Author: Ellen

Marissa Mayer Reveals the Future of Yahoo Advertising

Ellen

1/7/2014   Mashable

Yahoo on Tuesday answered the question about what the company intends to do with Tumblr.

CEO Marissa Mayer announced at the company’s CES event on Tuesday the introduction of Yahoo Advertising, a united platform for that will simplify the purchase of ads on Yahoo’s various properties including Tumblr.

“The new Yahoo Advertising includes a comprehensive suite of web, mobile, and video ad products across native, audience, and premium display, which are accessible through a new buying platform. These products are supported by Yahoo’s data and analytical tools, with insights into the daily digital habits of more than 800 million people worldwide,” Yahoo wrote in a blog post. Analytics had been a sore point for Tumblr. Until now, marketers haven’t had the ability to buy by gender or location. In addition, advertisers will only have to pay when their Tumblr ad is reblogged, liked or followed or if there’s a direct click to the ad.

David Karp, who founded Tumblr and is now working under Mayer, also made an appearance where he noted that Tumblr’s sponsored posts, which have shown early success since their introduction in 2012, will be under the umbrella of the new ad platform.

The move marks one of the most dramatic moves by Mayer since she took the lead job at Yahoo in summer of 2012. She has executed numerous acquisitions as part of a three-pronged plan to turn around the web portal.

Despite positive reactions to Mayer’s moves — Yahoo’s stock is up 160% since she became chief executive — advertising revenue has continued to decline.

 

http://mashable.com/2014/01/07/marissa-mayer-yahoo-advertising/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

 

What Does the Book Business Look Like on the Inside?

Ellen

11/16/2013   Vulture

Harold Evans, the publisher of Random House, calls me at The New Yorker, where I work. “I’d like to have a word with you,” he says. “Can we have coffee sometime, perhaps?”

It is 1995, and Evans and I have met at parties given by his wife, who happens to be Tina Brown, who happens to be the editor of The New Yorker.

“How about today?”

“Let me check with my assistant,” ­Evans says. A minute or so later, he says, “Well, yes—can you come up right now?” The vowels, in his Beatles-esque accent, make the words sound a little like “coom oop.”

At the elevator bank of The New Yorker, I run into Nancy Franklin, later to become the TV critic for the magazine. We call each other “Nosy,” for “Nosy Parker”—the British slang term for a snoop. “Where are you going at this time of day, Nosy?” Nancy says.

“To see Harry Evans,” I say.

“Oh, no!” she says. And at this point, with a cold, sick feeling, I realize what’s going on: Tina now wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.

**********************

“You want to buy this book, Dan?” my boss, Ann Godoff, says, referring to the first work I’m trying to acquire at Random House, by George Saunders. “Well, do a P-and-L for it and we’ll see.”

“What’s a P-and-L?”

“I’ll walk you through it. What’s the advance?”

My only knowledge came from what I had been paid for my own books, so I thought surely I should offer more. “Fifty thousand dollars?”

“For a book of stories? But okay, what’s the payout?”

“Payout?”

“Start with how much of the advance the author will get on signing the contract.”

“Thirty thousand dollars?”

“Twenty-five—half on signing.”

“Okay, 25.”

“On delivery-and-acceptance?”

“Well, 25, I guess.”

“No—you have to have an on-pub payment.”

“Oh. Twenty for D-and-A? And five on-pub?”

“Nothing for paperback on-pub?”

“Oh. Ten for D-and-A, ten for on-pub, and five for the paperback?”

“Nah—it’s okay. You don’t really need a paperback payment. I just wanted to mention it. How many hardcovers are we going to print at the start?”

“Twenty thousand?”

“Too much. Ten.”

“Okay.”

“Second printing?”

“Five?”

“Good! Returns?”

“Returns?”

“How many unsold hardcovers will booksellers send back?”

“Five hundred?”

“Nah. Usually figure one third—in this case, 5,000.”

“Whoa!”

“It’s a shitty business, Dan. What’s the price?”

“Twenty-one ninety-five?” I say, using my own most recent book as a guide.

“Good. So how much will we earn against this advance?”

“____”

“We make about $3 for each hardcover sale, $1 for each paperback.”

“So if we sell 10,000 hardcovers, that’s $30,000.”

“Right.”

“And say 10,000 paperbacks. That’s $40,000.”

“Right—so the P-and-L probably won’t work. So we have to adjust the figures. But remember, you can’t change the returns percentage.”

“Increase the first printing to 15,000 and the second printing to 7,500?”

“That ought to do it. Isn’t this scientific?”

**********************

Now I have been senior literary editor at Random House for six months. I remain in many ways ignorant of the realities of book publishing. But it begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of “basic” publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.

I am trying to acquire two novels, one completed and the second under way, by a British writer. Ann Godoff likes the finished book, or takes my word for it that it’s good, or she is in a good mood, and has authorized me to offer $100,000 for each book. On the phone to the agent in England, I say, with no guile, “We’re offering a hundred thousand dollars for both books.” He says, with acceptance detectable in his voice, “You mean $50,000 for each?”

I hesitate, but not too long. “Yes.”

“Done and done.”

**********************

Steven Pinker is in my office at Random House. I am trying to get him to consider writing a short, essayistic book in popular language on the question of Free Will.

Pinker decides that he can’t do this book, owing to contractual obligations to another publisher. He notices a book jacket on my desk for a collection of poems by Katha ­Pollitt. The title, fittingly enough, is The Mind-Body Problem. Pinker says, “Oh! You know, my friend Rebecca Goldstein wrote a novel with this same title. I’d like it if you could change the title of this book.”

“Well, you can’t copyright a title,” I say. “And wasn’t that novel published some years ago?”

“Yes, but I would appreciate it if this title could be changed.”

I tell myself that I choose to table this request, and that I will end up leaving Random House before Pollitt’s book comes out. As it happens, I do.

**********************

I am assigned to work with Michael ­Eisner on his autobiographical book, Work in Progress. I meet him a couple of times, and he is perfectly congenial. He tells me how foolish it was for anyone to call any movie anything like The Lemon Sisters—inviting, as it did, all kinds of review snidery. “On the other hand, we had a great success with a movie whose title had three words that each by itself should have spelled death at the box office,” he adds.

“What was it?” I say.

“Dead. Poets. Society.”

**********************

Atul Gawande has been writing ­wonderful pieces about medicine for The New Yorker. I have gotten in touch with him about the possibility of publishing these essays. His agent advises him not to do so, as collections of previously published essays generally don’t do well.

I see the agent at a party. I press my suit once again, in person. Either because I’m so persuasive (unlikely) or because Gawan­de doesn’t have the time to write an original work, they finally relent. The agent sends out a submission to a number of publishers.

On the morning of the closing, Gawan­de calls me because he wants to work with me but has heard from his agent that the acquisition will go to someone else. “I don’t want this to happen,” he says. I tell him that I am trying to get more money. Five minutes later, the agent calls and says, “I understand that Atul called you about the situation with his book.”

“Yes, he did—his book which I have been encouraging him to do for a couple of years now, and which I don’t want to lose.”

“Well, he didn’t have the authority to call you,” she says.

“That’s funny—that word has the word author in it,” I say.

**********************

Publishing is an often incredibly frustrating culture. If you want to buy a project—let’s say a nonfiction proposal for a book about the history of Sicily—some of your colleagues will say, “The proposal is too dry” or “Cletis Trebuchet did a book for Grendel Books five years ago about Sardinia and it sold, like, eight copies,” or, airily, “I don’t think many people want to read about little islands.” When Seabiscuit first came up for discussion at an editorial meeting at Random House, some skeptic muttered, “Talk about beating a dead horse!”

To make matters worse, financial success in frontlist publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not. Yes, you may be able to count on a new novel by Surething Jones becoming a big best seller. But the best-­seller lists paint nothing remotely like the full financial picture of any publication, because that picture’s most important color is the size of the advance. But let’s say you publish a fluky blockbuster one year, the corporation will see a spike in your profits and sort of autistically, or at least automatically, raise the profit goal for your division by some corporately predetermined amount for the following year. This is close to clinically insane institutional behavior.

**********************

The publisher of HarperCollins takes me to lunch and offers me a job as executive editor. I tell Ann Godoff, who has replaced Harry Evans as publisher.

“Who made the offer?” Ann says.

“Well, it doesn’t really make any difference, does it?” I say. “It’s a respectable competitor.”

“But you don’t really want to leave, do you?”

“Ann, I have one kid going to college and one kid who will be going in a few years.”

“Well, I got you a bonus this year, don’t forget.”

“I know, and I appreciate it, but still, there’s a real differential in this offer.”

“And we gave you a bonus for Primary Colors.”

“Well, no, actually, I never got a bonus for that.”

“Really?”

“Really. I was so ignorant that I didn’t know that I might have gotten a bonus for that.”

“I was sure you got a bonus. I’ll have to look it up and see what happened.”

“I’d like to stay, all things being equal, but they’re not. Equal.”

“This is Random House, Dan. You know you don’t want to leave. Come on, tell me who made the offer.”

“Okay—HarperCollins.”

“I hate what they do,” Ann says.

“What? Publish books?”

**********************

I work at HarperCollins for so little time—less than two years—that it ends up feeling more like a walkabout than any kind of era in my working life. But a conversation that I have at HarperCollins with an agent stands out for its typicality. I’m trying to acquire a “Best of the Year” collection. The agent wants to “move” the series from its old publisher because he thinks the old publisher didn’t do enough to promote it.

“How many copies did it sell last year?”

“Fifteen thousand.”

“Fifteen thousand as in 12,500?”

“Yeah, about that. Twelve thousand five hundred.”

“Twelve thousand five hundred as in eleven?”

“Twelve-five as in twelve.”

“So it sold about eleven-five?”

“Yeah.”

**********************

Gina Centrello, who has replaced Ann Godoff as publisher of Random House, calls me and asks me to return to the division as editor-in-chief. It’s my impression that since Godoff’s departure some time ago, naming an editor-in-chief has become an urgent matter. I know, through publishing’s chronic gossip affliction, that Centrello has offered the job to one or two others, who turned the offer down. I don’t.

Manuscripts and proposals and file folders cover the floor of my office. When my friends Chip McGrath or David ­McCormick complain about the work he has to do, I always say, “I wish you could sit in my chair for ten minutes if you want to know what real hard work is like.” Or I must always say that, because one day when I’m having dinner with Chip, he says, “I wish you could sit in my chair for ten or fifteen minutes, and then you’d know what real hard work is.” Then he laughs, and I realize he’s mimicking me.

But the work is hard. In fact, I think it’s impossible to do an editor-in-chief’s job very well for any length of time. If I belong anywhere, it probably isn’t in publishing. But, then, I keep forgetting that this sense of dissatisfaction explains why work is called “work.” Like the teenager I was and in some ways still am, I grouse about and make fun of what I have to do and the people who tell me I have to do it, even when those people are me. For all kinds of reasons, I simply have not grown all the way up. And never will. But then again, I know very few people who have. The best most of us can do is manage intermittent maturity; this was especially important in the raising of my children and in my work as editor-in-chief.

**********************

My colleague Jonathan Karp leaves Random House to run his own imprint at Hachette. As executive editor-in-chief, I travel to visit Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit, to try to persuade her not to ­follow Karp.

There is a flag on her lawn. I say how I admire her patriotism, especially given who the president is at the moment. When I get back to the office the next day, Gina Centrello comes into my office with an annoyed look on her face. “You said something negative about George Bush to Laura Hillenbrand,” she says.

“Well, just barely,” I say.

“You’re lucky,” Centrello says. “She’s going to stay with us, but she doesn’t want to work with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s a good friend of Laura Bush.”

**********************

Gina Centrello takes me to lunch and lets me know that she would like me to step aside as editor-in-chief. Why? Numbers, evidently. Prizes—lack thereof. My high salary. It comes back to me that Harry Evans, when he hired me, said, “You have five years to fook oop.” I have barely finished four years.

Centrello is a good publisher. She knows the numbers. And my numbers, insofar as they are mine, have been mediocre, at best. Later, the numerous prizes “my” authors win look to me like the work of an ironic deity—Elizabeth Strout wins the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, Colum McCann the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, and Siddhartha Mukherjee the Pulitzer in nonfiction for his book about cancer. In the meantime, I keep wondering if there are other, more personal factors at work in my being let go, but in the end, in such situations, it doesn’t matter, does it? When it comes to corporate life, especially at its higher altitudes, factors of all kinds tend to get tangled up with each other. And it’s impossible to untangle them, and pointless, and fruitless, to try.

Excerpted from My Mistake: A Memoir, ­published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. © 2013 by Daniel Menaker.

*This article appears in the November 26, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

A Big Step Forward for MSNBC’s Coverage of the LGBT Civil Rights Movement, But…

Ellen

3/8/2012   HuffPost Gay Voices

Last week MSNBC took a big step into 21st-century reality when, for the first time in the network’s history, it demonstrated that it understands that the modern civil rights movement isn’t entirely wrapped up in whether gays and lesbians can serve in the military or marry each other, that just like every other segment of American society, one of our community’s key concerns is jobs and employment.

There’s no question that the intention of host Thomas Roberts, an openly gay man, in bringing this issue to MSNBC’s air is a good one, and we should be thankful and appreciative that out of all of his on-air colleagues, up to and including even the also-openly-gay Rachel Maddow and major civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton, Mr. Roberts is leading the way at the network in covering this critical issue. Yet as is so often the case when mainstream media cover an important and well-established issue for the first time, mistakes were made, mistakes that could have been easily avoided had there been more prep work and research done on the issue before it was presented on-air for public consumption.

The segment was titled “LGBT: Next Steps” and featured a trans woman, People.com Associate Editor and Huffington Post contributor Janet Mock, and gay conservative Robert Traynham, a former staffer for virulently anti-LGBT Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

Thomas Roberts’ first question was also the most revealing. After using about a third of the slightly less than five minutes allotted for the topic on his introduction, Roberts asked Traynham the leading question, “Is DOMA the next biggest obstacle to fair and equal treatment in the eyes of our government?” Traynham eagerly took the bait, beginning his response with “Without question….” While Thomas Roberts accepted Traynham’s inaccurate response without challenge, anyone who’s done their homework on these issues knows well that nothing could be further from the truth.

Leaving aside the patently obvious reality that the ability to make a living and provide for one’s family is of far greater concern to a much larger number of LGBT Americans than the right to legally marry their partner, even a cursory examination of the known facts surrounding these issues will inevitably lead one to the conclusion that marriage is chiefly the pet issue of well-heeled 1-percenters and the organizations that cater to them, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), while workplace rights are the primary concern of the working-class majority, particularly those who live in any of the 34 states where LGBT Americans are still denied fully inclusive basic civil rights in the workplace. At this point, with the economy and the state of our civil rights laws being what they are, it’s mainly only the Beltway-bubble 1-percenters, their political patrons in Washington, D.C., and those in the mainstream media who are still eagerly gulping down that elitist Kool-Aid who still believe any differently.

The second problem with the segment was in the time allotted for it. As someone who regularly covers these issues in print and on my weekly Internet radio show, I found it particularly frustrating as a viewer that just as the conversation on this long-ignored topic was starting to get interesting, it came to an end.

I wanted to hear more from Janet Mock, who is emerging as an excellent media spokesperson for transgender people and the issues that impact our lives. I also wanted to see Robert Traynham challenged on his completely inaccurate and utterly unsupportable contention that the right of a same-sex couple to marry and file joint tax returns is somehow of greater urgency than the right of that same couple to be able to earn a living and generate enough income to provide for their family and thus make the ability to file a joint tax return, as well as many of the other federally mandated benefits associated with marriage, a valid concern in the first place.

As someone intimately familiar with these issues, it was almost humorous to watch Robert Traynham try to justify prioritizing the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) because it is “outdated” while completely ignoring (or demonstrating his ignorance of) the reality that the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been around in some form since the early 1970s and has been introduced in every session of Congress since 1994, except for the 109th. Mr. Traynham also seemed completely unaware that no less of an authority than Congressman Barney Frank, the Democratic Party’s go-to guy on LGBT civil rights, has said that he expects the repeal of DOMA to happen through the courts and that ENDA will be the next major LGBT civil rights legislation to be taken up by Congress.

Also very concerning was Thomas Roberts’ suggestion that all three of them could legally be fired under current laws regarding LGBT workers. The truth is that because Thomas Roberts works in New York and Robert Traynham works in Washington D.C., neither of these men can be legally fired for being gay in their jurisdictions. The same would also be true of Janet Mock, assuming she works in New York City, where she was speaking on-set with Mr. Roberts. On the other hand, however, Ms. Mock would enjoy no such protections if her employer were based in most areas of New York outside New York City, while both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Traynham would be fully protected against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation anywhere in New York State.

Another concern was how it seemed that LGBT workplace rights were presented in the segment as a new issue, instead of more truthfully as one that has simply been consistently ignored for many years by MSNBC and the mainstream news media in general in favor of the flashier, more media-friendly issues of same-sex marriage and military service.

The segment began and ended with the 1-percenter issues of military service and same-sex marriage, with only two questions from Mr. Roberts to Ms. Mock on employment rights before moving on to the already-well-covered issue of same-sex marriage. While thrilled and grateful to Thomas Roberts for covering LGBT employment rights, I found it incredibly disappointing that the issue, which is so critical in the lives of millions of LGBT workers, was sandwiched between the already-covered-to-death issues of marriage and military service rather than given the focus it really deserves in a segment devoted specifically to that topic. It’s my hope that Thomas Roberts, or whoever next takes on the topic at MSNBC, will devote more on-air time to an in-depth exploration of the state of LGBT employment-rights protections in the United States.

In addition, I question the inclusion of Robert Traynham in this segment, given that he’s someone who was clearly focused on the single issue of same-sex marriage and apparently has little to no interest in or expertise when it comes to the issue of LGBT workplace rights. When MSNBC has covered same-sex marriage and military service in the past, the network has frequently used well-informed and supportive activists and politicians to address those issues.

In this case, however, for some reason the network saw fit to employ a conservative commentator who has worked for one of the most aggressively anti-LGBT U.S. politicians in modern history, apparently simply because he himself is gay. The results were unsurprising, perhaps even inevitable. I hope that when MSNBC next takes on the topic of LGBT employment rights, an effort will be made to eschew a one-issue same-sex-marriage-focused commentator like Mr. Traynham in favor of a more well-rounded and well-informed expert who can speak to the diversity of issues faced by LGBT Americans, not just those favored by wealthy Beltway insiders.

Thomas Roberts deserves our gratitude and our respect for bringing the issue of employment rights into the public discourse on LGBT equality on MSNBC and in the mainstream media in general, but this was just a start, a beginning of that conversation, not in any way a full or definitive examination of the topic. American LGBT workers need and deserve more, deeper, and better coverage of the issues that most directly affect our lives and the lives of the families that depend upon us to keep them out of homelessness and poverty.

Here’s hoping that the next time we see LGBT employment rights covered on MSNBC, the coverage will reflect the kind of quality, in-depth attention the network already provides so well on LGBT-relevant issues favored by upper-class elites, like marriage and military service.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-juro/lgbt-employment-protections_b_1328325.html

 

Dan Brian, Young Gay Man, Comes Out To His Mother On YouTube (VIDEO)

Ellen

2/24/2012   HuffPost Gay Voice

A young gay man’s poignant coming out to his mother is making the blogosphere rounds.

As Dan Brian notes on his YouTube page, “Finally got the strength to come out to my mom…I decided to post this so that I could share my experience with you. Hopefully it will give hope to those who do not have such supportive families.”

Though heartwarming, the authenticity of the video has been questioned on Twitter, to which the 24-year-old has responded, “If she did know [it was being filmed] she would’ve worn better pants!”

The video comes on the heels of Randy Phillips, the gay U.S. Airman whose post-“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” admission to his parents went viral after he uploaded it to YouTube last fall.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Dan Brian as a teen. He is 24 years old.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/24/dan-brian-gay-teen-mom-comes-out_n_1299272.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

 

Bullying And Suicide: The Dangerous Mistake We Make

Ellen

2/8/2012   HuffPost Parents

Tyler Clementi killed himself in 2010 after his roommate at Rutgers University filmed him kissing another man. Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old girl who moved to the U.S. from Ireland, killed herself the same year after being bullied by high school classmates in Massachusetts. Fifteen-year-old Amanda Cummings from Staten Island made headlines early this January when her family said that relentless bullying was to blame for her suicide.

Each of these tragedies mobilized a cultural army of anti-bullying advocates, celebrities, the media and policymakers who have said — or at least strongly implied — that bullying can lead to suicide.

But mental health professionals and those who work in suicide prevention say bullying-related suicides that reach the spotlight are painted far too simplistically. Bullying and suicide can indeed be connected, though the relationship between the two is much more complicated than a tabloid headline might suggest. To imply clear-cut lines of cause and effect, many experts maintain, is misleading and potentially damaging as it ignores key underlying mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety.

“Bullying is so at the top of our consciousness that we’re bending over backwards to get it into the story,” said Ann Haas, a senior project specialist with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “Years and years of research has taught us that the overwhelming number of people who die by suicide had a diagnosable mental disorder at the time of their death.”

Haas argues that failing to look at the other contributing factors, from depression to family life to the ending of a relationship, is problematic and even perilous from a suicide prevention standpoint. “I am very concerned about the narrative that these stories collectively are writing, which is that suicide is a normal, understandable response to this terrible [bullying] behavior,” said Haas. “In suicide prevention, we tend to favor the explanation that there are multiple causes.”

Lidia Bernik, an associate project director with National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, said that people often seek a simple explanation when something as difficult to understand as suicide occurs. “I speak from personal experience,” she said. “I lost my sister to suicide. You’re left with, ‘Why did this happen?'”

Bullying can offer an answer, she said: “It’s almost easier to understand — someone was victimized, and then they killed themselves.”

Nicole Cardarelli, 27, who works in state advocacy outreach for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, admits that for years after her brother Greg’s suicide in 2004, she also blamed bullying. While in high school, Greg began what he thought was a relationship with a girl he met online in a Ford Thunderbird car club. It turned out that two of his friends were behind the fake account. After several months, the boys exposed the prank to Greg. Hours later, he killed himself. His family opted not to press charges but they couldn’t help placing blame when Greg had named what the boys did in his suicide note as the reason he could no longer go on living.

“If you had asked me after Greg died what I wanted to have happen, I probably would have said I want to kill those boys,” said Cardarelli. “It’s so much harder to look at the person you loved so much and ask, what was going on inside him?”

At the time, Cardarelli didn’t see the signs that Greg was troubled, she recalled. But in the subsequent years, she has thought about his behavior a few months before he died. He had lost interest in baseball and Boy Scouts — two activities he’d been involved with for years. He was sleeping more than usual, pulling away from his family and spending a lot of time on his computer. Cardarelli even remembers a conversation where her mother told her she thought there might be something really wrong with Greg.

“I believe that he was depressed,” she said recently.

Just as that suicide may have been more complicated than Cardarelli initially thought, several high-profile cases have exhibited similar, deeper patterns upon further investigation.

Emily Bazelon’s 2010 article for Slate exploring the suicide of Phoebe Prince, the teen from Ireland, serves as a powerful example of what can be learned when a suicide is examined more closely. There’s no doubt that Prince endured cruel treatment from a group of classmates, but Bazelon reported that Prince had attempted suicide in the past, that she’d gone off antidepressants, and that she frequently cut herself. (In December, Bazelon followed up on the Prince case by reporting that Prince’s family members had reached a settlement with the town of South Hadley, Mass., for $225,000.)

The death of Staten Island teen Amanda Cummings, whose family primarily blamed bullying for her death, is proving to be less straight-forward as well. The NYPD has yet to find any evidence of bullying, and she was reportedly devastated over the end of a relationship with an older boy.

Last week, the New Yorker revisited the Clementi case at Rutgers from 2010 and offered a more nuanced view of the tragedy. News stories initially reported that Clementi was outed by his roommate, and that the video of him with another man was posted to the Internet, neither of which is true.

According to the New Yorker, Clementi came out to family members three days before he started at Rutgers — he told a friend his mother didn’t respond well — and he attended a meeting of the school’s Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance. Documents found on Clementi’s computer, the piece reported, were titled “sorry” and “Why is everything so painful.” He had told a friend, “I would consider myself out if only there was someone for me to come out to.” His roommate’s actions were reprehensible, and they may have contributed to Clementi’s death, but these new details suggest the possibility of a far more complex situation.

Even though suicides often prove to involve multiple factors, most experts are still quick to add that bullying can aggravate depression and increase suicide risk, and its seriousness shouldn’t be minimized.

Clayton Cook, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, argues that because mental health issues are often a common thread running through bullying and suicide, schools should not have a narrowly-focused solution.

“The idea is that if you adopt a broad spectrum approach to preventing mental health problems, that you’re also going to reduce the bullying,” said Cook. “If you look at the scientific literature, bullying prevention programs haven’t shown to be effective. It’s addressing the symptom and not the cause.” Cook suggests teachers adopt a social emotional learning curriculum as they would a reading curriculum. “We’d teach kids how to exhibit care and concern for others, how to manage their emotions before they get the best of them,” Cook explained.

The good news, according to Cook, is that the prevalence of bullying has likely been overstated. Catherine Bradshaw, deputy director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins, agrees. “We don’t have data to show that bullying is an epidemic or that it’s increasing,” she said.

The Centers for Disease Control’s bullying task force, of which Cook and Bradshaw are members, is working to establish a uniform definition of bullying for research purposes, but results may not be available until this summer. The task force is treating bullying as a public health concern and developing policy-based solutions.

As far as the prevalence of youth suicide goes, the most recent numbers from the CDC show that, among 15 to 19 year-olds, suicides fell marginally from 8.02 per 100,000 in 2000 to 7.79 per 100,00 in 2009. Those numbers have fluctuated in the years between though, and the 10-year low was in 2007.

“We don’t know about 2009 to 2011,” said Madelyn Gould, a professor of clinical epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia who studies youth suicide and prevention efforts. “But probably, the accessibility of the Internet has made it such that there are many more stories about suicide, not necessarily more suicides.” Since January of 2010, the words bullying and suicide have appeared together in 592 articles — and that’s only print newspapers.

“I would just hope that these stories also talk about the other risks involved with suicidal behavior,” said Gould. “If someone is being bullied, they should not jump to the conclusion that one of [their] options is suicide. What they should jump to is, one of the options I have is to get help.”

Megan Meier killed herself in 2006 after a cruel MySpace prank orchestrated by an adult neighbor. Her mother, Tina Meier, argues that the pros of linking bullying and suicide still outweigh the cons. “I think since Megan’s story there has been a lot more awareness,” she explained. “Before, everybody was kind of like, ‘Okay, well kids get bullied and we’ll deal with it.’ We didn’t realize the impact that it truly has.”

Young people may not be able to avoid exposure to bullying or suicide, but David Litts, an associate director with the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, said parents should take these tragic stories as an opportunity to talk to their children, especially if already concerned.

“You really need to open up the dialogue in a way that he or she can risk being honest,” said Litts. “To look someone in the eye and say, ‘Yes, I want to kill myself,’ is a hard thing to do. So it’s important that whoever asks the question asks it in a way that conveys they’re ready to hear an honest answer.”

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also visit The Trevor Project’s website, a national organization providing support to LGBT youth, or call them at 1-866-488-7386. And if you’re worried about a friend on Facebook, you can report troubling posts. They’ll connect your friend with a representative from National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/bullying-suicide-teens-depression_n_1247875.html

 

Amid Daily Struggles, Gay Rights Movement Embraces Watershed Moments

Ellen

2/9/2013   NPR

Audio: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=171585896&m=171588475

Chris (right) and Renee Wiley pose for a wedding photo on Times Square in New York in December. Same-sex marriage in New York state became legal in July 2011.

From the sparks lit at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 to the whirl of same-sex marriage laws, the gay rights movement has made a lot of advances. But has it now reached a plateau?

Nine states and Washington, D.C., now legally recognize gay marriage, and the Supreme Court will take up same-marriage cases this session. American support for gay marriage has crossed a threshold, the Pew research center finds, and now more people support it than oppose it.

With the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Pentagon is moving toward extending some of the benefits for married heterosexual couples to same-sex couples.

In his inaugural address, President Obama mentioned gay rights alongside the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

“For me, at my age to see the president of the United States … compare gay rights to the civil rights movement — I never thought I’d see this day,” says veteran journalist Hank Plante, one of the first gay reporters on TV. “A lot of people worked hard for this over the years. I just feel very grateful about it all.”

Plante tells NPR’s Jackie Lyden that the gay rights movement is “nearing an end.” He says younger people feel even more positive than he does.

“This whole thing is generational,” he says. “Young people, they don’t care.”

He notes a Public Religion Research Institute study in 2011 that showed 44 percent of evangelical millennials (those aged 18-29) support gay marriage. That’s compared to 12 percent of evangelicals 65 and older.

Beyond Marriage Fight, Daily Battles

At 66, Plante believes there’s “no question” gays will see full and equal rights in his lifetime. But he says there’s still work to be done: The Supreme Court’s decisions await, for example, as do employment protections for the LGBT community in certain states.

One of those states is Kentucky.

“It is still legal currently, in most of our state, to fire someone from a job, deny them a place to live, or kick someone off a bus or out of a restaurant if someone thinks that they’re lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender,” says Chris Hartman, who directs the Fairness Campaign, a gay rights advocacy organization in Louisville.

The Kentucky Civil Rights Act protects a number of things, including race, religion, color and disability, but not sexual orientation or gender identity.

“This type of discrimination occurs many places,” Hartman says, “but in places that don’t have these types of protections, people who are prone to prejudice or who would commit discriminatory acts are emboldened to do so when leaders in their community will not step up and extend these types of anti-discrimination and fairness protections.”

There’s a lot more work ahead before the fight is over, Hartman says.

“In a lot of places in the country, folks feel that we’re so close, that marriage is sort of the final frontier. And, of course, Barack Obama has created some watershed civil rights moments,” he says. “But in a state like Kentucky, where you can still be fired from your job, it feels like the battle has just begun.”

Visibility And Representation

Part of the struggle has also been reflected in popular culture. Back in 1994, actor Wilson Cruz played one of the first gay Hispanic characters on TV, Rickie Vasquez in My So-Called Life. In the show, the teenager comes out to his family and then is kicked out of his house.

Cruz got the role when he was 19, and it mimicked his own life. He became homeless after he told his family he was gay. He says when he auditioned for My So-Called Life, he was just grateful the part existed — whether or not he was cast.

“I knew how powerful it would be to me to see it, and how powerful it would have been for me as a teenager to have seen Rickie Vasquez on television,” Cruz says.

He says people still tell him how much the half-black, half-Puerto Rican character affected them.

“For the most part — even, sadly, still — most of the LGBT characters that we see are white men. … And I was not. And Rickie really was saddling a few different communities,” Cruz says.

Cruz wishes he could see more diversity on TV, even now. But there are characters that stand out to him, like Unique, the black transgender teen on Glee. Cruz expects these contemporary actors won’t realize the impact of their portrayals until they’re much older.

“I feel like the granddaddy of them all, and I couldn’t be prouder,” he says.

 

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/09/171585896/amid-daily-struggles-gay-rights-movement-embraces-watershed-moments?sc=emaf

 

Portia De Rossi on Fears of Coming Out: ‘I Just Didn’t Want to Be a Lesbian’ — VIDEO

Ellen

11/3/2013   towleroad

Portia de Rossi opened up about the fears she had before coming out and getting married to Ellen DeGeneres, in a new episode of the UK show The Conversation, hosted by Amanda De Cadenet.

Said De Rossi:

“I just didn’t want to be a lesbian. I’d never met one for a start and I just thought they were strange and that they hated men and they were very serious…I had these ridiculous images in my head and there were no out celebrities or politicians or anybody that I could look to and go, ‘Oh, I could be like that’…There was nobody that I could say, ‘I could date her and I want to be like her’…I just kind of thought I don’t want to live like this. I don’t have to, I don’t need to, I just shut down the emotional life.”

Watch an ABC News report on the interview, AFTER THE JUMP…

Vice Continues to Grow as It Heads Into Its First NewFronts

Ellen

Expanding into sports and food programming

4/27/2014   ADWEEK

Since its humble beginnings as a Montreal-based print publication on news and culture, Vice has mushroomed to 129 million views per month across its platforms, which include online channels, TV shows, its tablet and mobile offerings, and the original magazine (not to mention Vice Music, Film and Books).

Vice’s digital mission for next year, which will be unveiled at its first NewFronts presentation on May 2, is all about expansion, especially for recently launched site Vice News and food vertical Munchies. Chief creative officer Eddy Moretti asserts that no publisher has kept up with how prevalent food has become in youth culture. Vice is putting itself in prime position with a slate of cuisine-themed programs, including F-ck, That’s Delicious hosted by rapper Action Bronson.

“Ten years ago, the coolest kids would be in bands. Now you see the cool kids … they’re saying ‘F-ck it, you know what’s cool? A wood-burning pizzeria with farm-to-table f-cking tomatillos,’” Moretti said.“This is 2014. The standard for language, nudity and what’s acceptable for a young audience has completely changed,” he said.

Kerry Tracy, CEO of media agency Working Media Group, pointed out that any number of fashion, video game and extreme sports brands would be clamoring to get their products next to Vice material.

“Even with an edgy brand, you take that risk of being associated with content that is continually pushing the envelope. That said, some brands are looking for that exposure and association,” he said.

It hasn’t stopped the likes of AT&T, Intel or Budweiser from signing on.

Vice is open for new advertisers as it continues the uphill battle that all digital publishers face with distribution and monetization. Vice News launched with minimal ad support and like many outlets will not put ads on breaking news, Creighton pointed out. However, it is looking for marketers to sponsor franchises, including the to-be-announced show about the environment, Toxic.

 

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/vice-continues-grow-it-heads-its-first-newfronts-157303

 

Netflix’s 50 Million Subscribers Face a Flood of New Shows

Ellen

7/21/2014   Businessweek

Netflix’s second-quarter results popped out Monday afternoon, and here are the highlights: The company posted revenue of $1.15 billion vs. $837 million in the same period last year. Its net income hit $71 million, up from $29 million, and it now has more than 50 million customers worldwide—50.05 million, to be precise. Investors gave Netflix (NFLX) a pat on the back for increasing its subscribers at a healthy clip, sending shares 1 percent higher in after-hours trading.

Let’s step away from the numbers, though, and head to the second section of Netflix’s letter to shareholders (pdf), where the company discussed what it lovingly refers to as “Content.” After going on for a bit about its 31 Emmy nominations and the debut of a new season of Hemlock Grove, Netflix listed its cavalcade of coming shows:

“In the coming weeks, we will premiere the all new 4th and final season of The Killing and a new adult animated comedy BoJack Horseman. Also in August, we will release Mission Blue from the Oscar winning director of The Cove, Fisher Stevens.
“Reflecting the increasingly global nature of the Netflix service, we now have original series in production around the world, involving some of the best storytellers working in television and film today. Marco Polo, a historical adventure from Executive Producer Harvey Weinstein, is shooting in Kazakhstan and Malaysia. In New York there is Marvel’s Daredevil, the first of our original series from Marvel Television, as well as the already eagerly anticipated third season of Orange is the New Black; while in Baltimore, production is underway on the third season of House of Cards. In the Florida Keys, the creators of Damages (Glenn Kessler, Daniel Zelman, and Todd Kessler) are shooting a dark family thriller with an ensemble cast led by Kyle Chandler, Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, Linda Cardellini, Ben Mendelsohn, and Norbert Leo Butz.
“Sense8, a mind-bending series from the Wachowskis (The Matrix trilogy, Cloud Atlas) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5), began production in San Francisco last month, is now in Chicago, and will shoot in many international locations this year. In August, production begins in Los Angeles on Grace and Frankie, a comedy led by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston; and in Colombia, Brazilian director José Padilha (Elite Squad, Robocop) will begin filming Narcos with an all-star international cast led by Wagner Moura.
“During the quarter, we announced our first ever talk show, hosted by Chelsea Handler, the popular comedian and best-selling author.”

OK, no one in their right mind should brag about being associated even loosely with Cloud Atlas. Fair enough. But beyond that, you have to feel gobsmacked after digesting Netflix’s list of shows. Whatever Amazon.com (AMZN) and Hulu are working on can’t match this in quantity or quality of talent. (Netflix has transported Coach Taylor to the Florida Keys. Think about it.)

Netflix has spent more and risked more to become a real competitor to HBO (TWX) and Showtime (CBS) in programming while maintaining a technology edge over everyone. When Netflix first set out on this strategy, it was easy to predict a bleak future in which the company would spend itself to death buying shows that no one watched. Netflix took a huge risk, although hindsight and the rising subscriber numbers are making it harder to remember just how gutsy the move was.

Neither Hulu nor Amazon seem as good at making or marketing their shows. Hulu’s shows tend to come off as amateurish, while Amazon’s are just hard to find and trapped in the company’s clunky interface. It’s unclear to me how either company will compete with Netflix over the long term unless they’re willing to go bigger and risk more.

 

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-21/netflixs-50-million-subscribers-get-tons-of-original-shows

 

Comcast, NBC U pledge more diversity

Ellen

Companies commit to greater minority representation

6/7/2010   Variety

As a congressional committee holds a Los Angeles hearing today devoted largely to the impact of the Comcast and NBC Universal transaction on diversity, the companies are unveiling a new series of public interest commitments designed to boost minority representation on and off screen.

Comcast, which already had committed to adding two independently owned and operated cable networks to its systems for each of the next three years, is pledging that at least half of them will have substantial ownership by minorities. NBC Universal also says that it has committed to a major effort to identify minority buyers for Los Angeles Spanish-language station KWHY-TV, which it is divesting from its portfolio.

Among other commitments, the companies also say they will establish four external “Diversity Advisory Councils,” representative of African-American, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander and other communities, that will meet at least two times per year with Comcast and NBC Universal execs, including an annual meeting with Comcast’s chairman and chief executive officer. Comcast will appoint up to nine members to each advisory council, with input from national minority leadership organizations, and will develop a strategic plan related to diversity, with benchmark studies updated annually.

The two companies’ new commitments come after some criticism over their records in hiring and minority representation, in particular from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee. At a congressional hearing in February, she chided NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker for a lack of NBC shows aimed at African-American audiences. In a letter to the FCC, she cited low marks that the companies have received by the National Hispanic Media Coalition in the hiring of Latinos in their executive ranks.

She pushed for today’s House Judiciary Committee field hearing at the California Science Center, where representatives from a number of groups including the Hispanic Media Coalition, the National Coalition of African-American Owned Media and the National Assn. of Latino Independent Producers are expected to testify. A number of watchdog orgs have long been critical of all networks, with the NAACP releasing a report in 2008 showing what it called a “serious shortage of minority faces in primetime,” although they did report gains in reality TV.

For their part, NBC U and Comcast released a letter from entrepreneur Magic Johnson in support of the transaction, in which the basketball legend says that NBC U’s commitment to diversity “is long-term and real” and that it is “one of the few companies where I’ve witnessed a CEO who makes diversity and inclusion one of his company’s five business imperatives.”

Representing the network at today’s hearing will be Paula Madison, its executive vice president of diversity. Also expected is Alfred Liggins, the president and CEO of Radio One, which is in partnership with Comcast in the African-American oriented cable channel TV One.

 

http://variety.com/2010/tv/news/comcast-nbc-u-pledge-more-diversity-1118020260/