Times Announces Changes in Washington

The New York Times on Wednesday announced a reorganization of its Washington bureau, including the elevation of Carolyn Ryan to bureau chief and the start of two new ventures.

In a memo to the staff, Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said that Ms. Ryan, currently the top political editor, would succeed David Leonhardt, who will head up one of the new initiatives, in a role that combines data with analytical reporting.

Ms. Ryan, 48, was named to her most recent post in May after serving as metro editor since January 2011. Before that she was the metro desk’s political editor and helped oversee the coverage of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with a high-end prostitution ring; that coverage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for breaking news reporting. She joined The Times in 2007 from The Boston Globe, where she was deputy managing editor for local news.

In her new role as bureau chief, Ms. Ryan will continue to oversee a team of reporters in New York, along with the Washington bureau.

Mr. Leonhardt, 40, will become managing editor of a new venture that Ms. Abramson said would “be at the nexus of data and news” across a range of subjects, including economics, politics, policy, education and sports. Mr. Leonhardt’s new team is expected to include “reporters, graphics editors, economists, historians and political scientists.”

Before becoming Washington bureau chief in September 2011, Mr. Leonhardt wrote the Economic Scene column for The Times and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011. Mr. Leonhardt joined The Times in 1999 after working at BusinessWeek and The Washington Post.

The Times is also introducing an early-morning news tip sheet, a digital product about the day’s happenings in Washington that will be supervised by Carl Hulse, currently a deputy in the Washington bureau. The tip sheet is expected to resemble the New York Today report, which provides a roundup of news and events in the New York metropolitan area.

According to the memo, the Washington report will “harvest the best tweets of bureau reporters and aggregate other elements from the Washington news report.” Mr. Hulse will also continue to write for The Times as chief Washington correspondent.

Mr. Hulse, 59, was previously the chief congressional correspondent for The Times. Mr. Hulse joined The Times in 1986 after working for The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

According to the memo, “existing and new staff” will work on both new ventures. The new positions will be effective on Dec. 15.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the column David Leonhardt wrote before becoming the Washington bureau chief. It is the Economic Scene column, not Economic Sense.

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Notes of Sorrow in Changes at Steinway

For pianists who obsess about all things Steinway — is a brand-new Steinway as good as one from the 1920s, and are those made in Germany preferable to those made in New York? — the developments had the force of a one-two punch. Pianists cherish memories of the first time they set foot in the building and its famous basement, where generations of professional pianists have chosen the Steinways they played at concerts and recording sessions.

They also worry that new owners could meddle with Steinway’s time-honored and time-consuming manufacturing methods. Steinway spends almost a year building each grand piano, and pianists fret that an assembly line speedup at the company’s two factories would spoil what they prize: the delicacy of a Steinway’s touch, the colorations of its sound.

“There’s concern any time there’s a shift,” the pianist Gary Graffman said. “There’s no way of my knowing: will they take as much care with each piano as they have in the past?”

It is a question that has reverberated through the music world since the $438 million deal for the company was announced last week. The offer, which came from the private equity firm Kohlberg & Company, would take Steinway private. It has been traded under the stock symbol LVB, for Ludwig van Beethoven, since Steinway went public in 1996.

Steinway is now 13 days into a 45-day “go-shop” period, during which it can consider other bids, and at least one portfolio manager whose firm has a stake in Steinway has said the price is too low. Shares of Steinway closed at $36.18 on Friday, $1.18 above Kohlberg’s $35-a-share offer.

Kohlberg is “not contemplating any changes to any of the manufacturing operations,” said a Kohlberg investment partner, Christopher W. Anderson, adding that there had been no discussion of closing or moving the factories in Astoria, Queens, and Hamburg, Germany. He would not comment on whether Steinway’s top management would remain after the takeover. (Kohlberg’s chairman, James A. Kohlberg, has been a director of The New York Times Company since 2008.)

Beyond the balance sheet, Mr. Anderson, 38, has an interest in the company’s products. “I grew up playing on a Steinway,” he said in an interview this week: an upright that once belonged to his great-grandmother. And on Friday, he posted a letter online to Steinway’s dealers in which he said one of Kohlberg’s “main goals for Steinway” was to “preserve and support everything that makes a Steinway piano special.” He also said that by going private, Steinway would be “free from the short-term financial constraints of publicly-traded companies” and would have more latitude to “plan and invest with a long-term perspective.”

The deal would give Steinway its fifth set of owners. In 1972, the Steinway family — descendants of the immigrant instrument maker who started the company in 1853 — sold it to CBS. That marriage eventually soured, and in the 1980s, Steinway was sold to an investment group from Boston. Steinway changed hands again in the 1990s, when it was bought by what was then Selmer Industries, a band-instrument manufacturer with plants in the Midwest and South. The combined company was led by two investment bankers who had controlled Selmer, Kyle R. Kirkland and Dana D. Messina.

Mr. Messina served as chief executive until 2011, stepping down after he and John M. Stoner Jr., the president of the band-instrument division, made a bid to buy everything but the company’s piano operations. Steinway began a review of strategic alternatives that ended last December, when it turned down the Stoner-Messina offer and said the company was not for sale. Then came the overture from Kohlberg.

Under Mr. Messina’s replacement — Michael T. Sweeney, a former presidenet of Starbucks in Britain who is chairman of the holding company for The Minneapolis Star-Tribune — Steinway’s financial picture brightened. The company posted a profit of $2.7 million in the first quarter of 2013, up from $590,000 in the first quarter of 2012. Piano sales rose 2.9 percent worldwide.

To keep pace with orders in Europe and Asia, Steinway has increased its work force by almost 20 percent in the last year at the Hamburg plant, and Mr. Sweeney said that leaving either New York or Hamburg “would be pushing the self-destruct button for an investor.”

He said the building on 57th Street was another matter. He called it old and forbidding — it opened in 1925 down the block and across the street from Carnegie Hall — and a financial burden. Steinway is shopping for space in Manhattan, convenient to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and Mr. Sweeney said he wanted a showroom where the pianos would look like “sculptural objects,” along with a recital hall and practice rooms.

Steinway must vacate the 57th Street space by the end of next year, and many pianists are sorry it is leaving. “I’m sure I’m with everybody else on this, that it’s a shame that building will no longer be Steinway Hall,” the pianist Emanuel Ax said. “One of the two times that I met Horowitz for five seconds was when they did a celebration in that building after his 1965 return” to performing, at Carnegie Hall. “That was very, very meaningful.”

Mobile Apps Drive Rapid Changes in Search Technology

Google has repeatedly made the argument — and the commission agreed — that the speed of change in the technology industry made it impossible for regulators to impose restrictions without stalling future innovations.

Exhibit A is the mobile device. Nowhere has technology changed as rapidly and consumer behavior as broadly. As people abandon desktop computers for mobile ones, existing tech companies’ business models are being upended and new companies are blooming.

“Mobile is very much a moving target,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has been a paid adviser to Google. “This is a market in which new competitors come in a week’s time.”

When the commission began its investigation 19 months ago, for instance, the iPhone did not have the Siri voice search, Apple did not have its own mapping service and Yelp’s mobile apps had no ads. By the time the inquiry concluded, all of that had changed. Google had new competitors on all sides trying to chip away at its hold on the mobile search and advertising market.

Still, Google is even more dominant on mobile phones than on desktop computers. It has 96 percent of the world’s mobile search market, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use. It collects 57 percent of mobile ad revenue in the United States, while Facebook, its nearest competitor, gets just 9 percent, according to eMarketer.

But, analysts say, as people change their search habits on mobile devices — bypassing Google to go straight to apps like Yelp’s, for example — that dominance could wane, or a competitor could swoop in and knock Google off its perch.

“It’s important to recognize that many mobile apps are really vertical search engines,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital media analyst at the Altimeter Group. “It is impossible to really say anyone dominates a section of mobile in a secure way right now.”

On cellphones or tablets, for instance, people increasingly skip Google altogether in favor of apps like Flixster for movie times or Kayak for flights.

Apple is taking on mobile search with Siri on the iPhone, which can answer questions about the weather or search for nearby restaurants. With its new mapping service, Apple has also entered local search.

On Friday, Blekko, a search start-up, introduced an app called Izik for Apple and Android devices. It tries to make searching more tablet-friendly by showing images instead of just links, and making it easier to swipe through many pages of results with a finger.

On mobile devices, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, “the user experience is so different that we think it opens things up. On your desktop, if it doesn’t look like Google, you think that’s not a search engine. On a tablet, it’s just vastly different.”

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said at a news conference Thursday that the speed of change in the tech industry meant that “you want to be careful before you apply sanctions.”

The commission also considered Google’s partnerships with cellphone makers like Samsung and HTC that license Google search on phones, so that a search box shows up on the home screen. In the end it decided not to take action against Google.

Some Google critics said that even though the competitive landscape is different on mobile devices, it should not have influenced the government’s analysis of Google’s behavior on the desktop Web.

“There’s no doubt that mobile applications, including Yelp’s, give consumers the ability to bypass the major search engines and go directly to the best provider of the service they’re looking for,” said Vince Sollitto, vice president for government relations at Yelp. Still, he added, “I don’t see how that impacts how someone is acting anticompetitively on the desktop.”

(One of Google’s concessions to the federal agency, that it would allow other Web companies to ask Google not to show their content in its own vertical search products — a chief complaint of Yelp’s — applies to mobile as well.)

But others said antitrust enforcement in the 21st century needs to be more agile.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting from Seattle.

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Some Gun Retailers Make Changes After Newtown Shootings

Dick’s Sporting Goods, a chain with more than 500 stores, said in a statement that “during this time of national mourning” it was stopping gun sales, and withdrawing them from display, at its store closest to Newtown. The company said it was also temporarily ceasing sales of modern sporting rifles nationwide.

 And Walmart.com removed its information page on the Bushmaster .223, a semiautomatic rifle said to be used by the gunman, Adam Lanza, in the Newtown killings.

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, said it removed the information page on Bushmaster “in light of the tragic events.” However, it said it had made no changes to its sales policies on guns and ammunition.

 A spokesman for Wal-Mart, David Tovar, said that the company remained “dedicated to the safe and responsible sale of firearms in areas of the country where they are sold,” and that the company “had not made any changes to the assortment of guns we sell in select stores.”

Walmart had recently been increasing its emphasis on gun sales, after a five-year period where it had backed away from them.

In 2006, the company stopped selling guns in most of its American stores, saying there was little customer demand for the items.

 But in 2011, it reversed that decision, saying it wanted to appeal to hunting enthusiasts, and began selling guns at more than half of its stores.

Mr. Tovar said that the company was a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. As part of that, the company takes video recordings of gun sales, conducts background checks on employees selling guns and takes other steps to help keep guns away from criminals.

 Still, Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and other Arizona residents last year, bought ammunition for a Glock gun at a Walmart the morning of the shooting.

Walmart.com’s removal of the Bushmaster .223 information page was first reported by The Nation.

A spokesman for Cabela’s, another large chain that sells guns, did not immediately return requests for comment on Tuesday. An information page at Cabela’s featured the Bushmaster .223 on Tuesday.

Bass Pro Shops’ site showed information about other guns on Tuesday but no Bushmaster-brand guns; last month, though, it offered a Black Friday special on a Bushmaster M4 Patrolman for $949.99. A spokesman said in an e-mail that the company had made no changes to its Web site.  

A Dick’s Sporting Goods spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

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Three judges ? instead of the entire county judiciary ? have been named as defendants by a Northeast Pennsylvania man who has filed a lawsuit over Lackawanna County's guardian ad litem program.

Wealth Matters: Advisers Caution Against Hasty Decisions in Advance of Tax Changes

But financial advisers say that in their rush to do something this year, investors may end up with regrets.

“Any time you make a decision purely for tax reasons, it has a way of coming back and biting you,” said Mag Black-Scott, chief executive of Beverly Hills Wealth Management. “Could you be at a 43 percent tax on dividends instead of 15 percent? The straight answer is yes, of course you could. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if they increase just slightly?”

Various proposals are on the table, but the taxes the wealthy say they worry most about are an increase in the capital gains rate to 20 percent from 15 percent, which would affect investments like stocks and second homes; an increase in the 15 percent tax on dividends; and a limitation on deductions, which would effectively increase the tax bill. For the truly wealthy, there is also the question of what will happen to estate and gift taxes.

In addition, the health care law sets a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on investment income for individuals with more than $200,000 in annual income (and couples with more than $250,000). Taking taxes on capital gains as an example, Ms. Black-Scott, who started her career at Morgan Stanley in the late 1970s, said people needed to remember that the rates were 28 percent when Ronald Reagan was president. “If they go from 15 to 20 percent, is it really that bad?” she asked. “You need to say, ‘Do I like the stock?’ If you do, why would you get rid of it?”

Here is a look at some of the top areas where short-term decisions based solely on taxes could end up hindering long-term investment goals.

APPRECIATED STOCK Many people have large holdings in a single stock, often the result of working for a company for many years. And the stock may have appreciated significantly over that time. But if they are selling now solely for tax reasons, advisers say they shouldn’t. The stock may continue to do well and more than compensate for increased capital gains.

But there is an upside to an increase in the capital gains rate: wealthier clients may finally be pushed to diversify their holdings. “If you have 75 percent of your wealth in one stock, then it’s a really appropriate time to think about this,” said Timothy R. Lee, managing director of Monument Wealth Management. If the increased tax rate “is a motivating factor for some people, O.K. Letting go of that control and the pride that goes with it is a really difficult decision.”

Selling stock now may also make sense when it is in the form of stock options set to expire early next year. “Do you want to take the risk the price will drop in January?” asked Melissa Labant, director of the tax team at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “What if we have a fiscal cliff or a change in the markets? If you’re comfortable, do it now.”

Some investors may also fear that higher taxes will drive all stocks down. Patrick S. Boyle, investment strategist at Bessemer Trust, said there was no historical link between tax increases and stock market performance.

In the most recent three tax increases, he says, “the market has actually gone up in the six months before and after.” He added: “It’s not that tax rates aren’t important. They are. It’s just that there are so many other things going on that are more important than tax policy.”

MUNICIPAL BONDS Bonds sold to finance state and local government projects are tax-free now and will be tax-free next year. That is no reason to load up on them.

Tax-free municipal bonds have always been attractive to people in higher-income tax brackets. Now, advisers fear that individuals just above the $200,000 threshold, people who say they do not feel wealthy but will probably be paying higher taxes on their income and investments, will try to offset that increase by moving more of their investments into municipal bonds.

Beth Gamel, a certified public accountant and executive vice president at Pillar Financial Advisers, imagined a case where people in higher tax brackets, thinking they were acting rationally, sold stocks this year to take advantage of the lower capital gains rates and then, to avoid higher taxes next year, put all or some of that money into municipal bonds. Maybe they outsmart the tax man, but they do so at risk to their retirement.

“It will be very difficult for them to reach their long-term goals,” she said, “because the yield on muni bonds is lower than stocks over time.”

Or as Will Braman, chief investment officer of Ballentine Partners, said of this trade-off: “It’s not about minimizing the taxes but maximizing the after-tax returns.”

He suggested that people use their deductions to reduce what is owed from taxable securities.

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Three judges ? instead of the entire county judiciary ? have been named as defendants by a Northeast Pennsylvania man who has filed a lawsuit over Lackawanna County's guardian ad litem program.

Suit Over Lackawanna Co. Guardian Ad Litem Changes Defendants

Three judges ? instead of the entire county judiciary ? have been named as defendants by a Northeast Pennsylvania man who has filed a lawsuit over Lackawanna County's guardian ad litem program.

Rajan, Adviser to India, Urges Changes to Economy

But instead of drawing a rebuke from India’s often thin-skinned leaders, he got a job offer. In August, Mr. Singh, who has frequently sought Mr. Rajan’s advice, called and asked him to take a leave from his job as a professor at the University of Chicago to return to India, where he was born, to help revive the country’s flagging economy. Within weeks, he was at work as the chief economic adviser in the Finance Ministry.

Analysts say the appointment of an outspoken academic like Mr. Rajan, along with the recent push by New Delhi to reduce energy subsidies and open up retailing, insurance and aviation to foreign investment, signal that India’s policy makers appear to be serious about tackling the nation’s economic problems.

Mr. Rajan has advocated changing India’s financial system, which is dominated by state-owned banks, by among other things loosening government restrictions on foreign banks and other financial institutions. He has also been critical of the country’s crony capitalism, likening its business tycoons to Russia’s oligarchs. He has argued that India needs to build stronger, impartial agencies to make the allotment of licenses and natural resources more transparent.

And India might finally be ready to make such changes, he said in an interview in his office here.

“I believe that one of the virtues of a functioning democracy is that they prevent things from getting too bad,” he said. “When things get bad, democracy creates the space to make improvements.”

Economists say Mr. Rajan, and his boss, the recently reappointed finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, face daunting challenges in their effort to revive the slowing economy, which is expected to post growth of 5.5 percent this year, down from an average of 7.7 percent a year over the last decade. The credit rating agencies Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings have warned that they may downgrade India’s sovereign debt to junk status if it doesn’t bring its ballooning budget deficit under control.

Many of the government’s proposals, including reduced subsidies for food and fuel, are deeply unpopular. Moreover, the governing alliance, led by the Indian National Congress Party, recently lost its majority in the lower house of Parliament, which will make it hard to enact legislation.

“Most emerging market governments only carry out reforms when they have their backs to the wall,” said Ruchir Sharma, an executive at Morgan Stanley and author of the recent book “Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.” “The government is under siege and they are reacting to that.”

Though Mr. Rajan’s current post does not carry any executive authority, his return to India has attracted attention because many policy analysts consider him to be the leading candidate to take over the top job at India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, next year when the current governor, Duvvuri Subbarao, retires.

Mr. Rajan, 49, became famous in the economics profession for his prescience in warning about the growing risks in the financial system at a Federal Reserve conference in 2005, three years before the failure of Lehman Brothers. He argued that innovations and deregulation appeared to have made the global financial system riskier, rather than safer and more stable as many economists and top policy makers like Alan Greenspan then believed.

The son of an Indian diplomat, Mr. Rajan grew up around the world and in New Delhi, earning degrees from prestigious Indian universities before studying economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first big policy job came when he was appointed the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Since 2008, he has been an external adviser to Mr. Singh, who is his highest-placed champion in India and who also asked him to lead a committee to propose changes to the country’s financial system.

Jim Yardley contributed reporting.

Suit Over Lackawanna Co. Guardian Ad Litem Changes Defendants

Three judges ? instead of the entire county judiciary ? have been named as defendants by a Northeast Pennsylvania man who has filed a lawsuit over Lackawanna County's guardian ad litem program.