Author: Brian

TV Ratings – Mon Nov 2nd

Brian

http://www.zap2it.com/tv/ratings/

Fast National ratings for Monday, Nov. 2, 2010

The 2010 World Series took a small chunk out of “Dancing With the Stars” audience — but not enough to keep it from easily winning the night for ABC.

“DWTS” 200th episode special helped ABC average 17 million viewers throughout the evening, with a 10.8 rating/17 share in households. FOX bested last week’s numbers with 11.4 million and a 6.8/10, edging out third place CBS (10.6 million, 6.5/10). NBC placed fourth (5.4 million, 3.4/5), ahead of the CW (2 million, 1.4/2).

CBS’s comedy block helped to tie ABC in adults 18-49, with both networks scoring a 3.6 rating, followed by FOX (3.3), NBC (2.0) and the CW (1.0).

Monday hour by hour:

8 p.m.

ABC: “Dancing With the Stars” (18.9 million viewers, 11.9/19 households)
FOX: “2010 World Series” (11.3 million, 6.7/10)
CBS: “How I Met Your Mother” (9.0 million, 5.5/8)/”Rules of Engagement” (8.8 million, 5.3/8)
NBC: “Chuck” (5.5 million, 3.2/5)
The CW: “90210” (2 million, 1.3/2)

18-49 leader: “Dancing With the Stars” (3.8)

9 p.m.

ABC: “Dancing With the Stars” (20.4 million, 12.8/19)
CBS: “Two and a Half Men” (13.6 million, 8.2/12)/”Mike & Molly” (10.9million, 6.8/10)
FOX: “2010 World Series” (12.3 million, 7.5/11)
NBC: “The Women of SNL” (5.2 million, 3.2/5)
The CW: “Gossip Girl” (1.97 million, 1.4/2)

18-49 leader: “Dancing With the Stars” and “Two and a Half Men”/”Mike & Molly” (4.1) (tie)

10 p.m.

ABC: “Castle” (11.8 million, 7.6/12)
CBS: “Hawaii Five-0” (10.6 million, 6.7/11)
NBC: “The Women of SNL” (5.6 million, 3.7/6)

18-49 leader: “Hawaii Five-0” (3.0)

Why Twitter’s C.E.O. Demoted Himself

Brian

October 30, 2010
Why Twitter’s C.E.O. Demoted Himself
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

San Francisco

AT the annual South by Southwest gathering of techies in Austin, Tex., in March, conference organizers had chosen a hangar-size room to accommodate their star speaker: Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, the messaging and social networking site that had become a digital phenomenon.

In a private moment before the doors opened, Mr. Williams, who is famously deliberate and cautious, snapped a photograph of the endless rows of chairs facing the stage and posted it on Twitter.

“Gulp,” he wrote.

Later, as Mr. Williams talked with the interviewer about building a 21st-century business, keeping to Twitter’s foundational principle (the Google-like “be a force for good”) and fostering corporate experimentation, members of his audience started groaning — and leaving, one by one.

“They wanted Ev Williams; they got Ev Williams,” a Twitter staff member said later.

It is no small irony, of course, that a man so ill at ease on the big stage is a pivotal force in a communications revolution, one that has made it easier for people to chat, disseminate information and mobilize locally and globally with almost anyone who has a cellphone or an Internet connection.

And Twitter has become one of the rare but fabled Web companies with a growth rate that resembles the shape of a hockey stick. It has 175 million registered users, up from 503,000 three years ago and 58 million just last year. It is adding about 370,000 new users a day.

It has helped transform the way that news is gathered and distributed, reshaped how public figures from celebrities to political leaders communicate, and played a role in popular protests in Iran, China and Moldova. It has become so muscular and ubiquitous that it now competes with the likes of Google and Facebook for users — and is beginning to compete with them for advertising dollars.

Yet for all its astonishing growth, Twitter has succeeded in spite of itself — the enviable product of a great idea and lightning-in-a-bottle viral success rather than a disciplined approach to how it’s managed.

Because of that, Twitter is on the cusp of becoming the next big, independent Internet company — or the next start-up to be swallowed whole by a giant like Google or, possibly, the next start-up to run out of steam.

Now the company is trying to instill some of the rigor and sense of purpose it needs to ensure that it is, indeed, the next big thing.

“The thing I’ve learned that’s much different than any other time in my life is I have a team that is really, really great,” says Mr. Williams, 38. “I’ve been studying this stuff for a really long time, and I’ve screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people and product decisions and business, so I feel fairly confident at this point that it could scale pretty well.”

Last month, he unexpectedly announced that he had decided to step down as chief executive and give the job to Dick Costolo, who had been Twitter’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Williams, who remains on the company’s board, now focuses on product strategy. He made the decision after conceiving and spending months working on the recent redesign of the Twitter Web site. People who have worked with him say he excels at understanding what Internet users want and contemplating Twitter’s future, but isn’t a detail-oriented task manager.

“He takes these things that everyone thinks are as big as they can get, these geeky things, and he makes them mainstream,” says Philip Kaplan, a co-founder of the review site Blippy and one of Mr. Williams’s close friends.

Mr. Costolo, meanwhile, is all about the details of making money and getting things done. This has been his third time running a company; he sold his last one, the Web subscription service FeedBurner, to Google in 2007.

For his part, Mr. Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type — the inspired, talented start-up guy with good ideas, but not the one to execute a sophisticated business strategy once things get rolling, says Steve Blank, an entrepreneurship teacher at Stanford.

And Mr. Williams may have also earned the self-awareness and confidence to recognize exactly who he is.

“Evan Williams is the type of entrepreneur who knows when to pivot,” says Mr. Blank, “and what we may be seeing is wonderful signs of entrepreneurial wisdom.”

TWITTER was born in 2006 as a side project.

At the time, it was an appendage of a podcasting service named Odeo, another company that Mr. Williams co-founded that had millions of dollars from investors.

Even the founders, though, were having a hard time getting excited about Odeo, and Mr. Williams told everyone who worked there to hatch new ideas. While sitting on a children’s slide at a park eating Mexican food one day, an engineer, Jack Dorsey, suggested to colleagues a simple way to send status updates by using text messages.

Mr. Dorsey and Twitter’s third co-founder, Biz Stone, built a prototype in two weeks. During that time, Mr. Stone was ripping up the carpet at his Berkeley home when his cellphone vibrated in his pocket. It was Mr. Williams sending a message on Twitter: “Sipping pinot noir after a massage in Napa Valley.”

Twitter was a unique entrant on the social media scene. People could follow others without being followed back, and all posts were public by default — and limited to 140 characters so they could fit inside cellphone text messages.

The founders likened Twitter to ice cream: not that useful, but “a fun thing for family and friends when they are not in the same place,” Mr. Williams says.

That is a far cry from his vision today, an about-face that is typical of Twitter’s evolution. For a long time, Twitter’s founders talked about it with awe, as if it had a life of its own and they were mere bystanders. They freely acknowledged that they had no idea how people would use it or how it would make money.

But they thought it had potential, and in 2007 they spun it off as a separate company from Odeo, with Mr. Dorsey serving as Twitter’s first chief executive, Mr. Stone as creative director and Mr. Williams as chairman.

Mr. Williams had dipped into his own funds to cash out Odeo’s investors and subsequently gained a controlling stake in Twitter — but he was spending his days running yet another company, Obvious, an incubator for start-ups, and wasn’t focused on managing Twitter.

While Mr. Stone, an outgoing showman, was friends with both Mr. Williams and Mr. Dorsey and socialized with them, Mr. Williams and Mr. Dorsey are much quieter men whose only bond was their work. When Mr. Williams decided to join Twitter full time in the spring of 2008, his relationship with Mr. Dorsey quickly became strained as the two men competed for power.

By the end of 2008, Twitter’s growth was exploding — and things inside the company were beginning to break down. Mr. Williams suggested to Twitter’s board that it push Mr. Dorsey out. With the exception of Mr. Dorsey, the board unanimously agreed, according to several people involved in the discussions. Mr. Williams had run three companies, directors reasoned, so they figured that he would do a better job.

Upon Mr. Williams’s ascent, Mr. Dorsey became Twitter’s chairman. Although that move was potentially fraught with problems, the board wanted to ensure that Mr. Dorsey remained close to the company because he still owned a large stake in Twitter and he had originally come up with the idea for it, according to two board members.

The change shocked employees and further frayed relations between Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Williams. Mr. Dorsey declined to comment for this article, but people close to him say he felt betrayed by Mr. Williams.

“There was a feeling that Ev wanted to take control after he realized the potential importance of Twitter,” says a Twitter employee who was there during the transition and requested anonymity to protect business relationships.

“It’s hard and confusing,” Mr. Williams says of Mr. Dorsey’s departure. “I think there’s few cases in history where the C.E.O. steps down and is also the founder and reports to someone and that works.”

Directors say Twitter’s board meetings are amicable, and in the last couple weeks, Mr. Dorsey has been spotted around the offices more and has taken on a greater role in long-term strategy.

Even with Mr. Williams as C.E.O., Twitter was growing faster than he or anyone else at the company could handle. In 2009, Twitter ballooned to 71.3 million registered users from 5 million. The Web site crashed often, and the “fail whale” — an image of a whale that appears on the site whenever Twitter falters — became the butt of jokes.

Twitter was fielding dozens of calls a week from big companies, celebrities and politicians. Among the callers were CNN, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the State Department, which asked Twitter to delay maintenance so that Iranians protesting an election in 2009 could continue using the service.

“We were just hanging on by our fingernails to a rocket ship,” Mr. Williams recalls.

What the company needed was simple: people to do all the work. Yet it moved painfully slowly in hiring, with just 110 employees by the end of 2009, even though it had raised $150 million in venture capital by then.

“The mistake I made was definitely underhiring, both in quantity and in experience, in several areas, for a long time,” Mr. Williams says now. He attributes that mistake to the daily distractions of running Twitter and not anticipating how big it would become.

Twitter’s first office in San Francisco was classic start-up: dorm-room décor, complete with a keg in the kitchen, a couple of big, green concrete deer and a communal table where employees ate take-out burritos together.

Big-name chief executives would visit the company and sit on frumpy couches because there wasn’t an adequate conference room. A video crew once walked in through Twitter’s unlocked front door without permission and began recording employees.

The company’s offices today have locked doors and a receptionist in a sunlit lobby, where the green deer now stand. Trendy furniture includes plentiful conference tables, and while there is still a keg, a chef prepares lunch for the 300 employees.

Sixty percent of those people are engineers, who have spent the last year methodically rebuilding the software that runs Twitter and developing a system to monitor downtime.

The fail whale still appears, but not nearly as often, an important change now that Twitter sells ads to companies like Starbucks, Ford and Microsoft. The ads can appear on the Twitter feed as sponsored posts, or in Twitter’s list of trending topics or among the suggested accounts that Twitter recommends that its users follow. Mr. Costolo spearheaded all of these initiatives.

Twitter finally hired a recruiter, as well as people to handle mundane but important big-company tasks like human resources, payroll and ensuring that all of Twitter’s partners use the same blue bird logo. A whiteboard near the executives’ desks lists headings like “commit,” “invest” and “leverage.”

Mr. Williams and his colleagues no longer liken Twitter to ice cream. They now describe it as an information network, not a social tool, and see it as an essential way for people to communicate and get information in real time.

Yet even though Twitter’s executives say their heads are finally above water, Mr. Williams still describes the company as “a 6-foot-tall sixth grader — there’s a lack of maturity, despite size and the perception of outsiders.”

He says Twitter now has a team that can realize the company’s ambitions — a revelation coming from someone who arrived in Silicon Valley with something to prove and volumes to learn about working with others.

EVAN WILLIAMS grew up on a farm in Nebraska, “90 miles and an eternity” from Lincoln, he says. And he didn’t fit in.

“My brother was the consummate Nebraska boy — the football star who went to the university, was president of his fraternity, hunted with my dad all the time,” he says. “I just didn’t feel at home there.

“I had a fierce desire to create things, to be independent and prove myself, which caused me to reject authority, but never in a sort of rebellious way,” he adds. “It was more like, ‘I’m going to show you by doing it all myself.’ ”

Mr. Williams dropped out of the University of Nebraska and started a business in Lincoln, financed by his father, designing Web sites for local businesses and making CD-ROMs about Nebraska football and the Internet.

But it turned out that, among other problems, football fans weren’t using CD-ROMs. The business ended up being Mr. Williams’s first failure, and he couldn’t repay his father.

Mr. Williams had devoured the early issues of Wired magazine, and California loomed in his imagination as a place where he could truly carve out his own niche as an entrepreneur. He made his first move west in 1997, with a marketing job at O’Reilly Media, the technology publisher in Sebastopol, Calif.

“Ev was just very frustrated, and he had ideas for how we could do things differently and better,” recalls Tim O’Reilly, the publisher’s founder. “He had a little bit of attitude, a chip on his shoulder, but always with good spirit.”

Mr. Williams left O’Reilly after seven months — “I was bad at working for people,” he says. And in January 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, he started his second company, Pyra Labs, with his former girlfriend, Meg Hourihan. Paul Bausch, a friend from high school, soon joined.

Pyra made a Web-based project management tool but soon saw a different opportunity: a tool that allowed users to easily post articles and photographs to personal blogs. That became Blogger, one of the first Web services that automated blog publishing.

Soon after, the tech bubble burst, and Blogger was running out of money. Mr. Williams told his five employees, including Ms. Hourihan and Mr. Bausch, that he could no longer pay them and that he would run the company alone.

But six months later, in June 2001, Blogger started making money by charging for added features, and Mr. Williams had a budget that allowed him to hire new workers. In 2003, Google acquired Blogger.

Several people who once worked at the company said they didn’t make money on the sale because Mr. Williams had never submitted the paperwork needed to allocate stock options. Mr. Williams says that this group hadn’t worked at the company long enough for their stock options to vest.

Others have a different view of Mr. Williams’s tenure at Blogger.

“I don’t think he took care of the people who got him to where he was,” says Ms. Hourihan, who earned millions of dollars from the sale. “It was bitter, horrible and tough. He’s not C.E.O. material. It doesn’t play to his strengths. He’s a better inventor; he’s better at coming up with ideas.”

Mr. Williams says that all successful businesspeople make enemies along the way. Yet he also says he learned from the Blogger experience. “I was trying to do everything myself when we were going through hard times,” he says. “When it was just me, I was happier, which I think is a sign of failure of working with people.”

In 2004, Mr. Williams left Google, where he was still running Blogger, and planned to take time off. Instead, he started working on Odeo with his neighbor Noah Glass. A year later, he again found himself running a company.

MR. WILLIAMS doesn’t fit the Silicon Valley stereotype. He is neither a back-slapping former frat boy nor a socially awkward programmer most content behind a computer screen.

He is at ease with himself, and convivial and dryly funny in small settings, but he tends to be quiet in large groups and is ambivalent about his newfound celebrity. Recently, with invitations to Davos and the Grammys, he traded in his uniform of jeans, a bird T-shirt and a hoodie for a suit — only to lose his luggage on the flight to Switzerland.

Last year, when his wife, Sara Morishige Williams, went into labor and wrote about it on Twitter, CNN published the news and her photo while she was still in the hospital. But Mr. Williams rarely posts personal messages to the 1.3 million people who follow him.

His fingers move constantly while he talks, whether fiddling with his keychain or shredding toothpicks at a bar, and staff members give him a drink and an espresso to loosen him up before big public appearances.

“Often there will be a room with five people having a conversation and he says the least, but when he does talk, everyone listens intently, and it’s a gem,” says Mr. Kaplan, his friend.

In business, that trait can be beneficial. In 2008, Facebook tried to buy Twitter, and financiers asked Mr. Williams if he wanted to sell. He said he wanted to sleep on it, and the next day sent them a long e-mail about why he wanted Twitter to stay independent.

“He’s got this ability to be patient in this very productive way,” says Bijan Sabet, who is on Twitter’s board and is a partner at Spark Capital, which invested in the company. “It was not just this flip e-mail but very thoughtful — what we could accomplish by when, why there’s still so much we have left to do. It was pretty inspiring.”

But others say Mr. Williams’s methodical approach can get in the way. “Ev is very difficult to work with because he has a tough time making a final decision on products,” says the C.E.O. of a Silicon Valley social networking company who requested anonymity because the company works with Twitter. “This all changed when Dick took over. He’s very logical and knows how to make things happen.”

From Mr. Williams’s point of view, his division of labor with Mr. Costolo, a wiry and restless counterpoint to Mr. Williams’s reserve, is a sign of success. After failing early on to work with others, Mr. Williams says he has figured out how to be part of a team.

“Dick is hard-charging and very focused on urgency and executing now, and I tend to be very contemplative,” he says. “My weakness is probably taking too long to make a decision, and his is being too hasty.”

THE cumbersome details of running Twitter now fall to Mr. Costolo. He says his biggest challenge is ensuring that in other countries, like Japan, South Korea and Brazil, where Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds, the company avoids the managerial mistakes it made in the United States.

That means marketing Twitter as an information network, not a social one, from the get-go; buying enough computing power; and hiring people to sell ads in those countries. Twitter also has to prove that it can build an advertising business in the United States.

The company, meanwhile, is trying to avoid the bureaucracy that plagues larger businesses. The topic is important to Mr. Williams, who says he started companies because he didn’t believe in aligning himself with institutions.

Twitter’s executives talk about the “Dunbar number” — the maximum number of people, generally believed to be 150, with whom one person can have strong relationships. This effort, mind you, comes from a company with a business model that fosters a multitude of ever-growing — and largely glancing — interactions among Twitter’s users.

“I’ve never seen a company so focused on avoiding the Dunbar number,” says Adam Bain, who recently joined Twitter from the News Corporation as head of global revenue. “You can tell Ev planned it out.”

Each time employees log on to their computers, for instance, they see a photo of a colleague, with clues and a list of the person’s hobbies, and must identify the person. And notes from every meeting are posted for all employees to read.

Speaking to a group of new hires at an orientation session last spring, Mr. Williams said Twitter had three goals: to change the world, to build a business and to have fun.

“You can succeed by only building a business, and many companies do,” he said. “We won’t consider it success unless it’s all three.”

Nick Bilton contributed reporting from New York.

Making Sure Nickelodeon Hangs With Cool Kids

Brian

By BROOKS BARNES
Published: October 30, 2010
“NO kicking. No spitting. No hitting,” said Cyma Zarghami, the president of Nickelodeon, at the start of a staff meeting in late September. It was a playful admonition suitable to her line of work, but the tone in her voice meant business. On the agenda was the release of “BTR,” the first album from the cast of “Big Time Rush,” a new Nickelodeon series about a boy band.

Ms. Zarghami immediately expressed concern about a promotional concert at the Mall of America in Minnesota. Major advertisers would be on hand. What if the event was sparsely attended? “We need hundreds of fans there,” she said.

She didn’t need to worry. On Oct. 16, more than 7,000 near-hysterical teenage girls turned out at the mall to watch the show’s floppy-haired quartet perform. “I thought I was witnessing the beginning of the Monkees,” says Mark Addicks, chief marketing officer at General Mills. “It was a very good sign for the show.”

For the first time in years, Nickelodeon has heat. Ratings are up across the board, powered by buzzy new live-action hits like “Victorious,” centered on life at an elite performing-arts high school, and “iCarly,” a series about an everyday girl with her own Web show. A new animated program, “The Penguins of Madagascar,” is a solid success. Even the decade-old “Dora the Explorer” has perked up, thanks to a yearlong birthday celebration.

Nickelodeon’s spinoff channels are also spiking upward, albeit from smaller bases. For Nicktoons, ratings among the target demographic of boys 6 to 11 are up 33 percent so far this year, compared with the year-earlier period, according to Nielsen Media Research. Nick Jr., aimed at preschoolers, is up 12 percent. And TeenNick has climbed 10 percent among its target audience, ages 12 to 17.

“We’re winning in a way that we haven’t been in a very long time,” Ms. Zarghami says. “That sounds braggy, but we’ve worked really hard, and we’re pleased it’s finally paying off.”

Pleased is an understatement. Philippe Dauman, C.E.O. of Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, struck a giddy tone about the children’s business in a recent note to employees: “The Nick family of channels now captures more than half of all kids’ viewing on TV — the highest share in more than a decade!”

Not that Mr. Dauman is content. “Nickelodeon is perhaps our most important asset,” he said in an interview. “It needs to retain its leadership position, and it needs to grow.” Viacom does not break out numbers for Nickelodeon.

For all the momentum, enormous puzzles remain for Ms. Zarghami to solve. Pre-teenage viewers, once a loyal age group, are starting to become more fickle as parents unleash them onto the Web at an earlier age. Some analysts criticize Nickelodeon’s digital efforts, particularly when it comes to entertainment on mobile devices as unfocused. Neopets, its once-booming online gaming world, has waned.

ADVERTISERS are under pressure to cut back on marketing to children — a problem to which Nickelodeon is particularly exposed because its primary rival, Disney Channel, does not accept traditional advertising. Last month, a children’s advocacy group asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate a new Nickelodeon series, “Zevo-3,” whose characters are named after Skechers shoes.

“We believe that the show violates several of the few existing rules we have to protect children from over-commercialization,” said Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a nonprofit group. Nickelodeon said in a statement that it was confident the show did not violate the Children’s Television Act, which limits advertising in shows aimed at kids.

Nickelodeon has also struggled to come up with a new generation of cartoons to replace aging stalwarts like “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Dora the Explorer.” Animated series are much more valuable than live-action programs like “iCarly” because they are easier to export overseas and generate a larger array of merchandise. But while Nickelodeon has poured tens of millions of dollars into the development of new animated hits, a parade of efforts — “El Tigre,” “The X’s,” “Catscratch,” “Mighty B,” “Back at the Barnyard” — have failed to catch substantial wind.

Ms. Zarghami concedes that Nickelodeon needs animated reinforcements but points to promising shows like “Team Umizoomi,” a preschool series centered on learning math; “Fanboy & Chum Chum,” about two science-fiction aficionados; and “The Penguins of Madagascar,” based on the DreamWorks Animation films.

Judy McGrath, chief executive of MTV Networks, which includes Nickelodeon, also brushes aside concerns. “They’re experimenting, and they’re figuring it out,” she says.

A PETITE woman with piercing eyes and a husky cackle, Ms. Zarghami, 47, is the daughter of an Iranian-born doctor and a Scottish-born nurse. She started at Nickelodeon in 1985 as a scheduling clerk, a year after leaving the University of Vermont three credits shy of an English degree. (In 2000, the university gave her an honorary degree.)

She rose up the scheduling ranks, taking on responsibility for things like brand positioning and marketing, until she became general manager of Nickelodeon. In 2006, she took over as president of Viacom’s Kids and Family Group, becoming one of the top executive women in the media industry.

In some ways, her ascent is a reflection of the usual attributes — ambition and a knack for playing corporate politics. But over the years, she also proved herself a highly talented programmer, with the rare ability to zero in on what children want to watch and when. She was not directly responsible for “SpongeBob” or “Dora,” but helped nurture them into hits by deciding how to schedule them and overseeing marketing partnerships. “Cyma is a deep thinker on a strategic level: ‘What pieces do I need to gather to get where I want to go?’ ” Ms. McGrath says.

When Ms. Zarghami landed the top job, she had to fight a number of fires. The Nickelodeon empire has tremendous muscle — ad sales and affiliate fees of $2.2 billion a year, according to the research firm SNL Kagan, and merchandising worth $5.5 billion — but two decades of breakneck growth had created inefficient wiring.

While a bloated Nickelodeon was basking in its top-dog status, Disney Channel cracked the code for the “tween” audience — ages 9 to 14 — with “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical.” That audience was once the icing on the kids’ TV cake, but became hugely important as younger children started to follow its lead. Although Nickelodeon has been the top-rated children’s network for 16 years, by 2007, Disney had started to regularly beat Nickelodeon by certain measures.
Nickelodeon, founded in 1979, had also become a mature business. With the easy growth behind it — the flagship Nickelodeon channel, fully distributed in North America, reaches more than 100 million homes — Ms. Zarghami needed a way to kick-start overseas expansion while broadening the audience at home to include families. “A full generation of our viewers now have kids of their own, and we needed to reflect that in more of our programming,” she said.

By her own account, she started off slowly. She was pregnant with her third child at the time of her promotion and spent part of her first year on maternity leave. Upon her return, she stepped cautiously, putting into motion a grinding two-year brand review.

Inch by inch, changes started to click. The spinoff channels for preschoolers and teenagers — then called Noggin and the N — were rebranded Nick Jr. and TeenNick to improve consumer recognition, a move that ratings growth indicates is working. Nick at Nite, the prime-time block of programs for adults, was expanded by an hour and scheduled with reruns families could watch together. (Out: “Murphy Brown.” In: “My Wife and Kids.”) As a result, Nick at Nite has also perked up in the ratings, reversing years of declines.

Ms. Zarghami also attacked Disney’s tween flank with “iCarly.” It is currently the No. 1 show on television among children 2 to 11, as measured by new episodes and not repeats, according to Nielsen Media Research, and it has spawned at least one cultural craze: spaghetti tacos, a dish created by an oddball character on the show.

“I probably care more than I should about popular culture’s endorsement of things,” says Ms. McGrath, the MTV Networks chief, “so I am very proud of how ‘iCarly’ has broken through.”

To find new hits fast, especially ones with powerful merchandising potential, Ms. Zarghami somewhat controversially decided to abandon Nickelodeon’s long-held policy of owning all its programming. She has begun licensing franchises — a rent-a-hit model.

“Power Rangers,” the martial arts series, is a prime example. Ms. Zarghami made a deal in May with the investor Haim Saban, who owns the series, to bring 20 new episodes and 700 reruns to Nickelodeon and Nicktoons starting early next year.

The deal was a jab at Disney, which had just sold “Power Rangers” to Mr. Saban. Disney was under the impression that he planned to license the show not to the rival Nickelodeon but to the Hub, a less-threatening children’s channel that is a joint venture of Discovery Communications and Hasbro.

Mr. Saban says he is impressed with how quickly Ms. Zarghami acted when he approached her about a deal. “The conversation took two minutes,” he says. He describes her as “very tough” but also “super professional” in negotiations. “I always ask for some compassion,” he adds, “but I don’t get very far.”

Nickelodeon’s array of future shows and initiatives is dizzying. A partnership with the owners of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” is to result in an animated preschool series in 2012, the same year “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” is slated to come back to life on Nick. “House of Anubis,” a live-action mystery series planned for early 2011, is a bold experiment in bringing the daytime soap opera format — a new episode each day, instead of once a week — to teenagers.

In January on the Web, Nickelodeon will introduce MonkeyQuest.com, an online game in which players in disparate locations play together. (Players are cast as young monkeys swept up in an epic quest to uncover the secrets of the lost Monkey King and to defeat the Shadow Monsters.) And Nickelodeon is rolling out an ambitious line of educational merchandise related to the math program “Team Umizoomi.”

IN the meantime, the children’s television business — always cutthroat — is growing more competitive.

After falling off a ratings cliff, the Cartoon Network, owned by Time Warner, is trying harder to get its act together; it has a new “Looney Tunes” series in the works and this month announced plans to turn the DreamWorks Animation film “How to Train Your Dragon” into a television show.

On Oct. 10, Discovery Communications and Hasbro introduced the Hub, stocked with shows tied to Hasbro toy lines like Transformers, My Little Pony and G.I. Joe. Borrowing a trick from Nick at Nite, the Hub is showing reruns of “Happy Days” in the evenings.

At first glance, Disney Channel is showing signs of cooling. Miley Cyrus, the 17-year-old “Hannah Montana” actress, has a controversial new sex-kitten persona. A series built around the Jonas Brothers is a dud. And the executive who turned Disney Channel into a juggernaut, Rich Ross, left television last year to run Disney’s movie studio.

But Disney is preparing a renewed programming attack, including a “High School Musical” spinoff, a TV movie called “Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure.” Disney also has high hopes for the movie “Lemonade Mouth,” the story of five high school students who meet in detention and form a band, and “Shake It Up,” a dance-driven sitcom. Over all, Disney plans to expand its content pipeline by 30 percent in 2011.

On the animation side at Disney, “Phineas and Ferb,” guided by an executive poached from Nickelodeon, is a breakout hit. In 2012, Disney will go after Nick Jr., introducing Disney Junior, a channel for preschool children.

“I guess I could make an imitation-is-flattery joke,” Ms. Zarghami says dryly.

She has done her share of co-opting the competition’s playbook. “Victorious” is an aspirational, music-infused program that shares DNA with “Hannah Montana.”

Even “Big Time Rush,” a co-production with Sony Music Entertainment, nods to the Disney formula, says Rob Stringer, chairman of the Columbia/Epic Label Group at Sony. “You take what Disney has done,” he says, “and make it more interesting — quirkier, a little cheeky, polite anarchy.”

WHATEVER the model, it’s working. “BTR” made its debut on the Billboard Top 200 chart at No. 3, and the band has sold more than one million digital tracks.

“When I saw the sales numbers and looked at how well the show is doing in the ratings,” Ms. Zarghami says, “I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, it doesn’t get much better than this.’ ”

MTV Is Looking Beyond ‘Jersey Shore’ to Build a Wider Audience

Brian

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: October 24, 2010
The second-season finale of “Jersey Shore” last week was one of the highest-rated hours all year on MTV. There was, perhaps, no better time to promote another boozy, in-your-face unscripted show.
Enlarge This Image

MTV

A scene from the finale of the second season of “Jersey Shore,” the hit show that has helped increase MTV’s viewing audience.

Instead, in every commercial break, MTV promoted “Skins,” a remake of a scripted British series about the sexually charged trials of teenage life that is scheduled to make its debut in January.

“We were using one of our biggest moments of the year to loudly shout about a very different kind of show,” said Stephen K. Friedman, MTV’s general manager.

MTV is enjoying a renaissance. Written off as irrelevant just a few years ago, the channel was resuscitated this year by the rambunctious cast of “Jersey Shore” and the young parents on “Teen Mom.”

Lest it rely too heavily on those shows, MTV is rapidly diversifying its slate of programs, “Skins” being one example.

“We’re in a constant state of reinvention,” said Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks Music/Film/Logo Group.

Mr. Toffler is fond of saying that MTV executives have to “embrace the chaos,” especially because MTV has a fickle young audience.

Advertisers and analysts have taken note of the revival. Benjamin Swinburne, a media analyst for Morgan Stanley, said “there’s no question that ‘Jersey Shore’ has been the catalyst” for ratings gains at MTV.

“But they’ve been able to build off that by taking some intelligent risks,” he added.

Investors expect advertising growth to accelerate in the next two quarters at MTV and its parent, MTV Networks, which is owned by Viacom.

Cast members like Nicole Polizzi, better known as Snooki, from “Jersey Shore” get some of the credit, but the rebound is also a result of rethinking the channel’s programs for the millennial generation, as those born in the 1980s and ’90s are sometimes called.

It is happening at a time of wholesale revamping within MTV. A year ago, Tony DiSanto, president of programming, approached Mr. Toffler about wanting to set up his own production company. Mr. Toffler asked him to stay on while MTV strengthened its programming leadership. That is what the last year has been about, as a half-dozen new executives have been hired away from Warner Brothers, E! and elsewhere. Mr. DiSanto will leave at the end of the year.

Under the new guard, flashy reality shows are out — “The Hills,” once a flagship franchise for MTV, wrapped up last summer — and a new buzzword, “authenticity,” is in. It is shorthand for a new “filter” for MTV’s programming decisions.

Until this year, MTV had been shedding viewers for the better part of a decade, falling to an average of 481,000 at any given time in 2009 from an average of 636,000 in 2005. MTV, which the MTV Networks chief executive, Judy McGrath, has said should be the “forever young network,” had clung to Generation X a little too long, some believed, at the expense of the millennials.

Compounding the problem, there was a perception that MTV was flailing online, where its audience was spending more and more time.

“We were the company that didn’t get MySpace,” said Ms. McGrath, referring to Viacom’s failed bid for the social networking site. News Corporation acquired MySpace, instead, and the site has since withered. “I don’t think about that anymore,” she said in an interview last week.

MTV’s music Web sites now have more than 60 million unique monthly visitors.

Mr. Friedman, the former head of MTV’s college channel mtvU, was put in charge of MTV in 2008, after Christina Norman departed to take over Oprah Winfrey’s forthcoming cable channel. He said he sensed that “reality was starting to feel really unreal to our audience,” citing the show “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF.” No one believed Ms. Hilton would actually find her new best friend through a reality show.

At the same time, the actual reality shows on MTV — unglamorous stalwarts like “Made” and “True Life” — were picking up new viewers.

“They were inspirational, authentic stories,” Mr. Toffler said. The channel saw a way forward, and most of its new reality shows, like “The Buried Life,” “World of Jenks” and “If You Really Knew Me,” share that DNA.

As a result of MTV’s research about the millennial generation, Mr. Toffler and Mr. Friedman said they had come away thinking that teenagers and twentysomethings nowadays were less rebellious than those in the past. They are not rebelling against their parents so much as they are watching TV with their parents.

These insights have informed the development of new shows, including “Jersey Shore,” which was first conceived as a reality competition show for MTV’s slightly older-skewing sibling, VH1. Mr. Toffler decided to redevelop it for MTV, and what changed says a lot about the channel today.

“As opposed to making it a competition, we accentuated the fact that they come around and support each other — yes, they fight with each other, but they are a family,” Mr. Toffler said. “You even see their parents come in and cook pasta for the house.”

Mr. Friedman added: “Four years ago, you never would have seen that on MTV. Parents were absent!”

Now parenting is the main topic of “Teen Mom,” which is second to “Jersey Shore” in popularity. “Teen Mom,” which features four young mothers, is a spinoff of “16 and Pregnant,” which started in mid-2009 and stunned MTV executives with high ratings out of the gate. Its second-season finale this month attracted an average of 5.5 million viewers, while the finale of “Jersey Shore” averaged 6.1 million.

This year, MTV is averaging 558,000 viewers at any given time, up 16 percent from last year.

MTV is restarting “16 and Pregnant” with new cast members this month, and it is bringing back “Jersey Shore” for a third season in January. Several “Shore” spinoffs featuring individual cast members are also under consideration.

But MTV’s programmers know they cannot rely too heavily on these two hits. “You have to plan for all of these franchises’ obsolescence,” Mr. Toffler said, “and we are.”

The channel recently gave up on production of “Bridge and Tunnel,” a reality show about young people who live on Staten Island. Asked by a reporter if it was simply “Jersey Shore” on Staten Island, Mr. Toffler said, “That’s probably exactly why we didn’t want to do it.”

That comes back to diversification. Still trying to come up with a viable successor to the music video countdown show “TRL,” MTV this month started a pop culture newscast on weekday afternoons called “The Seven.” A scripted show, “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” started last summer, and four more scripted shows will come online next year, including “Skins” and “Teen Wolf.” “Beavis and Butt-Head” is coming back, too, thanks to a newly reformed animation unit.

“The times when our network has been one-note,” Ms. McGrath said, “have never been as good as the times when we were diverse.”

Ex-Companion Details ‘Real’ Thomas

Brian

By ASHLEY PARKER
Published: October 22, 2010

WASHINGTON — Lillian McEwen is not one of the women whose name is generally associated with Justice Clarence Thomas and his contentious confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court seat.

The Caucus

The latest on President Obama, his administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus
More Politics News

But now, at age 65 and retired from a long legal career, with nothing to lose and a book to sell, Ms. McEwen is ready for that to change.

This week’s news that his wife, Virginia, had left voice mail for Anita Hill, asking her to apologize for “what you did with my husband” at the confirmation hearings, gave Ms. McEwen an unexpected opportunity to talk about Justice Thomas, the man she was romantically involved with for “six or seven years” in the 1980s. The phone call, she said in an interview Friday, makes sense to her.

For Ms. Thomas, she said, the accusation of sexual harassment made by Ms. Hill “still has to be a mystery, that he is still angry about this and upset about it after all these years, and I can understand that she would want to know why, and solve a problem if she could — I mean, acting as a loyal wife.”

But Ms. McEwen said she knew a different Clarence Thomas, one whom she recognized in the 1991 testimony of Ms. Hill, who claimed that he had repeatedly made inappropriate sexual comments to her at work, including descriptions of pornographic films.

Ms. McEwen said that pornography for Justice Thomas was “just a part of his personality structure.” She said he kept a stack of pornographic magazines, “frequented a store on Dupont Circle that catered to his needs,” and allowed his interest in pornography to bleed into his professional relationships.

“It starts inside,” she said, tapping her head during a 30-minute interview inside her three-story condominium in Southwest Washington. “And then your behavior flows from what it is that’s important to you. That’s what happened with him, certainly.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, Kathy Arberg, declined to comment.

Ms. McEwen, who said she was surprised not to be subpoenaed by either side, did not testify about Justice Thomas at his confirmation hearings. She said she never received a response from a note she wrote to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was running the hearings and with whom she had worked as a lawyer for the Judiciary Committee. She said the note, sent after Justice Thomas was nominated, reminded Mr. Biden that she knew the nominee.

“The hearings themselves were so constrained — the questioning, the subject matter — the scope of the hearings didn’t really allow for any kind of treatment of the issues that had been raised,” she said. “The kind of Clarence I knew at the time that these events occurred is the kind of Clarence that did not emerge from the hearings, I’ll say that. It was not him, and he probably would not have been on the court if the real Clarence had actually been revealed.”

But now Ms. McEwen, who first spoke to The Washington Post for an article published Friday, is ready to talk about the man she says is the “real Clarence,” or at least the one she knew intimately. After retiring in 2007, Ms. McEwen began working on a memoir, which she completed this year. Ms. McEwen also spoke with ABC News.

The book, tentatively called “All About Me,” focuses on her childhood in the District, but she said Justice Thomas appears “in probably about 20 to 25 percent of the pages in the book, because he was a significant part of my life for many years.”

However, what may be the biggest scoop in her book — the private details of her contact with Justice Thomas — may also prove the biggest challenge in getting it published. She said that some agents have not gotten back to her, and others have said “it’s just not the kind of book that they are particularly enthusiastic about, a lot of it having to do with the fact that Clarence is included.”

Though Ms. McEwen still seems to get upset discussing Justice Thomas at times, she said she was the one who ended the relationship.

“He was changing and I didn’t like it,” she said. “He was just becoming obsessed with campaigning for the president and interviewing with reporters and raising his child in a way I didn’t like. It’s a combination of obsessed, ambitious, irritable and bullying that was just too much for me.”

Ms. McEwen has generally kept a low profile all these years, largely out of respect for the wishes of Justice Thomas, who asked her to “take the same position toward him that his first wife had taken” and not speak publicly about their relationship. They see each other “sporadically” — the last time they crossed paths, she said, was at a talk he gave at Howard University after his book, “My Grandfather’s Son,” came out in 2007.

“His book had a sense of anger about that whole process, that led me to believe he still carries a grudge, as if he had been victimized somehow, and as if he hadn’t won,” she said. “It was almost as if he were not on the Supreme Court. Like he was kept from it.”

As for Ms. McEwen’s book, she said the process of writing it was therapeutic. She recently showed it to her daughter.

“It was probably T.M.I.,” she said, using the abbreviation for “too much information.” “But that’s the way it is.”

Supremely Bad Judgment

Brian

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 23, 2010

WASHINGTON

In the wacky coda to one of the most searing chapters in American history, everyone remained true to form. Anita Hill reacted with starchy disgust. Ginni Thomas came across like a spiritually addled nut. Clarence Thomas was mute, no doubt privately raging about the trouble women have caused him. And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.

Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.

If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.

In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.

Years later, some of the Democrats on that all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee told me they assumed there must have been a consensual romance between the boss and his subordinate. McEwen assumed so, too, because Clarence took Anita with him when he changed agencies. Hill has made it clear she felt no reciprocal attraction.

Joe Biden, the senator who ran those hearings, was leery of the liberal groups eager to use Hill as a pawn to checkmate Thomas. He circumscribed the testimony of women who could have corroborated Hill’s unappetizing portrait of a power-abusing predator.

For the written record, Biden allowed negative accounts only from women who had worked with Thomas. He also ruled out testimony from women who simply had personal relationships with Thomas, and did not respond to a note from McEwen — a former assistant U.S. attorney who had once worked as a counsel for Biden’s committee — reminding him of her long relationship with Thomas.

It’s too late to relitigate the shameful Thomas-Hill hearings. We’re stuck with a justice-for-life who lied his way onto the bench with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats.

We don’t know why Ginni Thomas, who was once in the thrall of a cultish self-help group called Lifespring, made that odd call to Hill at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. But we do know that the Thomases show supremely bad judgment. Mrs. Thomas, a queen of the Tea Party, is the founder of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, which she boasts will be bigger than the Tea Party. She sports and sells those foam Statue of Liberty-style crowns as she makes her case against the “tyranny” of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who, she charges, are hurting the “core founding principles” of America.

As The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote, Mrs. Thomas started her nonprofit in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and additional sums this year that we don’t know about yet. She does not have to disclose the donors, whose money makes possible the compensation she brings into the Thomas household.

There is no way to tell if her donors have cases before the Supreme Court or whether her husband knows their identities. And she never would have to disclose them if her husband had his way.

The 5-to-4 Citizens United decision last January gave corporations, foreign contributors, unions, Big Energy, Big Oil and superrich conservatives a green light to surreptitiously funnel in as much money as they want, whenever they want to elect or unelect candidates. As if that weren’t enough to breed corruption, Thomas was the only justice — in a rare case of detaching his hip from Antonin Scalia’s — to write a separate opinion calling for an end to donor disclosures.

In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court chose the Republican president. In Citizens United, the court may return Republicans to control of Congress. So much for conservatives’ professed disdain of judicial activism. And so much for the public’s long-held trust in the impartiality of the nation’s highest court.

Justice Stephen Breyer recently rejected the image of the high court as “nine junior varsity politicians.” But it’s even worse than that. The court has gone beyond mere politicization. Its liberals are moderate and reasonable, while the conservatives are dug in, guzzling Tea.

Thomas and Scalia have flouted ethics rules by attending seminars sponsored by Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by billionaire brothers that has donated more than $100 million to far-right causes.

Christine O’Donnell may not believe in the separation of church and state, but the Supreme Court does not believe in the separation of powers.

O.K., have a good day!

Clarence Thomas’s Wife Asks Anita Hill for Apology

Brian

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us/politics/20thomas.html?_r=1&emc=na

WASHINGTON — Nearly 20 years after Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Justice Thomas’s wife has called Ms. Hill, seeking an apology.

In a voice mail left at 7:31 a.m. on Oct. 9 — the Saturday of Columbus Day weekend — Virginia Thomas asked her husband’s former aide-turned-adversary to make amends. Ms. Hill played the recording, from her voice mail at Brandeis University, for The Times.

“Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” it said. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometimes and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”

Ms. Thomas went on: “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.”

Fact and friction for true-life pics

Brian

http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=print_story&articleid=VR1118025745&categoryid=13

Whenever Hollywood creates films about people who are still living, there are benefits and perils: The real-life folks can add details that enrich the film’s credibility — or they can refuse cooperation, making it harder to get to the essential truths.
Fox Searchlight’s “Conviction,” which bowed Oct. 15, was Exhibit A of the former, with Betty Anne Waters a constant presence in making the film. On the flip side, the filmmakers behind Sony’s “The Social Network,” about Mark Zuckerberg’s contentious rise as the public face behind Facebook, pressed ahead without any cooperation with its primary subjects.

In making Summit’s upcoming “Fair Game,” director Doug Liman and scripters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth had a mix of both cooperation and reticence: The pivotal Lewis “Scooter” Libby withheld any interaction with the filmmakers, while Valerie Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, were happy to help. The “Game” team also faced another factor that affects few filmmakers: Though Plame was cooperative, some of her experiences were classified information that she couldn’t reveal.

The Season of Gay Whiplash

Brian

Between Paladino, the Bronx tortures, and the suicides, are things really getting better?

By Chris Rovzar Published Oct 15, 2010
A few weeks ago, I found myself wondering whether the Logo reality show The A-List—in which a handful of vapidly handsome men make fools of themselves in the playground of Manhattan—would be “bad for the gays.” That this would even occur to me as a concern shows just how blissfully easy it can be to be a gay man in New York.

How embarrassingly silly that worry seems this week, with the news of the torture of three young gay men in the Bronx. That came on the heels of a string of gay-teen suicides nationwide, including one young man at Rutgers who felt so humiliated by his roommate that he jumped off the George Washington Bridge. And in the midst of it all, this state’s Republican nominee for governor declares that homosexuality is not a “valid or successful” option. As we were trying to process all of this, the Washington Post allowed Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, to write a thuggish op-ed inspired by those suicides, as though his bigoted gay-conspiracy theories are legitimate.

It has been, at the very least, confusing. We live in an America where public outcry can make a major movie studio remove a gay joke from a trailer for a Vince Vaughn comedy, but also in an America where a movie studio felt it was okay to make the joke in the first place. After Carl Paladino’s remarks, Rudy Giuliani, who leans further right with each passing year, surprised us by calling his remarks “highly offensive,” and the usually boorish New York Post strained to take Paladino to task for it.

Meanwhile, judicial momentum is on the side of gay rights. Recently, federal courts have ruled against “don’t ask, don’t tell”; California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay couples there from marrying; and the Defense of Marriage Act. And yet—disconcertingly—the Obama administration, which says it favors repeal of DADT and DOMA, is appealing both.

Of course, this confluence of events feels more significant than it is: The court rulings are parts of legal processes set in motion months or even years ago. Paladino is an unhinged man who’d already alienated his party by saying whatever was on his bitter and unsympathetic mind. The Bronx assaults, which riveted the nation—even Glenn Beck railed against them on his show—were, sadly, not unprecedented. Yes, the half-dozen suicides in the past few months among gay kids, or kids who were bullied for seeming gay, are a devastatingly high number—but I suspect if we knew the real number of kids who kill themselves as a result of these pressures, year round, devastating wouldn’t even describe it. Which is why it’s such a good thing that these tragedies have brought bullying and the preponderance of depression among gay youth into the national conversation.

As kids come out at younger and younger ages, they face resistance and even hatred. Progress always is met with resistance, and as gay people appear more and more in the mainstream, blowback is inevitable from those who don’t want to see them. These aren’t just people who don’t want to watch The A-List. These are people who don’t want to watch gays and lesbians living in their neighborhoods, or teaching in their schools.

So even though it feels like something is happening—because people are talking, because headlines are being written, because rage and sorrow are being expressed—in reality, progress is just a very long, winding path. It’s one that often seems to double back and take us through some scary places.

Which is why I’ve been fascinated with the popularity of the “It Gets Better” project on YouTube, in which grown-ups make videos to tell gay kids that things will be easier in the future, when they are out of school, or when they are simply older and more comfortable with who they are. “It Gets Better.” Not “Here, I’ll Make It Better.” The passive voice betrays the seeming helplessness of the situation. We really can’t do much to immediately ease the circumstances of bullied young people.

But still, I like the “It Gets Better” videos. I like their generosity. They make me tear up, even though I didn’t have such a rough go of it in school. I’m 29, and I know I’m fortunate; it has gotten better for my generation. But even I like to be reassured that the path is forward, if not straight.