Media Decoder: Oprah Winfrey Network Chief Is Out

 OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network Christina Norman, left, with Oprah Winfrey and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, celebrating the start of OWN on Jan. 1, 2011. Ms. Norman is exiting the channel.

9:17 p.m. | Updated | Dissatisfied by the first ratings report cards for OWN, Oprah Winfrey and her business partner, Discovery Communications, said on Friday that they had dismissed the four-month-old channel’s chief executive, Christina Norman.

Peter Liguori, the chief operating officer for Discovery Communications, will take over OWN through at least the end of the year. His assignment is formidable: to lure more viewers to a fledgling channel that most people cannot easily find on their cable systems and to manage the introduction for its two most anticipated programs, one featuring Ms. Winfrey and one featuring Rosie O’Donnell.

Mr. Liguori indicated in an interview that he would try to amp up the entertainment value of OWN’s programs without losing sight of Ms. Winfrey’s live-your-best-life principles. “I think you’re going to see more joy on the network,” he said. Ms. Winfrey and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, preached patience in the months preceding the Jan. 1 introduction of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, which is built around the supremely valuable Oprah brand. But both have been disappointed by the low ratings for the channel’s mix of feel-good reality shows, talk shows and films. On a total day basis, OWN is barely outperforming the channel it replaced, Discovery Health, despite hundreds of million of dollars of investment.

Already, Discovery has backed off its bold prediction that OWN will be profitable this year. A Discovery spokesman said profitability depended on “rating success, affiliate fees and the strength of the advertising market.”

Kevin Winter/Getty Images For AFI Oprah Winfrey and Peter Liguori, who will take over OWN, Ms. Winfrey’s fledgling channel, through at least year’s end.

Mr. Zaslav acknowledged to investors last week that the channel had a “slower start” than expected. And Ms. Winfrey said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, published Friday, that “it’s not where I want it to be.”

In part that is because Ms. Winfrey herself has not been a steady presence on the channel — a fact that Ms. Norman noted time and time again in past interviews. Ms. Winfrey is busy winding down her syndicated talk show, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which will end on May 25, and only after that point — and a vacation — will she turn her full attention to OWN.

The highest-rated shows on OWN have been “Ask Oprah’s All Stars,” with advice from people like Dr. Mehmet Oz; “Our America With Lisa Ling”; and “The Judds.” In its first four months, OWN attracted 148,000 viewers at any given time, according to the Nielsen Company, only 7,000 more than Discovery Health did in the same time period last year. In the prime-time hours, OWN averaged 297,000 viewers, 44,000 more than Discovery Health.

The decision to oust Ms. Norman was the culmination of several recent conversations among members of the board that oversees OWN, according to two people with direct knowledge of the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their employers had not authorized them to speak.

In an e-mail message to the staff at OWN, Ms. Winfrey said that Ms. Norman’s “hard work, passion and leadership were instrumental in getting OWN on the air,” but added, “Given all that we have to do, the OWN board felt it was necessary that we have a different kind of leadership in place for the next phase of OWN’s growth.”

What the board was seeking, according to the people with direct knowledge of the decision, was a person to improve the channel’s programming voice. “Right now it’s all about the programming,” one of the people said. Mr. Liguori has programming cachet as the former president of entertainment for the Fox Broadcasting Company. He said in an interview that he would apply lessons of the last four months — for instance, that straightforward how-to shows and darker subject matter don’t work as well as shows that are more clearly entertaining. One underperforming show he cited was “Addicted to Food,” which chronicled people’s treatment for eating disorders.

“With all its good intentions, it was just hard for the audience to watch,” he said.

Mr. Liguori said that every show on OWN should be purposeful, in keeping with Ms. Winfrey’s carefully cultivated brand. “But the price of entry for that purpose — that show’s intent, its message, its takeaway — is that you are entertained,” he said.

Asked to elaborate, he said, “It’s going to be compelling characters, storytelling with stakes, and then at the end of the show, you realize you have learned either some moral or practical lesson.”

Ms. Norman did not respond to a request for comment. She was the second chief executive of OWN, having taken over in January 2009 while the channel was trying — and at times struggling — to start up. While Ms. Winfrey provided the vision for the channel, it was Ms. Norman, a former president of MTV, who executed on that vision. She said in a statement Friday, “As I move on to my next challenge, I am confident the strong foundation we have built will position the network to achieve great things.”

A day earlier, Judy McGrath departed MTV Networks, prompting speculation that Ms. McGrath could be in line for the OWN job. But Mr. Liguori called the timing “pure coincidence.”

Mr. Liguori will oversee the introduction of Ms. O’Donnell’s talk show in October, and Ms. Winfrey’s next show, “Oprah’s Next Chapter,” in January 2012. (OWN executives had hoped to start “Next Chapter” in the fall.)

Mr. Zaslav reiterated last week that Discovery was “fully committed to the brand” and reminded investors that building a channel was a “long-term play.”

For her part, Ms. Winfrey has suggested that the channel should not be judged for three years. “I feel like I have not begun to give anything to OWN,” she told Entertainment Weekly. But that will change, she said, after her syndicated show ends — and, presumably, after that vacation. “It’s going to improve exponentially with the amount of time and service I can give to it.”

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Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

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A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

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Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.

View the original article here

Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

?

A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

?

Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.

 

Media Decoder: Samsung Takes New Camera on a National Tour

 Samsung will go coast to coast to highlight its SH100 camera.

The makers of the Samsung SH100 digital camera are taking a literal approach to product placement in a marketing campaign that starts on Monday.

The campaign, called the Samsung Coast to Coast Photo Post, will put a single SH100 into the hands of people in 25 cities across the country so they can use it to post photos on various social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Picasa. The campaign is intended to highlight the camera’s ability to instantly upload photos to the Web, something that an increasing number of cellphone cameras already do.

“We know consumers are increasingly sharing content,” said Reid Sullivan, the company’s senior vice president for mobile entertainment for the United States, adding that the quality of cellphone camera photos is no match for the Samsung device.

Samsung teamed up with the digital agency Mekanism to create the campaign, which is scheduled to start in Los Angeles and end in New York City at the end of the month. The initiative represents the first time the brand and the agency have worked together.

In order to pass the single camera from city to city, a small team from Samsung will visit each location and hand over the device to a person they have deemed a “social influencer” for the day. The goal is to create “little snapshots of Americana,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Representatives from Mekanism will document the approximately 3,600-mile journey in user-generated photographs, and the collection will be shown at a gallery event in June in New York City. The photo that generates the most “likes” on Facebook will be deemed the best of the bunch. Additional promotions will include product demonstration videos on YouTube, in-store dealer promotions and newspaper ads.

 

Media Decoder: A Case of Mistaken Identity

 

OTTAWA — Shortly before the start of Canada’s current federal election campaign, which concludes on Monday, the governing Conservatives had something they believed would seriously undermine the credibility of Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party.

Adrian Wyld/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Michael Ignatieff, head of the Liberal Party in Canada.

They came across a photograph on the Internet that showed six men wearing Santa Claus hats and American battle gear posing with weapons in front of an American military helicopter in Kuwait prior to the Iraq war. One of the men resembles Mr. Ignatieff, who directed a human rights center at Harvard before returning to his native Canada to take up political life.

To the Conservatives, the photograph, combined with other bits and pieces, suggested that Mr. Ignatieff had not only supported the invasion of Iraq when he was at Harvard — a position he has subsequently retracted — but also that he had been directly and secretly involved with the United States military in planning the attack. If true, this information would have been a setback for Mr. Ignatieff, who leads a center-left party in a country where the war in Iraq had little support.

Rather than release the information, the Conservatives passed it along to Sun Media, a Conservative-friendly tabloid newspaper chain, which started a television news channel in April that is sometimes compared to Fox News.

But although Mr. Ignatieff and the man in the photograph both have bushy eyebrows, they are not the same person. And ultimately the leak ended up harming the Conservatives’ credibility and souring the party’s relationship with Sun Media.

In an extraordinary move last week, Pierre Karl Péladeau, the president and chief executive of Sun Media, published a lengthy editorial in his newspapers that exposed the Conservatives as the newspapers’ source and condemned the party for the attempted smear, which he said was apparently intended to damage Mr. Ignatieff as well as Sun Media’s new television channel.

“It is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians,” Mr. Péladeau wrote.

The material, Mr. Péladeau revealed, had been passed along on behalf of the Conservatives by Patrick Muttart, a former senior aide to Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister. Mr. Muttart now works at Mercury Public Affairs in Chicago and is no stranger to Sun Media. Last year, he was retained through Mercury to help develop the Sun News channel, and during his time in Canada he worked with Kory Teneycke, Mr. Harper’s former spokesman who is now vice president of Sun News.

In an interview, Mr. Péladeau said that Mr. Muttart repeatedly failed to deliver a high-resolution version of the photograph to Sun Media. When that clearer image finally arrived, hours before The Toronto Sun was about to go to press with the photograph on its front page, it was apparent that the man in the photo is not Mr. Ignatieff.

Given the nature of the source, Mr. Péladeau said that he had a responsibility to expose the Conservatives, even though his news media outlets had not ultimately claimed the man in the photo was Mr. Ignatieff.

“It’s unusual,” Mr. Péladeau said about his editorial. “This specific situation was also highly unusual. Standing on this issue was particularly important.”

Mr. Muttart, who had been one of Mr. Harper’s key campaign organizers, left his campaign last week.

In an interview, Mr. Muttart said that “never, ever did we say that we had positively identified the individual in question as Michael Ignatieff.”

He recalled telling a Sun News producer: “It’s yours; do your due diligence, and see what you find out.”

As for the delay in delivering the high-resolution version of the photograph, Mr. Muttart blamed a clerical mix-up by the campaign.

Mr. Muttart said he is puzzled by Mr. Péladeau’s suggestion that he and the Conservatives set out to undermine the news channel he helped create.

“I’m completely baffled,” Mr. Muttart said. “For whatever reason, Mr. Péladeau wanted to make an example out of somebody to assert the editorial independence of the Sun Media organization.”

 

M.I.T. Media Lab Names a New Director

That makes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to name a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist who attended, but did not graduate, from two American colleges as the director of one of the world’s top computing science laboratories an unusual choice.

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier.

The Media Laboratory gained a global reputation during the 1990s as an avant-garde research center known for stunning high-technology demonstrations that pointed toward a future digital society.

Indeed, the Media Lab has on occasion been criticized for overemphasizing flashy demos. During the 1990s, under Dr. Negroponte, the lab evolved a research culture of “demo or die,” rather than the standard academic “publish or perish” model.

The Media Lab pioneered a range of computing-based technologies like the Aspen Movie Map, a forerunner of Google Street View, the $100 Laptop, an educational tool intend for students in the developing world, and E Ink, the display technology that makes an Amazon Kindle book reader viewable in bright sunlight.

Perhaps its most important role, however, has been in helping to nurture a generation of innovative designers like John Underkoffler, a user-interface designer who is now a Hollywood consultant and who provided most of the futuristic interface ideas seen in the movie “Minority Report.”

In 1990, with American fears about Japan as a high-technology competitor running high, the Media Lab also briefly became a lightning rod for criticism after it struck a deal to transfer its research approach to Japanese industry and educational institutions.

Although that adds a touch of irony to the decision to choose Mr. Ito, he is neither a conventional Japanese technologist, nor your average college dropout.

Raised in both Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Mr. Ito was part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet. His career includes serving as a board member of Icann, the Internet’s governance organization; becoming a “guild master” in the World of Warcraft online fantasy game; and more than a dozen investments in start-ups like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter. In 1994 he helped establish the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan.

He was also an early participant in the open-source software movement and is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox Web browse, as well as being the co-founder and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has sought to create a middle ground to promote the sharing of digital information.

“The choice is radical, but brilliant,” said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a University of California laboratory that pursues a similar research agenda to the Media Laboratory. “He can position the lab at the edge of change and propel it for a decade.”

Mr. Ito’s appointment comes at a time when the Media Lab, as well as other information technology research centers, have struggled to reclaim the financing levels that were characteristic of the era of the dot-com boom. Although the lab gets the bulk of its $35 million annual budget from corporate and government sponsors, that amount has declined measurably as a percentage of the overall budget during the last decade, Dr. Negroponte said.

“Funding got tight in 2002 and even tighter in the last economic downturn,” he said. That has made fund-raising the highest priority for the new director, he said. However, he added that Mr. Ito’s particular leadership qualities made him stand out among the 250 candidates who were considered for the position.

“Joi is very good at enabling others,” he said. “I’ve never met a 44-year-old who is able to enable others in this way. Most people who are at that age are into themselves and their career.”

L. Rafael Reif, the provost of M.I.T., called Mr. Ito “the right person to lead the Media Lab today,” describing him as “an innovative thinker who understands the tremendous potential of technology and, in particular, the Internet, to influence education, business, and society in general.”

Directing the Media Lab is an alluring challenge because of the potential of blending the longer term focus of university research and development efforts with the agility and risk-taking approach of Silicon Valley start-ups, Mr. Ito said.

“You embrace serendipity and you pivot as you go along this longer term arc. That’s the way I have lived my life. I’ve jumped around in terms of career and geography,” he said.

Mr. Ito, who maintains a home outside of Tokyo, became a resident of Dubai at the end of 2008 to gain a better understanding of the Middle East. He said that was part of his desire to understand intellectual property issues internationally and to become what he described as a “global citizen.”

Even among the Internet generation, Mr. Ito has been extraordinary in the degree to which he has lived his life publicly and online in blog posts and on a dizzying array of social media. Last year he traveled about 230 days, and it is possible to follow his adventures on a Web site he maintains in text, images and video including a diving trip this month that involved feeding sharks in the Caribbean.

Mr. Ito first attended Tufts where he briefly studied computer science but wrote that he found it drudge work. Later he attended the University of Chicago where he studied physics, but once again found it stultifying. He later wrote of his experience: “I once asked a professor to explain the solution to a problem so I could understand it more intuitively. He said, ‘You can’t understand it intuitively. Just learn the formula so you’ll get the right answer.’ That was it for me.”

Mr. Ito’s colleagues minimize the fact that he is without academic credentials. “He has credibility in an academic context,” said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who co-founded Creative Commons. Mr. Ito is currently chairman. “We’ve been collaborators, and I’ve stolen many ideas from him and turned them into my own.”

The Media Lab will benefit from a director who has Mr. Ito’s global connections, said John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. “What they really need right now is to have a two-way connection to the outside world. Who more to do that than Joi?”

 

Chinese State Media, in a Show of Openness, Print Jet Photos

 

BEIJING — The J-15 Flying Shark is China’s newest attack jet, a sinuous fighter with the folding wings, shortened tail cone and bulked-up landing gear it needs to serve on China’s first aircraft carrier, which is expected to start sea trials soon. It is indisputable evidence of China’s growing mastery of military technology.

Also military technology of Russia and Ukraine, albeit not entirely with their consent.

Barely two weeks after splashing photographs of the aircraft carrier on the Internet, China’s state media on Monday published the first close-up pictures of the J-15. The day before, Web sites that focus on China’s military had run the same photograph, snapped outside the Shenyang plant in northeast China where the plane is being developed.

Like the aircraft carrier it will call home, the jet faces years of tests and refinement before it will formally enter service, military analysts say. The photographs nevertheless suggest that the People’s Liberation Army, long notoriously secretive, is lifting some veils.

“The recent spate of releases of photographs of airplanes under development is a sign of relaxed control of military information in China,” Lan Yun, an editor at the Beijing-based Modern Ships magazine, said in an interview. “It could be seen as a sign of more transparency of the Chinese military.”

Mr. Lan and Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review, said that the photograph indicated that the aircraft had passed factory tests and was now bound for flight testing.

Internet posts by analysts and Chinese aviation enthusiasts point to a fighter crammed with the best technology China can produce: holographic “heads-up” instrument displays, advanced anti-ship radar and, Mr. Lan said, self-guiding missiles, in contrast to the gravity-controlled bombs and sight-guided missiles that largely populate China’s existing 3,200-aircraft fleet.

When it is deployed — probably sometime after 2015 — the J-15 will signal the dawn of a new ability by China to assert authority along its coastline.

The carrier and its jet are said to employ the best Chinese technology, but both are also direct descendants of weaponry devised in the dying days of the old Soviet Union.

China’s new carrier, expected to be christened the Shi Lang, is a retrofitted version of a 1988 Soviet aircraft carrier that Chinese interests bought from Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly for conversion into a floating casino in Macao. But the Macao gambling license never materialized, and as many had suspected, the ship wound up elsewhere — in Dalian, a city in northeastern China where workers began a decade-long retrofit.

The J-15 has followed an even more tortuous route.

At the century’s turn, many news reports say, the Chinese beseeched Moscow to sell them a Sukhoi-33, a 1980s Soviet fighter capable of landing on carriers. Moscow refused. But in 2001, the Chinese bought an Su-33 prototype from Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and began a teardown to learn its secrets.

The Russians were incensed.

Yet the J-15 unofficially unveiled this week, which externally seems a clone of the Su-33, in fact has been remade inside with Chinese improvements. Mr. Lan said that advances in the plane’s outdated avionics and missile-guidance systems had made it a far more sophisticated version of the Russian jet.

The J-15 is being compared in some quarters to the American F-18, a workhorse on Navy carriers. But Mr. Lan said it had a shorter range, in large part because its takeoff method — flying off a ski-jump-style runway — dictated that it could carry less fuel than a comparable American jet, which is propelled off a flat carrier runway.

Flying a ski-jump is not duck soup. And in February, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man of conspiring to give the Chinese details of a Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski-jump ramp.

In Huludao, a navy installation on China’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for ascending jets.

None of this is exceptional. Russian, Chinese and American espionage agents wage unacknowledged wars to steal the others’ technology.

But the Chinese, some experts say, are notably adept.

“They take what they can get, and improve what they can,” Abraham M. Denmark, an independent expert on China’s military in Washington, said in an interview. “It’s a strategy that permeates many of their innovations.”

 

From Poland, Satellite TV Tries to Pierce the Belarus Media Muzzle

But if you want to see Belsat’s nerve center, you have to head to neighboring Poland, to a cramped office in downtown Warsaw.

There, for 17 hours a day, a team of nearly three dozen Poles and Belarussians broadcast into a country whose media are tightly controlled by the government of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.

Recent crackdowns in Belarus stemming from demonstrations against Mr. Lukashenko’s grip on power have created even more hurdles for journalists.

Belsat’s operation here has sought to help overcome that, using 120 freelancers inside Belarus who each day send news to Warsaw by phone or the Internet. Many of them have been detained, arrested or fined.

“They are not allowed to work as journalists,” said Alaksei Dzikavitski, Belsat TV’s editorial director for news. “The authorities refuse to accredit them because they work for Belsat TV.”

For Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, the founder and director of Belsat TV, which made its first broadcast in December 2007, it is natural that her operation would find a home in Poland. As the daughter of leading Polish dissidents in the Communist era, she said she believed that Poles had something to give to their neighbors seeking freedom.

“We struggled for that freedom, but you do not get it if you do not do something to make it happen,” said Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy, 48, a former historian.

Her father, Zbigniew Romaszewski, was one of the founders in 1976 of KOR, the independent labor self-defense committee. He later founded the Helsinki Committee in Poland, a human rights movement. In the early 1980s he was a leading member of Solidarity, the trade union movement.

During martial law, which was imposed in 1981, Mr. Romaszewski was jailed for two years and his wife, Zofia, for a year. Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy herself was in jail for six months, and her husband, Jaroslaw Guzy, then a student leader, was imprisoned for a year.

“I suppose we are a criminal family,” Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said.

These days, the Polish government is one of the most active supporters of the democratic opposition in Belarus. And Poland’s Foreign Ministry provides an annual stipend to Belsat TV of nearly $6 million, the bulk of its annual budget of about $9 million. The Swedish government is providing a grant of about $3 million over a three-year period that ends in 2013.

That support led at least in part to accusations by Mr. Lukashenko’s government last month that Poland was trying to destabilize Belarus. Poland denies that claim. Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said that the role played by Western radio stations like Radio Free Europe, France International and the BBC in providing independent news to Poles during the Communist era gave Poles an alternative view of the news. Now, she says, Belarussians should have that opportunity, too.

“It’s about giving something back — in this case providing independent news to Belarus,” she said. “After all, the underground opposition in Poland during the 1970s and later under martial law depended so much on news from international broadcasting stations.”

“I suppose what we are doing inside Belarus is a kind of modern samizdat,” said Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy, referring to how information under the former Communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was disseminated on smudgy carbon-copied pages.

So when freelancers from Belarus offer to work for Belsat TV, Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy plays down the glamour of such a job and plays up the risks.

“Our contributors know what they are letting themselves in for,” she said. “I tell them that it is their choice, their fate, their own responsibility. I tell them that I cannot guarantee their security. It is Lukashenko who is responsible.”

At Belsat’s makeshift studios, which are inside the headquarters of Polish Television, Mr. Dzikavitski says that apart from the challenges inside Belarus, the channel needs cameras and transmission equipment, in addition to money for programming and training.

But despite the budget restraints and the conditions in which Belsat’s journalists work — they cannot attend official events or seek information from the authorities — it broadcasts the news every day.

Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said the continued actions of the Belarus security forces, which have cracked down on the opposition leaders as well as teachers, lawyers and journalists, underscored the need for timely news delivered to Belarussians.

“The repression, instead of stopping us, forced us to change strategy,” she said. “We decided to try and respond in real time to what was happening in Belarus.”

Belsat TV is now watched by nearly 761,000 people, or about 10 percent of the population, according to the Polish Zerkalo-Info Research Center.

“People want the truth,” Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said. “It is what we wanted when we lived under Communism.”

 

Itineraries: Hotels Turn to Social Media to Connect With Travelers

“We want to be there when someone transforms the recommendations of their friends into booking a reservation,” said David Godsman, vice president for global Web services for Starwood Hotels. “If they press the ‘Like’ button, we want to start a conversation.” He said he viewed his company’s Facebook pages as a way to extend Starwood’s relationship with its customers “from the 10 days they stay with us, to all year long.” Starwood has Facebook pages for 1,000 hotel properties across its nine brands.

Hotels need to make sure that their booking engines can be found wherever the customer is, rather than asking the customer to search them out, said Glenn Withiam, a spokesman for Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, which recently held a hotel industry conference that examined social media.

Offering reservations directly helps to keep the conversation between the hotel and its guests, Mr. Withiam said. He added that using social media to communicate took the relationship beyond the booking transaction. The hotel can find out what pillow guests prefer, the drinks they want in the minibar or the type of room they need. Personalized service can keep a guest coming back, he said, and that, in turn, helps hotels hold the line on room prices.

“Hotels need to demonstrate the value of staying with them,” Mr. Withiam said, because when the focus is just on the lowest price, the competition leads to fewer amenities, lower service levels and decreased customer satisfaction.

Mr. Withiam added that travelers were expecting trip-related services to be available on the new platforms. PhoCusWright, a travel research firm, has found that 13 percent of social-network users now shop for travel on those Web sites and 35 percent of mobile-phone users expect to book travel on their phones in the next year.

Axses Systems Caribbean, a company in Barbados, has helped about 30 small hotels and chains in Barbados and nearby make their reservations available on Facebook since early 2009. Ian Clayton, the chief executive of Axses, said he hoped that by offering reservations directly, while customers were excited by the property, his hotel clients would lose fewer bookings to online travel sites.

The online agencies — Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline among them — increased their share of total online hotel bookings to 46 percent last year from 41 percent in 2008, according to PhoCusWright. Douglas Quinby, senior director at the firm, attributed most of that increase to travelers’ greater price awareness and decreased business travel during the recession.

While those travel agencies can be great assets for hotels — allowing them to sell more rooms and to sell those rooms at a lower price without diminishing the hotel’s brand image — there are multiple drawbacks, Mr. Withiam said. Hotels make less money for rooms sold through an online travel agency than if customers had booked directly. Those customers may also start to think about meeting their travel needs through the online agency, rather than through the hotel, becoming in essence a customer with a relationship to the booking Web site and not the hotel.

Trump Hotel Collection has been offering Facebook reservations for around six months, and Ivanka Trump, executive vice president for development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization, even has a booking widget on her personal Facebook page. Ms. Trump said her company had an advantage in social media because “we are a personality-driven brand.” She added, “When I tweet out a hotel special, a million people see it.” Once guests have made reservations though Facebook, Ms. Trump said a hotel “attaché” contacted them to complete a “dossier” of their personal preferences, like the newspapers they wanted delivered, in-room amenities they required or particular room temperatures.

Jillian Carroll, a Facebook spokeswoman, said that the travel industry was a natural partner. “Travel is inherently social,” she said. Travelers have long asked their friends for hotel and restaurant recommendations, and then shared their impressions afterwards. In addition to making reservations, Ms. Carroll said, some travel-related companies used Facebook to respond to customer complaints, notify users of travel reviews posted by their friends or run sweepstakes to win a free hotel stay.

To help the companies refine their pages, Facebook offers analytics showing the aggregate demographic information of the people who “Like” a particular page. Companies can also discover the time of day that receives the most engagement and which actions spur more people to press the Like button.

Hotels are trying different ways to use the new media. Hyatt guests with smartphones can check in and check out with them. That means travelers can check in during the taxi ride from the airport and simply pick up keys at the front desk.

Hilton Worldwide estimates that about 615,000 customers have downloaded its mobile apps. Along with the ability to make or modify a reservation, it has offered new services like meals that are ready when guests arrive.

While at-your-fingertips booking and personalized service may be important to business travelers, there is no denying the bottom line. “All too often, travelers will leave a hotel Web site and look for a better rate in an online travel agency,” Mr. Clayton said. To entice customers to book directly via Facebook, some hotels are offering a guaranteed lowest price.

Using Facebook and smartphone apps, hotels hope to deepen or regain the relationships they had with customers and to raise the quality of their experiences when they check in. Attracting guests to book directly in new ways is a win for the hotel, said Mr. Withiam, from a financial, customer relationship and brand perspective.

 

Media Decoder: The Next Daily Deal

  The new SaverTime Web service.

The daily deal coupon world is set to get a little bigger on Monday when the company behind the direct mail PennySaver fliers known throughout California begins a Web service called SaverTime.

“We’ve always been the champion of the little guy,” said Loren Dalton, president of PennySaverUSA.com and SaverTime.com. “We’re trying to help even the field for them as they play against the big boys online now.”

The SaverTime site is intended to compete with the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial in a few important ways, Mr. Dalton said. Placing a deal with the service is free for a small business, which then splits the revenue evenly with SaverTime.

The company says its deals are aimed at more specific geographic locations than just a ZIP code. People who use a coupon will receive a SaverTime Sequel coupon for a similar offer, which is aimed at creating repeat business, Mr. Dalton said.

“I was really pleased with the fact that this was more territorial, more segmented to my area,” said Lynn Sanders, the owner of the Earth Wise Nutritional Centers outlet in Lake Forest, Calif.

Ms. Sanders is offering customers $40 worth of vitamins for $20. “In today’s economy people want to get the best buys,” she said. “Once I get someone in the door I have the opportunity to show what I’m all about.”

There are also incentives for those who register their friends. SaverTime’s 5-3-2 Network allows a user to get a credit of 2 to 5 percent of the dollar amount of purchases made by people associated with that user’s network.

The service will be available on Monday in about 20 areas in California, and the company says it is training nearly 400 sales representatives to sell Web coupons in addition to print coupons.

People interested in SaverTime deals can sign up for an e-mail alert or go to the Web site. A SaverTime mobile application is in the works, and the site encourages people outside California to “tell us where you would like to see us next!”

 

The Media Equation: A Native Son Revitalizes His Paper

It was the only company that Mr. Klingensmith, an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, had ever worked for. After three decades, including stops at Sports Illustrated and Time, he was on the short list to become the next chief executive. When the job went to Ann Moore, he hung in for a while as executive vice president in charge of strategy and acquisitions. “It was a real job, it just wasn’t a very fun one,” he said.

So in 2008 at the age of 55, he took early retirement. He could have gone to work at any publisher in Manhattan, but instead, after a short time as a consultant, he moved to Minneapolis to become the publisher of The Star Tribune.

It wasn’t a move to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The newspaper had been through years of upheaval, churning through bankruptcy, publishers and lots of layoffs.

But what could have been a quixotic last fling has turned into something far more impressive: The Star Tribune is adding readers — the Sunday circulation grew 5.7 percent in the last audit and will most likely be up again a bit in the audit that will be out in few weeks — the business is making money and, get this, distributing money from its profit-sharing plan to its employees.

It helps that Mr. Klingensmith is a local boy. He grew up in “friendly Fridley,” a suburb of Minneapolis, and he is a serious Twins fan. He traded deeply paneled rooms with a view of Rockefeller Center and its fabled skating rink for a fourth-floor office festooned with Twins memorabilia and a view of the staff parking lots, one of which is decorated with a statue of Joe Mauer of the Twins, a local hero, and another of Lucy from Peanuts, reading a newspaper.

Even Lucy probably notices that it’s a smaller newspaper than it used to be. Once a reliable moneymaker for the Cowles family, The Star Tribune was sold to McClatchy for $1.2 billion in 1998. As the midsize newspaper business tumbled, The Star Tribune became a drag on earnings for McClatchy and it was sold to Avista Capital Partners for $530 million at the end of 2006.

The private equity firm loaded $500 million in debt on the property just before revenue dropped by almost half. There were extensive layoffs, interim publishers, and in January 2009 the newspaper, the nation’s 15th largest, filed for bankruptcy. Like Mr. Klingensmith, I grew up reading the newspaper and I found it gut-wrenching to watch.

The newspaper ended up in the hands of its creditors, including the investment firm Angelo, Gordon and Company, which also has stakes in the Tribune Company and Philadelphia newspapers.

By the time Mr. Klingensmith said yes to the publisher’s job at the start of 2010, $500 million in debt had been reduced to $100 million in the reorganization, costs were way down because of the cuts, and revenues from both advertising and circulation had begun to crawl back.

The reason the company had profits to share is that while ad revenue was down 9 percent in 2010, it was far less than the 15 percent that had been budgeted. According to David Brauer,? who covers the paper for MinnPost, a local news site, the difference yielded more than?$30 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2010. And daily circulation has remained essentially flat even though the price of the daily newspaper was raised to 75 cents from 50 cents in May. The Sunday newspaper, which did not increase in price, has gone from a low of about 477,000 in September 2009 to 504,600 in September 2010, according to audit reports.

“When I was talking to them about the job, I looked at the financials and thought it had a good shot,” Mr. Klingensmith said. “I actually thought that newspapers have a lot more life in them than they get credit for.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n