Telemundo Media to Offer Bilingual Approach to Advertisers

September 30, 2012, 9:11 pm

By TANZINA VEGA

In a move to increase its reach with both English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanic consumers, Telemundo Media will announce on Monday a new advertising platform in conjunction with Comcast Spotlight, an advertising unit of Comcast. The initiative will be called Telemundo Plus and will allow advertisers to show ads in either language throughout the NBCUniversal, Comcast and Telemundo networks.

A major part of the strategy includes extracting the vast amounts of user data the companies own, said Andrew Ward, group vice president of Comcast Media 360, a division of Comcast Spotlight. Mr. Ward said the company was able to combine subscriber data with third-party data like voter registration files and census da ta, as well as data from companies like Experian, which collects credit scores, and Polk, which collects automobile data.

For now, advertisers will be able to specify an audience by neighborhood, but the aim is to approach the same level of precision available to marketers who run digital campaigns.

“What we want to do is maximize relevance,” Mr. Ward said. “When you put the right message in front of a right audience that level of engagement comes through.”

Dan Lovinger, executive vice president for advertising sales at Telemundo Media, said the new platform would help advertisers reach Hispanic audiences of all types. “Not just Spanish-dominant speakers, not just English-dominant Hispanics, but all of them,” Mr. Lovinger said. “When you look across Hispanic Americans, the 50 million don't all look alike, speak alike or come from the same socioeconomic platform.”

Advertisers will be able to focus their ad buys on specific geographic ar eas of Latinos, like a neighborhood of English-speaking Hispanics in New York or a neighborhood of Spanish-speaking Hispanics in California. Advertisers will also be able to show an English-language ad during Spanish-language shows and a Spanish-language ad during English-language programs.

So far, just a handful of advertisers have signed up to test the platform, including T-Mobile and Toyota. A third advertiser declined to be named, and representatives for Toyota were unavailable to comment. Toyota has run ads for its Camry in both languages using the new platform, said Chris Traina, a spokesman for Conill, the agency that worked on the ads.

E-Books Expand Their Potential With Serialized Fiction

September 30, 2012, 9:05 pm

By JULIE BOSMAN

Could serialized fiction finally force the e-book to evolve?

Various ventures are trying to satisfy a common complaint about e-books: that they are simply black-and-white digital reproductions of long-form print books, flat and unoriginal in their design and concept. One variation, what publishers call enhanced e-books, with audio and video elements woven throughout the text, has largely fallen flat with readers.

But serialized fiction, where episodes are delivered to readers in scheduled installments much like episodes in a television series, has been the subject of an unusual amount of experimentation in publishing in recent months. In September, Amazon announced Kindle Serials, stories sold for $1.99 and published in short episodes that download onto the Kindle as the episodes are released. Three of the first eight serials were produced by Plympton, a new literary studio.

In August, Byliner, a digital publisher, announced that it would begin a new digital imprint devoted to serialized fiction, with work by Margaret Atwood and Joe McGinniss at its start.

One of the most talked-about new experiments is taking serialized fiction a step further. Set to make its debut on Monday, it is a novel called “The Silent History” that is available on the Apple iPhone and its iPad. It includes interactive, user-generated elements.

The app itself is free, but readers pay for the book's content, which arrives in daily installments of about 15 minutes' worth of reading.

Eli Horowitz, a former publisher of McSweeney's, said the project grew out of his despair over the state of e-books when they began to emerge in earnest several years.

“It was a lit tle bit of a depressing moment,” Mr. Horowitz said last week. “We spent a lot of time making these print books into beautiful objects. And it seemed depressing to just squeeze them into a device. The prettiest e-book was still a little uglier than the worst book.”

He created “The Silent History” with Russell Quinn, a co-founder of the digital studio Spoiled Milk; Kevin Moffett, the author of “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events,” a story collection; and Matthew Derby, an author and designer.

They wrote a 160,000-word book and, using the iPhone for inspiration, created a “scavenger hunt” element allowing readers to see more story lines by visiting specific locations - like China and Washington, D.C. - that are outlines on a map within the app. Users can also add their own story lines.

The whole idea, Mr. Horowitz said, is finding ways for devices like the iPhone to tell a story in a way that a print book could not.

“It's a w ay to create a communal reading experience, so people can experience it in a certain time span together,” Mr. Horowitz said. “What we tried to make was something that allowed for the reader to approach it in his or her way. We wanted to allow for all levels of interest and obsession.”

Romney\'s Faith May Help in Idaho, Where He Doesn\'t Need It

September 30, 2012, 3:30 pm

By MICAH COHEN

We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of each state's political landscape and how it's changing. Here is a look at Idaho, the Gem State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with David Adler, director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University.

Idaho is a red state. It's a really red state. It is rural, socially conservative and overwhelmingly white. It's electorate is mostly anti-abortion, anti-union and anti-federal government, Mr. Adler said.

Idaho hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, and it is about twice as Republican-leaning in presidential elections as Mississippi.

“Idaho has been a dark, grim landscape politically f or Democrats for some time,” Mr. Adler said.

And this year's presidential election is likely to be even worse for Democrats.

According to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast, Idaho will be one of the states where Mr. Romney improves on Senator John McCain's 2008 performance by the largest margin. Utah tops that list, followed by Wisconsin, Nevada, Connecticut, Michigan and then Idaho.

What's special about those states? Mr. Romney's running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, is from Wisconsin. Mr. Romney's father, George Romney, was governor of Michigan. And the Wall Street-connected community in Connecticut will probably boost Mr. Romney's numbers there.

In Utah, Idaho and Nevada, however, it's religion. Mr. Romney is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and those three states have the three highest percentages of Mormons.

In Utah, 67 percent of residents are L.D.S. members, according to a Gallup survey. Idaho is secon d with 21 percent, and Nevada is tied for third with 9 percent.

The evidence is circumstantial, but it suggests that Mr. Romney's faith has helped him in states (Idaho and Utah) that he was never going to lose, and a state (Nevada) where he was going to lose by too much to make a difference. Although if the race tightens up nationally, Mr. Obama's lead in Nevada is likely to narrow as well. And if the race were closer in Nevada, an increase in the Mormon vote could be enough to tip the state in his favor. (We'll have more on Nevada later in this series).

One might expect Mr. Romney's faith to have more of an impact in states with large L.D.S. communities. But  Mormons have always been among the most Republican-leaning religious groups, according to the Pew-Forum on Religion & Public Life. In 2010, Mormon voters identified as Republicans over Democrats by about 3 to 1.

The conservatism of L.D.S. voters is evident in southeastern Idaho, which borders Utah an d is the most heavily Mormon part of the state. Mr. Romney won by large margins there in Idaho's Republican caucuses this year.

Most of southeastern Idaho is incredibly conservative. “Democrats hope to keep Republican numbers down to 65 percent in the southeast,” Mr. Adler said.

The southwest, known as the Treasure Valley, is centered on Boise, the state's main population hub. Boise has been a high-tech center ever since Micron Technology started there in the 1970s. Micron is still the largest employer in the state, Mr. Adler said, although it laid workers off during the recession.

Treasure Valley has attracted an influx of left-leaning migrants from the East and West coasts, as well as migrants from Latin America. The demographic changes have made Boise's Ada County more competitive politically.

“The Treasure Valley is the best opportunity that Democrats have,” Mr. Adler said.

But the rapid population growth in Idaho over the last two d ecades - the state grew from one to 1.57 million residents from 1990 to 2010 - has been mixed politically. While Ada County is more competitive, Boise is still a conservative city as far as cities go; Senator John McCain won a slim majority in Ada County in 2008. Conservative migrants from places like Orange County, Calif., have moved to Idaho, too, drawn to the state's clean air, lax business regulations and family-friendly ethos.

While Democrats are slowly making gains in the southwest, they have lost ground in northern Idaho, known as the Panhandle. The Panhandle - once a major mining region - was traditionally Democratic-leaning. Unions were powerful. But over the last three decades, mining has receded as an economic driver in Idaho, and Idaho became a “right to work” state in 1985.

The Panhandle is now mostly Republican, except for Latah County, home to the University of Idaho in Moscow. Latah County is one of just three counties Mr. Obama won in 2008.

The only truly blue county in Idaho is Blaine County in the Magic Valley. Blaine County includes the ski-resort city of Sun Valley and next-door Ketchum. Both towns have attracted affluent, liberal transplants from other states.

The Bellwether: Kootenai County

Kootenai County, anchored by Coeur d'Alene, is an emerging bellwether in Idaho. Historically the center of a region with a natural resources-based economy, Coeur d'Alene is now also a tourist destination, Mr. Adler said. And Kootenai County has reflected the political shift in Northern Idaho generally - once Democratic, now Republican.

In the 2000 presidential election, Kootenai County was three percentage points more Democratic than the state. In 2004, it was two percentage points more Democratic. And in 2008, it was almost perfect.

The Bottom Line

Mr. Romney is a 100 percent favorite to carry Idaho, according to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast. It's hard to overstate just how R epublican Idaho is. The state has had Democrats in office, notably Cecil D. Andrus, the governor from 1971 to 1977 and again from 1987 to 1995, and Frank Church, who was a United States senator from Idaho from 1957 to 1981.

But those days seem largely over. Idaho is now thoroughly Republican.

The one trend in Idaho that Democrats can pin their hopes to, Mr. Adler said, is the state's growing Hispanic population, which is nearing 12 percent, according to the Census Bureau. Agriculture is a dominant industry in Idaho; the state produces about a third of the nation's potatoes (about 60 percent of Idaho potatoes go to making french fries).

Those agricultural jobs have attracted Hispanic workers, and will likely continue to. But it may be a long time before that has any real effect on the politics of the state.

Sept. 29: As Iowa Goes, So Go Romney\'s Chances?

September 30, 2012, 10:34 am

By NATE SILVER

Saturday, not Sunday, is the news media's traditional day of rest - and so it is the slowest day of the week for polling.

But the national tracking polls were published on Saturday, and continued to show President Obama in a fairly strong position. He held at a six-point lead in the Gallup national tracking poll, although his approval rating dipped. He also maintained a rough seven-point advantage in the RAND Corporation's online tracking poll. Mr. Obama also pulled ahead to take a two-point lead in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, which had differed from other polling firms by previously showing a tie. (Another national tracking poll, from Ipsos, is not regularly published on the weekends.)

We 're getting to the point in the campaign where a day on which the polls are in line with expectations is a winning one for Mr. Obama, since Mr. Romney trails in the race and now has just five full weeks to make the deficit up. Mr. Obama's forecast rose slightly, to an 83.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, from 82.7 percent on Friday.

The Des Moines Register also published its highly regarded Iowa Poll on Saturday, which showed Mr. Obama with a four-point lead, 49 to 45. This result is quite consistent with other polls of Iowa published since the conventions, which also have shown Mr. Obama ahead by four points on average.

The only prior Des Moines Register poll this year, which was conducted in February, showed Mitt Romney up by two points instead. So this represents a favorable trend for Mr. Obama.

On the other hand, the same polling firm, Selzer & Co., conducted a national poll for Bloomberg recently, which gav e Mr. Obama a six-point advantage. So they have Mr. Obama polling slightly worse in Iowa than he is nationally.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast concurs: we have Mr. Obama projected to win Iowa by 3.6 percentage points on Nov. 6, smaller than his 4.1-point advantage in the national race.

These are marginal differences, obviously, but they matter some in terms of the electoral math since any hope that Mr. Romney has of winning the Electoral College without Ohio probably requires him to win Iowa. In the simulations that we ran on Saturday, Mr. Romney won the election only 2 percent of the time that he lost Iowa.

This isn't a good poll for Mr. Romney, but it does suggest that Iowa hasn't gotten out of hand, and that it could trend back toward him if the national race does.

Iowa ranks seventh on our list of tipping-point states, but it packs a lot of bang for the buck because its television markets are fairly small and cheap to advertise in. We estimate that a dollar spent there will do twice as much to sway the Electoral College outcome as one spent in Florida.

Poll Averages Have No History of Consistent Partisan Bias

September 29, 2012, 10:22 pm

By NATE SILVER

Presidential elections are high-stakes affairs. So perhaps it is no surprise that when supporters of one candidate do not like the message they are hearing from the polls they tend to blame the messenger.

In 2004, Democratic Web sites were convinced that the polls were biased toward George W. Bush, asserting that they showed an implausible gain in the number of voters identifying as Republicans. But in fact, the polls were very near the actual result. Mr. Bush defeated John Kerry by 2.5 percentage points, close to (in fact just slightly better than) the 1- or 2-point lead that he had on average in the final polls. Exit polls that year found an equal number of voters describing themselves as Democrats and Republicans, also close to what the polls had predicted.

Since President Obama gained ground in the polls after the Democrats' convention, it has been the Republicans' turn to make the same accusations. Some have said that the polls are “oversampling” Democrats and producing results that are biased in Mr. Obama's favor. One Web site, unskewedpolls.com, contends that even Fox News is part of the racket in what it says is a “trend of skewed polls that oversample Democratic voters to produce results favorable for the president.”

The criticisms are largely unsound, especially when couched in terms like “oversampling,” which implies that pollsters are deliberately rigging their samples.

But pollsters, at least if they are following the industry's standard guidelines, do not choose how many Democrats, Republicans or independent voters to put into their samples - any more than they choose the number of voters for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney. Instead, thi s is determined by the responses of the voters that they reach after calling random numbers from telephone directories or registered voter lists.

Pollsters will re-weight their numbers if the demographics of their sample diverge from Census Bureau data. For instance, it is typically more challenging to get younger voters on the phone, so most pollsters weight their samples by age to remedy this problem.

But party identification is not a hard-and-fast demographic characteristic like race, age or gender. Instead, it can change in reaction to news and political events from the party conventions to the Sept. 11 attacks. Since changes in public opinion are precisely what polls are trying to measure, it would defeat the purpose of conducting a survey if pollsters insisted that they knew what it was ahead of time.

If the focus on “oversampling” and party identification is misplaced, however, FiveThirtyEight does encourage a healthy skepticism toward polling. P olling is difficult, after all, in an era in which even the best pollsters struggle to get 10 percent of households to return their calls - and then have to hope that the people who do answer the surveys are representative of those who do not.

So perhaps we should ask a more fundamental question: Do the polls have a history of being biased toward one party or the other?

The polls have no such history of partisan bias, at least not on a consistent basis. There have been years, like 1980 and 1994, when the polls did underestimate the standing of Republicans. But there have been others, like 2000 and 2006, when they underestimated the standing of Democrats.

We have an extensive database of thousands of polls of presidential and United States Senate elections. For the presidency, I will be using all polls since 1972, which is the point at which state-by-state surveys became more common and our database coverage becomes more comprehensive. For the Senate, I will be using all polls since 1990.

The analysis that follows is quite simple. I'll be taking a simple average of polls conducted each year in the final 21 days of the campaign and comparing it against the actual results. There are just two restrictions.

First, I will be looking only at polls of likely voters. Polls of registered voters, or of all adults, typically will overstate the standing of Democratic candidates, since demographic groups like Hispanics that lean Democratic also tend to be less likely to turn out in most elections. (The FiveThirtyEight forecast model shifts polls of registered voters by 2.5 percentage points toward Mr. Romney for this reason.)

Second, the averages are based on a maximum of one poll per polling firm in each election. Specifically, I use the last poll that each conducted before the election. (Essentially, this replicates the methodology of the Real Clear Politics polling average.)

Let's begin by looking at the results o f national polls for the presidential race.

In the 10 presidential elections since 1972, there have been five years (1976, 1980, 1992, 1996 and 2004) in which the national presidential polls overestimated the standing of the Democratic candidate. However, there were also four years (1972, 1984, 1988 and 2000) in which they overestimated the standing of the Republican. Finally, there was 2008, when the average of likely voter polls showed Mr. Obama winning by 7.3 percentage points, his exact margin of victory over John McCain, to the decimal place.

In all but three years, the partisan bias in the polls was small, with the polling average coming within 1.5 percentage points of the actual result. (I use the term “bias” in a statistical sense, meaning simply that the results tended to miss toward one direction.)

The first major exception was 1980, when late polls showed Ronald Reagan leading Jimmy Carter by only two or three percentage points on average - b ut Mr. Reagan won by almost 10 points. There were some complicating factors that year: the first and only debate between Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan was held very late in the election cycle, perhaps too late to be captured by the polls. In addition, that race had a third-party candidate, John Anderson, and independent, and third-party candidates contribute significantly to polling volatility. And some private polls of the campaign showed Mr. Reagan with a much wider advantage.

Still, it is hard to make too many excuses for the polls: 1980 was probably the worst year for them since 1948, when the Gallup poll favored the Republican candidate, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, but the Democratic incumbent, Harry S. Truman, won instead.

In 1980, the miss was in Mr. Reagan's favor, meaning that the polls had a Democratic bias. But you do not have to go back to 1948 to find a year when they had a Republican bias instead. In 2000, national polls showed George W. Bush winn ing the popular vote by about three percentage points - but Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote.

The other year in which the polls were reasonably poor was 1996, when most of the national polls projected Bill Clinton to win re-election by double digits, but he defeated Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points. The results received little attention since Mr. Clinton's victory was not in any real doubt before or after the election. But the polls had a Democratic bias that year, as they had in 1980.

Over the long term, however, the polls have been about as likely to miss in either direction. Since 1980, they have overestimated the Democratic candidate's margin by an average of 0.9 percentage points, and by a median of 0.3 percentage points. These errors are so modest that they cannot really be distinguished from statistical noise.

We can also look for signs of bias in the state-by-state presidential polls. Since 1948, there have been 146 states that have had at lea st one poll conducted in the final three weeks of the campaign.

I took the average of late polls in each state, using the same rules as for the national polls (one poll per firm, and only likely voter polls). Then I took the average of these state polling averages, comparing them against the actual results in states where there was at least some late polling.

The state polls do not eliminate the problem for 1980. In the six states where there were late polls, Mr. Reagan led by an average of 3 percentage points - but he won by a much wider margin, 12 percentage points, on average in these states.

In 1996, however, the state polls did not show any bias toward Mr. Clinton, even though the national polls did. This is one reason why we say that state polls can be informative about the national campaign. Sometimes, a “bottom-up” strategy of adding the results from individual states will produce a better estimate of the national popular vote than national poll s do themselves.

Similarly, in 2000, the state polls were less biased than the national polls. They underestimated Mr. Gore's standing by about one percentage point on average, better than the three-point Republican bias in the national surveys. (Ironically, the speculation before the 2000 election was that Mr. Gore might win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote - exactly the opposite of what happened.)

Over all, the state polls have had little bias. Since 1972, they have overestimated the standing of the Democratic candidate by an average of half of a percentage point.

We can also evaluate whether there was bias in the polls of Senate races. In some ways, this is a much richer data set, since there are different candidates and different conditions in each of the 33 or 34 states that hold Senate contests every two years. If there is a persistent Democratic or Republican bias in the polls that transcends fluke circumstances, we might expect it to show up in the Senate data.

As in the case of presidential polls, there have been years in which most of the Senate polls missed in the same direction. Senate polls had a Democratic bias in 1992 and 1994 but a Republican bias in 1998, 2000 and 2006.

(A Republican bias, although it was very modest, shows up in 2010. The two Senate races that the FiveThirtyEight forecasts “called” wrong in 2010 were Colorado and Nevada, where the polls had Republicans as favored but where Democrats won instead.)

But as in the case of the presidential polls, the years in which the Senate polls missed in either direction have tended to cancel one another out. On average across 240 Senate races since 1990, the polls have had a Republican bias of just 0.4 percentage points, a trivial number that is of little meaning statistically.

On the whole, it is reasonably impressive how unbiased the polls have been. In both presidential and Senate races, the bias has been le ss than a full percentage point over the long run, and it has run in opposite directions.

That does not mean the pollsters will necessarily get this particular election right. Years like 1980 suggest that there are sometimes errors in the polls that are much larger than can be explained through sampling error alone. The probability estimates you see attached to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts are based on how the polls have performed historically in practice, and not how well they claim to do in theory.

But if there is such an error, the historical evidence suggests that it is about equally likely to run in either direction.

Nor is there any suggestion that polls have become more biased toward Democratic candidates over time. Out of the past seven election cycles, the polls had a very slight Republican bias in 2010, and a more noticeable Republican bias in 1998, 2000 and 2006.

They had a Democratic bias only in 2004, and it was very modest.

Still, 2004 went to show that accusations of skewed polling are often rooted in wishful thinking.

Sept. 28: A Circular Relationship Between Political and Economic Views

September 28, 2012, 9:35 pm

By NATE SILVER

President Obama's probability of winning the Electoral College fell slightly in Friday's FiveThirtyEight forecast, from 83.9 percent to 82.7 percent on Thursday.

Although Friday's polls were a bit more equivocal than on some recent days, the shift mainly came because of a decline in the FiveThirtyEight economic index, which continues to have some influence on the forecast.

A government report on Friday showed a decline in real personal income in August, one of the economic data series that the forecast model uses. Furthermore, the July personal income figures, which had initially looked quite positive, were revised downward to show slower income growth.

Real personal income is up 2 percent fro m one year ago, a below-average number, but one that roughly matches other economic figures. However, it had been flat to negative for much of 2011, and it has increased only at about the growth rate of the population over the whole course of Mr. Obama's term.

Another economic data series that the model uses, personal consumption expenditures, was also published on Friday and showed sluggish growth in consumer spending after adjusting for inflation.

Numbers from the manufacturing sector have also been poorer lately, and this month's monthly jobs report was mediocre.

And yet, consumer confidence was up sharply this month across several surveys, reaching a four-month high in The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's monthly measurement of it.

What accounts for the discrepancy? Some of it might be in the timing: the reports on consumption and personal income covered August, whereas the consumer confidence surveys are quick er to update and instead reflect numbers for September. And there have been some recent positives in the economic data, like tentatively better numbers from the housing sector.

Politics undoubtedly also plays a part, however. We often talk about the important role that the economy plays in the election. But Americans perceptions of the economy are also colored by their political views.

Gallup, which tracks numbers on economic confidence daily, found a substantial increase in consumer confidence that was unmistakably timed to the Democratic convention. Most of the increase, however, was caused by Democrats, who now view the economy much more positively. The numbers also improved modestly among independent voters, but there was no improvement among Republicans.

It seems that Mr. Obama and Bill Clinton were able to persuade some voters in their speeches at the convention that there are silver linings in the economy. It is the most persuasive explanation for ho w subjective perceptions of the economy improved at a time when objective measurements of it had worsened.

But could improved consumer confidence actually translate into improved consumer spending, which could help stimulate the economic recovery? Or do measures of consumer sentiment become unreliable predictors of actual economic behavior once we're this deep into an election cycle?

Some academic studies of this question find that improved consumer confidence actually may affect consumer behavior - even if the initial impetus for the change was rooted in political factors. Democrats might be going out to dinner a few more times this month - even if Republicans don't.

On the other hand, Gallup's tracking of self-reported consumer spending has not seen much of a change since the Democratic convention. Self-reported assessments of spending are not always reliable. But we'll have to wait several more weeks until September data on retail sales is available, giv ing us a harder measure of how consumers are actually behaving.

These ambiguous relationships between political attitudes, economic attitudes and actual economic behavior are complicated. It isn't necessarily so straightforward to say what constitutes the economic “fundamentals,” when those economic variables may be influenced in part by the political attitudes of consumers and businesses, along with fiscal and monetary policy.

However, I am especially wary of using sentiment-based measures like consumer confidence in elections analysis, and forecasting models that have done so have had extremely poor results when applied to real data. If you had an elections model based on horse-race polls and consumer confidence right now, you'd run the risk of double-counting Mr. Obama's gains, since in this case the consumer confidence figures seemed to have been influenced by electoral politics more than the other way around.

Friday's Polls

Speaking of silver linings: Friday's poll numbers were a bit more hopeful for Mitt Romney, at least as compared to his extremely poor numbers over the past week or so. A number of swing state polls congregated at a lead in the low- to mid-single digits for Mr. Obama, but we weren't seeing as many polls with him ahead in mid- to high-single digit leads.

Mr. Obama's lead also declined by one point in the RAND Corporation's national tracking poll, and by two points in the Ipsos online tracking poll, and in a poll published by United Press International. It held steady at six points, however, in the Gallup national tracking poll.

Our “now-cast,” which looks at the polls alone and does not account for the economic data, held steady on Friday, suggesting that it would be premature to make too much out of these shifts. A couple more days' worth of polls like this, however, and Mr. Romney might be able to make the case that Mr. Obama's momentum has abated some.

The smart money i s that Mr. Obama's standing in the polls will erode some between now and Nov. 6, especially if we continue to see the mediocre economic data that we did on Friday. It is probably too late in the election cycle for the economic data alone to prevent Mr. Obama from being favored in the race, unless the numbers are poor enough to give voters the sense that the economy has reached some new state of acute crisis. But it could soften the ground a bit for Mr. Romney down the stretch run if he can find some other ways, like the debates, to also make gains.

Apple\'s Plans for Internet Radio Come Up Against Big Music Publisher

Music September 28, 2012, 7:29 pm

By BEN SISARIO

The rough news for Apple lately is not only about its much-derided new maps program.

Apple's plans for an Internet radio service have recently hit a snag over the licensing of music controlled by Sony/ATV, a joint venture between Sony and the estate of Michael Jackson, which recently became the world's biggest music publisher.

The two, naturally, are at odds over what rate Apple should pay to stream Sony/ATV songs on its service, but what's new is that Apple needs to negotiate at all. Typically, streaming services have obtained publishing rights from the major performing-rights organizations, Ascap and BMI, which for decades have acted as clearinghouses on behalf of publishers and songwriters.

But in recent years, some music companies have moved away from that model, figuring that the returns would be better if they handled licensing deals directly and opted out of the “blanket” rates set by those organizations.

When an investor group led by Sony bought EMI Music Publishing in June for $2.2 billion, Sony/ATV took control of the world's largest music publishing catalog, with two million songs, including most Beatles songs as well as current hits by Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. EMI had already withdrawn its digital rights from Ascap, and Sony/ATV will follow suit with the rest of its catalog, effective Jan. 1.

In other words, just as Apple hopes to line up the licenses it needs to operate a streaming radio service, obtaining those licenses has suddenly become more complicated.

Critics of Sony's acquisition of EMI, and of the Universal Music Group's parallel deal for EMI's record la bels for $1.9 billion, warned that this consolidation would give the companies too much market power. These companies will now be so big, the argument goes, that no credible Internet radio service can operate without making a deal.

Martin N. Bandier, the chairman of Sony/ATV, said in an interview on Friday that the disagreement with Apple was simply an effort to get a higher royalty rate for his songwriters.

“This wasn't us not wanting the service,” Mr. Bandier said. “We want the service. It's like oxygen. We just want to be paid fairly, no different than the N.F.L. refs. Do you want replacement writers?”

Apple declined to comment. The news of Sony/ATV's negotiating standoff with Apple was first reported by The New York Post.

While Ascap and BMI still handle digital licensing for Sony/ATV's catalog through the end of the year, it was unclear whether Apple would be able to go to those organizations now. Mr. Bandier said any deal struck in the n ext few months would expire once Sony/ATV withdraws its digital rights in January. But Vincent Candilora, the senior vice president for licensing at Ascap, said that any deal would last as long as its agreed-upon term.

“When Ascap enters into a final license with any licensee,” Mr. Candilora said, “the permissions to the songs in our repertory at the time remain with that license until it expires.”

A spokesman for Sony/ATV said the company is still negotiating with Apple.

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

Advertising Week Begins Monday, Focusing on Technology and Returning Veterans

By STUART ELLIOTT

It has been said many times that the most popular words in the advertising business are “new and improved.” But the phrase offers a way to describe changes in store when the ninth annual Advertising Week takes place in New York next week.

The event, scheduled to begin on Monday and end next Friday, has new sponsors - among them Adobe, Amazon, AMC Networks, Machinima, Pandora, Premier Retail Networks, Telemundo, Time Inc. and Twitter - who will join returning sponsors like AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft.

Also new is a trade show, billed as a technology showcase, which is being called the Advertising Week Experience - possibly because the initials spell “AWE.” The estimated 40 exhibitors will be based at the Times Center on West 41st Street.

“It will not be a shlockfest,” said Matt Scheckner, who has been the executive director of Advertising Week since it began in 2004. “It has a very classy look.”

In another new step, Advertising Week 2012 will begin what it calls Operation Deploy, in partnership with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The goal of the initiative is to find jobs in the ad industry for returning veterans. Two dozen agencies and companies have agreed to interview job seekers, with a target for each participant to hire one veteran.

On the improvement front, organizers of Advertising Week are hoping to untangle logistical difficulties, primarily complaints from attendees that the sites for events are spread across Manhattan.

So the more than 150 panels, speeches and other events will take place at fewer sites that are closer to each other. For example, scores of events will take place in Times Square, at the Times Center; the Nederlander Theater, also on West 41st Street; a newly refurbished Liberty Theater, with entrances on West 41st and West 42nd Streets; and the Nasdaq Market S ite, at 4 Times Square.

Another improvement, Mr. Scheckner said, will be “to try to make more sense of the program” by grouping events into tracks that include mobile marketing, the intersection of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley and multicultural marketing.

More information about Advertising Week can be found on the Web site advertisingweek.com.  There is also a Twitter feed under the handle @advertisingweek.

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.

Baton Rouge Newspaper Sees an Opportunity in New Orleans

September 28, 2012, 5:47 pm

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

It's a Hail Mary pass for New Orleans newspaper lovers dreading the day the city no longer has a daily paper. Starting on Monday, the first day the Times Picayune no longer prints every day, the Advocate from Baton Rouge will offer home delivery of a New Orleans edition.

Many of the bylines in the paper will be familiar to readers there. That's because the Advocate hired seven people who left the Times Picayune to work in its New Orleans bureau. The publisher, David Manship, whose family has owned the paper since 1909, said that the Advocate had not had a reporter in New Orleans since its correspondent moved back to Baton Rouge, some 80 miles to the northwest, during Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Ma nship said the new edition, which will say New Orleans edition in red banner on the front, will feature coverage of basic news beats like city government. He will wait to see how it is received before deciding whether to expand into areas like arts coverage.

“If this thing goes like we hope it would, then we would add some additional staff,” said Mr. Manship.

But the Times Picayune is not taking this expansion into its turf lightly. Ricky Mathews, the president of NOLA Media Group who on Monday will take over as publisher of the Times Picayune, said that the company has been planning for six months to build its presence in Baton Rouge. He said the paper already has three reporters there but will now add 16 staff members to its Baton Rouge bureau - 12 on the editorial side and four on the sales side.

He said he welcomed the competition.

“We believe that competition is good and what we've got to do is serve this region really well no matter who it is,” said Mr. Mathews.

In May, the Times Picayune announced that it would scale back print production to three days a week and shift its emphasis to its free Web site, Nola.com. Widespread layoffs followed, and some longtime Times Picayune employees left voluntarily.

In New Orleans, the newspaper war has already begun. Starting on Sept. 24, the Advocate has handed out 11,000 to 18,000 free copies throughout the city. Mr. Manship said more than 6,000 households had signed up for home delivery.

Both papers hope the changes will help with their declining circulation. According to data tracked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Times Picayune's circulation from Monday through Friday declined to 134,639 in March, from 142,700 the same time the year before. The Advocate's circulation from Monday through Friday declined to 76,263 in March, compared with 82,695 the same time the year before.

Mr. Manship said that the success of the New Orleans editio n depends heavily on advertisers in that city.

“If the advertising community in New Orleans doesn't support it, then I would have to rethink the whole thing,” said Mr. Manship. “If I don't make money on it, as nice a guy as I am, I can't afford to throw money into a hole.”

As It Followed a Car Chase, Fox News Showed a Man Kill Himself

By BRIAN STELTER

The Fox News Channel, in the course of following a car chase live in Arizona, on Friday broadcast the suicide of the man who was being pursued by the authorities.

The network anchor at the time, Shepard Smith, apologized to viewers after returning from a sudden commercial break. “That won't happen again on my watch, and I'm sorry,” Mr. Smith said, clearly shaken by the circumstances.

The broadcast immediately spurred scrutiny about the network's tendency to take car chases live during its daytime newscasts. Mr. Smith, in particular, has developed a reputation for his colorful play-by-play coverage of such scenes.

Mr. Smith had been following the chase, then switched to other news, including the violence in Syria, before returning to Arizona as the man being pursued pulled his car over. “Looks like he's a little disoriented or something,” Mr. Smith said as the man ran down a path.

The Associated Pres s reported that the chase may have been provoked by a carjacking.

The man left the car, then stepped a few feet off the path into a grassy area and pulled a gun out of his right pocket. He pulled the trigger and fell face-first to the ground before Fox cut to Mr. Smith, who was leaning forward and saying to his producers, “Get off, get off, get off, get off it.” He raised his voice and said again: “Get off it. Get off it.”

A Fox spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the network would continue to show such chases.

Car chases, captured by local news helicopters in some major cities, are frequently shown on a 5- to 10-second delay because of the possibility of violence. Fox and, to a lesser extent, several other national cable news networks, like HLN and MSNBC, sometimes pick up the local feeds, especially on relatively slow news days.

Mr. Smith said on the air afterward: “W hen the guy pulled over and got out of the vehicle, we went on delay. So that's why I didn't talk for about 10 seconds. We created a five-second delay, as if you were to bleep back your DVR five seconds. That's what we did with the picture we were showing you, so we would see in the studio what was happening five seconds before you did, so that if anything went horribly wrong, we'd be able to cut away from it without subjecting you to it.”

But the Fox control room did not cut away in time. Then, Mr. Smith realized, it was too late.

He leaned back in his chair, disgusted, and the network cut to a commercial break.

After the break, Mr. Smith apologized at length. “We really messed up,” he said. “And we're all very sorry. That didn't belong on TV.”

The case called to mind a televised suicide in Los Angeles in 1998, when a man unfurled a banner that read “HMO's are in it for the money. Live free, love safe or die,” then set his truck on fire and shot himself with a shotgun. The scene was broadcast live by several Los Angeles television stations, including two that had been running children's programming beforehand. One of the stations' feeds was repeated by the cable news channel MSNBC.

After that incident, some local stations apologized, put  time delays on future live coverage and instructed aerial cameramen during to send back wide shots rather than close-ups during chases.

Headline in The Onion About Ahmadinejad Taken Seriously in Iran

The satirical report, "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama," was posted as truth by the FARS news agency on Friday, The Lede blog reported.

Universal Closes on EMI Deal, Becoming, by Far, Biggest of Remaining Big Three

Music September 28, 2012, 1:32 pm

By BEN SISARIO

The Universal Music Group closed on its $1.9 billion acquisition of EMI Music on Friday, a week after receiving regulatory clearance in Europe and the United States and more than 10 months after it first made the deal with Citigroup.

As a condition of approval, Universal will be forced to sell off about a third of EMI's assets to other music companies. Even so, it will be the largest, by far, of the three remaining major record companies, with a global market share of about 36 percent.

Universal has now paid the balance of the purchase price to Citigroup, after paying roughly 90 percent of it earlier this month, Citi and Universal's parent company, Vivendi, announce d on Friday. In its arrangement with Citi, struck last November, Universal assumed the full regulatory risk for the deal, agreeing to pay the full $1.9 billion regardless of the decisions by the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission and other government agencies around the world.

“This is a next step towards ensuring the health of our industry,” Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal, said in a statement. “EMI is finally returning to people who have music in their blood. We are acquiring incredible labels and a roster of stellar talent, including top-selling artists like Katy Perry, Lady Antebellum, the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We remain true to our vision of investing in EMI, growing the company as a vibrant source of new music, offering consumers more choice and supporting the growth of online music services.”

Just 15 years ago there were six major labels, but their ranks have consolidated through successive mergers.

According to the European Commission's conditions for approving the deal, Universal must sell off EMI's prestigious Parlophone label along with a long list of other labels and assets, which means that the worldwide rights to release music by superstars like Coldplay, Pink Floyd and Kylie Minogue will be up for grabs.

Those assets might be worth well over $500 million, and according to the European regulators' conditions, the majority of them must be sold to a single music company, to shore up competition.

The sales have not begun, but among the likely bidders are the Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and BMG Rights Management, which is backed by Bertelsmann and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

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

On a Night Crowded With Hits, \'Big Bang\' and \'Grey\'s Anatomy\' Stand Out

By BILL CARTER

The television season's first Thursday - a night always packed with hit shows - delivered some of the most-watched episodes of premiere week with established favorites like “The Big Bang Theory” and “ Grey's Anatomy” coming back strong.

New entries like “Elementary” on CBS and “Last Resort” on ABC got off to promising starts. And Fox's “X-Factor” proved it has found its audience level, which is lower than last year but still competitive on a tough night.

NBC's results for its comedy are the hardest to gauge because, while better in every case than last week, they are most likely skewed because NBC stations in two cities, Cleveland and Baltimore, carried an N.F.L. game between the Browns and the Ravens Thursday night, no doubt to huge local audiences. NBC's true results won't be clear until about 4 p.m. Friday.

What is clear is that “Big Bang” remains the biggest power on Thursday. It has th e most viewers of any show, 15.3 million, and the best rating in the advertiser-preferred audience segment of 18- to 49-year-olds-a 4.8. That has been topped in premiere week only by ABC's comedy powerhouse “Modern Family,” which had a 5.5 rating.

But ABC had strong results for a drama it has had to fear might be fading, “Grey's Anatomy.” Perhaps because of its dealing with a compelling cliffhanger from last season, “Grey's” posted a strong 4.3 rating in the 18-49 group, with about 11.5 million viewers.

The network's new drama, “Last Resort,” which had probably the best critical reception of any new series, scored a 2.2 rating in the 18-49 audience at 8 p.m. with a solid nine million viewers. Best news for that drama, it added about 700,000 viewers in its second half-hour.

“Elementary,” CBS's latest crime drama (the only kind of drama the network does anymore), recorded a solid 3.1 in the 18-49 rating, with a total of 13.3 million viewer s. The fact that it exceeded its lead-in, “Person of Interest,” in the 18-49 segment was a promising sign. “Person of Interest,” meanwhile, turned in a typically sound 18-49 number (3.0) and a resounding total viewer total 14.2 million.

But much will be made of the precipitous drop in ratings for the premiere of “Two and a Half Men” on CBS. Statistically it was down 67 percent from last season (when it was on Monday) but that number was hugely inflated by the national attention surrounding the departure of Charlie Sheen. The actual numbers for “Men” last night, a 3.5 with 12.3 million viewers, would not be bad for any network show, though CBS will surely watch closely where they move from here.

Fox now knows basically what it has in “X-Factor” â€" a more-than-respectable show on a super-competitive night, though not anything like the blockbuster the network once hoped the show might become. “X” averaged a 3.2 rating in the 18-49 segment, down only 6 percent from last week despite the greatly increased competition. It had 9.2 million total viewers. The numbers are still well better than the average for network shows.

“Glee” may be more a concern. Once a breakout hit, the show slid to a 2.5 rating within the 18-49 group, which had been the core for the series. That was down 14 percent from a week ago; it had 5.9 million viewers.

NBC's comedies did show some growth, but football was surely a boost. The four shows jumped by an average of about half a million viewers over totals from last week. As usual, “The Office” was the best performer, and its 18-49 rating, a 2.4, looked much more robust than the puny 2.1 for its premiere a week ago. But that will surely come down when football numbers are factored out.

And then it will go up again, as delayed viewing is eventually counted in. “The Office” has always been among the biggest gainers in all of televisi on when delayed viewing is included. The other NBC shows also perform at more acceptable levels when those numbers are included.

Indeed, all the shows, especially on a competitive night like Thursday, need to be re-assessed first after three days, and then after seven days of recorded viewing is reported by Nielsen.

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

The Breakfast Meeting: New F.T.C. Rules for Children Online, and Being a Replacement Official

September 28, 2012, 9:51 am

By NOAM COHEN

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to tighten rules soon about Web sites that collect information about children, Natasha Singer writes, greatly increasing the need to obtain parental permission for common practices like using cookies to track young users' activities online, or their location via a mobile phone, or accepting photographs submitted by children under 13. The current federal rule, which dates to 1998, requires parental consent before Web sites can collect personal information like phone numbers or physical addresses from children, but those rules can appear antiquated considering how technology has changed over more than a decade.

The authorities arrested the man thought to be responsibl e for “The Innocence of Muslims” - the crude YouTube video that set off riots in the Muslim world - for violating the terms of his probation in a 2010 bank fraud case, Brooks Barnes reported. The man, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was ordered held without bail because the magistrate considered him a flight risk. He was arrested for eight violations of his terms of probation, including lying to law-enforcement officers.

• Google's senior executive in Brazil on Wednesday was questioned by the authorities over a video on YouTube, which is owned by Google, that criticized a local mayoral candidate, Claire Cain Miller reported. A Brazilian court had ordered the video taken down as violating local election laws and after rejecting Google's appeal issued an arrest warrant for the executive, Fabio Coelho. Late Wednesday, the video was taken down, and Mr. Coelho wrote a blog post registering Google objection to the court's restriction of “legitimate free speech videos” t hat “should remain available in Brazil.”

On Thursday night, an hour before kickoff at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, a roar could be heard - it wasn't for the hometown Ravens, Adam Himmelsbach reports, but for the regular officials who had been locked out by the N.F.L. owners, who installed replacements. The referee working the game, Gene Steratore, a 10-year veteran presided over the opening coin toss at midfield and said simply: “Good evening, men. It's good to be back.”

• The deal that brought back the officials was well on its way to being done, the union officials and owners say, but the “Monday Night Football” debacle certainly got everyone's attention, Judy Battista reported. She writes:

When the league and the union returned to the negotiating table Tuesday, each side was more conciliatory. The officials wanted to get back to work and undoubtedly realized this was the time to get the best deal they could. In th e end, though, the league probably moved more than the officials to complete the deal.

• The replacement officials were forbidden to speak to the media, but now that the replacements are being replaced, they are free to talk. One of the replacements, Jeff Sadorus, a former college official, spoke to Sam Borden of the work as “something I had wanted to do forever and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” though the barrage of criticism began to take a toll. And, now that it is all over, there is a final indignity over the uniform: “I think in the contract we signed, it said we had to return the equipment,” he said. “It's O.K. - I have a lot of stripes.”

Facebook already reminds users when it's time to send birthday greetings to their “friends,” but a new tool that the company announced on Thursday will allow users to mail a physical gift as well, Somini Sengupta reports. Gift givers can pay with a credit card and recipients will have to offer up their offline addresses so a gift can be delivered.

Sept. 27: The Impact of the \'47 Percent\'

September 28, 2012, 8:30 am

By NATE SILVER

After a secretly-recorded videotape was released on Sept. 17, showing Mitt Romney making unflattering comments about the “47 percent” of Americans whom he said had become dependent on government benefits, I suggested on Twitter that the political impact of the comments could easily be overstated.

“Ninety percent of ‘game-changing' gaffes are less important in retrospect than they seem in the moment,” I wrote.

But was this one of the exceptional cases? A week and a half has passed since Mr. Romney's remarks became known to the public - meaning that there's been enough time to evaluate their effect on the polls.There's a case to be made that they did damage Mr. Romney's standing some.

In the chart below, I've tracked the progress of the national popular vote in the FiveThirtyEight “now-cast” over the past five weeks. The “now-cast” reflects our best estimate of what would happen in an election held today, based on a combination of recent national and state polls. Unlike our Nov. 6 forecast, the “now-cast” does not account for economic measures, and it does not adjust for the effect of the party conventions. This makes it a little bit more straightforward to interpret in terms of tracking the progress of the polls in real time.

In the chart, I've highlighted the dates of what are probably the four most important political news events of the last month: the Republican and Democratic conventions; the deaths of four Americans in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya; and the release of the “47 percent” tape.

The first of these events, the Republican National Convention, did not produce mu ch in the way of a discernible change in the “now-cast.” My view is that Mr. Romney probably did receive a bounce in his polls, but it was small and short-lived, since the Democratic convention began only a few days after the Republican one ended. The “now-cast” is trained not to overreact to modest changes in the polls, and so it had trouble distinguishing any convention bounce for Mr. Romney from statistical noise.

The Democratic convention, however, did produce a clear (if quite middling by historical standards) bounce in the polls for President Obama. He went from being 1.4 percentage points ahead in the “now-cast” popular vote when his convention began, to four points ahead a week after it ended, once there had been time for it to work its way through the polls.

It's not clear whether the Libya attacks had any impact on the polls, despite the news media judging Mr. Romney's reaction to them very harshly (while spending less time scrutinizing a po tential security lapse on the part of Mr. Obama's administration).

By Sept. 17, the date when the video of Mr. Romney's remarks was released and received widespread attention, the momentum from Mr. Obama's convention appeared to have stalled (although not necessarily reversed itself). Mr. Obama led in the popular vote by 4.1 percentage points on that date, according to the “now-cast.”

Since then, however, Mr. Obama has gained further ground in the polls. As of Thursday, he led in the popular vote by 5.7 percentage points in the “now-cast,” a gain of 1.6 percentage points since Mr. Romney's remarks became known to the public.

It's hard to tell whether this recent gain for Mr. Obama reflects the effect of the “47 percent” comments specifically. But the most typical pattern after a party convention is that a candidate who gains ground in the polls cedes at least some of it back.

Instead, the more pertinent question seems not whether Mr. Obam a is losing ground, but whether he is still gaining it.

Thursday's Polls

What we can say with more confidence is that Mr. Romney is now in a rather poor position in the polls. In three of the four national tracking surveys published on Thursday, Mr. Romney trailed by margins of six, seven and eight percentage points. He also trailed by five percentage points in a one-off survey published by Fox News. The exception was Thursday's Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, which showed the race in an exact tie, although that was improvement for Mr. Obama from a two-point deficit on Wednesday.

The state polling published on Thursday was more of a mixed bag. Mr. Obama led by seven points in an NBC News-Marist College survey of New Hampshire, a strong but not extraordinary result for him. He also led by two points in a Marist poll of North Carolina, continuing a streak of stronger polling for him in that state. For the first time all year, Mr. Obama is listed as the favor ite in North Carolina in the “now-cast” - although he still trails slightly in the Nov. 6 forecast, which expects his numbers to decline some between now and Election Day.

However, Mr. Obama got middling results in a Suffolk University poll of Virginia, which put him ahead by 2 points, and in the Marist poll of Nevada, which also had him up by 2. Perhaps it's damning Mr. Romney with faint praise to describe swing-state polls in which he trailed as constituting “good” news for him - but these surveys were a little bit better for Mr. Romney than other swing-state polls in recent days.

There were also a series of partisan-tinged polls released on Thursday: in Mr. Romney's case, a poll by Voter Consumer Research in Iowa for the Web site The Iowa Republican, which showed him leading by one point in that state; and for Mr. Obama, a series of polls conducted by Public Policy Polling on behalf of the National Resource Defense Council in Ohio and other swing state s.

We have taken a rather inclusive attitude toward which polls are included in the forecast this year - excluding only those conducted directly on behalf of the campaigns, or by “super PACs” very closely associated with them like Priorities USA Action. The philosophy here is that persistent bias in these polls will be corrected for by our “house effects” adjustment, and that there is little merit in making overly fine distinctions about which polls qualify as partisan and which don't. There are nominally nonpartisan polls that have strong house effects - and arguably partisan ones that normally play it pretty straight. Nonetheless, I wouldn't recommend that you rely on these borderline cases to tell you much about the momentum in the race.

The overall story line, however, is fairly clear: Mr. Romney is at best holding ground in the polls, and quite possibly losing some, at a time when he needs to be gaining it instead. Further, it's increasingly implaus ible for Mr. Romney to attribute the numbers to temporary effects from the Democratic convention. Mr. Obama's probability of winning the Electoral College advanced to 83.9 percent in the Nov. 6 forecast, up from 81.9 percent on Wednesday.

Growth of Suburban D.C. Is Felt Politically in Maryland

September 27, 2012, 8:48 pm

By MICAH COHEN

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. Here is a look at Maryland, the Old Line State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Donald F. Kettl, the dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland; and Theodore F. Sheckels, a professor of communications and English at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.

Political contests at the state and national level tend to be settled in the suburbs. Republicans carry the countryside, Democrats win by large margins in big cities, and both parties battle to win the votes of those living in between.

That is an oversimplification, of c ourse, but it's a useful rule of thumb. In every presidential election since 1980, the candidate who won the suburban vote also won the national popular vote, according to exit polls.

Suburbia's informal role as the last arbiter of elections also explains why Maryland is among the most Democratic-leaning states. According to the current FiveThirtyEight projection, President Obama will carry Maryland by 23 percentage points; Mitt Romney is projected to win just 39 percent.

Maryland's urban and rural areas follow the normal partisan pattern: Baltimore is overwhelmingly Democratic, while the more rural parts of the state - the Eastern Shore and western Maryland - tend to vote Republican.

But the pattern falls apart in Maryland's suburbs, particularly those in Montgomery County and Prince George's County. For several reasons, a large chunk of suburban Maryland behaves more like a city politically, favoring Democrats by significant margins.

Not all suburbs are equally competitive. Generally, suburbs in the Northeast have been less friendly to the Republican Party than those in the Deep South or Great Plains ever since cultural conservatism gained sway in the party. That dynamic accounts for much of suburban Maryland's partisan lean (although, Maryland's northern border doubles as the Mason-Dixon line).

Baltimore and Baltimore County - which report election returns separately - vote like a typical city and suburban county in the Northeast; in 2008, Mr. Obama won 87 percent of the vote in Baltimore and 57 percent in Baltimore County.

But the same is not true for Maryland's share of suburban Washington. Mr. Obama won 89 percent in Prince George's County and 72 percent in Montgomery County, both of which have been made more Democratic-leaning, at least partly, because the federal government is right next door. Both counties have a large population of government workers and government cont ractors, and both counties are more diverse than typical suburbia.

Maryland has the highest share of black residents of any state outside the South, and the fourth-highest proportion overall, 29 percent. That alone would make the state Democratic. But Maryland's African-American community is more affluent and more suburban than in most other states (perhaps only the Atlanta region is comparable). The federal government, as Mr. Kettl explained: “has long put a very high priority on ensuring broad and diverse hiring. For a very long time, the government was a place where minority workers could get fair treatment in employment. That, in turn, helped create strong and stable middle-class black communities.”

As a result, Prince George's County, where the majority of the population is black, is highly educated and affluent; it is the 69th wealthiest county in the country, ranked by household median income. That wealth, as well as the wealth of the surrounding subur bs in Montgomery and Howard Counties, has been partly fueled by federal dollars.

And that economic relationship is a hurdle for Republicans.

The Washington suburbs have expanded as the federal bureaucracy has grown. An army of government workers, as well as contractors directly and indirectly employed by the government, live in suburban Maryland. The Republican Party's message is ill-suited to win their votes. The “evils of big government” narrative is not an effective pitch to a voter who works for big government.

This dynamic is clearly evident in Montgomery County, which is home to a raft of federal agencies, that have helped spawn booming support industries, like defense, biotechnology, technology and health care. The bustling economy has, in turn, attracted immigration. Montgomery is now a majority minority county with large black, Asian and Hispanic populations.

The Bellwether: Howard County

The spread of suburban Washington has passed through Montgomery County and reached Howard County, beginning a transformation from rural and Republican to suburban and Democratic.

At this point in its transition, it is a slightly Republican-leaning bellwether. It has been a couple percentage points to the right of the state in the last two presidential elections. But because the suburbs have continued to expand since 2008, Howard County may be an even more accurate bellwether in this year's race.

The Bottom Line

If the Washington metropolitan area continues to expand, Maryland will only get more Democratic. The suburban sprawl has already reached previously rural counties like Howard, Charles and Frederick, Mr. Sheckels said, and Democratic constituencies have been encroaching on Maryland's Republican territory: western Maryland, Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore.

For example, historically Republican-leaning Anne Arundel County went just barely to Senator John McCain in 2008, despite the l arge military presence around Annapolis.

Living next to the federal government has had a profound effect on the state. Eleven of Maryland's 24 counties are in the top 100 most affluent counties by median income. And the state overall has the highest household median income in the country, according to the Census Bureau.

But talk of austerity has increased in Washington, and if it arrives, the region will likely feel the impact economically. In turn, suburban expansion could slow.

The political preferences of Maryland's ethnically diverse suburbs may also be a harbinger of things to come in other states. Suburban communities across the country became significantly more diverse throughout the 2000s, and it has started to show. Mr. Obama's share of the suburban vote was the highest of any Democrat since 1980.

Mr. Obama is a 100 percent favorite to carry Maryland, according to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast, and the presidential race is unlikely to receive much attention there.

Instead, same-sex marriage is likely to be a major focus of the fall campaign. Opponents of Maryland's Civil Marriage Protection Act, which allows same-sex couples to obtain a civil marriage license, gathered enough signatures to put Question 6 on the ballot. The referendum asks Maryland residents to vote for or against the law. If it passes, and polling shows that it may, the Maryland electorate would be the first to endorse same-sex marriage at the ballot box.

Digital Notes: An Apology for Kim Dotcom, and a New Royalties Deal for Clear Channel

Music September 27, 2012, 2:11 pm

By BEN SISARIO

In the latest twist to the story of Kim Dotcom and his defunct file-sharing site Megaupload, the prime minister of New Zealand has publicly apologized to Mr. Dotcom after it was determined that the country's foreign intelligence service spied on him illegally.

Mr. Dotcom was arrested in January after the police raided his home near Auckland on behalf of the United States government, which had indicted him and six others on charges of criminal copyright infringement. According to a recent report by the inspector general of New Zealand's intelligence service, the Government Communications Security Bureau, the agency gathered information on Mr. Dotcom for use by the police, but had no right to do so because Mr. Dotcom holds a permanent resident's visa.

“I apologize to Mr. Dotcom,” Prime Minister John Key said on Thursday, according to TVNZ. “I apologize to New Zealanders because every New Zealander that sits within the category of having permanent residency or is a New Zealand citizen is entitled to be protected from the law when it comes to the G.C.S.B., and we failed to provide that appropriate protection for him.”

Mr. Dotcom has been released on bail and is awaiting an extradition trial next year. In the months since his arrest, he has successfully challenged some aspects of the case against him in New Zealand courts, including winning more favorable bail conditions and forcing United States prosecutors to turn over Federal Bureau of Investigation files to his defense.

As diverting as the case may be to watch unfold, it is being watched intently by the entertainment and technology industries and by legal experts, wh o see it as a test of whether the United States can pursue copyright infringement cases overseas.

Another Radio Royalties Deal: Clear Channel Communications, the radio giant that in June took a big step in a new direction over how it pays royalties through a deal with Taylor Swift's record label, has now made a similar deal with another independent label, this one behind major alternative rock bands like Mumford & Sons and Phoenix.

Clear Channel announced on Thursday that it would pay the label, Glassnote, an undisclosed percentage of its revenue whenever music by Glassnote's acts are played on its terrestrial stations or on Clear Channel's Internet radio streams, like those available on its iHeartRadio app.

Such deals break with almost a century of copyright history by letting record labels collect a royalty when their songs are played on the air. Under United States copyright law, stations are required to pay only music publishers and songwriters for the music they play.

In exchange, these deals with labels allow Clear Channel to change its online royalty method from a “penny rate” - in which it pays a fraction of a cent every time someone listens to a song online - to a percentage of its advertising revenue, which could reduce its online royalty costs.

Clear Channel's first such arrangement was with Big Machine, the label behind Ms. Swift. Last week Big Machine made a similar deal with Entercom Communications, which owns more than 100 radio stations around the country.

Glassnote's arrangement with Clear Channel, which takes effect Monday, is well timed for the label. This week, it released “Babel,” the new album by Mumford & Sons, a young British folk-rock group, which is projected to sell more than 600,000 copies in its first week and be one of the most popular rock records of the year.

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

< /div>

Fandango.com Hires Away Entertainment Weekly\'s Longtime Oscar Expert

By BROOKS BARNES

In a blow to Entertainment Weekly, the magazine's longtime Oscar expert, Dave Karger, is jumping ship for a new job at the movie ticket seller Fandango.com.

“It's a tremendous opportunity that was impossible to turn down,” Mr. Karger said by telephone early Thursday of his new role, which will be the newly created position of chief correspondent. He added: “It's not because I was unhappy in my old job. Fandango is on such a roll right now.”

Fandango, owned by Comcast's NBCUniversal, has been planning for some time to move beyond selling tickets into related programming like news and commentary. Now that the company processes the bulk of online and mobile movie ticket sales in the United States, executives there see an opportunity to use its distribution platform in other ways, and sell more advertising in the process.

Prying Mr. Karger loose from Entertainment Weekly, the Time Inc. magazine, is a coup for Fandango. A 17-year veteran of the magazine and Web site, he in many ways served as its public face, at least during Oscar season, popping up with peppy awards commentary on the “Today” show, “Access Hollywood” and other programs. Last year, Mr. Karger was named an official red carpet greeter for Oscar night by the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences.

Mr. Karger, 39, will now be the face of Fandango, working on its programming strategy and available to appear - on behalf of Fandango - across NBCUniversal's news and entertainment outlets, which include “Today” and the E! network.

“This is a big step for Fandango as it evolves into a true entertainment brand,” said Hilary Smith, an NBCUniversal senior vice president of digital communications and integrated marketing, to whom Mr. Karger will report.

Entertainment Weekly has perked up considerably in the last couple years under its editor, Jess Cagle, but i s still engaged in a continual battle for relevance in an era when its bread and butter - the deep coverage of entertainment for fans - has been diminished by a plethora of blogs. What was Mr. Cagle's response to Mr. Karger's departure?

“He was a total prince, supportive and enthusiastic, and I will never forget it,” Mr. Karger said.

Brooks Barnes writes about Hollywood with an emphasis on Disney. Follow @brooksbarnesnyt on Twitter.

Times Selects Deborah Needleman to Run Its Style Magazines

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Deborah Needleman, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal's style magazine, has been hired to run T: The New York Times Style Magazine, the Times announced Tuesday. Ms. Needleman is taking over a franchise that publishes 15 magazines a year and is closely followed in the fashion industry.

Ms. Needleman will replace Sally Singer, a former Vogue editor who left The Times in August after running the T magazines for two years.

Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, said she expects Ms. Needleman to help drive T's expansion.

“Deborah is a creative and innovative editor with an impeccable sense of style and design,” Ms. Abramson said in a statement. “As we look to expand and extend T and continue to evolve it for our loyal and sophisticated New York Times audience, we will rely on Deborah's broad range of experience and creative energy. She is coming on board to strengthen the franchi se and re-imagine its future on all platforms.”

In addition to running the Journal's style magazine, WSJ, Ms. Needleman oversees the paper's weekend lifestyle section, called Off Duty. Earlier in her career she founded the style and decorating magazine Domino, and was an editor at large for House & Garden. She also co-authored ”The Domino Book of Decorating” and wrote ”The Perfectly Imperfect Home.”

Sept. 26: Could 2012 Be Like 2008?

September 27, 2012, 9:55 am

By NATE SILVER

There's no point in putting it gently: Mitt Romney had one of his worst polling days of the year on Wednesday.

It began with a series of polls from The New York Times, CBS News and Quinnipiac University, released early Wednesday morning, which gave President Obama leads of between 9 and 11 points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Later in the day, Mr. Romney got polls showing unfavorable numbers for him in Colorado and Iowa.

Unlike many recent days, when Mr. Obama's national polls were slightly less euphoric than his swing state surveys, Wednesday's national polls seemed to support the notion that Mr. Obama has a clear lead in the race. The Gallup national tracking poll gave Mr. Obama a six-point l ead among registered voters, close to his high mark on the year in that survey. The online tracking poll conducted by Ipsos gave him a six-point lead among likely voters. Another online tracking poll, from the RAND Corporation, put Mr. Obama's lead at roughly seven and a half percentage points, his largest of the year in that poll. And a national poll for Bloomberg produced by the pollster J. Ann Selzer, who has a strong track record, put Mr. Obama six points ahead.

The exception was the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, which gave Mitt Romney a two-point lead among likely voters. (This was in the version of the poll that included voters who leaned toward a candidate, which is the one that FiveThirtyEight uses for all surveys.)

What to think of the Rasmussen poll? Their surveys usually have a Republican lean, but it seems to have gotten stronger in the last few weeks. It has also been stronger in some years than others. Rasmussen got reasonably good results in yea rs like 2006 and 2008 when their polls were close to the consensus. However, their polls were the least accurate of the major polling firms in 2010, when they had an especially strong Republican house-effect. The same was true in 2000, when they had a three- or four-point statistical bias toward Republican candidates.

This feature is not unique to Rasmussen Reports: a poll that substantially differs from the consensus, whether in a Democratic or Republican direction, is usually not one that you'll want to bet on. And there is even less reason to do so when a poll is taking a number of methodological shortcuts, while others are being more thorough. But there have been years when the whole polling average has been off in one direction or another, and the “outlier” polls turn out to look good. It's also the case that a broken clock is right twice a day.

Accounting for all of the data, including the Rasmussen Reports poll, the FiveThi rtyEight forecast showed Mr. Obama making gains. His probability of winning the Electoral College is now listed at 81.9 percent, his highest figure of the year and up from 79.7 percent on Tuesday.

We're at a point in the race, however, when it's important to contrast what we think might happen on Nov. 6 with what we're seeing in the polls at the moment. Right now, there is a gap between these two things.

Although Mr. Obama is now the clear favorite in the Nov. 6 forecast, his advantage is larger in the FiveThirtyEight “now-cast,” which projects what would happen in an election held today.

The “now-cast” estimates that Mr. Obama would have a 97.8 percent chance of winning an election held today. Further, it pegs his advantage at five and a half percentage points in the national popular vote.

By contrast, the Nov. 6 forecast expects Mr. Obama to win by a smaller margin, 3.6 percentage points, on Election Day itself. Two things account for this d isparity.

First, there are still some effects from the convention bounce penalty that the Nov. 6 forecast applies to Mr. Obama's polls, but which the “now-cast” does not. The convention bounce adjustment is phasing out of the model, but it hasn't done so completely.

Second, the Nov. 6 forecast is still using economic data along with the polls. By design, the economic component of the forecast receives less and less weight over the course of the year, since it becomes less and less likely that there will be predictable effects from economic news that are not already priced into the polls. (By Election Day itself, the economic component of the model will phase out completely, meaning that the forecast will become equivalent to the “now-cast.”) For the time being, however, the economic index still accounts for about 30 percent of the forecast.

The way that the economic index evaluates the data, Mr. Obama is the favorite in the race. However, he is only a slight one, and the economic index has been declining recently, following a poor report on manufacturing activity and a decline in the stock market over the last week on renewed investor concerns about Europe.

Mr. Obama is considered a modest favorite by the economic model because he is the incumbent president, and incumbents are favored given average economic conditions. The economy is decidedly below-average, but it is not recessionary, and there have been just enough bright spots in the data that Mr. Obama remains in the buffer zone where his incumbency advantage could outweigh it.

However, the economic index would point toward a two- or three-point win for Mr. Obama in the popular vote, rather than the five- or six-point advantage that he has enjoyed in the most recent polls. Thus, the economic index is exerting some downward pressure on Mr. Obama's Nov. 6 forecast.

If the election were held today, however, it could look pretty ugly for Mr. Romney. T he “now-cast” has Mr. Obama favored in all the states he won in 2008 except for Indiana, where he is several points behind, and North Carolina, which it shows as an almost exact tie. It would project Mr. Obama to win 337 electoral votes, slightly fewer than the 365 that he won in 2008.

Beneath the surface, however, there are some bigger differences in the individual states. In the table below, I've compared how Mr. Obama performed in each of the 50 states in 2008 against what the “now-cast” estimates would happen in an election held today.

In 14 of the 50 states, the “now-cast” would bet on Mr. Obama winning by a larger margin than he did in 2008. They are an eclectic mix and include the following:

· Two states, Arizona and Alaska, that were home to the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 2008.

· Three states in New England: Vermont, Maine and Rhode Island. There is an interesting split this year a mong the six New England states, with Mr. Obama running very well in these three, which are poorer, but not as well in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where voters are better off.

· Several states in the upland South, like Kentucky and Tennessee, where polls have sometimes shown Mr. Obama running ahead of his 2008 numbers. This is a region of the country where a higher-than-average number of voters said in exit polls that the race of the candidates played a role in their voting decision. It is possible that some of these racial effects have abated as Mr. Obama has become more of a familiar presence. It is also possible that this is a region of the country where polls still exaggerate the standing of African-American candidates. (This phenomenon, termed the Bradley Effect, no longer seems to hold in most parts of the country.)

· New York, where Mr. Obama's numbers have been quite strong in the polls, and which has gone from a state where Republicans could sometimes compete into one that seems completely lost for them.

· Finally, two swing states: Florida and Ohio.

The utter weirdness of this mix â€" how often do you see Ohio, New York, Kentucky and Vermont on the same list? â€" is one reason to be skeptical that either candidate has all that much of an advantage in the Electoral College relative to his position in the popular vote.

With Mr. Obama's strong run of polling in the swing states recently, the model has reverted back to figuring that he would have just the slightest Electoral College edge in an election in which the popular vote were exactly tied. But it is a slight advantage indeed: the model estimates that Mr. Obama would have a 53 percent chance of winning the Electoral College under those conditions.

If Mr. Obama were to choose any two states in which to overperform, Ohio and Florida are pretty good picks, and both represent huge problems for Mr. Romney. I t is too late in the race, and there are too many polls there, to write off Mr. Obama's polling in these states as a fluke â€" although the set of Quinnipiac polls certainly present a rather optimistic case.

Mr. Obama is also polling fairly close to his 2008 levels in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, two states that Mr. Romney has not contested as vigorously as John McCain did four years ago. Some recent polls also show Mr. Obama near his 2008 numbers in Virginia and North Carolina, where demographic and cultural shifts seem to be working in favor of Democrats.

But there are a number of other swing states in which Mr. Obama is still polling well off his 2008 pace. Mr. Obama's numbers have perked up in Iowa and Colorado, for instance â€" but polls are suggestive of a lead for him in the mid-single-digits there, when he won both states by nine percentage points in 2008.

Mr. Obama is a heavy favorite in Michigan, but is highly unlikely to replicate his 2008 perform ance, when Mr. McCain pulled out of the state early and he won it by more than 16 points. He is also unlikely to duplicate his 12-point margin of victory in Nevada, where economic conditions are so poor as to be almost depressionary (Nevada's median household income fell to $47,043 in 2011 from $54,744 in 2008) - or in Wisconsin, in which Paul D. Ryan should help Mr. Romney at least a little bit.

Because he won some of these states by such a wide margin in 2008, Mr. Obama has a lot of cushion in them. Michigan, in particular, looks all but lost for Mr. Romney, and Wisconsin may be getting that way.

But in order to say that Mr. Obama had an especial advantage in the Electoral College relative to his standing in the popular vote, we'd need to see at least one or two more of these states start polling in the high single digits for him, as Ohio now is. If Mr. Obama were polling three points better in Colorado than our current estimate has him, for instance, he'd win the Electoral College in about an additional 2 percent of the time, making him almost an 85 percent favorite, with most of those additional wins coming in cases where he lost the national popular vote.

If Mr. Obama did this in two or more of these states â€" say, Colorado and Nevada, or Iowa and Virginia â€" we might say that Mr. Obama had really developed a “blue wall.” Right now, we're not quite able to do that. His highly favorable numbers in Ohio and Florida lately offset other swing states where he's likely to underachieve his 2008 numbers by several percentage points.

Still, this Electoral College discussion is going to be academic unless Mr. Romney can reverse his poor run of polling. We'll conclude with a scary thought for Republicans.

Right now, the Nov. 6 forecast projects that Mr. Obama will win the popular vote by 3.6 percentage points. As I mentioned, that does account for about a two-point decline from where Mr. Obama seems to be in the po lls right now. Otherwise, however, the model assumes that the uncertainty in the forecast is symmetric: Mr. Obama is as likely to overperform it as underperform it.

If Mr. Obama misses to the downside by 3.7 percentage points, then Mr. Romney would win, at least in the popular vote. However, if Mr. Obama missed to the upside by 3.7 percentage point instead, he'd win the popular vote by 7.3 percentage points, exactly replicating his margin from 2008.

In other words, there looks to be about a 20 percent chance that Mr. Romney will win, but also about a 20 percent chance that Mr. Obama will actually beat his 2008 margin in the popular vote. The smart money is on an outcome somewhere in the middle â€" as it has been all year. But if you can conceive of a Romney comeback â€" and you should account for that possibility â€" you should also allow for the chance that things could get really out of hand, and that Mr. Obama could win in a borderline landslide.

The Breakfast Meeting: N.F.L. Quickly Reverses on Referees, and Satire Gone Wild

September 27, 2012, 9:12 am

By NOAM COHEN

The debacle of an ending to “Monday Night Football” on ESPN apparently was enough to propel a settlement Wednesday night to the lockout of N.F.L. referees, Judy Battista reported. Under the eight-year labor deal, pensions will remain in place for current officials through the 2016 season; new officials will get a 401(k) instead. The average official's salary will rise to $173,000 in 2013 from $149,000 in 2011.

• The league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, is lifting the lockout Thursday to allow a crew of regular officials to work the game on the NFL Network between the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns. The new contract is expected to be ratified on Saturday to allow regular crews to work Sun day's games.
• Sure, the replacement referees were putting the reputation of the league in jeopardy, but while it lasted, the controversy was good for ratings, USA Today noted. The 90-minute SportsCenter on ESPN immediately following Monday night's game, as late as it was, had more than six million viewers and was the most-viewed Sports Center in its history.

David Pogue took a drive with the map application Apple provides users of its new iPhone 5, having booted the Google maps app that was installed with earlier iPhones. Suffice to say it didn't end well. The iPhone 5 maps, he writes, “may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.”

In a sign either of how eager commentators are to repeat embarrassing stories about the Romney campaign or how difficult it is to write successful satire, or perhaps both, a column by Roger Simon on the Politico Web site now carries an editor's note: “Some readers were confus ed that this Roger Simon column was satire.” The Times columnist Paul Krugman and MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell were among those who took the juicier, if ultimately fabricated, details from Mr. Simon's column, and ran with them, Trip Gabriel writes, including the “anecdote” that Paul Ryan had taken to calling the man at the top of ticket, Mitt Romney, “the Stench.” In a note appended to the column, Mr. Simon alludes to Swift's “Modest Proposal,” but perhaps in this hotly contested elections season, Orson Welles's “War of the Worlds” is the better example.

The new novel by J.K. Rowling, “The Casual Vacancy,” is decidedly adult fare as “suicide, rape, heroin addiction, beatings and thoughts of patricide percolate through its pages,” Michiko Kakutani writes in her review Thursday morning. Ms. Rowling's urge to leave the world of wizardry for Muggle-land is understandable, Ms. Kakutani writes, but “unfortunately, the real-life world she has limn ed in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that ‘The Casual Vacancy' is not only disappointing - it's dull.”

Andy Williams, a TV Star When Variety Shows Were Just Hanging On

By BILL CARTER

In this YouTube clip, Andy Williams is with Antônio Carlos Jobim to sing “The Girl From Ipanema.”

Andy Williams, who died Wednesday at the age of 84, was mostly known for his mellow crooning style but he was, for much of the 1960's, well traveled in the declining genre called the variety show.

“The Andy Williams Show,” appeared in various forms, and for various networks - Mr. Williams had shows on each of the three broadcast networks during his career. He started with summer series first on ABC in 1958, and then on CBS in 1959, but he was best known for his initial five-year run on NBC.

None of the shows was ever a significant hit, which probably accounted for its many different locations on the television schedule. The NBC show alone played on Thursday night, Tuesday night, Monday night and Sunday night. And it never cracked the top 30 rated shows on television. Despite that, he won three Emmy Awards over the years for outstanding variety series.

The program, which also introduced the Osmond Brothers to big-time show business, came in an era when many variety shows built around mainstream singers, like Perry Como and Dinah Shore, were fading from television. Mr. Williams's second NBC entry made an effort to be more contemporary, with a psychedelic set and music guests that rocked a bit more than the Osmonds (the Bee Gees and Creedence Clearwater Revival were booked, though Liberace and, yes, the Osmonds, also appeared). By that time, the variety genre had shifted mainly to comedy stars like Carol Burnett.

Later, Mr. Williams mainly stuck to popular Christmas specials, which also helped him sell a lot of albums.

The Obituary

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

Executive Producer of \'Today\' Says Ouster of Ann Curry Was His Call

By BILL CARTER

Commenting publicly for the first time about the decision to remove Ann Curry from the “Today” show's co-anchor position after only a year on the job, Jim Bell, the show's executive producer, said Wednesday that it “was absolutely my call.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Bell spoke broadly about the show's recent ratings setbacks, including the end of its 16-year weekly winning streak. He offered numerous reasons that ABC's “Good Morning, America” had taken over as the regular leader in the morning news competition, including the sheer difficulty of maintaining dominance for so long a time.

But he especially pointed to what he called the difference in the show's approaches, calling “Today” a “more serious show” and accusing “GMA” of “doing something else.”

Asked if he was saying “GMA” is now a tabloid-style program, Mr. Bell said, “That's what I'm saying.”

Mr. Bell declined to call the original decision to name Ms. Curry to the anchor position a mistake, but he said that she is now “in the role she is naturally suited for.” (Ms. Curry has become a special correspondent for the show reporting, so far, mostly on international stories; for example, on Wednesday morning, she interviewed the president of Libya, Mohammed Magarief.)

Mr. Bell defended the insertion of Savannah Guthrie as the co-anchor beside Matt Lauer, calling her an important part of the “long view” plan to regain pre-eminence for the “Today” show. He said of the original choice of Ms. Curry to succeed Meredith Vieira: “Ann had earned it. Hindsight is 20/20. You can sit there and think this or that, but we're comfortable with that decision and the one we've made now.”

“Today” lost its long-standing lead over ABC's “GMA” in April, before Ms. Curry was ousted from the anchor job at the end of June. But even after NBC's Olympics coverage - and with Ms . Guthrie now the co-anchor - “Today” has lost every week to ABC in terms of total viewers. For the last four weeks, the show has trailed in the critical category of viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, which determines ad sales for news programs.

Mr. Bell specifically denied reports that have circulated recently that the decision to remove Ms. Curry was a response to demands by Mr. Lauer, who recently renegotiated his contract. “It was definitely not Matt's call,” Mr. Bell said. “He is the host and does not have management responsibility. It was not his call. That was my call.”

Mr. Bell said that rumors that he had a lunch with Mr. Lauer at which the anchor made a change on the co-anchor role a quid pro quo for his re-signing, were “absolutely not true.”

Mr. Bell expressed anger and incredulity at recent reports that Mr. Lauer had been been more vocal in his demands about the show, and had begun berating sta ff members. “These stories portraying Matt in a negative light are just preposterous,” Mr. Bell said. “Matt is the heart and soul of the broadcast. He has a heart of gold. This stuff about him has been very irresponsible and in a lot of cases flat-out wrong.”

Nor is “Today” facing any budget cuts to make up for paying Mr. Lauer a reported $25 million a year, Mr. Bell said. “There is no plan for any cutbacks of layoffs for any of the staff,” he said. As for any reduction to Matt's salary, which was reported in The Daily News this week, “That could not be more wrong,” Mr. Bell said.

“Today” should be facing a downturn in its profits, given its recent ratings declines. But the show was mostly sold out for the year during sales in advance of the television season, so “Today” effectively could have a year to fix itself before the financial impact is fully felt.

Asked what viewers could expect in the way of changes to affect this long- view approach, Mr. Bell said, “You just have to watch.”

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