DealBook: Koch Brothers Make Offer of $7 Billion for Molex

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Business Briefing | Company News: UBS Settles Suit in Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy

Lots of great songs aren’t “about” anything, writes Adam Schlesinger of the band Fountains of Wayne.

China tries a market fix for its dirty air.

Warner Brothers Announces New Studio Leadership

LOS ANGELES — Warner Brothers on Monday announced a new leadership team at the studio, while sending employees an e-mail that said Jeff Robinov, who has been president of the motion picture group, “will no longer serve” in that position.

The company’s public announcement said responsibility for the movie group will be divided among Sue Kroll, who will be president of worldwide marketing and international distribution; Greg Silverman, who will be president of creative development and Worldwide Production; and Toby Emmerich, who will continue as president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, while adding responsibility for the Warner theater operations.

The new lineup will report directly to Kevin Tsuijihara, who is chief executive of the studio, which also includes an extensive television and home entertainment operation.

The company’s internal e-mail stopped short of saying that Mr. Robinov would leave the company; his departure has been widely expected since Mr. Tsujihara won the chief executive’s post after an internal competition. But associates of Mr. Robinov said last week that he might surface at another Hollywood studio, if he managed to exit contractual arrangements that tie him to Warner.

The shake-up follows the exit of Bruce Rosenblum as the president of Warner’s television group, and leaves Mr. Tsujihara, who took the chief executive’s post in March, replacing Barry Meyer, with a field that is cleared of his former competitors for the top job. He also has a management structure that is spread, in both movies and television, among lieutenants who had been overseeing operations under Mr. Robinov and Mr. Rosenblum.

Advertising: Sophomore Slump Afflicts Once-Promising TV ShowsDarren Michaels/Warner Brothers Television

Even with increased competition from cable television and online entertainment, networks could always count on new hits to be their strongest line of defense. And for decades the best thing about these new shows was that they continued to get stronger in their second season.

But in the television season about to end, some of the most popular new shows from a year ago have not built on their initial success — and in fact have wound up in premature decline.

The excitement that surrounded the introduction, in fall 2011, of comedies like “New Girl” on the Fox network, “Two Broke Girls” on CBS, and “Last Man Standing” on ABC, and the family-friendly drama “Once Upon a Time” on ABC, largely fizzled in season two, as their ratings fell.

That does not include the calamitous plunge for more marginal shows, like NBC’s “Smash,” which lost half its audience this year and was canceled last Friday.

“It’s something new for breakout hit shows to be down in their second year,” said Warren Littlefield, who put a generation of hits, including “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” on NBC when he led its entertainment division in the 1990s. “And yes, it’s alarming.”

Monday is the start of what is known as upfront week in New York, when the networks show off their new programming to advertisers. In the last few days, the networks announced the new shows they have ordered, and their message was unmistakable: We need new hits — a lot of them.

The four major networks will present a total of at least 41 new series next season, surely among the most to be introduced in one season. And they are not finished; other shows are expected to be announced within weeks.

Hit shows that gather momentum in their second seasons can create a cash cow that will produce revenue for years, even decades. Many shows that later emerged as cultural touchstones were helped by a jump in ratings in their second seasons, including “The X-Files,” “C.S.I.” and “The Simpsons.”

Not every new show last season faltered. The CBS drama “Person of Interest” grew, and ABC’s “Scandal” has caught fire this season. But most have skidded, for a variety of reasons.

Executives say one factor in the downturn for second-year shows has been the across-the-board ratings drop afflicting the industry. Every network is down in the category most closely watched by advertisers — viewers ages 18 through 49 — by margins ranging from 3 percent for CBS to 21 percent for Fox.

“Obviously, this has just been a terrible year for network television,” said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying company. “And it means this pilot season is the most important for the networks that I can remember.”

But there are other reasons. Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, pointed to changes in the content. “Each of those shows had different issues,” she said, referring to the slumping series. “Creative choices were made that impacted how viewers felt about them.”

Mr. Adgate said too much was asked of some of the new hits, such as counting on them to prop up whole nights. “In the case of ‘Two Broke Girls,’ I think CBS asked it to be a linchpin show,” he said. “It’s not a linchpin show yet, like ‘Big Bang Theory.’ ”

This season CBS moved “Two Broke Girls” to Mondays at 9 p.m., the so called tent-pole spot for that night. Even with delayed viewing counted, it is down almost a million viewers among the 18-to-49 group.

Mr. Adgate also cited the sweeping, often disruptive, issues network programmers face. “You have the competition from cable,” he said. “And now streaming video. And you have young people turning off their TVs. How can a show grow in that environment?”

Masha Gessen to Write Book on Tsarnaev Brothers

The first major book on the Tsarnaev brothers, the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, has been acquired by Riverhead Books, the publisher said on Wednesday.

Masha Gessen, in a 2005 photograph.

 It will be written by the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, the author of “The Man Without a Face,” a biography of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Ms. Gessen would seem well qualified to write the book: she is fluent in Russian and English, has reported from Chechnya — where the Tsarnaev family has roots — and emigrated to the Boston area when she was a teenager.

 According to the publisher, an imprint of Penguin Group, the book will “reconstruct the struggle that ensued for each of the brothers between assimilation and alienation, and their metamorphosis into a new breed of home-grown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere, a split in identity that opened them to a deadly sense of mission.”

 A spokeswoman for Riverhead Books, Jynne Martin, said Ms. Gessen was leaving her job at Radio Liberty to concentrate exclusively on the book on the two Tsarnaev brothers — Tamerlan, 26, who died after a shootout with the police and Dzhokhar, 19, who is being held in a prison hospital.

 No publication date has been set.

JULIE BOSMAN

Koch Brothers Making Play for Tribune’s Newspapers

The first two pieces of the strategy — educating grass-roots activists and influencing politics — were not surprising, given the money they have given to policy institutes and political action groups. But the third one was: media.

Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties.

The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

One person who attended the Aspen seminar who spoke on the condition of anonymity described the strategy as follows: “It was never ‘How do we destroy the other side?’ ”

“It was ‘How do we make sure our voice is being heard?’ ”

Guests at the Aspen seminar included Philip F. Anschutz, the Republican oil mogul who owns the companies that publish The Washington Examiner, The Oklahoman and The Weekly Standard, and the hedge fund executive Paul E. Singer, who sits on the board of the political magazine Commentary. Attendees were asked not to discuss details about the seminar with the press.

A person who has attended other Koch Industries seminars, which have taken place since 2003, says Charles and David Koch have never said they want to take over newspapers or other large media outlets, but they often say “they see the conservative voice as not being well represented.” The Kochs plan to host another conference at the end of the month, in Palm Springs, Calif.

At this early stage, the thinking inside the Tribune Company, the people close to the deal said, is that Koch Industries could prove the most appealing buyer. Others interested, including a group of wealthy Los Angeles residents led by the billionaire Eli Broad and Ronald W. Burkle, both prominent Democratic donors, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would prefer to buy only The Los Angeles Times.

The Tribune Company has signaled it prefers to sell all eight papers and their back-office operations as a bundle. (Tribune, a $7 billion media company that also owns 23 television stations, could also decide to keep the papers if they do not attract a high enough offer.)

Koch Industries is one of the largest sponsors of libertarian causes — including the financing of policy groups like the Cato Institute in Washington and the formation of Americans for Prosperity, the political action group that helped galvanize Tea Party organizations and their causes. The company has said it has no direct link to the Tea Party.

This month a Koch representative contacted Eddy W. Hartenstein, publisher and chief executive of The Los Angeles Times, to discuss a bid, according to a person briefed on the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was private. Mr. Hartenstein declined to comment.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.