a young website catches conservatives’ eyesbut the story also has another, less obvious...
TRANSCRIPT
B1N
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
Energy
Power From the TidesThere are high hopes for an ener-gy project on the coast of Wales,but it may have limited impact. 3
Television
More ‘Masterpiece’Mark Rylance in “Wolf Hall,”part of an expanded lineup forthe enduring PBS franchise. 3
Finance
Bank Needs Money Monte dei Paschi di Siena musttell European regulators how itwill raise 2 billion euros. 8
Last week, I read an interest-ing article about how smart hard-ware can allow users to browseanonymously and thus foil snoop-ing from governments. I found it
on what looked like anifty new technologysite called Sugar-String.
Oddly enough,while the article men-tioned the need for
privacy for folks like Chinese dis-sidents, it didn’t address the factthat Americans might want thesame kind of protection.
There’s a reason for that, al-though not a very savory one. Atthe bottom of the piece, there wasa graphic saying “Presented byVerizon” followed by some teenytype that said “This article waswritten by an author contractedby Verizon.”
As the DailyDot pointed outlast Tuesday, Verizon not onlybacks the site, but also sets itscoverage agenda. And that agen-da, according to an email recruit-ing reporters for the site, did notinclude reporting on domesticspying and net neutrality, two ofthe most vital issues in technol-ogy. Those subjects were off thetable.
You can guess why. Thanks toEdward Snowden, we know thatVerizon turned over the phonerecords of millions of people tothe American government with-out their consent. And Verizon ishardly neutral on the issue of netneutrality, having successfullysued to keep the F.C.C. fromblocking efforts to charge for afast lane for data traffic.
After inquiries from variousnews media outlets, Verizon fedthe editor who sent the recruiting
Journalism,Independent
And Not
DAVIDCARR
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Continued on Page 4
By MARK SCOTT
LONDON — Poor cellphoneand Internet service is a fact oflife in many parts of Europe.
Less than a quarter of Euro-peans can connect to high-speedcellphone networks, comparedwith about 90 percent of Ameri-cans. And broadband connec-tions are often painstakinglysluggish.
But the prices here for theseservices are among the lowest inthe world. Europeans spend anaverage of $38 for a monthly cell-phone contract, about half ofwhat Americans pay on average,according to the Groupe SpecialeMobile Association, an industrygroup.
Now, though, the region’s toppolicy makers are set to change
that, giving investment and cost-lier services higher prioritiesthan affordability and antitrustworries.
The details of their plans areexpected take shape now that anew European Commission, theexecutive arm of the EuropeanUnion, began its five-year termon Saturday. An outline is al-ready forming, accompanied by afrenzy of deal making.
The commission’s new digitalchiefs recently expressed sup-port for plans that would loosenthe region’s strict rules on tele-com mergers.
Several national politicians, in-cluding Chancellor Angela Mer-kel of Germany, are also willingto see bigger telecom operators— many of which are formerstate monopolies — pick offsmaller, less-profitable rivals.
“We need to create a less frag-mented market and incentivizeprivate companies to make thenecessary investments,” AndrusAnsip, Europe’s new vice presi-dent for the digital single market,
Europe ShiftsOn PrioritiesFor Telecoms
Continued on Page 2
A focus on qualityover affordability andantitrust concerns.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, withthe midterm elections fast approaching,the conservative website IndependentJournal Review was not focused on thecontrol of the Senate or crucial statehouseraces. Instead, it led its home page with agruesome beheading on Long Island and avideo of a belligerent drunk being arrestedat a Dallas airport.
But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of arti-cles critical of President Obama and otherDemocrats. “Obama’s schedule from todayshows how toxic he is to Democrats run-ning for Senate,” read one headline. An-other asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talkover a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ toher?” (The sub-headline: “If elected presi-dent, she would be the second oldest in his-tory.”)
IJReview, a two-year-old site started bya pair of Republican operatives, hasemerged as one of the most popular onlinedestinations for conservatives. The sitemixes entertaining, shareable topics likepets through a conservative-values lens(for example, a recent piece about a doghelping to heal a sick veteran) with articles
A Young WebsiteCatches the EyesOf Conservatives
Continued on Page 4
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
The heroine of “Find Me I’mYours,” a new novel by Hillary Car-lip, is a quirky young woman namedMags who works at an online bridalmagazine and is searching for love inLos Angeles.
But the story also has another, lessobvious protagonist: Sweet’N Low,the artificial sweetener.
Sweet’N Low appears severaltimes in the 356-page story, in subtleand not-so-subtle ways. In one scene,Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee,shows off her nails, which she haspainted to resemble the product’spink packets. In another, she getsteased by a co-worker for puttingSweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” thefriend asks. Mags replies that shehas researched the claims online andfound studies showing that the prod-uct is safe: “They fed lab rats twen-ty-five hundred packets of Sweet’NLow a day … And still the F.D.A. orE.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’tconnect the dots from any kind ofcancer in humans to my party in apacket.”
The scene was brought to you bythe Cumberland Packing Corpora-tion, the Brooklyn-based companythat makes Sweet’N Low. Cumber-land Packing invested about $1.3 mil-lion in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novelmight strike some as unseemly. But“Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like mostnovels. It’s an e-book, a series ofwebsites and web TV shows, and avehicle for content sponsored bycompanies. And if it succeeds, it
E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Carlip, left, and Maxine Lapi-duss co-founded Storyverse Studios,the multimedia entertainment compa-ny behind “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Continued on Page 4
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up tosince the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended lastyear. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell,Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company isabout far more than the personal computers and computerservers it has been known for, with products intended forthings as varied as the cloud computing networks of globalenterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually startedsix years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuri-ating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry an-
By QUENTIN HARDY
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computercompany private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have hisnamesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
“This morning on the treadmill I was watching Bloom-berg and CNBC, all the circus clowns,” Mr. Dell said in a re-cent interview. His disdain for investment advice as en-tertainment is obvious — so obvious that no one shouldhave been surprised that to get away from Wall Street’s in-fluence, Mr. Dell endured a monthslong, often personalcampaign for a higher shareholder buyout price by the cor-porate raider Carl C. Icahn.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dell’s Life After Wall StreetMichael Dell put up a long fight to take his company
private again. Now he has to make it successful.On Tuesday, Mi-chael Dell willpresent his com-pany’s plan forits shareholder-free future.
Continued on Page 8
C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-03,B,001,Bs-4C,E1
Last week, I read an interesting article about how smart hardware can allow us-ers to browse anonymously and thus foil
snooping from governments. I found it on what looked like a nifty new technology site called sugarstring.
Oddly enough, while the article mentioned the need for privacy for folks like Chinese dissi-dents, it didn’t address the fact that americans might want the same kind of protection.
there’s a reason for that, although not a very savory one. at the bottom of the piece, there was a graphic say-ing “Presented by Verizon” followed by some teeny type that said “this article was written by an author con-tracted by Verizon.”
as the DailyDot pointed out last tuesday, Verizon not only backs the site, but also sets its coverage agenda. and that agenda, accord-ing to an email recruiting reporters for the site, did not include reporting on domestic spying and net neutrality, two of the most vital issues in technology. those subjects were off the table.
You can guess why. thanks to Edward snowden, we know that Verizon turned over the phone records of millions of people to the american government without their consent. and Verizon is hardly neutral on the issue of net neutrality, having successfully sued to keep the F.C.C. from blocking efforts to charge for a fast lane for data traffic.
after inquiries from various news media outlets, Verizon fed the editor who sent the re-cruiting email into the wood chipper, saying, “Unlike the characterization by its new edi-tor, sugarstring is open to all topics that fit its mission and elevate the conversation around technology.” When I contacted the company on Friday, they would not say if that elevated conversation would include domestic spying and net neutrality, but a spokeswoman sent a
note saying, “Verizon believes this was a good, sound concept, but the execution was not what it should have been, and we’ll learn from it.”
Clearly, historical models of funding origi-nal content are under duress, and a variety of efforts have emerged to innovate around that new reality: nonprofit news sites, digital news operations with low-cost approaches and yes, brands like Verizon that are also beginning to finance their own media operations.
the brand publishing that has emerged ranges from enlightening to harmless, with much of it arrayed over topics like extreme sports, small business advice or food and health. as my colleague stuart Elliott pointed out, Pep-si is big into brand publishing, having come up with Green-Label.com, a lifestyle publication sponsored by Mountain Dew and produced by Pepsi along with Complex Media.
Complex is also producing the sugarstring site on behalf of Verizon. according to people who were part of the process, Verizon brought the idea to McGarryBowen, an ad agency, and it soon became clear that what the company wanted was not a brand campaign, but a media property with visibility in social platforms.
“It was odd — it just sort of showed up here, fully formed,” said a Complex employee not au-thorized to speak publicly on the subject.
Coming up with credible consumer sites is complicated enough, but throw news into the mix and the degree of difficulty climbs, especial-ly if your company is a behemoth with a reach into all aspects of technology.
Of the many attempts at new approaches to publishing — native advertising, custom con-tent, sponsored content — sugarstring sets a new low. It was a bad idea with a pratfall of a rollout, a transparent attempt to project brand might into a very controversial conversation. the fact that the name of the corporation bring-ing you the information is at the bottom of ev-
B1N
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
Energy
Power From the TidesThere are high hopes for an ener-gy project on the coast of Wales,but it may have limited impact. 3
Television
More ‘Masterpiece’Mark Rylance in “Wolf Hall,”part of an expanded lineup forthe enduring PBS franchise. 3
Finance
Bank Needs Money Monte dei Paschi di Siena musttell European regulators how itwill raise 2 billion euros. 8
Last week, I read an interest-ing article about how smart hard-ware can allow users to browseanonymously and thus foil snoop-ing from governments. I found it
on what looked like anifty new technologysite called Sugar-String.
Oddly enough,while the article men-tioned the need for
privacy for folks like Chinese dis-sidents, it didn’t address the factthat Americans might want thesame kind of protection.
There’s a reason for that, al-though not a very savory one. Atthe bottom of the piece, there wasa graphic saying “Presented byVerizon” followed by some teenytype that said “This article waswritten by an author contractedby Verizon.”
As the DailyDot pointed outlast Tuesday, Verizon not onlybacks the site, but also sets itscoverage agenda. And that agen-da, according to an email recruit-ing reporters for the site, did notinclude reporting on domesticspying and net neutrality, two ofthe most vital issues in technol-ogy. Those subjects were off thetable.
You can guess why. Thanks toEdward Snowden, we know thatVerizon turned over the phonerecords of millions of people tothe American government with-out their consent. And Verizon ishardly neutral on the issue of netneutrality, having successfullysued to keep the F.C.C. fromblocking efforts to charge for afast lane for data traffic.
After inquiries from variousnews media outlets, Verizon fedthe editor who sent the recruiting
Journalism,Independent
And Not
DAVIDCARR
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Continued on Page 4
By MARK SCOTT
LONDON — Poor cellphoneand Internet service is a fact oflife in many parts of Europe.
Less than a quarter of Euro-peans can connect to high-speedcellphone networks, comparedwith about 90 percent of Ameri-cans. And broadband connec-tions are often painstakinglysluggish.
But the prices here for theseservices are among the lowest inthe world. Europeans spend anaverage of $38 for a monthly cell-phone contract, about half ofwhat Americans pay on average,according to the Groupe SpecialeMobile Association, an industrygroup.
Now, though, the region’s toppolicy makers are set to change
that, giving investment and cost-lier services higher prioritiesthan affordability and antitrustworries.
The details of their plans areexpected take shape now that anew European Commission, theexecutive arm of the EuropeanUnion, began its five-year termon Saturday. An outline is al-ready forming, accompanied by afrenzy of deal making.
The commission’s new digitalchiefs recently expressed sup-port for plans that would loosenthe region’s strict rules on tele-com mergers.
Several national politicians, in-cluding Chancellor Angela Mer-kel of Germany, are also willingto see bigger telecom operators— many of which are formerstate monopolies — pick offsmaller, less-profitable rivals.
“We need to create a less frag-mented market and incentivizeprivate companies to make thenecessary investments,” AndrusAnsip, Europe’s new vice presi-dent for the digital single market,
Europe ShiftsOn PrioritiesFor Telecoms
Continued on Page 2
A focus on qualityover affordability andantitrust concerns.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, withthe midterm elections fast approaching,the conservative website IndependentJournal Review was not focused on thecontrol of the Senate or crucial statehouseraces. Instead, it led its home page with agruesome beheading on Long Island and avideo of a belligerent drunk being arrestedat a Dallas airport.
But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of arti-cles critical of President Obama and otherDemocrats. “Obama’s schedule from todayshows how toxic he is to Democrats run-ning for Senate,” read one headline. An-other asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talkover a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ toher?” (The sub-headline: “If elected presi-dent, she would be the second oldest in his-tory.”)
IJReview, a two-year-old site started bya pair of Republican operatives, hasemerged as one of the most popular onlinedestinations for conservatives. The sitemixes entertaining, shareable topics likepets through a conservative-values lens(for example, a recent piece about a doghelping to heal a sick veteran) with articles
A Young WebsiteCatches the EyesOf Conservatives
Continued on Page 4
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
The heroine of “Find Me I’mYours,” a new novel by Hillary Car-lip, is a quirky young woman namedMags who works at an online bridalmagazine and is searching for love inLos Angeles.
But the story also has another, lessobvious protagonist: Sweet’N Low,the artificial sweetener.
Sweet’N Low appears severaltimes in the 356-page story, in subtleand not-so-subtle ways. In one scene,Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee,shows off her nails, which she haspainted to resemble the product’spink packets. In another, she getsteased by a co-worker for puttingSweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” thefriend asks. Mags replies that shehas researched the claims online andfound studies showing that the prod-uct is safe: “They fed lab rats twen-ty-five hundred packets of Sweet’NLow a day … And still the F.D.A. orE.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’tconnect the dots from any kind ofcancer in humans to my party in apacket.”
The scene was brought to you bythe Cumberland Packing Corpora-tion, the Brooklyn-based companythat makes Sweet’N Low. Cumber-land Packing invested about $1.3 mil-lion in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novelmight strike some as unseemly. But“Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like mostnovels. It’s an e-book, a series ofwebsites and web TV shows, and avehicle for content sponsored bycompanies. And if it succeeds, it
E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Carlip, left, and Maxine Lapi-duss co-founded Storyverse Studios,the multimedia entertainment compa-ny behind “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Continued on Page 4
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up tosince the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended lastyear. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell,Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company isabout far more than the personal computers and computerservers it has been known for, with products intended forthings as varied as the cloud computing networks of globalenterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually startedsix years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuri-ating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry an-
By QUENTIN HARDY
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computercompany private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have hisnamesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
“This morning on the treadmill I was watching Bloom-berg and CNBC, all the circus clowns,” Mr. Dell said in a re-cent interview. His disdain for investment advice as en-tertainment is obvious — so obvious that no one shouldhave been surprised that to get away from Wall Street’s in-fluence, Mr. Dell endured a monthslong, often personalcampaign for a higher shareholder buyout price by the cor-porate raider Carl C. Icahn.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dell’s Life After Wall StreetMichael Dell put up a long fight to take his company
private again. Now he has to make it successful.On Tuesday, Mi-chael Dell willpresent his com-pany’s plan forits shareholder-free future.
Continued on Page 8
C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-03,B,001,Bs-4C,E1
B1N
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
Energy
Power From the TidesThere are high hopes for an ener-gy project on the coast of Wales,but it may have limited impact. 3
Television
More ‘Masterpiece’Mark Rylance in “Wolf Hall,”part of an expanded lineup forthe enduring PBS franchise. 3
Finance
Bank Needs Money Monte dei Paschi di Siena musttell European regulators how itwill raise 2 billion euros. 8
Last week, I read an interest-ing article about how smart hard-ware can allow users to browseanonymously and thus foil snoop-ing from governments. I found it
on what looked like anifty new technologysite called Sugar-String.
Oddly enough,while the article men-tioned the need for
privacy for folks like Chinese dis-sidents, it didn’t address the factthat Americans might want thesame kind of protection.
There’s a reason for that, al-though not a very savory one. Atthe bottom of the piece, there wasa graphic saying “Presented byVerizon” followed by some teenytype that said “This article waswritten by an author contractedby Verizon.”
As the DailyDot pointed outlast Tuesday, Verizon not onlybacks the site, but also sets itscoverage agenda. And that agen-da, according to an email recruit-ing reporters for the site, did notinclude reporting on domesticspying and net neutrality, two ofthe most vital issues in technol-ogy. Those subjects were off thetable.
You can guess why. Thanks toEdward Snowden, we know thatVerizon turned over the phonerecords of millions of people tothe American government with-out their consent. And Verizon ishardly neutral on the issue of netneutrality, having successfullysued to keep the F.C.C. fromblocking efforts to charge for afast lane for data traffic.
After inquiries from variousnews media outlets, Verizon fedthe editor who sent the recruiting
Journalism,Independent
And Not
DAVIDCARR
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Continued on Page 4
By MARK SCOTT
LONDON — Poor cellphoneand Internet service is a fact oflife in many parts of Europe.
Less than a quarter of Euro-peans can connect to high-speedcellphone networks, comparedwith about 90 percent of Ameri-cans. And broadband connec-tions are often painstakinglysluggish.
But the prices here for theseservices are among the lowest inthe world. Europeans spend anaverage of $38 for a monthly cell-phone contract, about half ofwhat Americans pay on average,according to the Groupe SpecialeMobile Association, an industrygroup.
Now, though, the region’s toppolicy makers are set to change
that, giving investment and cost-lier services higher prioritiesthan affordability and antitrustworries.
The details of their plans areexpected take shape now that anew European Commission, theexecutive arm of the EuropeanUnion, began its five-year termon Saturday. An outline is al-ready forming, accompanied by afrenzy of deal making.
The commission’s new digitalchiefs recently expressed sup-port for plans that would loosenthe region’s strict rules on tele-com mergers.
Several national politicians, in-cluding Chancellor Angela Mer-kel of Germany, are also willingto see bigger telecom operators— many of which are formerstate monopolies — pick offsmaller, less-profitable rivals.
“We need to create a less frag-mented market and incentivizeprivate companies to make thenecessary investments,” AndrusAnsip, Europe’s new vice presi-dent for the digital single market,
Europe ShiftsOn PrioritiesFor Telecoms
Continued on Page 2
A focus on qualityover affordability andantitrust concerns.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, withthe midterm elections fast approaching,the conservative website IndependentJournal Review was not focused on thecontrol of the Senate or crucial statehouseraces. Instead, it led its home page with agruesome beheading on Long Island and avideo of a belligerent drunk being arrestedat a Dallas airport.
But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of arti-cles critical of President Obama and otherDemocrats. “Obama’s schedule from todayshows how toxic he is to Democrats run-ning for Senate,” read one headline. An-other asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talkover a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ toher?” (The sub-headline: “If elected presi-dent, she would be the second oldest in his-tory.”)
IJReview, a two-year-old site started bya pair of Republican operatives, hasemerged as one of the most popular onlinedestinations for conservatives. The sitemixes entertaining, shareable topics likepets through a conservative-values lens(for example, a recent piece about a doghelping to heal a sick veteran) with articles
A Young WebsiteCatches the EyesOf Conservatives
Continued on Page 4
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
The heroine of “Find Me I’mYours,” a new novel by Hillary Car-lip, is a quirky young woman namedMags who works at an online bridalmagazine and is searching for love inLos Angeles.
But the story also has another, lessobvious protagonist: Sweet’N Low,the artificial sweetener.
Sweet’N Low appears severaltimes in the 356-page story, in subtleand not-so-subtle ways. In one scene,Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee,shows off her nails, which she haspainted to resemble the product’spink packets. In another, she getsteased by a co-worker for puttingSweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” thefriend asks. Mags replies that shehas researched the claims online andfound studies showing that the prod-uct is safe: “They fed lab rats twen-ty-five hundred packets of Sweet’NLow a day … And still the F.D.A. orE.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’tconnect the dots from any kind ofcancer in humans to my party in apacket.”
The scene was brought to you bythe Cumberland Packing Corpora-tion, the Brooklyn-based companythat makes Sweet’N Low. Cumber-land Packing invested about $1.3 mil-lion in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novelmight strike some as unseemly. But“Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like mostnovels. It’s an e-book, a series ofwebsites and web TV shows, and avehicle for content sponsored bycompanies. And if it succeeds, it
E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Carlip, left, and Maxine Lapi-duss co-founded Storyverse Studios,the multimedia entertainment compa-ny behind “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Continued on Page 4
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up tosince the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended lastyear. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell,Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company isabout far more than the personal computers and computerservers it has been known for, with products intended forthings as varied as the cloud computing networks of globalenterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually startedsix years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuri-ating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry an-
By QUENTIN HARDY
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computercompany private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have hisnamesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
“This morning on the treadmill I was watching Bloom-berg and CNBC, all the circus clowns,” Mr. Dell said in a re-cent interview. His disdain for investment advice as en-tertainment is obvious — so obvious that no one shouldhave been surprised that to get away from Wall Street’s in-fluence, Mr. Dell endured a monthslong, often personalcampaign for a higher shareholder buyout price by the cor-porate raider Carl C. Icahn.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dell’s Life After Wall StreetMichael Dell put up a long fight to take his company
private again. Now he has to make it successful.On Tuesday, Mi-chael Dell willpresent his com-pany’s plan forits shareholder-free future.
Continued on Page 8
C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-03,B,001,Bs-4C,E1
B1N
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
Energy
Power From the TidesThere are high hopes for an ener-gy project on the coast of Wales,but it may have limited impact. 3
Television
More ‘Masterpiece’Mark Rylance in “Wolf Hall,”part of an expanded lineup forthe enduring PBS franchise. 3
Finance
Bank Needs Money Monte dei Paschi di Siena musttell European regulators how itwill raise 2 billion euros. 8
Last week, I read an interest-ing article about how smart hard-ware can allow users to browseanonymously and thus foil snoop-ing from governments. I found it
on what looked like anifty new technologysite called Sugar-String.
Oddly enough,while the article men-tioned the need for
privacy for folks like Chinese dis-sidents, it didn’t address the factthat Americans might want thesame kind of protection.
There’s a reason for that, al-though not a very savory one. Atthe bottom of the piece, there wasa graphic saying “Presented byVerizon” followed by some teenytype that said “This article waswritten by an author contractedby Verizon.”
As the DailyDot pointed outlast Tuesday, Verizon not onlybacks the site, but also sets itscoverage agenda. And that agen-da, according to an email recruit-ing reporters for the site, did notinclude reporting on domesticspying and net neutrality, two ofthe most vital issues in technol-ogy. Those subjects were off thetable.
You can guess why. Thanks toEdward Snowden, we know thatVerizon turned over the phonerecords of millions of people tothe American government with-out their consent. And Verizon ishardly neutral on the issue of netneutrality, having successfullysued to keep the F.C.C. fromblocking efforts to charge for afast lane for data traffic.
After inquiries from variousnews media outlets, Verizon fedthe editor who sent the recruiting
Journalism,Independent
And Not
DAVIDCARR
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Continued on Page 4
By MARK SCOTT
LONDON — Poor cellphoneand Internet service is a fact oflife in many parts of Europe.
Less than a quarter of Euro-peans can connect to high-speedcellphone networks, comparedwith about 90 percent of Ameri-cans. And broadband connec-tions are often painstakinglysluggish.
But the prices here for theseservices are among the lowest inthe world. Europeans spend anaverage of $38 for a monthly cell-phone contract, about half ofwhat Americans pay on average,according to the Groupe SpecialeMobile Association, an industrygroup.
Now, though, the region’s toppolicy makers are set to change
that, giving investment and cost-lier services higher prioritiesthan affordability and antitrustworries.
The details of their plans areexpected take shape now that anew European Commission, theexecutive arm of the EuropeanUnion, began its five-year termon Saturday. An outline is al-ready forming, accompanied by afrenzy of deal making.
The commission’s new digitalchiefs recently expressed sup-port for plans that would loosenthe region’s strict rules on tele-com mergers.
Several national politicians, in-cluding Chancellor Angela Mer-kel of Germany, are also willingto see bigger telecom operators— many of which are formerstate monopolies — pick offsmaller, less-profitable rivals.
“We need to create a less frag-mented market and incentivizeprivate companies to make thenecessary investments,” AndrusAnsip, Europe’s new vice presi-dent for the digital single market,
Europe ShiftsOn PrioritiesFor Telecoms
Continued on Page 2
A focus on qualityover affordability andantitrust concerns.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, withthe midterm elections fast approaching,the conservative website IndependentJournal Review was not focused on thecontrol of the Senate or crucial statehouseraces. Instead, it led its home page with agruesome beheading on Long Island and avideo of a belligerent drunk being arrestedat a Dallas airport.
But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of arti-cles critical of President Obama and otherDemocrats. “Obama’s schedule from todayshows how toxic he is to Democrats run-ning for Senate,” read one headline. An-other asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talkover a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ toher?” (The sub-headline: “If elected presi-dent, she would be the second oldest in his-tory.”)
IJReview, a two-year-old site started bya pair of Republican operatives, hasemerged as one of the most popular onlinedestinations for conservatives. The sitemixes entertaining, shareable topics likepets through a conservative-values lens(for example, a recent piece about a doghelping to heal a sick veteran) with articles
A Young WebsiteCatches the EyesOf Conservatives
Continued on Page 4
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
The heroine of “Find Me I’mYours,” a new novel by Hillary Car-lip, is a quirky young woman namedMags who works at an online bridalmagazine and is searching for love inLos Angeles.
But the story also has another, lessobvious protagonist: Sweet’N Low,the artificial sweetener.
Sweet’N Low appears severaltimes in the 356-page story, in subtleand not-so-subtle ways. In one scene,Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee,shows off her nails, which she haspainted to resemble the product’spink packets. In another, she getsteased by a co-worker for puttingSweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” thefriend asks. Mags replies that shehas researched the claims online andfound studies showing that the prod-uct is safe: “They fed lab rats twen-ty-five hundred packets of Sweet’NLow a day … And still the F.D.A. orE.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’tconnect the dots from any kind ofcancer in humans to my party in apacket.”
The scene was brought to you bythe Cumberland Packing Corpora-tion, the Brooklyn-based companythat makes Sweet’N Low. Cumber-land Packing invested about $1.3 mil-lion in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novelmight strike some as unseemly. But“Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like mostnovels. It’s an e-book, a series ofwebsites and web TV shows, and avehicle for content sponsored bycompanies. And if it succeeds, it
E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Carlip, left, and Maxine Lapi-duss co-founded Storyverse Studios,the multimedia entertainment compa-ny behind “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Continued on Page 4
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up tosince the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended lastyear. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell,Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company isabout far more than the personal computers and computerservers it has been known for, with products intended forthings as varied as the cloud computing networks of globalenterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually startedsix years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuri-ating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry an-
By QUENTIN HARDY
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computercompany private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have hisnamesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
“This morning on the treadmill I was watching Bloom-berg and CNBC, all the circus clowns,” Mr. Dell said in a re-cent interview. His disdain for investment advice as en-tertainment is obvious — so obvious that no one shouldhave been surprised that to get away from Wall Street’s in-fluence, Mr. Dell endured a monthslong, often personalcampaign for a higher shareholder buyout price by the cor-porate raider Carl C. Icahn.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dell’s Life After Wall StreetMichael Dell put up a long fight to take his company
private again. Now he has to make it successful.On Tuesday, Mi-chael Dell willpresent his com-pany’s plan forits shareholder-free future.
Continued on Page 8
C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-03,B,001,Bs-4C,E1
B1N
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
Energy
Power From the TidesThere are high hopes for an ener-gy project on the coast of Wales,but it may have limited impact. 3
Television
More ‘Masterpiece’Mark Rylance in “Wolf Hall,”part of an expanded lineup forthe enduring PBS franchise. 3
Finance
Bank Needs Money Monte dei Paschi di Siena musttell European regulators how itwill raise 2 billion euros. 8
Last week, I read an interest-ing article about how smart hard-ware can allow users to browseanonymously and thus foil snoop-ing from governments. I found it
on what looked like anifty new technologysite called Sugar-String.
Oddly enough,while the article men-tioned the need for
privacy for folks like Chinese dis-sidents, it didn’t address the factthat Americans might want thesame kind of protection.
There’s a reason for that, al-though not a very savory one. Atthe bottom of the piece, there wasa graphic saying “Presented byVerizon” followed by some teenytype that said “This article waswritten by an author contractedby Verizon.”
As the DailyDot pointed outlast Tuesday, Verizon not onlybacks the site, but also sets itscoverage agenda. And that agen-da, according to an email recruit-ing reporters for the site, did notinclude reporting on domesticspying and net neutrality, two ofthe most vital issues in technol-ogy. Those subjects were off thetable.
You can guess why. Thanks toEdward Snowden, we know thatVerizon turned over the phonerecords of millions of people tothe American government with-out their consent. And Verizon ishardly neutral on the issue of netneutrality, having successfullysued to keep the F.C.C. fromblocking efforts to charge for afast lane for data traffic.
After inquiries from variousnews media outlets, Verizon fedthe editor who sent the recruiting
Journalism,Independent
And Not
DAVIDCARR
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Continued on Page 4
By MARK SCOTT
LONDON — Poor cellphoneand Internet service is a fact oflife in many parts of Europe.
Less than a quarter of Euro-peans can connect to high-speedcellphone networks, comparedwith about 90 percent of Ameri-cans. And broadband connec-tions are often painstakinglysluggish.
But the prices here for theseservices are among the lowest inthe world. Europeans spend anaverage of $38 for a monthly cell-phone contract, about half ofwhat Americans pay on average,according to the Groupe SpecialeMobile Association, an industrygroup.
Now, though, the region’s toppolicy makers are set to change
that, giving investment and cost-lier services higher prioritiesthan affordability and antitrustworries.
The details of their plans areexpected take shape now that anew European Commission, theexecutive arm of the EuropeanUnion, began its five-year termon Saturday. An outline is al-ready forming, accompanied by afrenzy of deal making.
The commission’s new digitalchiefs recently expressed sup-port for plans that would loosenthe region’s strict rules on tele-com mergers.
Several national politicians, in-cluding Chancellor Angela Mer-kel of Germany, are also willingto see bigger telecom operators— many of which are formerstate monopolies — pick offsmaller, less-profitable rivals.
“We need to create a less frag-mented market and incentivizeprivate companies to make thenecessary investments,” AndrusAnsip, Europe’s new vice presi-dent for the digital single market,
Europe ShiftsOn PrioritiesFor Telecoms
Continued on Page 2
A focus on qualityover affordability andantitrust concerns.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, withthe midterm elections fast approaching,the conservative website IndependentJournal Review was not focused on thecontrol of the Senate or crucial statehouseraces. Instead, it led its home page with agruesome beheading on Long Island and avideo of a belligerent drunk being arrestedat a Dallas airport.
But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of arti-cles critical of President Obama and otherDemocrats. “Obama’s schedule from todayshows how toxic he is to Democrats run-ning for Senate,” read one headline. An-other asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talkover a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ toher?” (The sub-headline: “If elected presi-dent, she would be the second oldest in his-tory.”)
IJReview, a two-year-old site started bya pair of Republican operatives, hasemerged as one of the most popular onlinedestinations for conservatives. The sitemixes entertaining, shareable topics likepets through a conservative-values lens(for example, a recent piece about a doghelping to heal a sick veteran) with articles
A Young WebsiteCatches the EyesOf Conservatives
Continued on Page 4
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
The heroine of “Find Me I’mYours,” a new novel by Hillary Car-lip, is a quirky young woman namedMags who works at an online bridalmagazine and is searching for love inLos Angeles.
But the story also has another, lessobvious protagonist: Sweet’N Low,the artificial sweetener.
Sweet’N Low appears severaltimes in the 356-page story, in subtleand not-so-subtle ways. In one scene,Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee,shows off her nails, which she haspainted to resemble the product’spink packets. In another, she getsteased by a co-worker for puttingSweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” thefriend asks. Mags replies that shehas researched the claims online andfound studies showing that the prod-uct is safe: “They fed lab rats twen-ty-five hundred packets of Sweet’NLow a day … And still the F.D.A. orE.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’tconnect the dots from any kind ofcancer in humans to my party in apacket.”
The scene was brought to you bythe Cumberland Packing Corpora-tion, the Brooklyn-based companythat makes Sweet’N Low. Cumber-land Packing invested about $1.3 mil-lion in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novelmight strike some as unseemly. But“Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like mostnovels. It’s an e-book, a series ofwebsites and web TV shows, and avehicle for content sponsored bycompanies. And if it succeeds, it
E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Carlip, left, and Maxine Lapi-duss co-founded Storyverse Studios,the multimedia entertainment compa-ny behind “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Continued on Page 4
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up tosince the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended lastyear. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell,Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company isabout far more than the personal computers and computerservers it has been known for, with products intended forthings as varied as the cloud computing networks of globalenterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually startedsix years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuri-ating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry an-
By QUENTIN HARDY
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computercompany private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have hisnamesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
“This morning on the treadmill I was watching Bloom-berg and CNBC, all the circus clowns,” Mr. Dell said in a re-cent interview. His disdain for investment advice as en-tertainment is obvious — so obvious that no one shouldhave been surprised that to get away from Wall Street’s in-fluence, Mr. Dell endured a monthslong, often personalcampaign for a higher shareholder buyout price by the cor-porate raider Carl C. Icahn.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dell’s Life After Wall StreetMichael Dell put up a long fight to take his company
private again. Now he has to make it successful.On Tuesday, Mi-chael Dell willpresent his com-pany’s plan forits shareholder-free future.
Continued on Page 8
C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-03,B,001,Bs-4C,E1
B1N
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
Energy
Power From the TidesThere are high hopes for an ener-gy project on the coast of Wales,but it may have limited impact. 3
Television
More ‘Masterpiece’Mark Rylance in “Wolf Hall,”part of an expanded lineup forthe enduring PBS franchise. 3
Finance
Bank Needs Money Monte dei Paschi di Siena musttell European regulators how itwill raise 2 billion euros. 8
Last week, I read an interest-ing article about how smart hard-ware can allow users to browseanonymously and thus foil snoop-ing from governments. I found it
on what looked like anifty new technologysite called Sugar-String.
Oddly enough,while the article men-tioned the need for
privacy for folks like Chinese dis-sidents, it didn’t address the factthat Americans might want thesame kind of protection.
There’s a reason for that, al-though not a very savory one. Atthe bottom of the piece, there wasa graphic saying “Presented byVerizon” followed by some teenytype that said “This article waswritten by an author contractedby Verizon.”
As the DailyDot pointed outlast Tuesday, Verizon not onlybacks the site, but also sets itscoverage agenda. And that agen-da, according to an email recruit-ing reporters for the site, did notinclude reporting on domesticspying and net neutrality, two ofthe most vital issues in technol-ogy. Those subjects were off thetable.
You can guess why. Thanks toEdward Snowden, we know thatVerizon turned over the phonerecords of millions of people tothe American government with-out their consent. And Verizon ishardly neutral on the issue of netneutrality, having successfullysued to keep the F.C.C. fromblocking efforts to charge for afast lane for data traffic.
After inquiries from variousnews media outlets, Verizon fedthe editor who sent the recruiting
Journalism,Independent
And Not
DAVIDCARR
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Continued on Page 4
By MARK SCOTT
LONDON — Poor cellphoneand Internet service is a fact oflife in many parts of Europe.
Less than a quarter of Euro-peans can connect to high-speedcellphone networks, comparedwith about 90 percent of Ameri-cans. And broadband connec-tions are often painstakinglysluggish.
But the prices here for theseservices are among the lowest inthe world. Europeans spend anaverage of $38 for a monthly cell-phone contract, about half ofwhat Americans pay on average,according to the Groupe SpecialeMobile Association, an industrygroup.
Now, though, the region’s toppolicy makers are set to change
that, giving investment and cost-lier services higher prioritiesthan affordability and antitrustworries.
The details of their plans areexpected take shape now that anew European Commission, theexecutive arm of the EuropeanUnion, began its five-year termon Saturday. An outline is al-ready forming, accompanied by afrenzy of deal making.
The commission’s new digitalchiefs recently expressed sup-port for plans that would loosenthe region’s strict rules on tele-com mergers.
Several national politicians, in-cluding Chancellor Angela Mer-kel of Germany, are also willingto see bigger telecom operators— many of which are formerstate monopolies — pick offsmaller, less-profitable rivals.
“We need to create a less frag-mented market and incentivizeprivate companies to make thenecessary investments,” AndrusAnsip, Europe’s new vice presi-dent for the digital single market,
Europe ShiftsOn PrioritiesFor Telecoms
Continued on Page 2
A focus on qualityover affordability andantitrust concerns.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, withthe midterm elections fast approaching,the conservative website IndependentJournal Review was not focused on thecontrol of the Senate or crucial statehouseraces. Instead, it led its home page with agruesome beheading on Long Island and avideo of a belligerent drunk being arrestedat a Dallas airport.
But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of arti-cles critical of President Obama and otherDemocrats. “Obama’s schedule from todayshows how toxic he is to Democrats run-ning for Senate,” read one headline. An-other asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talkover a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ toher?” (The sub-headline: “If elected presi-dent, she would be the second oldest in his-tory.”)
IJReview, a two-year-old site started bya pair of Republican operatives, hasemerged as one of the most popular onlinedestinations for conservatives. The sitemixes entertaining, shareable topics likepets through a conservative-values lens(for example, a recent piece about a doghelping to heal a sick veteran) with articles
A Young WebsiteCatches the EyesOf Conservatives
Continued on Page 4
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
The heroine of “Find Me I’mYours,” a new novel by Hillary Car-lip, is a quirky young woman namedMags who works at an online bridalmagazine and is searching for love inLos Angeles.
But the story also has another, lessobvious protagonist: Sweet’N Low,the artificial sweetener.
Sweet’N Low appears severaltimes in the 356-page story, in subtleand not-so-subtle ways. In one scene,Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee,shows off her nails, which she haspainted to resemble the product’spink packets. In another, she getsteased by a co-worker for puttingSweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” thefriend asks. Mags replies that shehas researched the claims online andfound studies showing that the prod-uct is safe: “They fed lab rats twen-ty-five hundred packets of Sweet’NLow a day … And still the F.D.A. orE.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’tconnect the dots from any kind ofcancer in humans to my party in apacket.”
The scene was brought to you bythe Cumberland Packing Corpora-tion, the Brooklyn-based companythat makes Sweet’N Low. Cumber-land Packing invested about $1.3 mil-lion in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novelmight strike some as unseemly. But“Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like mostnovels. It’s an e-book, a series ofwebsites and web TV shows, and avehicle for content sponsored bycompanies. And if it succeeds, it
E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Carlip, left, and Maxine Lapi-duss co-founded Storyverse Studios,the multimedia entertainment compa-ny behind “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Continued on Page 4
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up tosince the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended lastyear. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell,Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company isabout far more than the personal computers and computerservers it has been known for, with products intended forthings as varied as the cloud computing networks of globalenterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually startedsix years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuri-ating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry an-
By QUENTIN HARDY
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computercompany private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have hisnamesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
“This morning on the treadmill I was watching Bloom-berg and CNBC, all the circus clowns,” Mr. Dell said in a re-cent interview. His disdain for investment advice as en-tertainment is obvious — so obvious that no one shouldhave been surprised that to get away from Wall Street’s in-fluence, Mr. Dell endured a monthslong, often personalcampaign for a higher shareholder buyout price by the cor-porate raider Carl C. Icahn.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dell’s Life After Wall StreetMichael Dell put up a long fight to take his company
private again. Now he has to make it successful.On Tuesday, Mi-chael Dell willpresent his com-pany’s plan forits shareholder-free future.
Continued on Page 8
C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-03,B,001,Bs-4C,E1
ery story, not the top, is an attempt to hide the fundamental intent.
“I think they overlooked the first rule of storytelling, which is to not deceive the reader,” said shane snow, the co-founder of Contently, which helps brands produce media of their own. “the exposure they were seeking ended up be-ing negative.”
What had been an attempt by Verizon to build engagement and relevance had precisely the opposite effect, coming off as a kind of as-troturfing — grass roots that are anything but — rendered in pixels. the broadly skeptical response to the site serves as a reminder that publishing looks easy, but is filled with peril.
But if brands are less willing to just slap expensive ads onto sites they have no control over, how is smart, good content going to be underwritten? the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica have both demonstrated sus-tainable nonprofit approaches to significant national news. But First Look Media, begun a little over a year ago with lots of fanfare and a respected backer — Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay — seems to be having significant trouble;
last week Matt taibbi resigned amid talk of corporate bureaucracy over-whelming journalism.
If you are thinking there must be some way for corporations to en-rich the civic debate through publish-ing, you’re right. Five years ago this Monday, I met with Evan smith, who was just starting the texas tribune. He suggested that as newspapers re-treated, Republicans and Democrats, corporations and foundations, govern-ment and the private sector would get behind a nonpartisan news site to cov-er texas state politics.
It sounded far-fetched at the time, but it all came true and then some. Five years later, the texas tribune has raised $27 million from people, foun-dations and corporations including Exxon, Walmart and at&t. It has built the largest newsroom in the country covering any statehouse and created a thriving events business. While other nonprofit news efforts have tumbled, the texas tribune has $6 million in annual revenues and $2.5 million in the
bank, according to Mr. smith.the company will announce Monday that
it is opening a Washington bureau backed by the Hewlett Foundation, reversing a trend of regional flight from the capital. the nonprofit site now has 50 full-time staff members doing work that any media outlet would be proud of, including a 15-part series on how the shale boom has affected life in texas and a huge se-ries on the private conflicts of a part-time leg-islature, with a companion data project called the Ethics Explorer.
Its live stream of a filibuster by state sena-tor Wendy Davis became a national sensation, while its events calendar has included statewide conversations with Governor Rick Perry, sena-tor ted Cruz and Ms. Davis, among many others.
“It sounds very corny, but we always be-lieved that there was a place where people of unlike minds could put down their weapons, get in a room and hash stuff out,” Mr. smith said.
It’s not all hunky dory. the tribune had a twice-a-week distribution agreement with the New York times in which its work was part of the printed paper in texas. On Friday, Mr.
B4 Ø N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
could usher in a new businessmodel for publishers, one thatblurs the lines between art andcommerce in ways that are rou-tine in TV shows and movies butrare in books.
When RosettaBooks publishes“Find Me I’m Yours” as ane-book on Monday, it will be soldthrough all the major digital re-tail channels — Amazon, Apple’siBook store, Barnes & Noble’sNook store and Kobo.
But RosettaBooks is also try-ing to bridge the digital and phys-ical divide by marketing the $6.99e-book with postcard-size cardsmarked with codes that readerscan use to download the book.The cards allow e-book creatorsto market and sell digital books inphysical retail stores, hand themout at promotional events andgive them away to readers.
The cards are also a way forauthors to attract corporate spon-sors. Since publishers can printdifferent batches with specialcodes, a company could buy10,000 cards to give away, withbrand-specific sponsored contentthat would be bundled with ane-book. RosettaBooks is printingan initial batch of 15,000 cards for“Find Me I’m Yours.”
And because the e-book cardsare marked with individualdownload codes, they offer ac-cess to detailed information onhow readers engage with thebook, including how much timethey spend immersed in it, howfar into the story they read andwhether they reread certain pas-sages. “It delivers high-poweranalytics, which is much morevaluable to advertisers,” said Ar-thur Klebanoff, the RosettaBookschief executive.
RosettaBooks — an independ-ent digital publisher that offersworks by Kurt Vonnegut and Ar-thur C. Clarke as well as non-fiction books about history,health and current events — isone of several publishers experi-menting with e-book cards.
HarperCollins, Simon & Schus-ter and Open Road IntegratedMedia are also testing e-bookcards as a way to sell or giveaway digital books at authorevents and conferences, and — ina few cases — offer them in retailstores. RosettaBooks has alreadyprinted e-book cards for a hand-ful of nonfiction titles, and hasdistributed about 100,000 of thecards at conferences, collegecampuses and author events.
“Find Me I’m Yours” was con-ceived as click bait from the start.Ms. Carlip, the author of four oth-er books, including “Girl Power:Young Women Speak Out,” setout to write an interactive multi-media narrative packed originalvideos and with links to websitesthat enhanced the story.
The novel, a romantic comedy,centers on Mags, a quirky, strug-gling artist in Los Angeles who isheartbroken after she discoversher boyfriend cheated on her.When she finds a videotapedmessage from a handsomestranger, she is convinced theyare soul mates and sets out on ascavenger hunt to find him.
To flesh out the fictional world,Ms. Carlip built 33 websites thatconnect to the story line, withdedicated themes like spiritual-ity, weddings, goofy pet photosand videos, and public apologies.
As readers progress throughthe story, they can click on Brid-alville, the bridal humor websitewhere Mags works, and read ar-ticles and watch videos, or visitFreak4mypet.com, a site whereMags’s ex-boyfriend posts photosof her dogs (and where readerscan post their own funny pet im-ages and videos). The e-book fea-tures videos of an actor portray-ing the mysterious, attractivestranger as part of her scavengerhunt.
The sites are intended to hostsponsored content — a pet foodcompany might sponsor an ani-mated series on Freak4mypet,for example — as well as user-generated material. In the novel,for example, Mags’s ex-boyfriendbuilds a website to apologize forcheating on her, and readers canvisit the site Ms. Carlip built andpost their own confessions.
“Find Me I’m Yours” has takenthree years and $400,000 to de-velop. It is the first project tocome out of Storyverse Studios,an entertainment company Ms.Carlip co-founded this year withMaxine Lapiduss, a TV producerand writer for shows including“Roseanne,” “Ellen” and “Dhar-ma & Greg.” They run the busi-ness, which has 35 writers, webdevelopers and a social mediateam, from several bungalows inStudio City in Los Angeles.
The investment from Cumber-land Packing, their first big cor-porate sponsor, helped pay forthe development of the websites,and the company is sponsoring afan art contest. Ms. Carlip isworking on a sequel to “Find MeI’m Yours,” and Storyverse Stu-dios is developing several com-edy web series and a reality showthat link back to the novel.
Ms. Lapiduss said that in addi-tion to the sponsorship deal withCumberland Packing, negotia-tions were underway with fiveother large companies, includingautomakers and food and bever-age producers. Ms. Lapiduss andMs. Carlip say the readers theyare seeking to reach — youngwomen — are brand consciousconsumers who won’t be put offby copious mentions of products.
The novel is littered with brandnames — the main characterrides a Vespa and drinks RedBull (the companies behind thoseproducts are not sponsors). AndMs. Carlip said Sweet’N Low wasin the novel before CumberlandPacking was approached aboutbecoming a sponsor, but theproduct’s role was beefed up af-ter a deal was reached.
Steven Eisenstadt, the presi-dent and chief executive of Cum-berland Packing, said he saw“Find Me I’m Yours” as a way toreach younger, female consum-ers and to combat “latent myths”about the health risks associatedwith artificial sweeteners. Hesaid he was particularly excitedabout integrating his company’sproducts into the story line, rath-er than delivering the messagethrough an outright ad.
He said he especially liked theidea of having a main characterwho loves Sweet’N Low and hasto defend her use of it. To helpshape the scene, the companyshowed Ms. Carlip some of the re-search Mags cites when she ar-gues that the product is safe.
“It seemed like a more modernversion of product placement onTV,” he said. “They’re cleverlyand carefully having a productwritten into the story, but doing itin a way that didn’t tarnish theintegrity of the piece.”
E-Book Mingles LoveAnd Product Pitches
From First Business Page
about politics and policy. “It’s like if you crossed Red-
State with BuzzFeed,” said AlexCastellanos, a Republican politi-cal consultant and an adviser toIJReview.
IJReview has roughly 24 mil-lion unique visitors a month, ac-cording to the most recent Quant-cast rankings. Its traffic exceedsthat of more seasoned right-wingsites like the Drudge Report,Newsmax and Breitbart News,and is not far behind other con-servative brands like Fox Newsand TheBlaze.
The site’s founders, Alex Ska-tell and Phil Musser, say that itspopularity comes from havingmastered “social sharing” onwebsites like Facebook and Goo-gle. They boast of the ability togenerate maximum traffic from aminimum number of articles. InAugust, for instance, IJReviewreceived 14 million shares onFacebook from just 646 articles,according to NewsWhip, a sitethat tracks social sharing. Bycontrast, Huffington Post, theleader in Facebook shares, hadfour times as many shares atnearly 55 million, but with 38times as many articles.
Such a model has economic ad-vantages. IJReview generatesrevenues in the low seven figuresa month, up 500 percent from thistime a year ago, the men said.The Media Group will earn reve-nue of $30 million this year, theysaid. While they declined to dis-close their bottom line, Mr. Muss-er said, “we have been profitablefrom Day 1.”
When Mr. Skatell, a formerdigital director of the NationalRepublican Senatorial Commit-tee, looked to start a site after the2012 election, he saw a huge gapin reaching what he calls “a moremainstream center-right audi-ence.” He teamed with Mr. Muss-er, a former executive director ofthe Republican Governors Asso-ciation. The two “bonded over be-ing generally dispirited about ourparty’s approach to all thingsdigital,” Mr. Musser said.
They pledged to change things.“We shared a goal of building anew ecosystem to communicateour message,” Mr. Musser said,“and to develop practitioners
who could deliver it.” Mr. Skatell,28, had already earned a rep-utation as a digital wunderkind inthe Republican Party. At 22, hestarted the Republican Gover-nors Association’s first Facebookpage and increased online fund-raising.
He had also started his ownFacebook page, called Conserva-tive Daily, that aggregatedstories across the web. Mr. Ska-tell experimented with how topromote the page (including paidads), and it took off, inspiring himto start IJReview as an independ-ent website.
Using $40,000 he had savedfrom a game app he made in col-lege and $20,000 from his par-ents, he hired Bert Atkinson, afriend known as Bubba who hadbeen working as a waiter, as edi-tor and chief writer.
While the site continued re-packaging content from otherswith eye-catching headlines, Mr.Atkinson and a growing staff be-gan adding their own content too,like amusing explainers of cur-rent events. They also began tobe fed content by readers. WhenMr. Obama told a factory workerat a plant that he had been usingObamacare the wrong way, IJRe-view received a video of the ex-change and posted it.
In 2013, Mr. Skatell joined with
Mr. Musser to build a larger com-pany. At the time, IJReview wasstill receiving fewer than two mil-lion unique viewers a month. Themen started to focus on audiencedevelopment.
“We put more of an emphasison watching how our audienceresponded to certain content,tracking real-time analyticsmuch more closely, and lastly re-investing in growing our distribu-tion channels: Facebook andemail lists,” Mr. Skatell said.
A breakthrough insight wasfiguring out that if they couldidentify readers who felt stronglyabout health care and alert themto all their Affordable Care Actarticles, there was a higher likeli-hood they would share them.Putting the right content in frontof the right audience becametheir mantra. Traffic took off.“There is an art and science tothis,” Mr. Musser said.
IJReview’s roughly 30 report-ers and editors work from anopen-office space in Old Town Al-exandria, Va. At a recent newsmeeting, the young staff mem-bers sat on beanbags while brain-storming how to compare theObama administration to charac-ters in the 1990s sitcom “TheFresh Prince of Bel Air.” (Theidea never panned out.) The half-dozen reporters at the meeting
said they did not do reportingoutside the office, although oneventured she would look upsomething health-related on theCenters for Disease Control andPrevention website.
The IJReview’s lighter ap-proach belies the deep politicalfocus in the rest of Mr. Skatell’sand Mr. Musser’s business, Me-dia Group of America. The 62-employee company also runsIMGE, a digital consulting firmfor Republican candidates andcorporate clients, and IMGELabs, which builds technical toolslike mobile apps for clients, alsolargely Republican campaigns.
Mr. Skatell and Mr. Mussersaid they plan for the site to wid-en its reach by becoming a plat-form for other viewpoints — in-cluding Democrats. That couldalienate their core readers, butthey say they believe that will nothappen because of their ability totarget specific content to specificreaders.
For now, their audience re-flects the typical conservativebase, with an outsize share ofreaders under 18 and over 45. Abroader base would be good forpolitics and good for business.“This isn’t just a Republican pri-mary voter play,” said Mr. Caste-llanos, the consultant. “It is muchbigger and more valuable.”
A Young Website Catches Conservatives’ EyesFrom First Business Page
MATT ROTH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Bert Atkinson, left, editor in chief of the Independent Journal Review, meeting with colleagues.
email into the wood chipper, say-ing, “Unlike the characterizationby its new editor, SugarString isopen to all topics that fit its mis-sion and elevate the conversationaround technology.” When I con-tacted the company on Friday,they would not say if that elevat-ed conversation would includedomestic spying and net neutral-ity, but a spokeswoman sent anote saying, “Verizon believesthis was a good, sound concept,but the execution was not what itshould have been, and we’ll learnfrom it.”
Clearly, historical models offunding original content are un-der duress, and a variety of ef-forts have emerged to innovatearound that new reality: nonprof-it news sites, digital news opera-tions with low-cost approachesand yes, brands like Verizon thatare also beginning to financetheir own media operations.
The brand publishing that hasemerged ranges from enlighten-ing to harmless, with much of itarrayed over topics like extremesports, small business advice orfood and health. As my colleagueStuart Elliot pointed out, Pepsi isbig into brand publishing, havingcome up with Green-Label.com, alifestyle publication sponsored byMountain Dew and produced byPepsi along with Complex Media.
Complex is also producing theSugarString site on behalf of Ve-rizon. According to people whowere part of the process, Verizonbrought the idea to McGarryBo-wen, an ad agency, and it soonbecame clear that what the com-pany wanted was not a brandcampaign, but a media propertywith visibility in social platforms.
“It was odd — it just sort ofshowed up here, fully formed,”said a Complex employee not au-thorized to speak publicly on thesubject.
Coming up with credible con-sumer sites is complicatedenough, but throw news into themix and the degree of difficultyclimbs, especially if your compa-ny is a behemoth with a reachinto all aspects of technology.
Of the many attempts at newapproaches to publishing — na-tive advertising, custom content,sponsored content — Sugar-String sets a new low. It was abad idea with a pratfall of a roll-out, a transparent attempt toproject brand might into a verycontroversial conversation. Thefact that the name of the corpora-tion bringing you the informationis at the bottom of every story,not the top, is an attempt to hidethe fundamental intent.
“I think they overlooked thefirst rule of storytelling, which isto not deceive the reader,” saidShane Snow, the co-founder ofContently, which helps brandsproduce media of their own. “Theexposure they were seeking end-ed up being negative.”
What had been an attempt byVerizon to build engagement andrelevance had precisely the oppo-site effect, coming off as a kind ofAstroturfing — grass roots thatare anything but — rendered inpixels. The broadly skeptical re-sponse to the site serves as a re-minder that publishing lookseasy, but is filled with peril.
But if brands are less willing tojust slap expensive ads onto sitesthey have no control over, how issmart, good content going to beunderwritten? The Center forPublic Integrity and ProPublicahave both demonstrated sustain-able nonprofit approaches to sig-nificant national news. But FirstLook Media, begun a little over ayear ago with lots of fanfare anda respected backer — PierreOmidyar, founder of eBay —seems to be having significant
trouble; last week Matt Taibbi re-signed amid talk of corporate bu-reaucracy overwhelming journal-ism.
If you are thinking there mustbe some way for corporations toenrich the civic debate throughpublishing, you’re right. Fiveyears ago this Monday, I metwith Evan Smith, who was juststarting The Texas Tribune. Hesuggested that as newspapers re-treated, Republicans and Demo-crats, corporations and founda-tions, government and the pri-vate sector would get behind anonpartisan news site to coverTexas state politics.
It sounded far-fetched at thetime, but it all came true and thensome. Five years later, The TexasTribune has raised $27 millionfrom people, foundations and cor-porations including Exxon, Wal-mart and AT&T. It has built thelargest newsroom in the countrycovering any statehouse and cre-ated a thriving events business.While other nonprofit news ef-forts have tumbled, The TexasTribune has $6 million in annualrevenues and $2.5 million in thebank, according to Mr. Smith.
The company will announceMonday that it is opening aWashington bureau backed bythe Hewlett Foundation, revers-ing a trend of regional flight fromthe capital. The nonprofit sitenow has 50 full-time staff mem-bers doing work that any mediaoutlet would be proud of, includ-ing a 15-part series on how theshale boom has affected life inTexas and a huge series on theprivate conflicts of a part-time
legislature, with a companiondata project called The Ethics Ex-plorer.
Its live stream of a filibuster byState Senator Wendy Davis be-came a national sensation, whileits events calendar has includedstatewide conversations withGovernor Rick Perry, SenatorTed Cruz and Ms. Davis, amongmany others.
“It sounds very corny, but wealways believed that there was aplace where people of unlikeminds could put down theirweapons, get in a room and hashstuff out,” Mr. Smith said.
It’s not all hunky dory. TheTribune had a twice-a-week dis-tribution agreement with TheNew York Times in which itswork was part of the printed pa-per in Texas. On Friday, Mr.Smith was notified that TheTimes, as part of an effort to fo-cus on its core business, would beending the relationship.
But even that didn’t dent Mr.Smith’s belief that innovation andelbow grease will serve as a cor-rective to all of the sad-sack talkabout news going away. The Trib-une serves as proof that a localsite can combine news, data andevents into a three-legged stoolthat stands on its own.
“Nonprofits rely on rich peopleand corporations, and Texas hasa lot of both,” Mr. Smith said.“But the people and companieswho contribute expect, and getnothing more than, a firm hand-shake and the knowledge thatthey helped make Texas a littlesmarter. They know we don’t puta thumb on the scale, and theydon’t try to either.”
Contrast that with Verizon,whose effort to dip a toe into pub-lishing turned out to be allthumbs.
Online Journalism, Done Independently and OtherwiseFrom First Business Page
ERIKA RICH/THE AUSTIN-AMERICAN STATESMAN, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Evan Smith, editor in chief ofthe nonpartisan news organi-zation The Texas Tribune,with State Senator Wendy Da-vis, above. The coverage agen-da of SugarString, left, is setby Verizon.
Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @carr2n
Do not forget the Neediest!
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smith was notified that the times, as part of an effort to focus on its core business, would be ending the relationship.
But even that didn’t dent Mr. smith’s belief that innovation and elbow grease will serve as a corrective to all of the sad-sack talk about news going away. the tribune serves as proof that a local site can combine news, data and events into a three-legged stool that stands on its own.
“Nonprofits rely on rich people and corpo-
rations, and texas has a lot of both,” Mr. smith said. “But the people and companies who con-tribute expect, and get nothing more than, a firm handshake and the knowledge that they helped make texas a little smarter. they know we don’t put a thumb on the scale, and they don’t try to either.”
Contrast that with Verizon, whose effort to dip a toe into publishing turned out to be all thumbs. n