Author: Brett

Flo Allen-Hopson Runs Boston Marathon For Grandson

Brett

http://espn.go.com/espnw/more-sports/7809528/flo-allen-hopson-runs-boston-marathon-grandson

As the mother of NBA champion Ray Allen, Flo Allen-Hopson is best known for wearing her bedazzled No. 20 jersey while cheering for her son at Boston’s TD Garden. But don’t let her jeweled attire fool you; Allen’s 56-year-old mom can probably kick your butt in a foot race.

That’s because when she’s not in the crowd supporting her son, she’s pounding the pavement in preparation for her third consecutive Boston Marathon on Monday. Allen-Hopson once again is running to raise funds for the Joslin Diabetes Center.

Allen-Hopson has been active her entire life, playing semipro basketball in the United Kingdom and going to cycling class at her local gym, but running was never part of her routine. That changed four years ago when a devastating disease hit close to home.

In 2008, Ray Allen’s youngest son, Walker, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease in which a child’s pancreas no longer produces the insulin needed to survive. Allen was by his son’s side when he was hospitalized due to diabetic complications during the Celtics’ 2008 champion run.

 

Cupcakes! Food Network Builds An Interactive Cookbook

Brett

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/20/cupcakes-food-network-builds-an-interactive-cookbook/?utm_source=General+Users&utm_campaign=d18b360853-c%3Amed+d%3A04-23&utm_medium=email

Food Network’s digital strategy has always been fairly straightforward: to supplement its cable TV content and promote its on-air talent. Consequently its website, social media efforts and mobile apps are all linked to its programming — aggregating recipes, blogs and video from its shows and celebrity chefs. But this week Food Network deviated from that strategy.

It launched what can only be described as digital interactive coffee table recipe book centered on the theme of today’s hippest dessert: cupcakes. The iPad app (available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store) is stocked with lush interactive photographs and video, designed to entice the food fetishist in us all, and while it’s full of recipes and instructive lessons, it’s an easy app to flip through, letting you swipe between one tantalizing cupcake image to the next – just like the bound food-porn tomes that grace end tables and bookstore cookbook displays around the world.

How Tumblr Plans to Attract Brands & Their Money

Brett

How Tumblr plans to attract brands & their money

Tumblr is finally ready to start opening the doors to brands. It will begin with a new tool for placing branded Tumblr posts into its Radar feature starting May 2, said Tumblr founder David Karp, speaking at the Ad Age Digital Conference Wednesday. The details are still being worked out but Tumblr will allow brands to buy a presence on the site through Radar, a feature on the Tumblr dashboard which highlights editorially selected posts.

The move starts to address Tumblr’s big question about how it will generate revenue. In a recent interview, Karp told me he was planning on growing revenues by promoting creativity within the network, especially for users who can highlight their own posts for a fee and buy more themes and designs through Tumblr’s marketplace. But the path for brands has been less clear.

Martha Stewart to Do Weekly Show on PBS

Brett

Martha Stewart, whose daily talk show is being dropped by the Hallmark Channel this summer, is starting a weekly show for PBS this fall.

The series, titled “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School,” will be distributed by PBS stations across the United States, her company,
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, announced on Thursday.

Ms. Stewart and executives at her company believe that public broadcasting will be a better fit for her brand than daytime cable,
where “The Martha Stewart Show” struggled to attract an audience for the last two years. But the move from a five-day-a-week show to a once-a-week series will effectively reduce Ms. Stewart’s footprint on TV.

“Cooking School,” inspired by Ms. Stewart’s cookbook of the same name, will be produced in association with WETA, a PBS station in
Washington, which had previously been her production partner on the culinary series “Everyday Food.” Ms. Stewart was a producer, not a host, of “Everyday Food,” but she will be the host of the new series.

In a statement, Ms. Stewart called PBS “the perfect home for this series.”

 

Among His Duties, Choosing the Guests

Brett

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/22/style/people-invited-to-state-dinners.html?ref=style

As the Obama administration’s third social secretary, Jeremy Bernard has planned three of the administration’s six White House state dinners, concerning himself not only with décor, but also the political calculations involved in compiling a guest list. A former fund-raiser himself, Mr. Bernard had been an important liaison to “bundlers,” supporters of the president who solicit checks from friends and associates. Below, 806 people who have accepted invitations, in some cases more than once.

White Gloves Not Needed: Jeremy Bernard, White House Social Secretary, Makes His Mark

Brett

SOME months after Jeremy Bernard became the first man and openly gay person to be the White House social secretary, he visited an assisted living center in suburban Maryland. There, he and Letitia Baldrige, the 86-year-old legendary social secretary of the Kennedy administration, spent what Mrs. Baldrige fondly remembers as a convivial hour and a half over a French white wine chatting about guest lists and other secrets of the job.

Mrs. Baldrige said she also offered Mr. Bernard an important piece of advice: “Keep your mouth shut.”

And so he has.

Now more than a year into what has become a massive event-planning job for the most famous couple in the world, Mr. Bernard, 50, has played a crucial but largely silent role managing some of the biggest, showiest parties in the history of the White House. He has overseen hundreds of events, from this month’s Easter Egg Roll for a record 35,000 participants — Mr. Bernard kept watch from the sidelines, jauntily chewing gum in dark sunglasses — to a stampede of Christmas celebrations to three state dinners. At the most recent one, in honor of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, 362 guests, including celebrities like George Clooney and Elizabeth McGovern, dined on the South Lawn in what the White House called a “tent” but was in fact a mammoth pavilion theatrically lighted in magenta hues, with orbs of green hydrangeas rising up from the tables on pedestal vases. Mr. Bernard had contracted out the décor to Rafanelli Events, the planner behind Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and events for clients like Giorgio Armani and Bain Capital.

Creative Artists Agency Gets Into Celebrity Tech Start-Ups

Brett

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/talkingtech/story/2012-04-18/caa-startup-incubator-moonshark/54394716/1

LOS ANGELES – When Matt Kozlov walks through the halls of the super-powerful Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency each morning, he works alongside agents and managers for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. His job? Helping to create celebrity-based apps for the Apple and Android mobile platforms.

Kozlov is CEO of Moonshark, a new start-up set to release its first titles in the summer. His firm is being incubated at CAA, best-known for its muscle in getting huge paydays for its A-list talent roster in movies, TV shows, music and sports.

CAA has also recently ventured into Internet start-ups, founding companies it hopes will one day see the type of paydays exhibited recently by photo-sharing appmaker Instagram, which was bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

“We’re really active in developing companies we think will make a difference, and that we can take to the next level with CAA,” says Michael Yanover, CAA’s head of business development.

Yanover, who previously worked in new media at software firm Macromedia before it was acquired by Adobe, acts as an in-house broker, putting folks together from both CAA’s client list and contacts he’s picked up through the years.

CAA’s biggest hit is Funny or Die, a top comedy website owned by Sequoia Capital, CAA, actor Will Ferrell (Elf) and his production partners.

The idea started with Sequoia, which wanted to do a sequel to YouTube, which it helped finance, with professional content. Yanover put the Silicon Valley investors together with Ferrell.

Only Gay US PTA Aims to Confront Bullying

Brett

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-usa-gaysschooll2e8fil6f-20120419,0,7833279.story?page=1

NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) – Parents on New York’s Long

Island who are starting the nation’s only gay PTA say they want
to confront gay bullying and ease isolation by including gay
historic figures in classroom lessons.

When it receives its charter on Thursday, Long Island Gay
PTA will become the only parent-teacher association in the
country to focus on the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender students and their families, said the National
Parent Teacher Association.

Part of the National PTA, which has about 5 million members,
it also one of a growing number of PTAs linked not to individual
schools but to special-interest groups, such as students with
learning disabilities.

“GLBT youth issues were never something that PTAs were
interested in tackling,” David Kilmnick, a founding member of
the gay PTA.

“So many parents have come to us over the years and felt
that they really didn’t have a voice in their school’s PTA,”Kilmnick said.

He said the gay PTA wants to help schools better understand

how to support students who are being bullied because of their

sexual orientation. It also hopes to ensure the curriculum
includes the historic contributions of gay men and women in an
effort to ease the sense of isolation felt by students
struggling with their identity, Kilmnick said.

The New Normal

Brett

http://www.out.com/entertainment/television/2012/04/19/new-normal-modern-family-gay-fathers?utm_source=feedburner

‘Will & Grace’ got gays into everyone’s living rooms. Now, Cam & Mitch are selling fatherhood to the masses.

Will & Grace photo: Everett Collection

Modern Family: ABC

Modern Family is the most popular show on television — depending on how you measure the ratings power of that covetable 18–49 age demographic.That means, despite what you might think of its stereotypically fey fathers, Mitchell (gay actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (straight actor Eric Stonestreet), the fact is that Modern Family may be the most radical form of propaganda the LGBT community currently has going for it.

Cam and Mitch don’t worry about waistlines and fashion — as Will and Jack did on Will & Grace — instead, they are obsessed with rearing their adopted Asian daughter and are contemplating expanding their nuclear family with another child. Every week, millions of Americans are seeing two men raise a daughter, which isn’t unthinkable (we had the first hint of that in the late ’80s with My Two Dads, a show that was ostensibly straight but contained notes of queer fear). But it’s the reason a Facebook campaign to pressure the network, the Disney-owned ABC, to allow Cam and Mitch to kiss, was so revolutionary.

But is this false progress? Nielsen has proclaimed LGBT-inclusive shows “the new mainstream” of television — with gay-friendly shows capitalizing on 28% of broadcast primetime viewing (and 22% of ad dollars). It explains the competition between Happy Endings and Whitney to be the next Friends-with-a-non-threatening-gay-pal, and why the once-dominant American Idol may finally come out of the closet. Ryan Murphy, however, remains our most prominent culture czar when it comes to queer characters on TV. Although praise for his creation of Glee’s Kurt is trumpeted from the mountaintops (and actor Chris Colfer was recently voted the most-eligible bachelor in Out’s online poll), he’s actually an anomaly. Murphy has typically portrayed deranged, perverse, and despicable homos; just think of Zachary Quinto as one-half of a murderous ghostly gay couple on American Horror Story or the crazy transsexuals of Nip/Tuck. The fact that his new sitcom project for the fall, The New Normal, is about a gay couple and the female surrogate who will carry their baby may be a way to balance out that pathological trail of discarded characters.

Upfronts 2012: Hulu Announces New Shows From Seth Meyers, Richard Linklater, More

Brett

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hulu-upfront-seth-meyers-adrian-grenier-richard-linklater-314182

The video website reports $420 million in revenue last year, but it is spending even more to develop new shows, including series from Adrian Grenier and Michael Wendschuh.

At a presentation to ad buyers Thursday, Hulu touted its growth, saying its more than 2 million paid subscribers have made its $8-per-month video subscription service the fastest growing in U.S. history. The company also reported $420 million in revenue last year and expressed a commitment to original programming with new series including The Awesomes, from Saturday Night Live star Seth Meyers.

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Hulu was the first of many online giants scheduled to roll out their content and meet with advertisers in TV industry style upfront presentations during the next two weeks. In a room that included Meyers, Smash star Megan Hilty, Morgan Spurlock and Adrian Grenier, the company touted that Americans watched 2.5 billion videos on Hulu in February — about 1,000 videos a second. Hulu also said it held 20 percent of the online video market and 40 percent of the premium video market.

Most of Hulu’s traffic comes from the 1,900 TV series on Hulu and Hulu Plus, but the company also has big hopes for its new original programming. Hulu recently has made inroads here by launching the political-themed series Battleground and Spurlock’s documentary series, A Day in the Life, and the site introduced its latest programming investments Thursday.