Digital Notes: Apple Delays Latest iTunes Upgrade

On Tuesday, a day after a management shake-up and a month after the botched release of its Maps app drew a rare public apology from its chief executive, Apple quietly delayed the release of its latest upgrade to iTunes, saying it needed more time to “get it right.”

The new version of iTunes was announced last month with no more specific timing than “coming in October”; on Tuesday, with two days left on the month, Apple revised that timing with an orange tab on its Web site that now says “coming in November.”

The company issued no formal announcement about the change, but in a comment to the technology news site All Things Digital, a spokesman said: “The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right. We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.”

The new version is supposed to have a streamlined look and better integration with iCloud, its service for synching music and video collections. It is said to be the most significant upgrade to iTunes in the 11-year life of the program, which has grown from a simple music player to the most powerful retailer in the music business - and a force in the movie, television and e-books businesses - and, on Apple's PCs, the portal to its app store.

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

How Sandy Slapped the Snark Out of Twitter

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters People congregate on Tuesday in front of a building in Manhattan that still has wireless Internet access.

Twitter is often a caldron of snark, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can morph during large events - users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a real-time service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens.

As a media reporter, my Twitter feed has a strong Manhattan bias, serving as a sandbox for media and technology types that I follow. Under norma l circumstances, we show up on Twitter to preen, self-promote and crack wise about the latest celebrity meltdown. If that New York cohort has a soul - insert your own joke here - you could see into it on Twitter.

And then along came Hurricane Sandy. For most of Monday, people on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious.

It is hard to data-mine the torrent â€" some estimates suggested there were three and a half million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy - #8212;but my feed quickly moved from the prankish to the practical in a matter of hours as landfall approached. I asked Simon Dumenco, who writes the Media Guy column for Advertising Age and is well versed in the dark arts of Twitter analytics, about the tonal shift via e-mail.

“I kept a close eye on th e Top 10 Trends chart as Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, and there was no shortage of gravitas on Twitter,” he wrote. “The last time I checked before losing power in my Manhattan apartment, seven of the 10 trends were Sandy-related - New Jersey, ConEd, Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, FEMA, Queens and #SandyRI. Clicking on each of them yielded plenty of information.”

At my home in suburban New Jersey, a 30-foot limb dropped down at 4 p.m., so the illusion that this was an event happening to someone else quickly dissipated. And at 8 p.m., just when we hunkered down in front of the big screen, the house went dark. This very large event would not be televised. We built a fire and sat around a hand-cranked radio, but I was diverted over and over by the little campfire of Tweets on my smartphone.

It was hard to resist. Twitter not only keeps you in the data stream, but because you can contribute and re-Tweet, you feel as if you are adding something even though Mother Nature clearly has the upper hand. The activity of it, the sharing aspect, the feeling that everyone is in the boat and rowing, is far different than consuming mass media.

Because my Internet connection was poor, so much of the rich media - amazing videos and pictures documenting the devastation - was lost to me. In true media throwback fashion, Hurricane Sandy was something I experienced as a text event, but I don't feel as if I missed much. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel inundation, the swamping of the Lower East Side, the huge problems at New York hospitals, the stranding of the holdouts in Atlantic City, all became apparent on Twitter in vivid detail.

At the same time, much of the seen-it-all and isn't-it-dumb seemed to leak out of my Twitter stream. (The message that earnestness was nascent and irony was on the run seemed widespread - the servers of Gawker, the hilarious and ill-mannered Manhattan snark machine, were drowned and the site went down. Still is, as a matter of fact.)

Many local television stations did an amazing job and the big cable-news outlets played large, but the template of the rain-and-wind-lashed correspondent shouting to a blow-dried anchor back in the studio has its limits. The local radio stations were nimble and careful, including WCBS, WNYC and WINS, but they were part of the story on occasion, with transformers going down and hurricane-induced glitches along the way.

Manhattan is the epicenter of a number of big blogs, including Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, but each had to pivot to Twitter, among other platforms, as their servers succumbed to encroaching waters. (At a conference last year, Andrew Fitzgerald of Twitter wondered about the utility of the platform if the end of the world arrived in the form of an alien attack. The people participating in the discussion pointed out that the lightweight infrastructure of Twitter and its dur ability would probably make it very practical should end times draw nigh.)

In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. There were abundant news Tweets from @antderosa of Reuters, @acarvin of NPR and @brianstelter of The New York Times, among many others, but there were also Tweets from plain old folks retailing very important information about their blocks, their neighborhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as D.C. and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, wrote in a note: “To me the most basic act of journalism there can be is: ‘I'm there, you're not, le t me tell you about it.' Or: ‘I heard it, you didn't, let me tell you what Bloomberg said.' And the fact is Twitter is rife with such. That is why it is basic in a sprawling emergency.”

Twitter is a global platform, but it can be relentlessly and remarkably local should the occasion - or crisis - arise, as Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl, pointed out.

“Twitter was phenomenally useful microscopically - I was literally finding out information about how much flooding the Zone A block next to me was having, hour by hour - and macroscopically, too - I didn't even have to turn on the TV once the whole storm,” he wrote. He pointed out, as have many others, that there was abundant misinformation rendered in 140 characters as well, which reminded @kbalfe of another rapid-fire medium, actually. “Was a lot like cable news: indispensable … yet full of errors.”

In fact, some people used the friction-free, democratic nature of the medium to intentional ly stir panic. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed outed - “doxed” in the nomenclature of the Web - a person they said they said was the guy behind @comfortablysmug, an account that suggested that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had been trapped by rising waters, that Con Edison was shutting down all of Manhattan and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded.

BuzzFeed identified the person behind those tweets as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year's Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th Congressional District. (Mr. Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign.) Because his Twitter feed was followed by a number of New York-based reporters, the misinformation spread quickly, although John Herman, also writing in BuzzFeed, suggested that “Twitter is a Truth Machine,” writing that “during Sandy, the Internet spread - then crushed - rumors at breakneck speed.”

Margaret S ullivan, the public editor of The New York Times, said in a message on Twitter that whatever the quality of the feed at any given moment, it was riveting: “Impossible to tear one's eyes from, with occasional nuggets of helpfulness amid constant stream of flotsam and jetsam.”

The day after the storm, Twitter shook off much of the earnestness and reverted back to its snarky self, although the storm's death toll and the quest for resources made it a more serious village common than usual. In an e-mail, Peter Kafka of AllThings D, considered the value of Twitter in a big news event by running it through the way-back machine.

“Would it have been better during 9/11 if we had Twitter?” he wrote. “Plenty of bad and good info spread that day, by mouth, web and TV. My hunch is Twitter would do the same. The difference? Twitter allows my friends/like-minded people/people I like to feel a bit more connected. And that's a lot better than less connected.”

Cal ling it a “pop-up town square” for the affected area, @editorialiste said in a message on Twitter, it was “a great place to laugh, cry, argue, sympathize together.”

Kurt Andersen, radio host and writer, said that the combination of utility and sociability made Twitter a remarkable informative shelter during the storm.

“I've never liked or used the word ‘community' about people communicating online, but the Sandy conversations seemed worthy of the word, actually communal,” he wrote. “And given the circumstances, it really could've only happened online.”

Oct. 30: What State Polls Suggest About the National Popular Vote

Mitt Romney and President Obama remain roughly tied in national polls, while state polls are suggestive of a lead for Mr. Obama in the Electoral College. Most people take this to mean that there is a fairly good chance of a split outcome between the Electoral College and the popular vote, as we had in 2000. But the story may not be so simple

For both the swing state polls and the national polls to be right, something else has to give to make the math work. If Mr. Obama is performing well in swing states, but is only tied in the popular vote nationally, that means he must be underperforming in noncompetitive states.

But polls of noncompetitive states don't always cooperate with the story. Take the polls that were out on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama trailed by “only” eight points, for instance, in a poll of Georgia that was released on Tuesday. Those are somewhat worse results than Mr. Obama achieved in 2008, when he lost Georgia by five percentage points. But they're only a little bit worse, whereas the national polls are suggestive of a larger decline for Mr. Obama in the popular vote.

Or take the poll of Texas, also out on Tuesday, which had Mr. Obama behind by 16 points there. He's obviously no threat to win the state or come close to it, but that still represents only a 4-point decline for Mr. Obama from 2008, when he lost Texas by 12 points instead.

High-population red states like these, Texas and Georgia, are just the sort of places where Mr. Obama would need to lose a lot of ground in order to increase the likelihood of his winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is underperforming in deeply blue states rather than deeply red ones? Sometimes you'll get numbers that check out with this assumption: Mr. Obama did get some mediocre polling in Oregon on Tuesday, for instance. But he also got a poll showing him ahead by 23 points in California. Another survey on Tuesday gave him a 31-point lead in Massachusetts.

Yes, I am deliberately cherry-picking a bit. But the discrepancy seems to hold if you look at the data in a more comprehensive way. Nor is it an unusual feature of the FiveThirtyEight model. Rather, pretty much every method for evaluating the election based on state polls seems to hint at a very slight popular vote lead for Mr. Obama, along with an Electoral College one.

In the table below, I've listed the current forecasts at seven different Web sites that use state polls, sometimes along with a modicum of other information like a state's past voting history, to produce predictions of the popular vote in each state.

The first of these sites is FiveThirtyEight. The others, in the order that they're listed in the table, are Electoral-Vote.com; Votamatic, by the Emory University political scientist Drew Linzer; HuffPost Pollster; Real Clear Politics; Talking Points Memo's PollTra cker; and the Princeton Election Consortium, which is run by Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton. These are pretty much all the sites I'm aware of that use state polling data in a systematic way.

You can see that the various projections strongly agree with another, for the most part, in making “calls” about individual states. The only state where different sites show different candidates ahead right now is Florida, where Talking Points Memo gives Mr. Obama a nominal 0.2-percentage point lead while the others (including FiveThirtyEight) have Mr. Romney slightly up instead. There are also four states - New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Virginia - in which some methods show an exactly tied race while oth ers give Mr. Obama the lead.

Although I hope that this chart serves as a useful reference point - and as a reminder that other data-driven sites that look at the polls with the same philosophy that FiveThirtyEight applies are achieving largely the same results - I'm more interested in looking at this data in a macroscopic way.

Suppose, for example, that you take the consensus forecast in each state. (By “consensus” I just mean: the average of the different forecasts.) Then you weigh it based on what each state's share of the overall turnout was in 2008, in order to produce an estimate of the national popular vote.

Do the math, and you'll find that this implies that Mr. Obama leads nationally by 1.9 percentage points - by no means a safe advantage, but still a better result for him than what the national polls suggest.

What if turnout doesn't look like it did in 2008? Instead, what if the share of the votes that each state contributed was the same as in 2004, a better Republican year?

That doesn't help to break the discord between state and national polls, unfortunately. Mr. Obama would lead by two percentage points in the consensus forecast weighing the states by their 2004 turnout.

Or we can weigh the states by their turnout in 2010, a very good Republican year. But that doesn't help, either: instead, Mr. Obama leads by 2.1 percentage points based on this method.

(In each of these examples, you'd get almost exactly the same outcome if you used the FiveThirtyEight forecast alone rather than the consensus. We're on the high end and the low end of the consensus in different states for Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, but it pretty much balances out over all.)

Whether the state polls or the national polls characterize the election correctly could well determine its outcome.

Mr. Obama's lead in the Electoral College is modest, but also quite consistent across the different methods. The states in wh ich every site has Mr. Obama leading make up 271 electoral votes - one more than the president needs to clinch victory. The states in which everyone has Mr. Romney ahead represent 206 electoral votes. That leaves five states, and 61 electoral votes, unaccounted for - but Mr. Obama would not need them if he prevails in the states where he is leading in the polls.

But perhaps national polls tell the right story of the race instead - meaning that the state polls systematically overrate Mr. Obama's standing?

It's certainly possible. (It keeps me up late at night.) If the polls in states like Ohio and Wisconsin are wrong, then FiveThirtyEight - and all of our competitors that build projections based on state polls - will not have a happy Nov. 6.

With that said, our decision to cast our lot mostly with the state polls is not arbitrary. In recent years, they've been a slightly more unbiased indicator of how the election will play out.

Bias, in a statistical sense, means missing consistently in one direction - for example, overrating the Republican's performance across a number of different examples, or the Democrat's. It is to be distinguished from the term accuracy, which refers to how close you come to the outcome in either direction. If our forecasts miss high on Mr. Obama's vote share by 10 percentage points in Nevada, but miss low on it by 10 percentage points in Iowa, our forecasts won't have been very accurate, but they also won't have been biased since the misses were in opposite directions (they'll just have been bad).

In a previous article, I examined the history of bias in public polls based on whether they've tended systematically to overrate the standing of the Democrat or the Republican. (The answer is that they don't exhibit either bias on a consistent basis, as long as your using likely voter polls; registered voter polls will tend to overstate the vote for the Democrat.)

This article also contained a comparison between state and national polls in the presidential race: which have been more free of bias?

In recent elections - since state polling data became more robust - it's the state polls that have done a bit better. This was especially so in 1996, when national polls implied a double-digit victory for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole (and Ross Perot) but state polls were more in line with the single-digit victory that he actually achieved. In 2000, state polls provided an accurate portrayal of a too-close-to-call race, while national polls missed high on George W. Bush vs. Al Gore.

There have been other years like 1992 in which the national polls did a bit better. But on average since that year, the state polls have had a bias of 1.1 percentage points - half as much as the national polls, which have had a 2.1-point bias instead.

We're approaching the point where Mr. Romney may need the state polls to be systematically biased against him in order to win the Electoral College. And that certainly could turn out to be the case: if Mr. Romney wins the popular vote by more than about two percentage points, for example, he'll be very likely to cobble together a winning electoral map, somehow and some way. (And he'll be a virtual lock if the results are in line with Mr. Romney's best national polls, like the Gallup survey, which put him four or five points ahead.)

But the historical evidence weighs in slightly more heavily on behalf of the state polls, in my view, when they seem to contradict the national ones. If the state polls are right, than Mr. Obama is not just the favorite in the Electoral College but probably also in the popular vote.

Tuesday's Polls

Mr. Obama made gains in the FiveThirtyEight forecast on Tuesday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College increasing to 77.4 percent.

A fair amount of this boils down to Ohio, where three polls released on Tuesday gave Mr. Obama leads by margins ranging from three to five percentage points. Two of the polls, from Grove Research and the Mellman Group, generally show strong results for Democrats, which give them less impact in the forecast after applying our adjustment for pollster “house effects”. Still, the three polls taken collectively were enough to widen Mr. Obama's projected lead in Ohio to 2.4 percentage points from 2.1 on Monday. Given how central Ohio is to each candidate's electoral strategy - and how little time remains in the race - this was enough to improve Mr. Obama's Electoral College chances. (The forecast does not yet account for the poll by Quinnipiac University for The New York Times and CBS News, which had Mr. Obama five points ahe ad in Ohio but which was released after we had run the model for the night.)

Another poll that received a lot of attention on Tuesday was one by Glangariff Group Inc. in Michigan, for The Detroit News. That survey had Mr. Obama ahead by only 2.7 points in Michigan.

There has been some odd polling in Michigan this year, but the Detroit News polls have not been a big part of the problem. Instead, its surveys have usually come pretty close to the polling consensus in the state. Furthermore, this survey suggests tightening in the race in Michigan since earlier this month, when a poll by the same firm had Mr. Obama ahead by 6.7 percentage points instead.

Nonetheless, Michigan is probably not as close a s two or three points right now: most polls released after the first debate in Denver suggested a lead for Mr. Obama in the mid-to-high single digits. Usually, states do not shift all that much relative to others in their region. The fact that Mr. Obama's polling has held up reasonably well in Ohio and Iowa, for example, is reason to suspect that some of the movement in the poll represents statistical noise, even if it comes from a good polling company.

Perhaps more important, we're at the stage in the race where getting a relatively good poll does not matter all that much: the question is which candidate is ahead outright in enough states to secure 270 electoral votes. Michigan deserves to be monitored over the final week of the campaign, but in all probability Mr. Romney's more likely paths to victory will run through Ohio instead.

Mr. Obama had a somewhat above-average day in national polls on Tuesday, which had him up in the race by about one percentage point on average. Part of this is because the Gallup poll, which has shown very poor results for Mr. Obama, did not publish results on account of Hurricane Sandy.

Perhaps the most intriguing result from this group is the poll from Google Consumer Surveys. (Yes, Google has begin to conduct surveys online.) That poll had Mr. Obama ahead by four percentage points, an improvement from a roughly 1-point deficit for Mr. Obama in their prior survey last week.

The Google survey could be an indication that the effects of the hurricane will play somewhat to Mr. Obama's political advantage. But it will probably be Thursday or Friday, once power and some of the national tracking surveys that have been discontinued have come back online, before we can say so with much confidence.

In the meantime, the state polls continue to hint that Mr. Obama remains the favorite to win the Electoral College - and if the state polls are right, he may well be the favorite in the popular vote as well.

The Breakfast Meeting: Lucas Hands Off to Disney, and a Storm\'s Online Power

The Walt Disney Company strengthened its position in fantasy entertainment on Tuesday by purchasing Lucasfilm - George Lucas's company, which made the “Star Wars” films - for $4.05 billion in stock and cash, Michael Cieply reports. The move follows a string of similar acquisitions, including the $4 billion deal for Marvel Entertainment in 2009 and the $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios in 2006.

• Disney said it planned to release a seventh “Star Wars” feature film in 2015, with new films coming every two or three years. (Mr. Iger said Disney acquired a detailed treatment for the next three “Star Wars” films as part of the acquisition.) Also, the company said it saw great potential in selling “Star Wars” merchandise worldwide.
• The combination of two pop-cultural institutions (Disney and Star Wars) was easily mocked online, but the hard-core fans on a forum at TheForce.net were often sympathetic to Mr. Lucas and his decision to move on. One wrote: “What if he just wanted it all behind him, where he couldn't have an opinion anymore and could truly, utterly relax?” Another noted that in a New York Times Magazine profile this year, Mr. Lucas spoke of the pressure of tending to the “Star Wars” franchise:

Lucas seized control of his movies from the studios only to discover that the fanboys could still give him script notes. “Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”

The punishing winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy on Monday night knocked out a range of Web sites whose servers sit in Lower Manhattan, including The Huffington Post, part of AOL, Quentin Hardy and Jenna Wortham report. The Huffington Post was back up by Tuesday morning, but others, including Gawker, were still down. The destructive storm nonetheless illustrated the vu lnerability of computer networks, particularly in Manhattan, where aging infrastructure and tight space force “servers and generators to use whatever space is available.”

• NY1, the local cable news channel, made a comforting and informative companion during Hurricane Sandy's arrival on Monday night, Jon Caramanica writes. Other local stations also went into round-the-clock storm coverage, but theirs tended to be more frenetic. NY1 has a 20-year-old style of unflashy, steady news coverage. Mr. Caramanica writes:

The plan seemed to be to find someone - a correspondent, a spokesman, a politician - with something to say, and stick with that person until someone else wanted to speak. One by one, they took their turn, everyone from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to representatives of Con Edison and various local elected officials, speaking at length, and often in detail, and often until cut short by a dial tone or a burst of silence when the connection was lost.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.

Lawsuit Seeking Greater Digital Royalties for Eminem\'s Music Is Settled

Larry Busacca/Getty Images for the Recording Academy Eminem performing at the Grammys in 2011.

A federal lawsuit that has been closely watched in the music industry because of its potential effect on the contentious issue of digital royalties has been settled.

In the case, F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath Records, a team of Eminem's early producers sued a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, arguing that they were not getting the royalties they were owed from downloads at iTunes and other digital stores.

The label calculates the royalties for those downloads as it does for CDs, but F.B.T. contended that the downloads should instead be treated as licensed music, whic h pays substantially higher royalties. (In typical contracts, artists earn a royalty of 10 percent to 20 percent from sales of albums and singles, and 50 percent from licenses for other uses, like a TV commercial.)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in California, ruled in F.B.T.'s favor in 2010, overturning a jury verdict by a lower court, and the parties have been involved in a damages trial for more than a year. They announced the settlement in a court filing on Monday, but both sides declined to reveal the terms of their agreement.

The F.B.T. case - Eminem himself was not a party - opened the door for a wave of litigation over the last two years. Artists as varied as Kenny Rogers, James Taylor, the Temptations, Weird Al Yankovic and Rob Zombie have all filed suits arguing that their labels owed them huge amounts of digital royalties. Sony settled a similar class-action suit earlier this year, agreeing to pay artists a total of $8 millio n.

The full effect of the F.B.T. case on the music business is still unclear. Universal declined to comment on Tuesday, but in the past the company has disputed that the case set a legal precedent. David M. Given, a lawyer in San Francisco involved in a number of such cases, including one filed by the estate of the singer Rick James, disagrees with that view.

“The legal precedent the case set has already had a profound impact,” Mr. Given wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “If U.M.G. paid the price, which I think it probably did, then that will set the bar (which I expect will be high) for the settlement of other download royalty claims, like the ones in the James class action, for other recording artists.”

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

Disney Buying Lucas Films for $4 Billion

LOS ANGELES - The Walt Disney Company, in a move that gives it a commanding position in the fantasy world of film, said Tuesday it had agreed to acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash.

The sale provides a corporate home for a private company that grew from Mr. Lucas's hugely successful “Star Wars” series, and became an enduring force in creating effects-driven science fiction entertainment for large and small screens. Mr. Lucas, who is 68 years old, had already announced he would step down from day-to-day operation of the company.

Combined with the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009 and of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, the acquisition also guarantees the legacy of Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, as a builder who aggressively expanded the company since taking charge in 2005.

Mr. Iger is set to step down as chief executive in March of 2015, but will re main with Disney in a lesser role under an employment deal he reached with Disney last year.

Like the Marvel acquisition, the Lucasfilm deal appears to have caught Hollywood and Wall Street by surprise. It was announced on Tuesday afternoon, while the New York Stock Exchange was closed by storm damage, though investors were scheduled for a briefing on the acquisition in a conference call set for late Tuesday afternoon.

Disney Buying Lucas Films for $4 Billion

LOS ANGELES - The Walt Disney Company, in a move that gives it a commanding position in the fantasy world of film, said Tuesday it had agreed to acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash.

The sale provides a corporate home for a private company that grew from Mr. Lucas's hugely successful “Star Wars” series, and became an enduring force in creating effects-driven science fiction entertainment for large and small screens. Mr. Lucas, who is 68 years old, had already announced he would step down from day-to-day operation of the company.

Combined with the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009 and of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, the acquisition also guarantees the legacy of Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, as a builder who aggressively expanded the company since taking charge in 2005.

Mr. Iger is set to step down as chief executive in March of 2015, but will re main with Disney in a lesser role under an employment deal he reached with Disney last year.

Like the Marvel acquisition, the Lucasfilm deal appears to have caught Hollywood and Wall Street by surprise. It was announced on Tuesday afternoon, while the New York Stock Exchange was closed by storm damage, though investors were scheduled for a briefing on the acquisition in a conference call set for late Tuesday afternoon.

\'Community\' to Return From the Wilderness in February, NBC Announces

“Community” fans will finally get a chance to see their favorite again - and on a night when better ratings could still save it.

The well-reviewed but lightly rated NBC comedy will return Feb. 7, and remain on Thursdays at 8. (It had originally been scheduled for the lost-items zone of Friday nights.)

NBC will also test the fans of the Broadway drama “Smash” by taking it away from the protection of the network's hit singing competition “The Voice” and moving it to Tuesdays at 10. It resumes with a two-hour episode on March 3 at 9.

Those were among a series of midseason announcements made by NBC on Tuesday.

Of most note was that the network will keep its new hit “Revolution” on Mondays at 10 - still after “The Voice” - when both return from a hiatus on March 25.

“The Biggest Loser” returns on Jan. 6 and “Celebrity Apprentice” on March 3.

“Community,” which will no longer be guided by its mercurial creator, Dan Harmon, will replace the departing “30 Rock” as part of a reconstructed Thursday. NBC is adding a new comedy, “1600 Penn,” at 9:30, starting Jan. 10. And “Parks and Recreation” will move to 8:30.

The scheduling of “The Voice,” “Revolution” and “Smash” means they will extend past the traditional end of the season in May - a move that could signal more interest in extending original programming into the summer.

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

Digital Gains Help Newspaper Circulation Figures

A steady increase in digital circulation has helped newspapers combat the pressures on their print product, with average daily and Sunday circulation remaining essentially flat for the sixth month period ending Sept. 30.

Digital circulation accounted for 15.3 percent of the total average circulation for newspapers in that period, up from 9.8 percent in the same period a year ago, an increase of more than 50 percent, according to figures released Tuesday by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Those figures include readers using smartphones, tablets, e-readers or metered Web sites, the bureau said.

Daily circulation decreased an average of 0.2 percent during the six-month period for the 613 newspapers that report comparable figures. Sunday circulation increased by 0.6 percent, the data showed.

Digital gains helped some newspapers make striking gains in overall daily circulation. The New York Times, for instance, had an increase of more than 40 percent in total circulation, from 1,150,589 in 2011 to 1,613,865 in the period ended Sept. 30 this year. Its average digital circulation for Monday-Friday totaled just over 896,000, and increase of 136 percent over a year ago. The Wall Street Journal gained about 200,000 in daily circulation from 2011 and had a digital circulation of 794,594.

The Journal had the highest total daily circulation, the figures showed, followed by USA Today and The New York Times. USA Today had the biggest print circulation. The Times's average daily print circulation was 717,513, a 7 percent decline, and its Sunday average declined by 1.8 percent, to 1,250,077.

Oct. 29: Polling Slows As Storm Wreaks Havoc

The effects of Hurricane Sandy on next Tuesday's election are hard to predict. But the storm is likely to have an impact on the volume of polling in the meantime.

Three of the eight national tracking polls - those from Gallup, Investors' Business Daily and Public Policy Polling - have announced temporary suspensions in their polling. Further delays and cancellations are likely over the next few days, especially in the Northeastern states.

Still, we were not completely without polls on Monday.

President Obama had a mediocre day of polling in the battleground states. In particular, a Rasmussen Reports poll of Ohio showed him trailing Mitt Romney there by two percentage points. It was the f irst poll to show to him down in Ohio since a poll by a Rasmussen Reports affiliate, Pulse Opinion Research, on Oct. 15.

Is this the sign of a shift toward Mr. Romney in Ohio?

It's probably premature to conclude that on the basis of this poll alone. With so many polling firms active in Ohio, any sustained trend toward Mr. Romney in the polls there should be reasonably apparent by late this week, although there may be some delays in the interim. (The storm's reach was broad enough to produce power outages in the Cleveland area, as well as in parts of southeastern Ohio.) Mr. Obama's projected lead in Ohio decreased to 2.1 percentage points from 2.2 points on the basis of the Rasmussen survey.

In Florida, a CNN poll had Mr. Romney up by one point against Mr. Obama , or tied with him when third-party candidates were included on the ballot. Another CNN survey, earlier this month, had also shown Mr. Romney one point ahead in Florida. The poll is consistent with how the FiveThirtyEight projection views Florida, with Mr. Romney ahead by 1.2 percentage points in our forecast there.

An American Research Group poll of Colorado had Mr. Obama one point behind there, although that reflects an improvement for him from their prior poll of the state, when Mr. Obama trailed by four points.

Mr. Obama got reasonably favorable numbers in polls of New Hampshire and Nevada, although both were from Democratic-leaning firms and so did not affect our forecast much.

Arguably Mr. Obama's best poll of the day, instead, was an Elon University survey of North Carolina, which had a tied race there. But North Carolina may be far enough way from the electoral tipping point that it is unlikely to figure all that prominently in next Tuesday's math. Mr. Obama could win North Carolina - the forecast model gives him about a 20 percent chance of doing so - but most of those outcomes involve cases in which Mr. Obama will already have secured enough electoral votes in states like Virginia to have clinched another term.

National polls out on Monday, including some of the tracking polls that released a last set of results prior to suspending their polls, showed a tied race, on average.

On the surface, these numbers look reasonably favorable for Mr. Obama, since he made gains on average (by 0.7 percentage points) from the previous edition of the same surveys.

A poll by Pew Research, for example, had a tied race - a better result for Mr. Obama than their last national poll, which had him trailing Mr. Romney by four points instead.

The FiveThirtyEight model views the Pew poll somewhat negatively for Mr. Obama, however. The reason is that, although a comparison of the trend against the most immediate prior release of the poll is important, the model also evaluates each survey in the context of all other polls that the firm has released over the course of the year. Pew Research had shown very strong results for Mr. Obama earlier in the year - for example, it had him up eight points among likely voters in a survey they conducted after the Democratic convention in September, so a tie there is still a middling result for Mr. Obama by comparison.

Mr. Obama's position declined slightly in the forecast on Monday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College decreasing to 72.9 percent from 74.6 percent on Sunday, and Mr. Romney's increasing to 27.1 percent from 25.4 percent.

Storm's Effect on the Popular Vote

On Monday, I mentioned the possibility that Hurricane Sandy could increase the chance of an split between the Electoral College and the popular vote, on the theory that it might reduce turnout in the blue-leaning states of the Northeast.

After running some numbers on this, I am less convinced that the storm is all that likely to induce such a split.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast of the popular vote is based on adding up the projected results in each state, and then weighing them based on their projected turnout. (Turnout estimates are based on the state's turnout in 2008 and 2010 and its population growth over the past four years.)

As of Monday, this projection showed Mr. Obama ahead in the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points nationwide. (Why does this result differ from what national polls seem to say? That's a great question, and one we have addressed previously: there are systemic differences between the way that state polls and national polls seem to be perceiving the race this year.)

How would the projection change if turnout were reduced by 10 percent in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Je rsey and New York?

Mr. Obama's projected margin in the popular vote would decline to 1.2 or 1.3 percentage points, meaning a shift against him of only 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points. Instead of having a 6 percent chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, as the default version of the FiveThirtyEight model gives him, those chances would increase to about 8 percent.

This is, of course, a fairly crude assessment: a fuller one would require a consideration of exactly which counties were affected, and whether they were Democratic or Republican leaning. It might also need to consider the effects of inland flooding and blizzards on states beyond the coasts, for example, in West Virginia.

But the United States is a big and resilient country; a disaster in one part of it may have a surprisingly small impact when viewed in terms of its entire economy, or its entire population.

Nor do I necessarily think that it can be taken for grante d that the storm will reduce turnout all that much, even in the worst-affected regions. Although the storm's after-effects may make it physically harder for some people to vote, disasters can also increase civic-mindedness and patriotism, attitudes that make voting more likely.

Oct. 29: Polling Slows As Storm Wreaks Havoc

The effects of Hurricane Sandy on next Tuesday's election are hard to predict. But the storm is likely to have an impact on the volume of polling in the meantime.

Three of the eight national tracking polls - those from Gallup, Investors' Business Daily and Public Policy Polling - have announced temporary suspensions in their polling. Further delays and cancellations are likely over the next few days, especially in the Northeastern states.

Still, we were not completely without polls on Monday.

President Obama had a mediocre day of polling in the battleground states. In particular, a Rasmussen Reports poll of Ohio showed him trailing Mitt Romney there by two percentage points. It was the f irst poll to show to him down in Ohio since a poll by a Rasmussen Reports affiliate, Pulse Opinion Research, on Oct. 15.

Is this the sign of a shift toward Mr. Romney in Ohio?

It's probably premature to conclude that on the basis of this poll alone. With so many polling firms active in Ohio, any sustained trend toward Mr. Romney in the polls there should be reasonably apparent by late this week, although there may be some delays in the interim. (The storm's reach was broad enough to produce power outages in the Cleveland area, as well as in parts of southeastern Ohio.) Mr. Obama's projected lead in Ohio decreased to 2.1 percentage points from 2.2 points on the basis of the Rasmussen survey.

In Florida, a CNN poll had Mr. Romney up by one point against Mr. Obama , or tied with him when third-party candidates were included on the ballot. Another CNN survey, earlier this month, had also shown Mr. Romney one point ahead in Florida. The poll is consistent with how the FiveThirtyEight projection views Florida, with Mr. Romney ahead by 1.2 percentage points in our forecast there.

An American Research Group poll of Colorado had Mr. Obama one point behind there, although that reflects an improvement for him from their prior poll of the state, when Mr. Obama trailed by four points.

Mr. Obama got reasonably favorable numbers in polls of New Hampshire and Nevada, although both were from Democratic-leaning firms and so did not affect our forecast much.

Arguably Mr. Obama's best poll of the day, instead, was an Elon University survey of North Carolina, which had a tied race there. But North Carolina may be far enough way from the electoral tipping point that it is unlikely to figure all that prominently in next Tuesday's math. Mr. Obama could win North Carolina - the forecast model gives him about a 20 percent chance of doing so - but most of those outcomes involve cases in which Mr. Obama will already have secured enough electoral votes in states like Virginia to have clinched another term.

National polls out on Monday, including some of the tracking polls that released a last set of results prior to suspending their polls, showed a tied race, on average.

On the surface, these numbers look reasonably favorable for Mr. Obama, since he made gains on average (by 0.7 percentage points) from the previous edition of the same surveys.

A poll by Pew Research, for example, had a tied race - a better result for Mr. Obama than their last national poll, which had him trailing Mr. Romney by four points instead.

The FiveThirtyEight model views the Pew poll somewhat negatively for Mr. Obama, however. The reason is that, although a comparison of the trend against the most immediate prior release of the poll is important, the model also evaluates each survey in the context of all other polls that the firm has released over the course of the year. Pew Research had shown very strong results for Mr. Obama earlier in the year - for example, it had him up eight points among likely voters in a survey they conducted after the Democratic convention in September, so a tie there is still a middling result for Mr. Obama by comparison.

Mr. Obama's position declined slightly in the forecast on Monday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College decreasing to 72.9 percent from 74.6 percent on Sunday, and Mr. Romney's increasing to 27.1 percent from 25.4 percent.

Storm's Effect on the Popular Vote

On Monday, I mentioned the possibility that Hurricane Sandy could increase the chance of an split between the Electoral College and the popular vote, on the theory that it might reduce turnout in the blue-leaning states of the Northeast.

After running some numbers on this, I am less convinced that the storm is all that likely to induce such a split.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast of the popular vote is based on adding up the projected results in each state, and then weighing them based on their projected turnout. (Turnout estimates are based on the state's turnout in 2008 and 2010 and its population growth over the past four years.)

As of Monday, this projection showed Mr. Obama ahead in the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points nationwide. (Why does this result differ from what national polls seem to say? That's a great question, and one we have addressed previously: there are systemic differences between the way that state polls and national polls seem to be perceiving the race this year.)

How would the projection change if turnout were reduced by 10 percent in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Je rsey and New York?

Mr. Obama's projected margin in the popular vote would decline to 1.2 or 1.3 percentage points, meaning a shift against him of only 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points. Instead of having a 6 percent chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, as the default version of the FiveThirtyEight model gives him, those chances would increase to about 8 percent.

This is, of course, a fairly crude assessment: a fuller one would require a consideration of exactly which counties were affected, and whether they were Democratic or Republican leaning. It might also need to consider the effects of inland flooding and blizzards on states beyond the coasts, for example, in West Virginia.

But the United States is a big and resilient country; a disaster in one part of it may have a surprisingly small impact when viewed in terms of its entire economy, or its entire population.

Nor do I necessarily think that it can be taken for grante d that the storm will reduce turnout all that much, even in the worst-affected regions. Although the storm's after-effects may make it physically harder for some people to vote, disasters can also increase civic-mindedness and patriotism, attitudes that make voting more likely.

The Breakfast Meeting: Publishing Consolidates, and Creeping \'Christmas Creep\'

Despite the storm, David Letterman broadcast from Midtown Manhattan on Monday night, without a studio audience. Above, Denzel Washington braved the elements to appear on the show, entering in a yellow slicker while the band played Bob Dylan's song “Hurricane,” which did double duty for Mr. Washington, who portrayed the boxer Rubin Carter in the film “The Hurricane.”

The planned merger of Random House and Penguin, announced on Monday, could be the start of even more consolidation in publishing, Eric Pfanner and Amy Chozick report. As e-books become more central to commercial publishing, the thinking goes, the competition is not only from rival publishers but from online giants like Amazon, Google and Apple.

• The decision by the publishers' parent companies, Bertelsmann and Pearson, to create a combined company with about 25 percent of the A merican market will need regulatory approval, but there could be a benefit from being the first of the Big Six publishers to combine. As one analyst explained: “It's easier to argue that the industry going from six to five publishing houses won't change the market, than arguing that going from five to four players won't impact competition.”
• Interest in Penguin by News Corporation, which owns the publisher HarperCollins, may have sped up the merger. Rupert Murdoch, who runs News Corporation, took to Twitter to mock the merger: “Bertelsmann-Penguin faux merger disaster. Two publishers trying to contract while saying opposite. Let's hear from authors and agents!”

The Supreme Court on Monday heard a copyright case over the sale of imported textbooks on eBay, Adam Liptak reports. At issue is whether the so-called first-sale doctrine - which says that owners of particular copies of products made in the United States can later lend them or sell them - al so applies to copies made abroad. In the case of textbooks, prices can be lower overseas, and one enterprising student from Thailand helped pay for his education by selling copies that his family shipped to him. The publisher John Wiley & Sons sued him.

“Christmas creep” is in full effect this year, Stuart Elliott writes, with many retailers planning to start their holiday campaigns this week. Some, like Target and Toys “R” Us, are already on the air with ads. This development can still seem a shock to those used to Thanksgiving as the start of the Christmas shopping season, but it appears to work for the stores and the shoppers. In an uncertain economy, retailers want to get customers as soon as possible, and consumers have welcomed a longer shopping season to seek out better deals.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.

Google Signs Deal With Warner Music Group

Google got one of the key pieces of its digital music puzzle in place over the weekend when it finally signed a deal to bring the catalog of the Warner Music Group - with Green Day, Madonna, Neil Young, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and hundreds of other acts - to its Play store.

The news of the deal was tucked in a Google company blog post on Monday that was mostly about new models of its Nexus phones and tablets. But for Google's music service, which has struggled to gain traction against iTunes, Amazon and the myriad of other digital services, it is an important step. It means that Google's millions of Android users - whose devices do not have iTunes - will finally have an essentially complete catalog of MP3s to buy.

“We're now working with all of the major record labels globally, and all the major U.S. magazine publishers, as well as many independent labels, artists and publishers,” wrote Andy Rubin, the company's senior vice president of mobile and digital content.

Google also announced in its blog post that its music store will open in Western Europe on Nov. 13.

In Europe, it will also introduce “scan and match,” a key feature for cloud music which matches songs on a customer's computer to a master database on Google's servers, allowing users to skip the laborious task of uploading every single song. (The feature will not be ready in the United States until “soon after” its introduction in Europe on Nov. 13, Mr. Rubin wrote.

Warner controls about 15 percent of the world's recorded music market, according to the trade publication Music & Copyright. But it was absent when Google announced its MP3 store last November; Warner was also the last of the big record labels to sign a deal with Spotify.

In March, Google consolidated its MP3 store, along with the Android app marketplace and stores for movies, television and magazines, under the umbrella of Play. Its bra nding efforts included a truck that gave out free ice cream at the Celebrate Brooklyn concerts in New York this summer.

As Sandy Takes Its Time, TV News Is an Endless Loop of Anticipation

Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images A TV reporter walks the beaches of Atlantic City, N.J., on Monday morning.

One of the blessings of Hurricane Sandy, if there are any, is its status as a very slow moving weather event.

The lead time has given people in the affected area - a broad swath of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic - days to make way for what is set to be a very destructive visitor. But people who turned on their televisions in search of up-to-date information could not be blamed for thinking that they had tuned into a storm-themed sequel to “Groundhog Day,” the film where a television weatherman, played by Bill Murray, wakes up to find the same day, running in replay, over and over.

Since Friday, and even before that, all-news channels and local TV stations in the areas in the hurricane's path have had to find a different way to say the same thing over and over.

The people in the studio do the toss to the reporters in the wind/rain/surf who say the storm is bad and getting worse, and then it is back to the studio, where the anchors repeat the following information: Sandy is dangerous; if you have been told to evacuate you should (this from media outlets whose reporters are standing in or near menacing waves); and once the storm arrives, it will wreak significant havoc. (Poynter, the media news site, had seen enough clichés crashing onto the shore to make GIFs of the more ubiquitous ones - people stocking up on groceries, the God's-eye satellite map of the storm itself and, of course, the reporter standing in the elements.)

It can be a silly spectacle, while important at the same ti me, which makes it hard to look away, especially when you are finished with whatever preparations you can do for a storm and are locked down inside the house. Once that's done, you can read the parade of both earnest updates and storm snark on Twitter, play board games, or turn on your television. And the storm will find you on almost every click of the dial.

Part of what is taking place is that Sandy is making landfall - very slowly - not just in one of the most populated places in the United States, but in one of the most thickly mediated places on the planet. The region is rife with national and local news outlets, all competing to be the go-to source for a captive audience.

The endless coverage takes on an air of sameness, even though the implications are dire. A word cloud of Monday morning's coverage would include the word “again” in three-foot-high letters. “Again, we have to remind again that this may be, again, one of the worst storms in the history, again, of this region.” Again, we got that.

“Worse than Irene” was trending on-air Monday, as was, “Get out now!” “Monster storm” is becoming a trademark of Sandy coverage, in part because it makes a natural event sound like a movie and partly owing to its size, duration and area of impact. Makes you wonder what will be left in the bank of hyperbole for tonight when Sandy actually makes landfall.

One of the major building blocks of the storm coverage has come from the news conferences, daily and sometimes more frequently, from local politicians, who find both opportunity and responsibility in the task of leading the public through a crisis.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been a steady and steadying presence at the mic, speaking both English and Spanish. And there is something vaguely hypnotic about the sign-language interpreter who is always at his side. Her ability to convey “over-topping,” “storm surge ” and “tunnel closure” in vivid, nonverbal terms is remarkable to behold.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is a natural - folksy and forthright - when it comes to telling people what to do. “If it looks stupid, it is stupid,” he said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon, speaking of people's efforts at jury-rigged power sources.

Speaking of people acting stupid, if news outlets want great video, they only have to head nearer to the ocean. And for the sake of the viewing audience, reporters need people who don't have the common sense of a bag of hammers.

Just after noon on Monday, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux found the money shot in Lindenhurst, on Long Island, in a live shot with reporter Jason Carroll. He was standing knee-deep in water, natch, but he was far from alone.

There was the family in a boat with a dog, finally persuaded to leave by the fact that, um, their house was flooding. While Mr. Carroll was talking to them, a guy tried to ride his bike through thigh-high water. Another guy chose a kayak, a wiser move, and great video to boot, given that they were filming on what had been a residential street.

But next to him? A guy lying down in full scuba gear. Tanks, goggles, breathing apparatus, the whole nine. Mr. Carroll stepped up to the guy, whom we will call Aqualung.

“What might convince you it was time to leave?” Mr. Carol asked.

“I dunno, maybe if they declared martial law?” Mr. Aqualung said.

Back to you, Suzanne.

Barnes & Noble Continues Push in Britain

Barnes & Noble said on Monday it would begin its first advertising campaign in Britain, focusing on its Nook reader with built-in light as a way to grab customers before Christmas time.

The ads, which begin Monday part of an aggressive recent push by the book store chain to gain e-reader market share in Britain. The company, which already has agreements to sell their eReaders through supermarket chains like Sainsbury, Dixons, and Waitrose, also announced a new partnership with Asda, another supermarket chain. The e-readers will be available in 300 of Asda¹s stores as well as on its Web site.

Currently the company says it has it products in 1600 retail outfits in Britain and will expand to over 2,500 in the coming months.

Barnes & Noble is struggling to position its Nook against competitors like Amazon¹s Kindle and Apple¹s iPad. In Britain it is promoting its e-ink devices like the Nook Simple Touch and the Nook Simple Touch GlowLight, which has a buil t-in reading light.

The campaign in Britain, which includes print and online ads as well as a 30-second television spots, focuses on couples where one partner is trying to sleep and the other is disturbing them by keeping a light on for reading. Barnes & Noble says its research shows that this is a common source of bedtime arguments.

“This is a common clash between couples at bedtime,” said Patrick Rouvillois, international managing director for Nook Media, LLC., in a written statement. “Our new campaign sheds light on this age-old issue and celebrates its resolution with Nook Simple Touch GlowLight.”

In August, the company announced that in the quarter ending July 28, Nook sales were flat over the previous year, at $192 million.

Shows Go On for Letterman and Fallon, but Kimmel\'s Brooklyn Broadcast Won\'t

The arrival of Hurricane Sandy changed plans Monday for several television shows that tape in New York.

ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, who had planned a week of shows from Brooklyn, will not go forward with Monday night's show, he announced about noon. The show hopes to return Tuesday, depending on the conditions.

Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert canceled Monday's shows on Comedy Central, and the network said that a decision on Tuesday's shows was yet to be made.

As of midday Monday, producers of David Letterman's late-night show on CBS and Jimmy Fallon's on NBC said they planned to go ahead with the shows. Mr. Letterman's executive producer, Rob Burnett, said that the show would move up the taping time to 3:30 p.m.

But the producers on both shows said they were concerned about whether they would be able to find live audiences, with the New York subways closed.

Mr. Burnett said, “We don't know if we'll have an audience at all, but we will do a show anyway.”

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

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic Lean Is Slight, but Durable

We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of each state's political landscape and how it is changing. Here is Pennsylvania, the Keystone State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Terry Madonna, a professor of public affairs and director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll; and Marc Meredith, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

New reports indicate that the 2012 presidential campaign is coming to Pennsylvania. After a spate of advertising during the summer, Pennsylvania - in a break from tradition - has largely avoided the volume of campaign commercials that states like Ohio and Virginia have seen.

But beginning Tuesday, Restore Our Future, a “super-PAC” supporting Mitt Romney, will blanket Pennsylvania with about $2 million worth of advertisements. President Obama's advisers greeted that news on Monday by saying that the Obama campaign would also spend advertising money in the Keystone St ate between now and Election Day.

Pennsylvania has been a swing state in presidential elections since the 1950s. In the last 60 years, the candidate who carried the state has also won a national popular vote in every election but one. Over that time, Republicans have carried Pennsylvania in six elections, and Democrats have carried it in nine.

But while Pennsylvania has swung between the two parties, its relative partisan bent has remained remarkably consistent: slightly Democratic.

In fact, Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation that has been unfailingly Democratic-leaning relative to the national popular vote in every presidential election since 1950. Wi th the exceptions of the landslide elections in 1964 and 1984, however, Pennsylvania's leftward lean has been fairly narrow, between one and five percentage points.

The fact that Pennsylvania is just slightly left-leaning and worth 20 electoral votes, tied for the fifth largest haul with Illinois, makes the state an attractive target for Republicans. Pennsylvania is not necessary for Mitt Romney to reach 270 electoral votes, but it would provide him with more flexibility, allowing him to lose two of the three smallest battleground states - New Hampshire, Nevada and Iowa - if he carried North Carolina, Florida and Virginia.

In addition, Pennsylvania has a lot of white, working-class voters who have never been especially enamored with President Obama (Hillary Clinton bested him by 10 percentage points in Pennsylvania's 2008 Democratic primary). Pennsylvania is also relatively old, with the fourth largest share of residents 65 years and older. The Republicans took the state's governor's mansion and a United States Senate seat in 2010.

But Pennsylvania may be fool's gold for the Romney campaign. The state is relatively inelastic; it has few true swing voters, and turnout tends to be the final deciding factor. In other words, the state's Democratic-lean isn't severe, but it is hard to reverse. Yes, Republicans have carried the state six times in the last 15 presidential contests. But in each of those wins the Republican won nationally by at least seven percentage points, a margin that is unlikely this year no matter who wins.

It has also become slightly harder for Republican presidential candidates to put together a winning map in Pennsylvania. The last time a Republican carried the state was in 1988, when President George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Mr. Bush carried the Philadelphia suburbs - Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties - which have often been the pivotal swing vote .

“The Republicans won elections here in the 1980s because they were winning the Philadelphia suburbs,” Mr. Madonna said.

In contrast, the single time Pennsylvania was carried by a candidate who failed to win the national popular vote was in 2004. President George W. Bush won re-election by 2.5 percentage points but lost the Keystone State by 2.5 percentage points. Mr. Bush lost the all-important Philadelphia suburbs.

Those suburbs have become less-hospitable to Republican presidential candidates. Bucks and Chester Counties are still competitive, but Delaware and Montgomery Counties are reliably left-leaning in presidential elections.

Much of the eastern wing of the state has become more Democratic-leaning, but this has been counterbalanced somewhat by a trend toward the Republicans in western Pennsylvania.

In 1992, the campaign strategist for Bill Clinton, James Carville, described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama between the two cities (that's not the exact quote, but it conveys the sentiment),

There was an element of truth to Mr. Carville's assessment at the time; the state was bookended by two urban pockets and the rest of Pennsylvania was more rural. But in the 20 years since Mr. Carville made the statement, the state's political landscape has shifted considerably.

Now, a better breakdown of the state is between east and west. Most of central Pennsylvania is still rural, but the eastern third of the state has become Democratic-leaning and culturally and politically Northeastern. Western Pennsylvania has a more Midwest feel and has trended toward the Republican Party.

The regi onal difference is evident in the state's two biggest cities. Philadelphia is heavily African-American and overwhelmingly Democratic. Pittsburgh is less diverse, more blue-collar and less overwhelmingly Democratic. The Republican candidate for governor, Tom Corbett, carried Pittsburgh's Allegheny County in 2010.

The difference is also apparent in the suburbs and smaller cities. The Northeast corridor - stretching from Philadelphia's suburbs in the south up through the Lehigh Valley and into Scranton's Lackawanna County - has become more left-leaning over the past two decades. Part of the shift toward the Democratic Party, particularly in the Philadelphia suburbs, has been driven by women, as the Republican Party became increasingly associated with social issues like opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. The realignment occurred throughout the Northeast and New England.

The northern part of the Northeast Corridor, in Lehigh Valley and Scranton, is more blu e-collar and less left-leaning than the Philadelphia suburbs. But white college graduates and minorities - groups that skew Democratic - have increased as a share of eligible voters in the Philadelphia suburbs, the Lehigh Valley and the Harrisburg-York-Lancaster region in south-central Pennsylvania.

The south-central region, specifically York and Lancaster Counties, is the beginning of Republican territory. There's a large Amish vote in Lancaster County, and the region tends to be more socially conservative, Mr. Meredith said.

Western Pennsylvania is culturally Midwestern, more socially conservative, and has moved towardthe Republican Party. Politically, it looks like Ohio, with a solidly but not overwhelmingly Democratic city, Pittsburgh, surrounded by heavily Republican suburbs in Westmoreland and Butler Counties.

Over all, the state's leftward lean has increased just barely because as parts of the Philadelphia suburbs moved left, the old mining and mill towns in southwestern Pennsylvania moved right. The southwest corner of the state was historically Reagan Democrat territory, Mr. Madonna said, and has become more Republican-leaning in recent years.

The Bellwether: Bucks County

Bucks County is very likely to provide an early clue as to how Pennsylvania will vote. It has been an almost perfect bellwether, just one percentage point more Democratic-leaning than the state in 2008 and exactly matching the statewide vote in 2004 and 2000.

Southern Bucks County, around Levittown and Bensalem, is solidly Democratic. To the northwest, Bucks County becomes more politically competitive in suburban communities like Yardley (where this i ntrepid FiveThirtyEight writer happened to grow up) and Newtown. Northern Bucks County, around Quakertown, is more Republican-leaning.

The Bottom Line

Mr. Obama is a 94 percent favorite in Pennsylvania, according to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast. The state is hard to move independent of a shift in the national political environment and is unlikely to vote Republican in an election that is so close nationally.

The new Restore Our Future ad buy notwithstanding, the Romney campaign has not seriously contested Pennsylvania, a state that is hard to move without an all-out effort. In the last 30 days, Ann Romney, Mr. Romney's wife, campaigned once in Pittsburgh, and Mr. Romney visited Philadelphia for a fund-raiser.

The state's partisan makeup has changed just slightly since 2008. The Democratic voter registration advantage in Pennsylvania doubled to a little over a million in the run-up to the 2008 election, Mr. Madonna said.

“Since 2008,” Mr. Madonna added, “the voter registration numbers have remained remarkably consistent.”

If Mr. Romney wins nationally by three or more percentage points, Pennsylvania could come along also. But in a closer contest, the Keystone State is likely to remain blue for Mr. Obama.

Anderson Cooper Talk Show Won\'t Return for a Third Season

Ali Goldstein/Warner Brothers Anderson Cooper during a taping of his show “Anderson.”

The syndication arm of the Warner Brothers studio, Telepictures, has decided that there will not be a third season of “Anderson,” the daily talk show hosted by Anderson Cooper.

Citing disappointing ratings, a studio executive, who insisted on not being identified because the studio planned no official release on the decision, said on Monday that the entire talk television market has been struggling to build audiences. Mr. Cooper's show will end after the summer.

The executive spoke because some of the stations that have been carrying Mr. Cooper's show have begun making feelers about replacement shows, and the news was certain to leak out through one of them, the executive said.

Telepictures issued statement on Monday:

“We are extremely proud of Anderson and the show that he and the entire production team have produced. While we made significant changes to the format, set and produced it live in its second season, the series will not be coming back for a third season in a marketplace that has become increasingly difficult to break through. We will continue to deliver top-quality shows throughout next summer.”

Mr. Cooper released his own statement:

“I am very proud of the work that our terrific staff has put into launching and sustaining our show for two seasons, I am grateful to Telepictures for giving me the opportunity, and I am indebted to the audience, who have responded so positively. I look forward to doing more great shows this season, and I'm sorry we won't be continuing, but I have truly enjoyed it.”

The decision was not a reflection of any lack of faith in Mr. Cooper, the executive said, but an acknowledgement of the business realities in daytime talk television.

The studio “could have renewed the show but could not create a viable economic business model to move forward,” the executive said.

Even the much anticipated new Katie Couric talk show has not yet emerged as a bona fide hit, the executive said. And new shows with other hosts, including Jeff Probst and Ricki Lake, have fared poorly.

But Mr. Cooper, who is also a mainstay in prime time on CNN, had been expected to be a star in daytime talk when his show started up last fall. After one year with sub-par ratings, the studio and Mr. Cooper instituted a series of changes including stressing same-day tapings as often as possible to deal with breaking subjects and a new location for the studio.

Mr Cooper was on assignment for CNN in New Jersey Monday, co vering the storm story.

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

Clear Channel Goes Classical (Sort Of)

Clear Channel Communications has made groundbreaking royalty deals lately with the record labels Big Machine (home to Taylor Swift) and Glassnote (Mumford & Sons). In a radio first, those labels will get a percentage of Clear Channel's revenue when their songs are played over the air and online. (In the United States, terrestrial radio stations pay royalties online to music publishers, not record labels.)

On Monday, Clear Channel announced another deal, this one with Naxos Records, one of the biggest independent classical labels. Naxos, known for an enormous catalog of budget albums, will program “Classica,” a new classical station on iHeartRadio, Clear Channel's app collecting hundreds of radio streams.

“Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Haydn - these composers wrote the original power chords, and their work is as vital today as when it was first written,” Robert W. Pittman, Clear Channel's chief executive, said in a statement. “Our agreement with Naxos further demonstrates that the market-based business model we unveiled this past summer makes sense for labels, artists, broadcasters, and fans.”

There is one major difference between this deal and the ones with Big Machine and Glassnote, however. The Naxos deal is only for digital play, with no corresponding royalty agreement for terrestrial radio play, a Clear Channel spokeswoman said. The company has 850 stations - but none of them are classical.

Sony Executive to Amazon: Michael Paull, a top digital executive at Sony Music, has joined Amazon, a move that could help Amazon smooth over its occasionally bumpy dealings with the big labels.

Mr. Paull, who was one of Sony's primary licensing negotiators, is now Amazon's vice president of content acquisition and business development, Amazon said, and will be based in New York.

Amazon is an important sales outlet for the labels, but last year the relationship was strained when Amazon introduced an unlicensed storage and streaming service, Cloud Player; the service was perfectly legal, but top executives at Sony made rare public complaints that the move was done without their cooperation.

In July, Amazon updated the service with a licensed version to compete with Apple's iTunes Match.

Layoffs at Universal: Following its acquisition of EMI Music last month, the Universal Music Group has laid off about 45 employees across the country in its distribution service and at its labels in Nashville, from the ranks of both Universal and EMI. Earlier this month, Universal hired Steve Barnett, a key executive at Sony's Columbia label, to run its EMI divisions in the United States.

“Our goal is to maximize the resources available for reinvestment in our labels so they can do what they do best: develop and promote artists, increase the output of new music and expand opportunities for digital innovation,” a Universal spoke sman said. “Change is never easy, but we are excited about the future.”

Impact of Hurricane Sandy on Election Is Uncertain

I'm not sure whether I render the greater disservice by contemplating the political effects of a natural disaster - or by ignoring the increasingly brisk winds whipping outside my apartment in Brooklyn. Still, I thought it was worth giving you my tentative thoughts on how Hurricane Sandy might affect the runup to next Tuesday's election.

We may see a reduction in the number of polls issued over the coming days. The Investor's Business Daily poll has already announced that it will suspend its national tracking poll until the storm passes, and other cancellations may follow. And certainly, any polls in the states that are most in harm's way, including Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania, will need to be interpreted with extreme caution.

But what about the national polls that remain in the field? Could the storm affect their results?

Imagine that 15 million people are essentially off-limits to pol lsters because of the hurricane, because they are without power, displaced from their homes or otherwise are well-adjusted human beings who are more interested in looking after their families than in answering a political survey. The Northeast is Democratic leaning, of course: imagine that these voters would prefer Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by a net of 20 percentage points, on average.

Fifteen million Americans represent about one-twentieth of the American population. If one-twentieth of Americans, who are 20 points Democratic-leaning, are unable to reply to surveys, Mr. Obama's standing in the polls would be negatively impacted by a net of one percentage point as a result.

That calculation assumes, however, that pollsters are reporting their results verbatim. Instead, almost all polling firms weight their polls to cover non-response among different demographic groups. Some also weight their polls by geography, or might begin to do so because of Hurricane Sandy . This might mitigate the effects, although perhaps in unpredictable ways, since the weighting algorithms that different pollsters use are as much an art form as a science.

Some analysts have also expressed concern that the storm could depress turnout along the Eastern Seaboard on Election Day itself. Since the affected states are Democratic-leaning, and since many of them are so Democratic-leaning that they are likely to vote for Mr. Obama even in a low turnout, it is thought that this might reduce Mr. Obama's national popular vote without hurting his standing in the Electoral College much, potentially increasing the risk of a split outcome.

This is a plausible argument, but let me offer a pair of cautions against it.

First, the Northeast is a wealthy party of the country, and wealthier regions have better infrastructure than impoverished ones, allowing them to recuperate more quickly after a disaster. Were the hurricane expected to hit at the same time ne xt week, it would almost certainly be profoundly disruptive to the election. But the effects might be more modest a week from now.

Second, although the storm surge represents the most immediate threat from the hurricane, inland areas are under considerable risk as well. Hurricane Sandy could potentially flood riverbanks and other low-lying areas, both because of the storm surge carrying forth into them and then because of the potential for large amounts of rainfall. Moreover, these inland regions may be less well prepared to deal with the storm's effects, especially given the news media's tendency to focus its alerts on the impact to major, coastal cities and then to ignore the impact of a storm once it passes through them. (Hurricane Irene in 2011 produced more deaths in landlocked Vermont than in New York City.) Thus, Sandy's after-effects could be felt in red-leaning areas like central Pennsylvania and West Virginia, along with others that are more Democratic-leanin g.

Along the same lines, it is probably unwise to anticipate what affects the storm might have within particular states, such as whether it might affect the Democratic parts of Pennsylvania more than the Republican ones. Hurricane Sandy is just too large a storm, and has such unpredictable destructive potential, to make reliable guesses about this.

The storm, of course, will also affect the plans of the campaigns and the tenor of news coverage about them.

Academic studies on the effects of natural disasters on elections have produced somewhat ambiguous results, but don't contradict the intuitive notion that a disaster response that seems well managed could help an incumbent, while a botched response (especially if the storm damage is severe) could harm him. However, most of these studies seek to evaluate the political effects of disasters on elections held months or even years later, so their utility for understanding the immediate political consequences o f a disaster may be limited.

More important: if you are in an affected region, take the weather forecast very seriously and make sure that you're safe and secure. Public officials, from mayors to presidents, unfortunately may have their incentives corrupted by political considerations, and will not always provide the best guidance to the public as a result. Err strongly on the side of caution; FiveThirtyEight will be here when your power is back on.

Oct. 28: In Swing States, a Predictable Election?

The conventional wisdom about this year's presidential race is that it has broken out of stasis to become wildly unpredictable.

And yet, after a period of polling turmoil following President Obama's convention in Charlotte, N.C., and Mitt Romney's sharp rebound after the first presidential debate in Denver, the polling in most swing states now looks very similar to the way it did for much of the late spring and summer.

When we introduced this year's FiveThirtyEight forecast model on June 7, the closest states were Colorado, Ohio and Virginia, each of which slightly favored Mr. Obama. In Florida and North Carolina, meanwhile, we had Mitt Romney listed as a modest favorite.

Pretty much the same could be said about the race today. In fact, our projected leader in all 50 states is the same as it was at our launch of the forecast in June.

The table below lists our projected res ults in the 18 states (and one Congressional district, in Nebraska) that were predicted to produce a single-digit race as of our original forecast in June. On average, our projection of the popular vote in each state has moved by just one and a half percentage points, in one or another direction, since then.

The change has been especially small in several of the most important battleground states. In June, Mr. Obama was projected to a 3-point lead in Nevada, a 2.3-point lead in Iowa, a 1.3-point lead in Virginia, a 1.1-point lead in Ohio and a 1-point lead in Colorado. The forecast in those states has moved just four-tenths of a point since then, on average; the largest shift has been in Ohio, where Mr. Obama's polling has bee n reasonably resilient and he now has a 2.2-point edge.

Which states have shown more movement? Wisconsin, clearly, became more competitive after Mr. Romney's selection of Representative Paul D. Ryan as his running mate. Mr. Obama enjoyed a more comfortable margin in New Hampshire in June than he does now. And in Indiana and Missouri, two states that are ordinarily red-leaning but which might qualify under a broad definition of swing states, the campaigns have spent few resources and polls there have gradually drifted toward showing a clearer edge for Mr. Romney.

The states where Mr. Obama has made gains since the June forecast are fewer in number (although the fact that Ohio is among them makes Mr. Obama's electoral math stronger). Mr. Obama is running slightly stronger in Florida now than he was in June, although that still reflects a disappointment for him since he was leading in our forecast there before the Denver debate. Mr. Obama has also made gains in Oreg on and New Jersey, counterparts to Indiana and Missouri in that they might have become competitive had Mr. Romney made more of an effort to contest them, but Mr. Romney did not do so.

In blue states, Mr. Obama's numbers are little changed on average from the June forecast. New York is one exception; polls there have shown an especially large lead for Mr. Obama, larger than we originally predicted. And Mr. Obama might have to settle for a single-digit margin of victory in New Mexico, but he is in little danger of losing it.

Change in FiveThirtyEight Forecast - Blue States

It's in deeply red states where the forecast has shifted more. On average, Mr. Romney has gained two percentage points since June between the red states you see in the chart below.

Could the race really have been this stable? Part of it is in the way the FiveThirtyEight forecast is constructed, since it uses nonpolling factors in a state (like its past voting results, relative to the national mean) in cases where the polling is sparse, helping to avoid unwarranted fluctuations based on one or two outlier polls.

But consider this interpretation of events. Prior to the Democratic convention, Mr. Obama's favorability ratings exceeded his approval ratings by several points. The voters who took a favorable view of Mr. Obama but had lukewarm views of his performance may have represented easy targets for the president, and they were brought into the fold by the strong spe eches given by Bill Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., who praised Mr. Obama's accomplishments. After the convention, Mr. Obama's approval ratings caught up with his favorability ratings, and his performance in horse-race polls against Mr. Romney improved as a result.

If Mr. Obama won over his share of Democratic-leaning undecided voters in Charlotte, however, Mr. Romney claimed most of the Republican-leaning ones after Denver. That event precipitated a sharp improvement in Mr. Romney's favorability ratings as voters saw him share the stage with Mr. Obama, and appear competent, confident and presidential.

Some other truly undecided voters may have jumped on the bandwagon along the way, favoring Mr. Obama after Charlotte but Mr. Romney after Denver based on the momentum they perceived in the race. However, their support may be inherently fickle; Mr. Obama now appears to have regained roughly a percentage point of the support he lost after Denver, wh ich may come from this group. (It may also be that the magnitude of the respective bounces was slightly exaggerated in the polls because of the tendency of more enthusiastic voters to respond to surveys.)

The national polls certainly look different than they did in June, but part of that may be artificial as well.

In June, many of the national polls were conducted among registered voters rather than likely ones. In national polls that have reported both registered-voter and likely-voter results throughout the course of the year, Mr. Romney has run about three points stronger in the likely-voter version, on average. (Interestingly, this difference is smaller in state polls, where the difference is about two points on average.)

Some of what looks like movement toward Mr. Romney in other polling averages instead reflects pollsters switching to their likely-voter models. The FiveThirtyEight model, since its design converted registered-voter polls into likely-vo ter ones from the start, will recognize that a change in methodology is different than a new trend in the race.

This change has been less pronounced at the state level, since a larger fraction of the state polls were reporting likely-voter numbers to begin with. We alerted you back in August to the prospect that the different-seeming results between state and national polls would become more apparent as more national pollsters flipped over to their likely-voter models.

Of the remaining gains that Mr. Romney has made in national polls, much of it may have come from his improved performance in deeply red states; that is where our state-by-state forecasts show his numbers improving the most. It might be kept in mind that, during the Republican primaries, Mr. Romney's performance was strongest in states and counties that are Democratic-leaning in general elections, while being weaker in deeply red areas. As highly conservative voters became more comfortable with Mr. Romney, however, he made gains among them.

So sure, there have been some twists and turns along the way - but that is true in every presidential election. Anyone who thinks this race has been especially wild need only look at the polling trajectory in 1976, 1980 or 1992 to get a sense for what a truly variable presidential election looks like.

Over all, instead, this race has been fairly stable relative to most presidential elections. And especially in the state polls, the results we're now seeing are quite consistent with what the economic fundamentals might dictate: a very tight race, narrowly favoring Mr. Obama.

There is always the chance that the race could be disrupted again over the final week of the campaign, perhaps because of the candidates' responses to Hurricane Sandy. And there is the possibility that this will be one of those years where the polls miss the mark badly in one or another direction on Election Day.

There is a pretty good poss ibility, however, that our forecast in every state on Nov. 6 will be the same as it was on June 7. Colorado, Virginia and Florida, being the closest states in the forecast now, are the most likely to switch sides.

Sunday's Polls

The polls released on Sunday were mostly unremarkable. The eight national polls showed about a tied race, on average, with each candidate gaining ground in some polls but losing it in others.

The state polls out on Sunday were slightly favorable to Mr. Obama, with polls by the firm Public Policy Polling showing him making gains in Ohio, Florida and New Hampshire. In another poll of Ohio, from Gravis Marketing, Mr. Obama held a one-point edge, versus a tied race before.

It should be noted that Public Policy Polling is showing a more pronounced shift toward Mr. Obama than any other pollster. Their polls were strongly Democratic-leaning at the start of the year, but then showed a poor run of numbers for Mr. Obama after the Denver debate, with their polls often being slightly more Republican-leaning than the consensus. Now, Mr. Obama has rebounded in their surveys, typically by two or three percentage points in the different swing states that they've polled, to the point that they now seem to be Democratic-leaning again by a percentage point or two.

Our forecasts adjust for these pollster “house effects” - whether pollsters are Republican- or Democratic-leaning relative to the consensus. But one innovatio n that we might consider in future years is to also apply an adjustment for the variance or “swinginess” in a poll. Some pollsters, like Public Policy Polling, American Research Group and Gallup, show more pronounced fluctuations. In others, like Rasmussen Reports and polls for the online firm YouGov, the numbers seem to move much less. There are sometimes logical reasons why these patterns occur - Rasmussen Reports, for example, weighs the results by party identification, which tends to dampen swings (if also potentially missing real changes in the electorate).

Still, there are now so many active polling firms, especially in states like Ohio and Florida, that one or two new polls won't affect the forecast much. (In Ohio, Mr. Obama advanced only to a 2.2-point lead on the basis of the new surveys, as compared with a 2.1-point lead in Saturday's forecast.)

Even in this last full week before the election, I'd encourage you to take a more macroscopic view of the election. We have seen, broadly speaking, a mild recovery for Mr. Obama over the past week or so in the polls. Among polls that have surveyed the race more than once since Denver, his numbers have improved more often than they have worsened in the most recent edition of the survey, and Mr. Obama's predicted probability of winning the Electoral College has improved as a result (to 74.6 percent as of Sunday).

Then again, it may be best not to make too much of these mild fluctuations. There certainly seemed to the the possibility in a brief period after Charlotte that Mr. Obama would run away with the race, although even then forecast expected some reversion to the mean.

But other than in that convention bounce period, the polls have usually told about the same story: that Mr. Obama has a modest edge, but far from an insurmountable one, in the states necessary for him to win him 270 electoral votes.

The forecast model is a bit more confident now about Mr. Oba ma's potential to turn that edge in to an Electoral College victory because there is so little time remaining in the race.

Still, an election held today would probably keep us up quite late before we knew the result with much certainty - and so, in all likelihood, will the one on Nov. 6.