Author: Brian

Viral Videos Catch On That Only Hint at a Sponsor’s Purpose

Brian

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/business/media/17viral.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Can a man with a tiny electronic device hack into the multitude of jumbo screens in Times Square and play videos from his iPhone? Maybe, if you believe a YouTube video that has been watched by more than half a million viewers in the last four days.

The video was posted on YouTube on Monday under the user name BITcrash44. By Wednesday, it had generated more than 800,000 views and had been mentioned on Web sites like Gizmodo, Gothamist, Salon and NBC New York. One Web site even listed it as the most popular viral video on Twitter.

The multitudes who have seen the video have become swept up in an intense debate around one question: is it real? Well, it’s a fake. And the reaction is exactly what James Percelay and Michael Krivicka wanted when they produced the video as part of a promotion for the soon-to-be-released film “Limitless.”

The two men, founders of a viral marketing company called Thinkmodo, are tapping into a growing desire among marketers to attract and keep the attention of online viewers with videos that get shared on social Web sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The strategy for Thinkmodo is to make videos that viewers will think are clever and authentic without overtly pushing or mentioning a product, Mr. Percelay said.

“We’re pushing the engagement of an idea which leads you then to the product,” he said. “It just is a whole new mind-set where you don’t have to wrap everything up in a bow and if you don’t, people are going to be a lot more interested in you and what you’re selling and what your message is.”

The video released this week, Mr. Percelay said, takes its cue from the premise of “Limitless,” in which a man is able to use all of his brain capacity with the help of a pill called NZT. The video shows a man in an orange jacket standing in Times Square explaining how a makeshift electronic “repeater” and “transmitter” connected to his iPhone can take over any video screen.

Day after saying no second term, a big win for Hillary Clinton

Brian

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51515.html#ixzz1HLstCTY9

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s revelation that she won’t be staying on if there is a second Obama term may have been news to those who don’t know her, but did not surprise her friends, who say she’s spending an increasing amount of time considering her post-government options even as challenges mount at Foggy Bottom.

Clinton has made similar “I’m not here forever” comments before – but it was the timing of her remarks to CNN on Wednesday that raised eyebrows, coming at a critical moment in her fierce internal battle to push President Barack Obama to join the fight to liberate Libya from Muammar Qadhafi.

Clinton’s position was vindicated early Thursday evening when the United Nations Security Council – at the urging of the United States – approved a resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians, including a no-fly zone. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters that such a move could involve direct attacks on pro-Qadhafi forces now bearing down on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in eastern Libya.

Clinton’s persistence in the anti-Qadhafi cause has been such a constant in the White House in recent days that Obama, according to reports, joked about Clinton lobbing rocks through his window during his remarks at Saturday night’s Gridiron dinner.

“Stay tuned,” said one Clinton friend when asked if the secretary would ultimately prevail.

Two Clinton friends, who speak with her regularly, told POLITICO she wasn’t trying to send any message to Obama with her interview with Wolf Blitzer Wednesday and she has no plans to leave earlier than the end of the president’s first term.

A New White House Social Secretary, And A New First by ARI SHAPIRO

Brian

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134264526/a-new-white-house-social-secretary-and-a-new-first?sc=emaf

When first lady Michelle Obama went looking for a new White House social secretary, she did not choose someone with years of experience throwing parties in Washington.

Instead, she tapped Jeremy Bernard, who has spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles. Bernard is currently chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador in Paris. But those are not the most unusual aspects of his appointment.

In a job that has always been held by women, Bernard is breaking the gender barrier.

‘A Mix Of Substance And Style’

Liz Perry and Marc Nathanson live on opposite sides of the country. Perry has known Jeremy Bernard only a couple of years; Nathanson has known Bernard a couple of decades. Yet they describe the new White House social secretary almost exactly the same way.

“He and I were the last to go through the buffet line because we were talking to everybody,” says Perry, who first met Bernard at a dinner party. “And I thought, ‘Oh! He likes to meet everyone at a party, too!’ ”

At that point, Bernard was the White House’s liaison to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rewind 20 years, when Bernard was 30 and working far down the totem pole, as an administrative assistant to Los Angeles businessman Marc Nathanson.

“He never stopped working. He never stopped socializing,” says Nathanson. “But I don’t mean socializing in a phony way — he actually liked people, liked to network, and particularly people who had a passion on politics.”

That’s a requirement for a job where Bernard will throw hundreds of White House events a year, from state dinners to Broadway cabarets.

“The White House social secretary has to blend a mix of substance and style,” says Gordon Johndroe, who used to be a spokesman for first lady Laura Bush.

Governor Brown Redux: The Iceman Melteth

Brian

Jerry Brown doesn’t know who Charlie Sheen is.

“Is he related to the other Sheen?” he asks.

Brown has a vague sense that there was a meltdown with a TV star. But the former Governor Moonbeam is now Governor Laser Beam; the only meltdown he cares about is California’s, with its $26.6 billion budget shortfall.

“There’s only one game in my life,” he tells me, as we split Southwest Airlines peanuts and a turkey and cheese sandwich in a hotel at the corner of Disneyland Drive and Magic Way, where he has come to address a police convention.

If you want to dish on tiger blood and Adonis DNA, go elsewhere. In the fantastic, monastic world of Jerry Brown, the talk veers toward Wittgenstein, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and preventing the collapse of the American empire.

“We’ve got to hunker down,” he says. “We’ve got to get more discipline. We don’t have a lot of time, and we’re an aging white society for the most part, and we need to get our act together.”

The shock of dark hair is gone, but Jerry Brown is still Jerry Brown. The prickliness, bluntness, questioning, calculating. That against-the-grain attitude; disdain for materialism, emptiness and politics as usual; that Jesuit-Buddhist outlook.

And yet, Jerry Brown is very different. The Howard Beale rants have become amiable riffs. Instead of tossing off insults, as when he called the Clintons the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics, he offers dry wit. He is less coiled.

“I’m very happy,” he says, adding with a grin, “I have a wife.”

In the old days, he tried to get people to accept their limits when they didn’t think there were limits; now that they’ve learned the hard way that there are, his gospel sells well.

NPR, PBS Put Millions Into Investigative Reporting

Brian

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/05/npr-pbs-put-millions-into_n_831837.html?ref=email_share

WASHINGTON — NPR, PBS and local public broadcast stations around the country are hiring more journalists and pumping millions of dollars into investigative news to make up for what they see as a lack of deep-digging coverage by their for-profit counterparts.

Public radio and TV stations have seen the need for reporting that holds government and business accountable increase as newspapers and TV networks cut their staffs and cable television stations have filled their schedules with more opinion journalism.

“Where the marketplace is unable to serve, that’s the role of public media,” PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said last year at a summit on the future of media at the Federal Communications Commission. “PBS exists to serve the people, not to sell them.”

In the past three years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has invested more than $90 million in federal funds on new journalism initiatives. That includes a $10 million local journalism initiative that is paying for the creation of five regional centers that will help local PBS and NPR stations cover news that affects wider geographic areas. Also, a $6 million grant from the group expanded the PBS investigative series “Frontline” from a seasonal series with a summer break to a year-round program.

Meanwhile, NPR has started an investigative reporting unit supported by philanthropic funds – including $3.2 million donated in the last year.

The need for such probing journalism was highlighted by a 2010 study by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. It noted the “old model” of journalism that supported watchdog reporting – by valuing stories based on their significance over their individual popularity – is breaking down. In new models driven by the Internet, revenue is more closely tied to individual stories and how popular they are, leaving less incentive for civic news. Newsroom staffs also continue to shrink, the study found.

Still, the prospect of tax dollars going toward public stations’ journalistic efforts has already drawn criticism. Their push for more news reporting also comes as conservatives seek to cut all federal public broadcast funding as part of their budget proposal. It’s a threat public broadcasters take seriously, though similar efforts in the 1990s and 2005 did not succeed.

Randolph May, president of the Rockville, Md.-based Free State Foundation, argued at the FCC summit that government-funded media should not be involved in shaping public opinion.

“In an age of information abundance, we do not need, and should not want, government-supported media acting as a filter or a megaphone,” said May, whose group is nonpartisan but advocates for libertarian principles.

Sexual Behavior And Identity In Young Americans

Brian

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/sexual-behavior_n_830822.html?ref=email_share#s248407&title=Abstinence_Is_Up

The CDC released a new report today, “Sexual Behavior, Sexual Attraction and Sexual Identity in the U.S.,” which looks at sexual activity in young Americans — some 13,500 of them, age 15 to 44. Among the big highlights? Abstinence is up among teens and 20-somethings, which could have implications for the state of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S.

The new study (which also looks at sexual attraction “trends” among 18 to 44-year-olds) comes on the heels of the biggest-ever sex health study, published last year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (and sponsored by the makers of Trojan condoms), which revealed facts like the number of sexually active teenage males dramatically increases between the ages of 14 and 17.

So why should we care about the sexual behavior trends of this particular age group?

According to the CDC, the new data, compiled between 2006 and 2008, should prove particularly useful to public health researchers who want to better understand and target populations that are at high risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections — i.e., teens. The center estimates there are some 19 million new cases of STIs in the U.S. every year — over half of which occur among people age 15 to 24.

Which is why it’s notable that abstinence seems to be on the rise among Americans within that age range. Bill Albert, chief program officer for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told U.S. News and World Report that he is encouraged by the news that more teenagers and 20-somethings are abstaining. He says that the general view among adults has been that teenagers are having more and more sex, but the new data appears to contradict that.

Anjani Chandra, a health scientist with the National Center for Health Statistics, which helped compile today’s report, told CNN that she has a slightly different take on the new information. By abstaining from vaginal intercourse, many teens think they’re being safer and they certainly eliminate the risk of an unplanned pregnancy. But, Chandra says, if they engage in oral sex — which the findings show many of them do — they’re still at risk for STIs.

One such STI that can spread through oral sex is HPV, the virus that can lead to genital warts and cancer in both men and women. Recent research suggests that HPV has infected 50 percent of men in the U.S. Scientists are currently working on tests that can help detect the virus in its early stages.

Cable TV In Pursuit Of Mobility

Brian

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/technology/personaltech/03pogue.html?_r=2

Destroy this top-secret strategy document after reading. It could be devastating to our business interests if it fell into the wrong hands — like The New York Times or something.

Fellow Comcastians, this is a difficult time for the cable TV business. We’ve been losing subscribers. These young people today, with their loud hair and long music! They don’t watch TV on TV sets anymore. They watch it online! Free episodes on Hulu.com. Ad-free episodes from iTunes. Unlimited past seasons on Netflix.

These people are actually proud to cancel their cable TV service. Not a healthy trend.

We’re not going to sit here watching the Internet nibble away at our very existence, people. We’re not going to behave like the music industry, either. We won’t start suing people for going with the technological flow. We need to work with the changing times instead of fighting them.

We may be the most hated cable company, but we’re also the biggest. We can do pretty much anything we want.

She cooks, she scores

Brian

http://bostonherald.com/entertainment/food_dining/food/view.bg?articleid=1320359&position=1

Shannon Allen believes there’s no need to sacrifice flavor on the altar of good health.

In her new television show, “The Pregame Meal,” which debuted last week on Comcast SportsNet and NECN, the wife of Boston Celtics [team stats] star Ray Allen prepares delicious recipes that are also good for you — with assistance from local sports figures and celebrities.

Among those joining Allen behind the stove are Boston Red Sox [team stats] third baseman Kevin Youkilis [stats], New England Patriots [team stats] wide receiver Wes Welker, MIX 104.1 FM DJ Sue Brady and superstar chef Ming Tsai of Wellesley’s Blue Ginger. Plus, many of Ray Allen’s teammates show up.
While she whipped up a pot of turkey chili one recent afternoon in her Metrowest kitchen, Allen said the idea for the show came from her own experience cooking for her husband and family.

“I’m not a chef,” she said. “I don’t pretend to be. I’m just a busy mom who has happened to be making a pregame meal for the past 15 years. I have a husband who is a professional athlete and food is very important in getting him to his next athletic performance.”

Additionally, the discovery that one of her sons — who’s 4 years old — has type 1 diabetes brought a new awareness to Allen’s approach to cooking.

“I never even knew what a carb was before Walker was diagnosed and I had no idea how it impacted your body and your circulatory system, your pancreas,” she said. “I didn’t even know what blood sugar was. But you really have to have a conscious effort and take responsibility for what you put in your mouth because eventually it really does affect your overall health and wellness.”

Allen’s refrigerator and pantry are stocked with healthy ingredients.

Vanity Fair Nominates Eric Eisner

Brian

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/03/eric-eisner-201103

Because 12 years ago Eric Eisner sat down with a handful of seventh-graders in a forgotten corner of Los Angeles and realized that they deserved the same opportunities as their counterparts in Beverly Hills. It was in Lennox, by the airport, which is about as rough as L.A. gets. Eisner still remembers the first kids he met—all boys in those days: Francisco Lopez, Chris Bonilla, Efrén Hernández, Alfredo Ramirez, Luis Medina. because Eric Eisner had a simple conviction: that there is talent everywhere, even in the most benighted communities of the inner city. He talked to teachers and principals. He set up shop in Lennox Middle School, a windowless building ringed by freeways. Every year he found 20 or so of the school’s best and brightest and counseled them, persuaded a private school somewhere to take them on scholarship, then saw them safely off to college. He began with those five. Now, 12 years later, the yes (Young Eisner Scholars) program—Eisner’s underground railroad—has served more than 200 children and their families. because Eric Eisner (whose wife, Lisa, is a contributing editor at this magazine) never pretended that he was starting a revolution. Wendy Kopp at Teach for America and Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg at kipp are the radicals, out to reshape the entire American public-school system. Eisner has been all by himself. If he has any guiding principle, it is a homespun version of William E. B. DuBois’s 100-year-old notion of the “Talented Tenth,” which held that the disadvantaged classes could not take their rightful place in the American community until they had their own educated generation of leaders. Eisner is the DuBois of the barrio. May many more follow his lead. because Francisco Lopez was a Gates Millennium scholar at the University of Southern California. because Chris Bonilla graduated from Columbia University and is planning on law school. because Efrén Hernández is finishing his senior year of film school at N.Y.U. because Alfredo Ramirez is an engineering student at Columbia University. And because Luis Medina is a senior at the University of Michigan.

Publishers Look Beyond Bookstores

Brian

Kitson, a group of boutiques based in Los Angeles, is the kind of store that appears regularly in the tabloids for both its stylish clothes and its celebrity clientele like Sean Combs and Joe Jonas.

But in a town that is all about flash, Kitson is finding a surprising source of revenue that is not from its fashionable shoes or accessories. It is from books.

The company’s owner, Fraser Ross, estimates that Kitson sold 100,000 books in 2010, double what it had the previous year.

Publishers turned aggressive about selling to Kitson, Mr. Ross said, as traditional bookstores switched focus or closed. That “has been good for us,” he said. “If there’s a good book, we’ll go deep into it.” And publishers, he said, “realize what a specialty store can do for their business, with the window and the table.”

Publishers have stocked books in nonbook retailers for decades — a coffee-table book in the home department, a novelty book in Urban Outfitters. In the last year, though, some publishers have increased their efforts as the two largest bookstore chains have changed course.

Barnes & Noble has been devoting more floor space for displays of e-readers, games and educational toys. Borders, after filing for bankruptcy protection in February, has begun liquidating some 200 of its superstores.

“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “But it doesn’t mean that all brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back.”