He ended his post with the work e-mail address of Mr. Zenkel. Soon he was retweeted and some angry followers added the ha shtag #NBCFAIL.

Writing in The Independent, Mr. Adams said he discovered that his account had been suspended “for posting an individual's private information such as private e-mail address.” But he stressed “I do not wish Mr. Zenkel any harm.”

NBC filed a complaint with Twitter; the two media outlets are collaborating to share the reaction of athletes and the public to the Games.

NBC issued a statement saying: “We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives. According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline.”

Mr. Adams declined to comment for this article. A Twitter spokeswoman said the company does not comment on individual users for privacy reasons.

Out of a sense of social-media solidarity, many on Twitter have been posting Mr. Zenkel's e-mail address.

In his article, Mr. Adams shar ed an e-mail he sent to Rachel Bremer, Twitter's head of European public relations.

“I'm of course happy to abide by Twitter's rules, now and forever,” it reads. “But I don't see how I broke them in this case: I didn't publish a private e-mail address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical [in form] to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share.”

Archie Bland, deputy editor of The Independent, wrote Monday afternoon that under those rules, Justin Bieber should also no longer be allowed on Twitter. Mr. Bieber recently briefly posted the phone number of someone who he said had hacked his friend's account.

Jonah Lehrer Resigns From New Yorker After Making Up Dylan Quotes for His Book

By JULIE BOSMAN

Jonah Lehrer, the staff writer for The New Yorker who apologized in June for recycling his previous work in articles, blogs and his bestselling book “Imagine,” resigned from the magazine, he said in a statement.

Mr. Lehrer faced new questions about his work on Monday in an article in the online magazine Tablet that reported that he had admitted to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan in “Imagine,” a nonfiction book published in March by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book ‘Imagine,' ” Mr. Lehrer said in a statement. “The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan's representatives. This was a lie spoken in a momen t of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.”

“The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.”

Michael C. Moynihan, the author of the Tablet article, wrote that he questioned Mr. Lehrer about quotes that appeared in “Imagine” that Mr. Moynihan could not verify.

Lori Glazer, a spokeswoman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said the publisher is “exploring all options” regarding the book. For, the publisher will halt shipment of physical copies of the book and is taking the e-book off the market.

\'The Hobbit\' Will Be Told in Three Movies, Peter Jackson Says, Not Two

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES - The two Hobbit movies will become three - so said Peter Jackson, their director, Monday morning in a posting on his Facebook page.

“It has been an unexpected journey indeed, and in the words of Professor Tolkien himself, ‘a tale that grew in the telling,' ” wrote Mr. Jackson, who said he will use the three-movie format to “tell more of the tale.”

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” which is the first of what will now be three films based on “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien, remains set for release by Warner Brothers and its New Line Cinema unit, along with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, on Dec. 14.

The second film is currently scheduled for release in December 2013. The third film can be expected in the summer of 2014, Warner said in a statement.

In an appearance earlier this month at the Comic-Con International fan convention, Mr. Jackson explained that some material from the related “Lord of the Rings” cycle, and a small bit of invention that added a stronger feminine presence to Mr. Tolkien's Hobbit story, had expanded its cinematic potential.

Michael Cieply covers the film industry from the Los Angeles bureau.

The Breakfast Meeting: Social Media Complicates the Olympics, and a Digital Focus at Time Inc.

By NOAM COHEN

NBC's reliance on tape delay for the biggest Olympics events may be a time-tested strategy for maximizing the prime-time audience, but in the Tweet-it-now world of social media those frustrated by the practice have a place to complain, Richard Sandomir writes. And complain they have, organizing around the hashtag #NBCFail, and creating fake accounts like NBCDelayed, which has 13,000 followers, with posts like “BREAKING: Jesse Owens wins gold in 100m sprint.” The network can point to its stellar ratings - 40.7 million viewers for the opening ceremony and 28.7 million for the first night of competition Saturday - to argue that it must be doing something right.

• Another defense of tape-delay from NBC is that it is live streaming every event, via nbcolympics.com, Mr. Sandomir writes. And while there have been complaints of losing the stream at particularly important times - the swimming race between Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps on Saturday, for example - the growth in streaming has been notable. On Saturday, the first day of competition, there were 7 million live streams, up from 1.6 million on the comparable day in Beijing. Total videos streamed through Saturday, including highlights and replays, stand at 13.2 million, compared with 5.2 million in Beijing.
• The “Today” show, which lately has been facing extraordinarily close ratings competition from ABC's “Good Morning America,” is getting a much-needed boost from NBC's exclusive rights to the Olympics, Brian Stelter writes. Some would go so far as to see the event as giving “Today” â€" which dominated mornings for some 16 years - as a chance to hit the reset button. But the show's co-hosts are loath to see it that way; after all, part of what morning shows like “Today” are offering is the comfort of the familiar. As one of those co-hosts, Matt Lauer, put it: “Do we look at it as, ‘Boy, we have to make or break it in these two weeks and then go back and be different people than we were before'? Absolutely not. We still have to go back and do the same show we want to do - and were doing before we got here.”
• One clear influence of social media is how athletes can let the public into worlds that normally would have been off-limits. Kevin Love, of the United States men's basketball team, considers himself the team's unofficial photographer, Greg Bishop writes; a favorite shot of his is the “gotem” photograph â€" that is “got ‘em” â€" when he catches teammates as they sleep. Nate McMillan, a former N.B.A. star and an assistant coach of the team, said: “It's reality. That's what everybody wants now. They want reality TV. They want the instant photographs. The cameras are there, in our locker rooms, huddles, interviewing coaches during games. What happens on the bus was once sacred. Now, it's part of what the fans want to see.”
• A sampling of Mr. Love's photog raphy

Laura Lang, the new chief executive of Time Inc., is enlisting for the task insights from her previous job running Digitas, the digital advertising firm. As such, Amy Chozick writes, Ms. Lang views the company not as a magazine publisher but as a branded news and entertainment company. That company, which publishes titles like People, Time and Sports Illustrated, has assets in its readership - print and online magazines reach 130 million unduplicated consumers a month and the publisher has 65 million households in its database - that would be considered a treasure trove in Silicon Valley, Ms. Lang argues.

 

 

Ask.com Heralds a New Focus

By TANZINA VEGA

In the world of search engines, Google's dominance has propelled it to a permanent place as a verb in dictionaries. But another Web site named after a verb wants to own the business of answering questions. On Friday, Ask.com began an advertising campaign with the hope of getting more people to visit the site when they have questions like “What's the best way to make a potato salad?” or “Who killed J.F.K.?”

“People aren't looking for a new search engine,” said Doug Leeds, the chief executive of Ask.com. “They are satisfied with Google.” Mr. Leeds said Google is a place to do research “where you just want a whole bunch of sites that point you in the right direction.”

Ask.com, by contrast, is where users come to get answers to specific questions. “People weren't using us for search,” he said. “They were using us for Q. and A., and we weren't giving it to them.” According to Mr. Leeds, users were typing long-form questions into the Web site 50 percent of the time. The site draws 70 million unique users in the United States a month, he said.

The site, originally called Ask Jeeves, was bought in 2005 by InterActiveCorp for $1.85 billion. But with so many people Googling for information, the company had little choice but to refocus its strategy. “We're kind of like the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet,” Mr. Leeds said.

In 2010, Ask.com shifted its focus from a search technology business to a question-and-answer business. The new ads, created by the company rather than an agency, began running in movie theaters across the country last Friday. One ad, called “Sense and Sensibility,” features a Victorian lord and lady. When summoned, the man tells the woman, “You may ask me anything,” to which she replies, “How do I jailbreak this smartphone?”

A second ad is a spoof of “Snow White.” The wicked queen begins her question with “Mirro r, mirror on the wall,” but when told that she is the fairest of them all, she stops and asks, “Why doesn't it tickle when you tickle yourself?”

Spin Announces Layoffs and Drops Nov./Dec. Issue

By BEN SISARIO

Two weeks after its takeover by an online media company, Spin magazine's future as a print publication was cast further into doubt on Friday when 11 employees - a third of the staff - were laid off and publication plans for the bimonthly magazine were suspended.

Whether Spin, an alternative music magazine founded in 1985, will disappear in printed form altogether is unclear.

The next issue, dated September/October and featuring the rapper Azealia Banks on the cover, will come out in late August. But according to a statement on Sunday by Spin's new owner, Buzzmedia, there will be no November/December issue while the company figures out what form a printed Spin might take given the magazine's expansion online.
“Buzzmedia and Spin are committed to moving forward with print, but we are still determining exactly how print fits in with Spin's multiple distribution points and growth initiatives,” the statement said.

On Friday, in its second round of major staff changes in a year, Spin dismissed 11 employees, including Steve Kandell, the editor in chief of the print magazine, and Catherine Davis, its managing editor. Twenty-five staff members remain, led by two editors with deep experience at Spin: Charles Aaron, its editorial director, and Caryn Ganz, the online editor in chief.

“In the coming year, we will build upon this core staff by doubling the editorial team,” Buzzmedia said.

Like most music magazines, Spin has struggled with online competition and falling advertising. To compete with online forces like the Web site Pitchfork, Spin introduced an iPad app and beefed up its Web site. In March, it shifted the print edition from monthly to bimonthly publication and lowered the magazine's rate base, the minimum guaranteed circulation, to 350,000 from 450,000.

Buzzmedia operates a portfolio of music and celebrity Web sites including Stereogum, Idolator, Absolu tePunk and one devoted to Kim Kardashian. From the beginning, the company said it wanted to preserve Spin in print - which could help lure blue-chip advertisers - but it has been ambiguous about the format and the frequency of publication.
One possible model that has been discussed by the new owners, according to two people briefed on the company's plans who did not want to jeopardize their jobs by commenting publicly on private meetings, is Grantland, a pop culture Web site from ESPN that also anthologizes some of its writing in quarterly books.

For the time being, Spin is relying on its Web site and other online platforms. But those outlets face challenges, too. Over the last year, Spin.com had an average of 490,000 monthly visitors, about half the audience of Pitchfork (with 971,000) and about one-sixth the audience of Rollingstone.com (2.97 million), according to the Web measurement service comScore.

Which Olympic Records Get Shattered?

By NATE SILVER

In track and field, athletes compete not just against one another, but against the intrinsic barriers of human achievement. At the London Olympics, the runners and jumpers and javelin-throwers will set fewer world records than the swimmers. But the ones they do set are more likely to survive the test of time. Read more in the Sunday Review.

July 28: Missouri Slipping Away From Democrats

By NATE SILVER

Missouri, the state that was once considered the nation's ultimate bellwether, looks as though it is likely to be out of reach for President Obama this year, unless there is a significant shift toward him in the final 100 days of the campaign.

A Mason-Dixon poll of the state, released on Saturday, gave Mitt Romney a nine-point lead there. Mr. Romney's nine-point lead matches his advantage from another poll of the state, conducted by the firm We Ask America, which was released earlier this week.

The forecast model now estimates that Mr. Romney has an 88 percent chance of winning Missouri in November. And Missouri has fallen off the list of tipping point states, meaning that it is very unlikely to be a decisive state in determining the winner of the Electoral College. The cases where Mr. Obama wins Missouri are probably those where he is headed toward some sort of near-landslide in the national race, like because of an une xpected rebound in the economy.

Democrats have made gains in some parts of the country in recent years - most notably in the Mountain West and in Virginia, which has increasingly begun to behave as a Northern state. But they have receded in the poorer states of the upland South, like Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.

With the exception of a few urban centers like Knoxville, Tenn., these regions have always been culturally conservative. But they also once had a reputation for being economically moderate or even populist, tending to support elements of the welfare state.

In the past four presidential elections, political partisanship has become more uni-dimensional, with a higher percentage of voters tending to align with the same party on both economic and social issues - even though there is often little intrinsic relation between them. In this part of the country, the trade seems to have worked against Democrats - or at least it ha s worked against the fairly liberal Democrats who have been the party's presidential nominees in the past four election cycles.

Over all, Mr. Romney's chances of winning the Electoral College improved somewhat in Saturday's forecast, to 32.6 percent from 30.9 percent on Friday, according to the model.

One reason for Mr. Romney's improvement - in addition to his strong Missouri poll - was that we went back and double-checked our polling database for cases in which polling firms had reported both registered voter and likely voter results within the same survey release.

A comparison between these numbers forms the basis of the forecast model's likely voter adjustment, which shifts numbers from polls of registered voters toward Republican candidates since Republicans typically perform better on surveys that estimate how likely each voter is to actually participate in the election.

The model shifts registered voter polls toward the Republican candidate by 1.5 percentage points as a default, since this is the average change from previous presidential election years. But the adjustment can increase or decrease as additional data becomes available. Based on the data so far this year, the model now estimates that the shift will be slightly larger than average this year, equal to about 2.3 percentage points instead.

Holdout at \'Modern Family\' Ends, as 6 Adult Stars Get New Deals

By BILL CARTER

LOS ANGELES - After what amounted to a routine holdout by the six adult stars of television's top comedy, “Modern Family,” deals were concluded Friday night that will have the show's premiere episode begin production Monday, as scheduled.

The president of ABC Entertainment, Paul Lee, said here Friday night that all cast members had agreed to new deals. They will receive significant, though undisclosed, salary raises.

Steve Levitan, the show's co-creator said, “I really was never worried about this at all.” He described the contract demands by the actors as completely expected and what always happens when shows emerge as big hits.
“We want everyone on the show to share in its success … within reason,” Mr. Levitan said.

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.

July 27: Ohio Polls Show Trouble for Romney

By NATE SILVER

I wrote earlier this week about some of the challenges in comparing state polls and national polls. Sometimes, apparent differences between the two sets of numbers can result from methodological quirks of the polling firms that are active in each arena, as well as random sampling error.

With that said, we are starting to see a bit of a gap between our Electoral College and popular vote forecasts based on the latest polling data this week - one which potentially favors President Obama.

In general, the polls from nonswing states this week, ranging from New Jersey to North Dakota, were mediocre for Mr. Obama. But his numbers held up better in swing states.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Ohio, where there were two new polls out on Friday. One of them, from the firm We Ask America, gave Mr. Obama an eight-point lead there. Another, from Magellan Strategies, put Mr. Obama up by two points.

Our model thinks the Magellan Strategies poll is a more realistic estimate of the state of play in Ohio. The model now forecasts a three-point victory for Mr. Obama there, which it translates to about a two-in-three chance of his winning the state given the uncertainty in the forecast.

Mr. Obama's projected three-point lead in Ohio is important for the following reason, however: it's slightly larger than the 2.4-point advantage that the model now gives Mr. Obama in the national popular vote.

In other words, based on the data so far this year, Ohio has been slightly Democratic-leaning relative to the country as a whole. That reflects a reversal from the usual circumstances. Normally, Ohio - though very close to the national averages - leans Republican by two points or so.

A split between the winners of the popular vote and the Electoral College is still relatively unlikely, in the view of the model. There is only a 3.9 percent chance that Mr. Oba ma will win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote, it estimates.

However, the model now assigns just a 1.3 percent chance to the reverse happening: Mr. Romney's winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.

Ohio is a big part of the reason. It's by no means impossible that Mr. Romney could win the Electoral College despite losing Ohio, but it would be an uphill battle.

If Mr. Obama won all the states that John Kerry did in 2004, and Ohio, he would have 264 electoral votes.

Winning New Mexico in addition to these states, where Mr. Obama is heavily favored, would make the Electoral College a 269-269 tie. That isn't necessarily a problem for Mr. Romney. The incoming House of Representatives is likely to contain a majority of Republican delegations, which would presumably vote for him under the 12th Amendment.

However, if Mr. Obama claimed any other competitive state that Mr. Kerry lost - Nevada, Iowa, Virginia, Florida or C olorado, for example - he would win the Electoral College outright, regardless of what happened in New Mexico.

Of the states, Nevada is probably the most problematic for Mr. Romney. He has trailed in all the polls there, and it has increasingly begun to behave as a Democratic-leaning state.

Another plausible scenario is that Mr. Romney could win New Hampshire, which Mr. Kerry lost in 2004, but lose New Mexico and Nevada. In that case, he'd lose the Electoral College by two votes, with 268 electoral votes to Mr. Obama's 270.

Alternatively, Mr. Romney could try to win one of the Midwestern states that Mr. Kerry won - most likely, Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin. But these states have broadly similar demographics to Ohio, and it is unlikely that Mr. Romney would win them conditional upon losing the Buckeye State.

Although state economic statistics have only modest predictive power as compared with the national numbers, Mr. Obama may be benefiting fro m the fact that Ohio's unemployment rate has fallen substantially - to 7.3 percent from a peak of 10.6 percent. Had the national unemployment rate declined by a similar margin, Mr. Obama would likely be a clear favorite in the election right now.

Much of the gain in Ohio has been from auto industry jobs, a relative bright spot in the economy, and a potential problem for Mr. Romney since he opposed the federal bailout of the major auto makers.

Mr. Romney could seek to even the score by naming Senator Rob Portman of Ohio as his vice-presidential nominee. Vice presidents do not make as much difference as the conventional wisdom sometimes holds: a net gain of two points by appointing a home-state candidate is a roughly realistic estimate, although it can vary a lot from case to case. Still, gaining two points in Ohio would provide a pretty meaningful push to Mr. Romney given the way that the polls look right now.

Mr. Obama also benefited on Friday from the rise in the stock market, which improved the model's economic index. The S. & P. 500 closed at 1,386 points on Friday, its highest figure since May.

The stock market is likely to remain volatile in the weeks ahead, as investors seek to weigh the consequences of critical economic news - including next Friday's jobs report, possible actions by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy and efforts by the European Central Bank to defend the euro zone.

My personal read on the stock market is that it seems to be pricing in a fairly high likelihood of stimulative actions by central banks, both in the United States and Europe. If investors do not get what they are hoping for, it could decline significantly.

In the meantime, Mr. Romney's campaign will need to consider whether it trusts the polls showing him down in Ohio, and if so, what actions it might take to remedy that problem.

Web Site Offers Advice on How to Get Ahead in Advertising

By STUART ELLIOTT

A longtime advertising executive and copywriter is behind an effort that might be called virtual mentoring for Madison Avenue.

Mat Zucker, who has held senior creative posts at shops like Agency.com, OgilvyOne and R/GA, is starting the Hindsight Career Project, which will live on a Web site, hindsightproject.net. The purpose of the initiative is described on the home page: “What we learn when we look back.”

Visitors to the Web site can watch video clips in which executives, from both the creative and account sides of the industry share advice by recounting stories about their careers. The videos are meant to address “a mentorship gap in the industry,” Mr. Zucker said, and are aimed at “people coming into the industry and mid-level people who want to move up.”

The first videos on the Web site present recollections of experienced executives who include Sarah Barclay, executive creative director at JWT; Brian Collins, chief executive at Collins; Matt Eastwood, chief creative officer at DDB New York; and Barry Wacksman, chief growth officer at R/GA.

The initiative is part of a nascent trend in advertising that seeks to use new media to share teachable moments. For instance, a New York agency, Seiter & Miller Advertising, has a channel on YouTube devoted to what it calls “Advertising's Greatest War Stories.”

Mr. Zucker is starting Hindsight with David Gaddie, a director at a production company, the Colony, and Andrea Leminske, a producer. Mr. Zucker said he hoped the effort could be expanded to include “technology, strategy, media and public relations.”

At this time, there are no sponsors for Hindsight on ads on the Web site, “but we will be seeking a funding mechanism to keep it going,” Mr. Zucker said.

A trailer for an initiative called the Hindsight Career Project offers people who want t o get into the advertising industry, and want to get ahead in the industry.

 

 

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter by clicking here.

What the New G.D.P. Figures Mean for the Election

By NATE SILVER

Let me begin with an important reminder. Unless you have a particular interest in economic or political forecasting, the major upshot of Friday's gross domestic product report, which estimated that the economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.5 percent in the second quarter, is simply that the American economy is still not doing very well.

What economists call “trend” or average growth is supposed to be closer to 3 percent. Moreover, after many past recessions, we've had above-trend growth in the year or so after the recession to help make up for the lost productivity in the economy.

We didn't have that this time around. After the latest revisions to the data, only two quarters since the recession officially ended came in above that 3 percent threshold; all the others were below it.

So, there remains an output gap of about $800 billion dollars. That's the difference between what economists think annual G.D.P. wo uld be if the economy were at its full productive capacity, and what it actually is.

But we concern ourselves with the more narrow question of election forecasting at this blog. On that front, I agree with other analysts who suggest that the G.D.P. numbers don't contain all that much new information.

In the case of how our forecasting model is designed, this is true - it does not use the backward-looking G.D.P. numbers.

The reason for this is simple: G.D.P. is reported on a quarterly basis. That's a bit slower than we'd like, when there are other good data series that have a shorter lead time.

Moreover, the initial estimates of G.D.P. are often very noisy. It's possible that Friday's numbers will eventually be revised to show that growth was actually negative, meaning that the economy was potentially in recession. It's also possible that they'll eventually be revised upward to show 3 percent growth or better. It's very com mon to see quarterly G.D.P. numbers revised by a full percentage point in one direction or the other, and reasonably common for the adjustments to be larger than that.

Instead, the bulk of our economic index (60 percent of the weight) is assigned to a series of four monthly indicators that correlate reasonably well with G.D.P. over the long run, and that economists use to help date recessions and recoveries.

These numbers are noisy too, of course - some more so than others. (The series called personal income, for instance, tends to get especially substantial revisions, while the jobs numbers are a bit more stable.)

But if you look at what they say in combination with one another, you can usually get a reasonably good estimate of G.D.P. a couple of months before the figure is released.

That was the case here. The reported figures of 1.5 percent growth in the second quarter, and 2 percent growth in the first quarter, are consistent with what the economi c index had already “priced in” to its expectations.

The chart below shows the normalized figures for the four G.D.P. proxies: payroll jobs, industrial production, personal consumption and personal income. The normalization process translates these numbers so that they are on the same scale as one another, and the same scale as quarterly G.D.P. reports.

The four indicators tell different stories about the economy. Income growth has been very poor, for example, while industrial production has been pretty encouraging.

For better or for worse, this is a pretty normal state of affairs. Economic data is really noisy, and different series often diverge quite a bit, especially before revisions.

Still, if you average the four numbers together, you get an index of 1.7 percent growth. That almost exactly matches the G.D.P. growth rate during the previous six months, which is the period that our model is mostly concerned about.

Growth at this rate woul d ordinarily make a president's re-election prospects extremely tenuous: probably about 50-50, according to our model and others.

The reason our economic index sees Mr. Obama as a very modest favorite for re-election is because it also considers inflation, which is assigned 15 percent of the weight. And inflation has been very low.

Imagine the counterfactual: that on top of all the other problems in the economy, we also had, say 6 percent inflation. Then gas might cost $4.75 a gallon, and you'd notice the change in prices pretty frequently when you went to the grocery store. Under those circumstances, our model would have Mr. Obama as an underdog.

Of course, the G.D.P. numbers and other economic statistics are pretty tenuous on their own. If things get much worse than this in the next three-and-a-half months before the election, our economic index will start to see Mr. Obama as an underdog even with the low inflation rate.

A New Ad Campaign for Kaiser Permanente

By TANZINA VEGA

Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care providers in the United States, is rolling out the latest installment of its nine-year-long advertising campaign, “Thrive,” on Friday.

The slew of new ads will coincide with the first day of the Olympic Games. It will include radio, digital, print and television spots created by Campbell Ewald, the company's agency of record, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

“All the way through, we've been emphasizing Kaiser Permanente's role as a total health advocate for our members,” said Christine Paige, the senior vice president of marketing and Internet services for Kaiser Permanente. “That means that commitment to comprehensive coordinated care with an emphasis on prevention, early detection and great clinical care when people need it.”

The ads come at a time when health insurance companies are trying to soften their images with ad campaigns that show them as consumer-friendly health care companies, not just insurance providers.

“We're not an insurer,” Ms. Paige said. “We're health care delivery, first and foremost.”

The ads take different approaches depending on where they run.

One television spot, called “Small Stuff,” focuses on the Kaiser successes, like “getting hypertension under control for over 80 percent of our members.” Another spot, called “Patient Info,” focuses on electronic health record technology and shows patients waiting to see their doctors and trying to answer questions.

“Honey, what's my blood pressure medicine called?” says one man in a cellphone call to his wife as he sits in an office. “One time I took something and I blew up like a puffer fish,” says another man in a hospital gown. “I'm probably allergic to that.”

“Over the past couple of years there's been much more discussion in the policy world a bout electronic health records,” Ms. Paige said about the decision to advertise that service. “It's easier to communicate about it now because at least the concepts have some familiarity.”

Digital ads have more of an Olympic feel. One video ad shows a group of synchronized swimmers and the tag line, “Synchronization: Good for swimming. Better for your health.” A second digital ad shows two men playing soccer in a lush meadow with the tagline, “We work as a team for a different type of gold.”

Rado ads have their own niche. “Health care is a little bit of a complicated story to tell, and radio gives you a bit more space than something like TV,” Ms. Paige said.

Radio ads will run in markets like San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., while television ads will run during shows like “The Voice,” “Person of Interest” and “Glee.” Digital ads will be seen on sites like USA Today, BBC, Yahoo Sports, Disney and Pandora, w here Kaiser has also created its own music channel.

New York: Not as Blue as It Could Be

By SARAH WHEATON

Today we continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Today's stop: New York. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Steven A. Greenberg, the Siena College pollster and political consultant, and Bruce Gyory, a consultant at Corning Place Communications and an adjunct professor of political science at the University at Albany.

New York's Democrats are underachievers.

Sure, Barack Obama won the 2008 election in New York with 62.2 percent of the vote â€" behind only Hawaii, Vermont and Washington, D.C. â€" and Andrew M. Cuomo took the governor's mansion in 2010 with 62.6 percent.

But in a state where almost half of the voters are registered Democrats, giving them a 2-to-1 advantage over registered Republicans, is that really such an accomplishment?

To understand the state's politics, it makes sense to divide New York into three regions: New York City, the downstate suburbs (Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, Westchester and Rockland Counties just north of the city), and the sprawling, diverse upstate region.

As far as Democratic performance goes, New York City, the state's liberal economic engine, is the biggest slacker of all. A city that has not voted for a Republican for president since Calvin Coolidge in 1922 has not elected a Democratic mayor since 1989. The five boroughs also don't vote their weight: As Mr. Gyory notes, in 2008 New York City made up about 42 percent of the state's population, 38 percent of its registered voters and 34 percent of the vote â€" and that figure actually shows improvement over previous years.

Upstate New York, on the other hand, contributes 42 percent to 46 percent of the vote, despite having about 36 percent of the population and 39 percent of the registered voters, Mr. Gyory said. The region includes vast rural tracts, including the northernmost stretches of Appalachia, as well as dying manufacturing towns and the state's capital. Upstate's medium-size cities, like Rochester and Buffalo, fit a Rust Belt profile â€" people even say “pop” instead of “soda.”

“A Democrat has a problem if he or she cannot carry at least 40 percent of the vote upstate,” Mr. Gyory said. But 45 percent, he added, can almost guarantee a victory.

It's hard to blame New York's Democrats for resting on their laurels. The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the state was Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election in 1984, and the last Republican to win a statewide race was Gov. George Pataki, whose third re-election race was two decades ago.

With the careers of Mr. Pataki and Rudolph W. Giuliani apparently over, the New York Republican Party has no standard-bearer. Republicans' small registration numbers hamper their ability to draw in undecided voters, because the conservative primary electorate tends to choose candidates well to the right of the state's mainstream.

“It's getting bluer because the Republicans are not giving them much of a run for their money,” Mr. Gyory said.

Case in point: In 2010, an energized Tea Party-infused Republican electorate chose Carl P. Paladino, a Buffalo businessman known more for his eccentricity than for his political acumen, over former Representative Rick A. Lazio of Long Island. (Earlier in the campaign, the head of the state Republican Party was so despondent about the party's chances that he tried to recruit a Democrat to switch parties and run against Mr. Cuomo on the Republican ticket.)

Mr. Cuomo beat Mr. Paladino by almost 30 points, and the state's Democratic United States senators won by similar margins. But as Mr. Greenberg pointed out, the Democrat running for attorney general won by 11 points, and Thomas P. DiNapoli won re-election to the comptroller's of fice by only 2.5 points.

“So we clearly have swing voters,” Mr. Greenberg said.

But without moderates, Republicans might not be able to draw them in.

“In gubernatorial years, New York is a Democrat, not a liberal, state,” Mr. Gyory said. But he warns that if Republicans “continue to not run good candidates, they won't be able to take advantage of that distinction.”

The Bellwethers
According to Mr. Greenberg, even the “worst Democrat” would get 40 percent of the vote, and his or her terrible Republican rival would get about 25 percent. An additional 15 percent of voters are likely to favor Democrats in most cases, he said, so only about 20 percent of the electorate is truly up for grabs.

Where do these swing voters live? Westchester County is a key battleground. Immediately north of New York City, Westchester is one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the state, with growing Hispanic and Asian communities clustered in cities like Yonkers and New Rochelle. Efforts to integrate minorities into the county's graceful, affluent bedroom communities along the Hudson River with affordable-housing grants have caused tension, and the moves have put County Manager Rob Astorino â€" one of the few rising Republican stars â€" in the spotlight.

Mr. Greenberg looks to Westchester and to Erie County, where Buffalo is situated, to determine a Democrat's chances.

“As a Democrat, you do what you're supposed to do in the city, you carry Westchester and Erie, you're going to win,” he said. Republicans have a more daunting task.

“If a Republican is going to be competitive in New York State, they've got to carry the suburbs, they've got to carry upstate,” Mr. Greenberg said. Republicans don't have to win upstate by a high margin, he added, but they need to amass “close to 60 percent” in the suburbs.

That's likely to be increasingly difficult. Though they once leaned Republica n, Long Island's two counties are increasingly purple. Almost a third of Long Island's population is nonwhite, a dramatic shift. In Westchester, that figure is 35 percent.

The other suburbs around Albany, Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse are also competitive, and there are even some swing voters in New York City, including the white ethnic enclaves of the boroughs outside Manhattan, including Staten Island, which is home to the First Congressional District, one of the most fiercely contested in the state.

The Bottom Line
Making matters worse for Republicans, people from the state's more liberal areas are moving upstate. Northern Westchester through the northern Saratoga Valley, along the Hudson, has the state's highest rate of growth, according to Mr. Gyory. Many of the migrants are coming from New York City, drawn in particular by an emerging high-tech sector. (Mr. Obama visited the University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in May.) The result, Mr. Gyory said, resembles “what's going on in North Carolina - it's less predictably Republican than it was.”

This isn't to say that there are no Republican bastions. On the contrary, Republicans hold a majority in the State Senate, with upstate's many rural districts sending conservatives to Albany.

“Democrats can't win upstate outside of major urban areas,” Mr. Greenberg said. And down the ballot, “most of upstate is actually in play,” he said.

A shrinking population cost New York two House seats, bringing the number to 27. When it appeared that his district would be split, one upstate Democrat retired, and several of the redrawn districts incorporated greater shares of Republicans. But the Republican candidates will not have much help from the state and national parties. “They're not going to contest for the presidential; they don't have a strong Senate candidate,” Mr. Gyory said. “They don't give a lot of air cover down -ballot.”

As minorities and young people move to swing districts, and as New York City begins to vote more in proportion with its share of the population, the long-term trends don't look good for Republicans. But New York's cycles are slow.

“In New York, the party pendulum doesn't swing in four- and eight-year cycles,” Mr. Gyory said. “It tends to swing in 16-to-20-year cycles.”

Remembrances of Frank Pierson, Creator of \'Cool Hand Luke\' and \'Dog Day Afternoon\'

By THE EDITORS

Frank Pierson, whose scripts included “Cool Hand Luke” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. His influence extended beyond those and other scripts: he was a director, a mentor, a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America, West. Recently, he was working as a consulting producer on two of the more celebrated current TV series “Mad Men” and “The Good Wife.”

What follows are a variety of remembrances of Mr. Pierson.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” a show that Mr. Pierson worked on in the last years of his life (as told to Bill Carter):

In the course of talking in my office, he made it clear he wanted to write on the show. I told him, “First of all, I can't rewrite you,” which is really a big part of what I do. He said: “Sure you can. I had a TV show. I know what the job is.” I asked him what sh ow that was. He said, “Have Gun Will Travel.” I asked whom he had on that writing staff. He said, “Gene Roddenberry.” I said, “Yeah, he's good.“

I feel lucky I got to learn from his bio. Sometimes we put it right in the show. Last year, we had a story where Sally Draper was talking to her step-grandmother and telling her she was so strict. Frank had told me a story his mother used to tell: how when she was a little girl, she was walking across the living room one day and her father was asleep on the couch and out of nowhere he kicked her and sent her all the way across the room and under a piece of furniture and said to her: “That's for nothing. So look out.” I turned to him and I was like, “Can I have that?” A writer reacts to stories like that. And Frank said: “Make it yours. I don't want it anymore.”

He had a real understanding for the adult marketplace that had kind of drifted away from the movie theater. Like any great writer, he had tremendous confidence in his subconscious. There is so much of him in “Dog Day Afternoon” and of him and his brother in “Cool Hand Luke.” When you learn about those things you're like, “How do I do that?”

Robert King, the creator of “The Good Wife,” a show Mr. Pierson worked in 2010 (as told to Bill Carter).

We don't live in a time of Shakespeare or Walt Whitman. In the screenwriting world you've got Robert Towne, Alvin Sargent and Frank Pierson. Those are kind of the Shakespeares. And you think: one of these guys is going to join our writing staff?

The earliest memory I have of my family going to a drive-in was to see “Cat Ballou.” He was extraordinarily clever in that, using the narrative technique of the strolling singers. He saw a way to make a hip Western. With “Dog Day,” it feels like a lot of gritty features and TV came from the grammar of that movie. Frank Pierson created the grammar of the urban crime story in “Dog Day Afternoon.”
You would imagine that one of the top screenwriters ever would talk down to TV, and think it was slumming. Instead he brought a real commitment that you could bring the feature sensibility to television.

Robert Kolker, who teaches at the University of Virginia, and is the author of “A Cinema of Loneliness.”

The death of Frank Pierson has brought the screenwriter out of anonymity, for a moment at least.

Pierson wrote (among other films) “Cat Ballou” (1965), “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), important films made during the so-called “Hollywood renaissance.” Beginning in the 1960s, the major studios began falling apart, their owners dying off or going into retirement, and their studios sold to large corporate entities. It was a period of churn that allowed new talent to enter the scene with films that broke with many of the conventions and restrictions of studio production. “Dog Day Afternoon” was a particularly energetic and imaginative entry into this exciting field. Together with director Sidney Lumet, Pierson created the rare film that remains vital in the cinematic imagination.

Like many other writers and directors of the period, Pierson started in television; but unlike most of his colleagues, he moved easily from film back to television, writing and occasionally directing a variety of programs. He was also active as a producer, as far back as the early 1960s series “Have Gun, Will Travel” and as recently as “Mad Men.” He was something of a renaissance man of the Hollywood renaissance.

Howard A. Rodman, vice president, Writers Guild of America, West, and professor at the  School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California.

Frank's screenplays were impeccably crafted. But the craft was never at the expense of wild, uncontaina ble character. His people were, moment-to-moment, surprising; but their actions, in retrospect, seemed inevitable. This is harder to do than it seems and Frank was a master at it.

Frank himself could have stepped out of a Pierson screenplay. (Have you seen many other 87-year-olds tear out of the parking lot of Musso in a top-down Tesla?) He did not suffer fools gladly and had little patience for bad, or even adequate, work. He was not shy about letting you know. But when he smiled, or uttered a grunt of approval, you were on top of the world.

He wasn't elected president of the WGAW, or of AMPAS, because he was slick, or politic, or ingratiating. (At awards ceremonies, he'd look like Paul Bunyan in a tux.) But there was never a room I saw him in - at the Guild, at the Academy, at Sundance, at Musso - where he didn't command immediate and thorough respect. It was his bearing. But more: it was the knowledge that he'd done a lifetime of honest work, and wasn't done y et.

I always knew Frank was not young, but it never crossed my mind, not even vaguely, that he might someday die. He was a force of nature as well as an icon of the cinema. It's hard to imagine him gone: his death is a shock as well as a surprise.

Universal Offers a Sweeping Sell-Off to Win Approval of EMI Purchase

By BEN SISARIO

In a significant retreat from Universal Music Group's ambitions of adding EMI's record labels to its already dominant position in the music market, the company has offered sweeping concessions to the European Commission, agreeing to sell the majority of EMI's holdings in Europe if the acquisition is approved.

According to an internal memo that Roger Faxon, the chief executive of EMI, sent to employees on Friday morning, shortly after Universal submitted its concessions package to the European regulators, the package includes the sale of Parlophone Records - the European home of Pink Floyd, Coldplay and the star D.J. David Guetta.

Also included are EMI's classical labels; its share of the profitable “Now That's What I Call Music!” compilation series; a number of the independent labels that EMI has absorbed over the years, like Mute, Chrysalis and Ensign; and at least seven of EMI's subsidiary operating companies throu ghout Europe.

By the estimates of two people briefed on the proposals, who were not authorized to speak about it, the assets divested could represent between 55 percent and 65 percent of EMI's annual revenue in Europe.

The concessions do not include EMI's greatest jewel, however, the recordings of the Beatles, as well as Virgin Records and EMI's flagship label, EMI Records, whose acts in Europe include Iron Maiden and Talking Heads. Nor do the concessions include rights to the music outside Europe.

But in another twist, Universal is also offering to sell a small number of its own assets, including Sanctuary, Co-Op, UMG Greece and a number of jazz labels.

Spokesmen for Universal and EMI declined to comment.

Such a large divestment of assets raises questions about the value of what Universal would ultimately be buying. According to its deal with Citigroup - which took over EMI last year after its previous owners, the private equity group Terra Firma defaulted on its debt - Universal assumed all regulatory risk for the deal and is scheduled to pay more than $1.7 billion of its full $1.9 billion purchase price by September, whether the deal is approved by regulators or not.

The European Commission has until Sept. 27 to rule on the deal.

Analysts have said that the more pieces of EMI that Universal has to sell at a lower price than what it agreed to pay for them, the more expensive the overall deal becomes for Universal and its parent company, the French conglomerate Vivendi.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Jim Walton to Step Down as Chief of CNN

By BRIAN STELTER

Time Warner said Friday that Jim Walton, the embattled president of CNN Worldwide, will hand the news giant over to a new chief at the end of the year.

The announcement came in the middle of a year of widespread scrutiny of CNN's - and by extension Mr. Walton's - performance. CNN, while hugely profitable, has been plagued by an identity crisis, particularly at its flagship cable news channel CNN/U.S., where the ratings have sagged.

“CNN needs new thinking,” Mr. Walton said in an internal memorandum. “That starts with a new leader who brings a different perspective, different experiences and a new plan, one who will build on our great foundation and will commit to seeing it through. And I'm ready for a change. I have interests to explore and I want to give myself time to do it.”

Mr. Walton's boss, Phil Kent, the president of Turner Broadcasting, has made his dissatisfaction with CNN/U.S. known in recent mo nths, as has his boss, Jeff Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner. In a statement, Mr. Bewkes said that he respects Mr. Walton and supports “the decision that he and Phil Kent have reached.”

Mr. Bewkes said that the CNN Mr. Walton inherited in 2003 “was underperforming,” with its earnings “in serious decline.” Mr. Walton, he said, grew the business into a “financial powerhouse” with annual growth of 15 percent.

The Breakfast Meeting: Facebook Disappoints, and Romney as Fodder in Britain

By NOAM COHEN

Facebook disappointed investors on Thursday with its first financial report as a public company, and the company's stock price took a hit, Somini Sengupta reported. In after-hours trading, the share price dipped to $24, a new low and 37 percent below where it was set as an initial public offering. The results were a mix: revenue in the quarter climbed to $1.18 billion; on an adjusted basis, the company posted a profit of 12 cents a share, or $295 million, meeting analysts' expectations. But all eyes were on the service's potential growth, and users' transition to mobile devices, and there the picture was murkier, Ms. Sengupta writes:

During the call with analysts, company executives emphasized their efforts to make Facebook accessible on mobile devices. The company only recently started surfacing advertisements in the mobile newsfeed. And while company executives said they were seeing promising results, they also sa id they were being careful not to crowd the mobile platform with too many advertisements, lest it spoil the user experience. The company said 543 million people looked at Facebook on their mobile devices at the end of June, a 67 percent jump from last year. “The shift toward mobile is incredibly important,” Mr. Zuckerberg said during the call.

• In listing the five take-aways from the earnings call that featured Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Jenna Wortham homed in on Facebook's accommodation of its mobile users. The riddle is that Facebook says its users are more active on mobile phones, but may be harder to reach through advertising; also, Facebook currently can't process mobile payments for social games; finally, Mr. Zuckerberg also poured water on the idea of a Facebook cellphone.

Amazon.com presented a vastly different picture in its earnings call, David Streitfeld writes: fast growing revenue, almost no profit. That is, the c ompany reported sales of $12.8 billion, up 29 percent, in the second quarter while producing net income of $7 million, or a penny a share. This is a familiar story for Amazon as it invests its revenues into expanding its consumer base.

• Amazon is building fulfillment centers, many of them close to major cities, including New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Mr. Streifeld writes, signaling a shift in priorities: “In the past, Amazon declined to build warehouses in states where it had many customers, because it would then have to collect sales taxes from them. Now the promise of offering these areas even faster delivery seems to be more of an imperative than continuing to fight the tax issue.”

A surprising new idea has been floated by Universal Music Group to win the support of European regulators for its planned $1.9 billion takeover of EMI: selling Parlophone Records, which releases the music of Coldplay and Radiohead and is the heart of EM I's holdings in Europe. The news was first reported by The Financial Times late Thursday, and indicates the difficulties Universal has faced in convincing Europe to approve the deal, despite concerns over what it could mean for competitiveness in the music industry, Ben Sisario writes.

Mitt Romney's comments in London about whether the city was prepared to hold the Olympic Games, and whether the British people were enthusiastic about playing host, made Mr. Romney excellent fodder for the British papers, across the political spectrum, The Guardian reported. The Times of London headline: “‘Nowhere man' Romney loses his way with gaffe about the Games”; The Daily Mail asked, “Who invited party-pooper Romney?”

In Bid for EMI, Universal Music Group Considers Sale of Parlophone Records

By BEN SISARIO

To get European regulators to approve its $1.9 billion takeover of EMI, the Universal Music Group may do something once considered unthinkable: sell Parlophone Records, which releases the music of Coldplay and Radiohead and is the heart of EMI's holdings in Europe.

According to a report in The Financial Times late Thursday that was corroborated by one person briefed on the talks, executives from BMG Rights Management, a music company backed by Bertelsmann and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, have met with Universal over a possible sale of Parlophone. Representatives for Universal, EMI and BMG all declined to comment.

The fact that Parlophone is on the table is a sign of how troubled Universal's talks with the European Commission have become. Universal, whose global market would swell to more than 40 percent if it absorbed EMI, entered the talks two weeks ago hoping it could gain the commission's approval by offering to sell Euro pean rights to a relatively small number of songs. After its early offers were found inadequate, Universal looked to sell off independent labels that EMI had acquired over the years, like Virgin, Chrysalis and Mute. In its latest strategy, Universal is considering keeping those smaller labels and selling Parlophone.

In an interview this week with Dow Jones, Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner, described the talks with Universal as being “very tough.” Last month, the commission sent Universal a nearly 200-page “statement of objections” that reportedly rejects many of Universal's central arguments in favor of the merger.

While any Parlophone deal would most likely include the bulk of its extensive catalog, it would exclude EMI's ultimate jewel, the Beatles, according to The Financial Times's report and the person briefed on the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. Parlophone's artists include stars like Kylie Minogue , Blur, Gorillaz and the Verve. The label also handles the European releases for other acts signed to EMI's American branches, like the Beastie Boys, but it is unlikely that a sale would include rights to those artists' music.

Peeling off Parlophone could have an adverse effect on the value of Universal's overall deal for EMI. Universal assumed all regulatory risk in the transaction, agreeing to pay about 90 percent of the full sale price by September, whether the deal is approved by regulators or not. If Universal is forced to sell big pieces of EMI for less than it paid, and also loses some of the $157 million it expected in annual savings, the deal could end up far more expensive for Universal.

Universal has until Wednesday to make its formal submission of remedies to the European Commission, although it may do so earlier. Its proposal will then go through “market testing” with competitors, and the commission will have until Sept. 27 to make a final ruling .

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating the deal.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.