Media Decoder: Outcry Against a Tooth Fairy Web Site

LOS ANGELES — The Real Tooth Fairies have encountered a pair of fangs.

The advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood typically goes after the likes of Disney and McDonald’s, but its newest crusade centers on an unusually tiny company: TheRealToothFairies.com.

Aimed at girls 5 to 10 years old, the site sells themed merchandise (lost tooth organizer, $12.99) and offers games meant to promote kindness. For a fee, users can enter a role-playing world.

In a July 16 news release and Huffington Post column, the director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Susan Linn, criticized the Web company for what she termed its “sexualized” fairies, whom she found to be “largely preoccupied with appearance, shopping, boyfriends — and leg hair!”

Ms. Linn argued that exploiting a childhood institution was particularly crass.

But what made her really angry was an investor video she discovered in the recesses of the Web.

Prepared by the start-up for nonpublic use, the video discusses revenue opportunities associated with lost teeth, emphasizing the number of baby teeth that girls lose annually, about 200 million. “And biology guarantees that will never stop,” a voice says.

TheRealToothFairies.com had YouTube remove the video, and hoped to move on. The site’s founder, Marilyn Bollinger, a North Carolina social worker and children’s book author, did not want to discuss the video when reached by telephone.

“Our focus is on the positive,” she said. “We have such a sweet, sweet brand. We hear from parents that we’re making a lot of happy memories.”

But moving on can be difficult in the Internet age.

Last week, Ms. Linn kept up the attack on Twitter and Facebook, nudging bloggers and the news media to pay attention. She noted, for instance, that a shorter version of the video appears on the investment site Gust.com.

Her campaign might seem akin to shooting a flea with a cannon. Ms. Linn conceded that it was unusual for her organization to go after a start-up, but she said that the site was focused on growth, and that the stature of the people involved with it required her to take the site seriously.

Ms. Bollinger’s husband, Howard, a former Hasbro executive who is the start-up’s chief financial officer, and Paul Yanover, a former Disney executive and now president of Fandango.com, appeared in the video.

A spokesman for Mr. Yanover said he only had a brief consulting role and no longer had anything to do with the site.

Media Decoder: Weinstein Company Loses Appeal to Use Movie Title ‘The Butler’

Eliot Spitzer promises to spend plenty on the race for New York City comptroller without revealing where it comes from.

Mark Kozelek shares a song about his mom, who cleaned his ears, dropped him off at rehab and helped him buy a Les Paul.

Media Decoder: Weinstein Company Loses Appeal to Use Movie Title ‘The Butler’

Eliot Spitzer promises to spend plenty on the race for New York City comptroller without revealing where it comes from.

Mark Kozelek shares a song about his mom, who cleaned his ears, dropped him off at rehab and helped him buy a Les Paul.

Media Decoder: The Other Snowden Drama: Impugning the Messenger

As a pure story, it’s tough to beat the Snowden saga. Man of intrigue? Roger. Crusading reporter? Check. A powerful government in hot pursuit? Yessir. Unclear agendas by foreign countries? Most certainly.

And as Edward J. Snowden made his way across the globe with a disintegrating passport and newly emerged allies, Twitter was there, serving up a new kind of chase coverage, with breathless updates from hovering digital observers speculating about the fleeing leaker’s next move. All day Sunday, it was like watching a spy movie unfold in pixels, except it was all very real and no one knows how it ends.

Almost lost in the international drama was a journalistic one in which Glenn Greenwald, the columnist from The Guardian, found himself in the gunsights on a Sunday morning talk show. The episode was part of a continuing story about the role of the press in conveying secrets to the public.

If you add up the pulling of news organization phone records (The Associated Press), the tracking of individual reporters (Fox News), and the effort by the current administration to go after sources (seven instances and counting in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media), suggesting that there is a war on the press is less hyperbole than simple math.

For the time being, it is us (the press) versus them (federal officials), which is part of the reason David Gregory ended up taking a lot of incoming fire for suggesting on NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Glenn Greenwald may have committed crimes, not journalism, when he published leaks by Mr. Snowden.

“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” he said in the interview.

Mr. Greenwald responded assertively.

“I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” Mr. Greenwald responded.

“The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence — the idea that I’ve ‘aided and abetted’ him in any way.”

Mr. Gregory may have thought he was just being provocative, but if you tease apart his inquiry, it suggests there might be something criminal in reporting out important information from a controversial source.

In using the term “aided and abetted,” Mr. Gregory adopted the nomenclature of Representative Peter T. King, a Republican of New York who has argued that Mr. Greenwald should be arrested, lately on Fox News.

Writing in The Washington Post, Erik Wemple expressed deep skepticism about Mr. Gregory’s assumptions.

“The entire question of Greenwald’s ‘aiding and abetting,’ furthermore, collapses when considering what it would entail,” he wrote. “Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency. Over his years of work in intelligence, he developed an exquisite understanding of the government’s eavesdropping activities. Plus, he had passcodes and access privileges that came with his position.”

Mr. Gregory’s position on the show was that as a journalist raising questions he was “not actually embracing any particular point of view.”

“There’s a question about his role in this,” he said, referring to Mr. Greenwald. “The Guardian’s role in all of this. It is actually part of the debate; rather than going after the questioner, he could take on the issues. And he had an opportunity to do that here on ‘Meet the Press.'?”

The press is frequently accused of giving itself a pass, but the present moment would seem like a good time for a bit of solidarity. The current administration’s desire for control of information is not a new phenomenon, but at this juncture, there is a clear need for a countervailing force in favor of openness.

There will be, as Ben Smith pointed out on BuzzFeed, an attempt to depict the sources of information as rogues and traitors, a process that will accelerate now that WikiLeaks has begun assisting Mr. Snowden. “Snowden is what used to be known as a source,” Mr. Smith wrote. “And reporters don’t, and shouldn’t, spend too much time thinking about the moral status of their sources.”

Politicians would like to conflate the actions of reporters and their sources, but the law draws a very clear and bright line between the two in an effort to protect speech and enable transparency. Mr. Greenwald may have a point of view and his approach to journalism is through the prism of activism, but he functioned as a journalist and deserves the protections that go with the job.

Media Decoder: Hollywood’s Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed

As the blockbuster film season unfolds, every major studio has firearms of one sort or another in its marketing arsenal. At Sony Pictures Entertainment, Channing Tatum clutches a sidearm the size of Wyatt Earp’s as he walks Jamie Foxx to safety on the poster for “White House Down.”

At Paramount Pictures, Brad Pitt, zombie hunter, has an even bigger piece of personal artillery slung across his back in the promotional art for “World War Z.”

Johnny Depp packs a pistol in his pants on the poster for Disney’s “The Lone Ranger.” Melissa McCarthy grips what appears to be a full-blown grenade launcher in the advertisements for 20th Century Fox’s “The Heat.”

The glowing handguns on the art for Universal’s “R.I.P.D.” have a preternatural look; but what really gets your attention are those chillingly real guns being flashed by Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, standing back to back, on the poster for the same studio’s “2 Guns.”

Warner Brothers, whose “The Dark Knight Rises” was playing in Aurora during last July’s shootings, has been soft-pedaling weaponry on its posters lately (unless you count the robots and helicopters pounding each other in the ads for “Pacific Rim”).

Still, Ken Jeong had some hot handgun moments in the red-band trailer for “The Hangover Part III.”

After the discussion of gun violence and pop culture at a January meeting between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a number of entertainment executives, the Motion Picture Association of America, an industry trade group, bolstered its ratings system with a campaign to remind parents of the content advisories that accompany a movie’s letter rating.

But don’t look for any move to change the movies, or the high-caliber images used to sell them. “We believe our role is to help parents be informed of a film’s content, not to dictate the content in any way,” Kate Bedingfield, an M.P.A.A. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail last week.

MICHAEL CIEPLY

Media Decoder: Apple Is Said to Be Pressing to Complete Deals for Internet Radio

After months of stalled negotiations over its planned Internet radio service, Apple is pushing to complete licensing deals with music companies so it can reveal the service as early as next week, according to people briefed on the talks.

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Apple’s service, a Pandora-like feature that would tailor streams of music to each user’s taste, has been planned since at least last summer. But Apple has made little progress with record labels and music publishers, which have been seeking higher royalty rates and guaranteed minimum payments, according to these people, who spoke anonymously about the private talks.

While it is still at odds with some music companies over deal terms, Apple is said to be eager to get the licenses in time to unveil the service — nicknamed iRadio by the technology press — at its annual developers conference, which begins June 10 in San Francisco.

Apple has signed a deal with the Universal Music Group for its recorded music rights, but not for music publishing — the part of the business that deals with songwriting. Over the weekend, Apple also signed a deal with the Warner Music Group for both rights. It is still in talks with Sony Music Entertainment and Sony’s separate publishing arm, Sony/ATV, whose songwriters include Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

Representatives for Apple and the music companies declined to comment.

Apple’s Internet radio feature is expected to be free and supported by advertising, and would represent a relatively late arrival by the company into what has become a fast-growing — if low-margin — sector of the music business. Pandora has more than 70 million regular users, the vast majority of whom do not pay, and similar features have been introduced by Google, Spotify and the radio company Clear Channel Communications.

The licensing fees paid by Pandora have been a sore spot for music companies, which see promise in Apple’s service, particularly since it can be linked to sales through Apple’s iTunes store, but want higher rates. Publishers, for instance, are paid about 4 percent of Pandora’s revenue, but want as much as 10 percent from Apple.

Apple is said to be negotiating directly with the music groups because it wants more extensive licensing terms.

Media Decoder: Defying Naysayers, ‘Gatsby’ Proves a Box-Office Winner

LOS ANGELES — “If history is any indication,” a Forbes report read on May 3, “ ‘The Great Gatsby’ will bomb rather hard.” BoxOffice.com at one point projected very soft opening-weekend sales of about $24 million. Early on, several studios were so worried about the movie’s multiplex prospects that they passed on making it.

Oops.

“The Great Gatsby,” directed by Baz Luhrmann, has become the latest example of the Hollywood machinery getting audience interest wrong. “Gatsby,” adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel and starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is now expected to take in at least $330 million worldwide.

With that kind of box-office success, the movie should be able to generate $200 million or so more from ancillary sources like DVD sales and reruns on cable channels, studio executives said.

Profitability is another matter, affected by unknown factors, including how compensation for Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Luhrmann was structured. The movie was also expensive to make; executives who worked on “The Great Gatsby” contend it cost about $105 million after heftier-than-normal rebates from filming in Australia. Global marketing costs, after factoring in partnerships, ran $90 million. (Some insiders say those costs were substantially higher.)

Is it surprising that “The Great Gatsby” has succeeded? Apparently not to a lot of movie fans. Who would bet against Mr. DiCaprio in a flashy retelling of one of literature’s best-known stories?

A lot of people did. Village Roadshow, a film financier and production company, showed interest early on, agreeing to collaborate with Sony. But Sony, which had a flop with “How Do You Know” around the time “The Great Gatsby” was getting under way, decided it was too risky.

Members of Mr. Luhrmann’s management team said he then approached other studios but got one no after another: too expensive; mainstream audiences would not be interested; his last movie, “Australia,” was a disappointment.

Warner, with Village Roadshow, finally said yes, but only after Warner’s president of production, Greg Silverman, became an avid supporter of the project.

So, with the money now rolling in, is Mr. Luhrmann’s camp saying “told you so”? In true Hollywood fashion, it is gloating in private while trying — successfully, apparently — to get the word of its vindication out there.

Media Decoder: Equestria Girls, a My Little Pony Offshoot, in Its Movie Debut

The ponies, a Hasbro staple for 30 years, have experienced a resurgence of popularity lately, thanks in part to the TV series “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.” Hoping to build on that interest, Hasbro recently revealed plans for brand extension called Equestria Girls.

The new property will get the red-carpet treatment when it premieres as a full-length animated feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June. The movie, created by Hasbro Studios, the company’s production division, will then be released in more than 200 theaters nationwide; its trailer will start appearing in theaters on Wednesday.

“We are responding to the desire by our fans to experience the brand in more ways,” said John A. Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer. “They imagined themselves as which pony they would be or which pony they identified with the most.”

So Hasbro created Equestria Girls, a parallel world in which the My Little Pony characters were reconceived as teenage girls in high school. To maintain continuity, Hasbro retained the same creative talent, animation style and message of friendship.

“Our goal is to stay true to who those characters are,” said Meghan McCarthy, the head writer for the movie, adding that the high school setting allowed for new storytelling possibilities. “It’s new but still an extension of our mythology.”

The movie — titled “My Little Pony: Equestria Girls” — will be released on DVD later in the United States and other markets worldwide, followed by a television debut on the Hub network in the fall.

“It is a major strategic initiative for us,” Mr. Frascotti said, one that will feature toys, apparel, publishing and accessories. Multimedia components include an interactive Web site, content on YouTube and a partnership with Stardoll.com, a fashion Web site for girls.

Hasbro does not break out revenue for My Little Pony, but in its earnings statement in April, the company said its girls’ category rose 23 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, growth that was helped in part by the My Little Pony brand.

Equestria Girls offers an opportunity to build on that growth, said Michael Vogel, vice president for development at Hasbro Studios. “This is a bold new direction,” he said.

Media Decoder: Snooping and the News Media: It’s a 2-Way Street

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruitt, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, wrote in a letter of protest to Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general.

Given that the government has brought six cases against people suspected of leaking classified information, under an administration that has set a record for the use of the Espionage Act, the Associated Press story adds to a growing atmosphere in which working reporters always need to worry that someone is looking over their shoulder while they type. As Scott Shane wrote in The New York Times in 2012, the investigative aggression creates “a distinct chill over press coverage of national security issues as agencies decline routine interview requests and refuse to provide background briefings.”

In the instance of The Associated Press, its leaders, who were notified of the investigation last Friday, worried that the information obtained would “provide a road map to A.P.'s newsgathering operations and disclose information about A.P.'s activities and operations.”

Something about that has a familiar ring.

“On Wall Street, anonymity is critically important,” a former senior trader at Bear Stearns told The New York Times. “Secrecy and the ability to cover one’s tracks is paramount. If Bloomberg reporters crossed that line, that’s an issue.”

The clients who use Bloomberg terminals found out on Friday — the same day that the government sent The Associated Press notice that it had seized the phone records — that reporters at Bloomberg News had used terminals to find out when clients were signing in to the service. Besides Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks, who were among the concerned subscribers? The United States Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The hunted and the hunter, the hacked and the hacker, all of it seemed up for grabs.

So at the same time The Associated Press, a nonprofit news organization owned by various media agencies, was responding to government intrusion into its affairs, another news service, Bloomberg, was responding to complaints from clients that it was peering into private matters.

So many lines are being crossed in so many directions, it is tough to keep track of who are the victims and who are the perpetrators. There has always been a cat-and-mouse game between government and the media, between the coverers and the covered, but increased reliance on technology has weaponized something that used to take spycraft and shoe leather.

At Bloomberg, reporters could sit at their desks and use a keyboard function to see the last time an official of the Federal Reserve logged on. And the Justice Department obtained the records of The Associated Press from phone companies with no advance notice, giving it no chance to challenge the action. The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.

In the past year, in addition to the recent revelations about Bloomberg and the Department of Justice, there have been overreaches by Google into homes and computers and a host of breaches into private data, by both foreign states and private hacks. And as a general fact of modern living, Facebook knows who we like, Foursquare knows where we are and Twitter knows what we think. How long before data gathering moves from the front of our face — Google Glass — to inside our head?

Some people are newly worried that Big Brother is coming and others say he is already here, having taken up residence in the cloud, where he snacks on Big Data as he pleases.

It’s worth remembering that in scary movies (see “Minority Report”) about the coming informational Armageddon, it is not just government that is doing the lurking. Part of the reason the Obama administration, which promised to be the most transparent in history, has become such a spectral presence is that it is facing cybersecurity threats like none other in history. Journalists, aided by computers, can find and surround any source they like. Leaked information, which used to have to be photocopied or whispered, can be dumped by the terabyte into drop boxes by organizations like WikiLeaks and sent everywhere in an instant.

Bloomberg is a hybrid informational agency — a wired gatherer and distributor of information — that had $7.9 billion in revenue last year, mostly from its 315,000 subscriptions around the world. Its media division may play a small role in profits — it is viewed as a marketing tool for the terminals — but it has been hailed as a newsroom of the future with its open office plan and lack of architectural hierarchy.

There is an instructive paradox in that arrangement. To be seen is also to be under surveillance. Every keystroke, every entrance and exit to the building, every note on every story, is there for the seeing when you work at Bloomberg. Putting a phone call into Bloomberg H.Q., as I did this morning, is akin to calling the C.I.A. “Don’t e-mail me, don’t call me here, please,” said an editor there I know.

So, we have discovered anew that government will do what it needs to in a vain, but chilling, attempt to plug leaks. But best to keep in mind that the most ubiquitous threats to our privacy do not originate in some secret government bunker. In the media, in the general public, in business realms, we are keeping an eye on ourselves.

Media Decoder Blog: At The New Republic, Even Firings Enter the Digital Age

Just one year after the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, the magazine confirmed it had fired one of its top editors.

Timothy Noah, a former Slate reporter and senior editor at The New Republic, posted a tweet on Friday afternoon that read, “I just got fired from @tnr. Don’t have a clue why. Anybody got a job?”

Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, confirmed through a spokeswoman that Mr. Noah had been fired. He added in a statement “Tim Noah has been a strong voice for liberalism and a rigorous columnist for The New Republic. We’ve appreciated his passion and contribution to the magazine over the past two years and wish him the very best.”

Mr. Hughes, who has spent the last year revamping the near century-old publication, started to reconfigure its masthead last May. He lured back Mr. Foer to replace the magazine’s editor at the time, Richard Just. Since then, Mr. Hughes has been courting new writers to the magazine, including Walter Kirn, the author of “Up in the Air,” and Judith Shulevitz, a former editor of Lingua Franca. In January, Mr. Hughes unveiled a redesign that featured an exclusive interview with President Obama. This week, Mr. Foer said the magazine had passed the 50,000 mark for its circulation, which is a 43 percent jump from the year before.

While Mr. Noah did not respond to a request for comment, his friends on Facebook and Twitter voiced their support. One wrote, “You did nice work there. You’ll do nice work in your next gig. There’s no shame in getting fired. It happens to me all the time.”

Media Decoder Blog: Bertelsmann Acquires Full Control of BMG Music Company

Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is among the artists in BMG’s million-song music catalog.

8:41 p.m. | Updated

Bertelsmann, the 178-year-old German media giant that has been trying to remake itself for the digital age, announced on Friday that it would take control of BMG Rights Management, the music company it restarted in 2008, in a deal that values BMG at $1.4 billion.

Bertelsmann said it would buy the 51 percent of BMG that it did not own from its partner in the venture, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The companies did not disclose financial terms, but a person with direct knowledge of the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the purchase price was $700 million to $800 million, including the assumption of debt.

The deal signals a full return to the music business for Bertelsmann, whose other media properties include Random House and the magazine publisher Gruner & Jahr. After building the first incarnation of BMG, which stood for Bertelsmann Music Group, into a global powerhouse in the 1980s and ’90s, Bertelsmann sold most of its music holdings through a series of deals with Sony and Universal in the mid-2000s.

“We are bringing the music home to our group,” Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

BMG was revived in 2008, and the next year, K.K.R. made the first of its $270 million of investments in the company. BMG has made a string of acquisitions in music publishing, the side of the business that deals with copyrights for songwriting, and built a catalog of more than one million songs by artists like Johnny Cash, Carly Simon and Frank Ocean and Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas.

“We saw that music was going to make a comeback,” Philipp Freise, a K.K.R. partner who directs its European media business, said in an interview. “Everybody said music was going to die, but we said music will not die — it will grow.”

K.K.R.’s exit after four years was not unusual for it as an investor. But some analysts said they believed that the sale could have been precipitated by BMG’s losing out on some of the biggest music auctions of the last couple of years, including Warner Music, EMI and, most recently, the Parlophone Label Group, a part of EMI that it divested itself of. (BMG has also bought some recorded music assets.)

Stressing efficient administration and the licensing opportunities of a largely digital business, BMG has been a bright spot for Bertelsmann. Mr. Rabe has said that he expects BMG’s annual revenue to grow to more than $640 million in the next four to five years, up from about $390 million in 2012.

Bertelsmann is also in the process of merging its Random House publishing unit with Penguin, a division of Pearson, creating the world’s largest book publisher. And in January, Bertelsmann said it wanted to sell part of its stake in the broadcasting subsidiary RTL to help finance more digital expansion.

“Like any traditional media company, they need to find a digital story for the future,” said Alice Enders, a media analyst at the research firm Enders Analysis in London. “In music, once you scrap out the cost of physically producing and distributing content, what you have is a pure copyright exploitation model. That’s what BMG Rights Management is all about.”

Hartwig Masuch, BMG’s chief executive, said in an interview that with Bertelsmann as its sole owner, the company could be “more aggressive moving forward” in developing its business, particularly with more recorded music rights.

“What we initially envisioned for BMG was an integrated rights company based on nontraditional models,” he said. “The old world was about complex distribution structures. Now you can license multiple users and distributors. The key is not infrastructure but how good are you at monetizing and accounting for those rights.”

Media Decoder: Glenn Beck Begins Campaign to Urge TV Systems to Add His Web Channel

8:48 a.m. | Updated Glenn Beck is beginning a campaign to get his Internet channel, TheBlaze, onto cable and satellite television systems across the country, and the one system that already carries the channel, Dish Network, is backing him up.

The campaign will begin on Monday when Mr. Beck starts promoting GetTheBlaze.com, a Web site that asks fans to contact their television provider and request the channel. He will talk about the site on his nationally syndicated radio show and link to it on his social networking Web sites.

“You probably pay good money every month to your TV provider for access to channels like MSNBC and Al Jazeera America — channels that you might not watch, or even agree with,” Mr. Beck wrote in a letter on the Web site. “Adding TheBlaze will ensure that you and your family have a source of news and analysis that you can trust and that doesn’t betray your values.”

Mr. Beck has previously indicated that he plans to position the channel as a libertarian news and entertainment source, which would put it into relatively direct competition with Fox News Channel, where he hosted a hugely popular 5 p.m. talk show for nearly three years. The plan is rather audacious, partly because TheBlaze is owned by Mr. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, not by a media conglomerate like Fox’s parent, News Corporation.

Twenty months ago Mr. Beck left Fox and started GBTV, the subscriber-only Internet channel that he later renamed TheBlaze. Within a year he had 300,000 subscribers, no small feat for any Web site. But by then he’d also decided he wanted to get back on old-fashioned TV. In September 2012 Mr. Beck announced a carriage deal with Dish, the first of what his company hoped would be many such deals. Simply stated, the economics of television are better — TV channels get small per-subscriber fees, whether or not the subscribers ever watch, and the advertising possibilities are enormous.

Dish has a period of exclusivity with TheBlaze, so no other cable or satellite system can carry the channel quite yet. The companies haven’t disclosed how long this period lasts, but it is probably ending soon, because TheBlaze is starting its campaign now. Such campaigns are attempted all the time by small, independently-owned channels, often with little success. Ordinarily cable and satellite systems are reticent to carry new channels; in fact, the trend is in the other direction, toward dropping independent channels altogether.

But what Mr. Beck has — and what other small channel owners don’t have — is an audience of millions on the radio and on the Internet. And some help from the Dish Network. In a statement provided by a spokesman for the channel, Dave Shull, the Dish senior vice president of programming, said, “TheBlaze and Glenn Beck bring a unique perspective to Dish’s broad spectrum of political programming on all sides.” When the channel was added last fall, he said, “We had customers sign up quickly, and we saw new customers join Dish. In fact, subscriptions attributable to TheBlaze outpaced our projections by 80 percent, proving that Dish is giving customers what they want with a choice in programming, not to mention the technology to choose how to watch it.”

Even with Dish’s endorsement, it remains to be seen whether other cable and satellite systems — such as DirecTV, Comcast and Time Warner Cable — will agree to carry TheBlaze. They may simply point out that viewers can find it on the Internet.

An end to Web streaming was something Al Jazeera accepted when it bought Current TV in January for an estimated $500 million. (Mr. Beck said he tried to bid for the channel, but was rebuffed by Current’s co-founders, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.) Al Jazeera currently streams its English-language news channel on the Internet free, but to make its cable and satellite distributors happy, it will stop doing so when it officially replaces Current this spring.

Then again, the Al Jazeera stream was free; the Internet stream of TheBlaze is only accessible to subscribers. Asked whether the channel would be taken off the Internet as a condition of gaining carriage on television, a spokesman said, “TheBlaze has no plans to do that at this time and believes that the continued success of the subscription platform proves to distributors the demand for our content.”

Along with the campaign announcement on Monday, TheBlaze said that Lynne Costantini, a former Time Warner Cable and Scripps Networks executive, was joining the channel as president of business development, to lead its effort to get on television.

The “Get TheBlaze” campaign will commence in phases and last for at least nine months. Mr. Beck wrote in his letter: “This journey for truth that we are on is much bigger than you and I; the future of liberty is hanging in the balance. All of us have a choice to make: sit on the sideline, or get involved.” He described TheBlaze not just as a family-friendly news and entertainment channel, but a cog in nationwide political change.

“If we succeed then we change the media. If we change the media, we control the debate. If we control the debate, we change politics. And if we change politics, we change the country,” he wrote.

TheBlaze has more than 40 hours of programming a week, including simulcasts of Mr. Beck’s radio show, a nightly show of his just for the channel, a nightly panel conversation about the news, and a couple of documentaries and reality shows. In January Mr. Beck described ambitious plans for the channel, involving more news reporting (“We are currently looking for our own Woodwards and Bernsteins,” he said) and a libertarian bent. “I consider myself a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said.

Media Decoder Blog: Online Piracy Alert System to Begin This Week

The Copyright Alert System, a program of escalating warnings and prods against people suspected of online copyright infringement, is finally going into effect this week, more than a year and a half after the plan was announced as part of an agreement between the entertainment industry and five major Internet service providers.

The Center for Copyright Information, the organization created to administer the system, announced on Monday that the Internet providers would begin putting it in place “over the course of the next several days,” though it gave no specifics. The Internet companies are AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable.

In the alert system, media companies monitor online traffic through a third party and can complain to Internet providers if a file is downloaded illegally. The suspected violator is then given the first of six warnings, some of which carry “educational” messages and must be acknowledged. After the fifth and sixth warnings, the customer’s Internet speed can be slowed to a crawl.

The Center for Copyright Information says it will not ask for repeat offenders’ Internet access to be blocked, but most service providers have the right to do that if a customer violates its terms of service. The findings can be contested for a $35 fee, to be refunded if an appeal is successful.

The introduction of the alert system has been notably slow. Nearly a year passed before the group had a leader in place, and its own prediction failed when it said in October that the system would be coming in two months. Part of the reason for that might be the relationships between media companies and Internet service providers, which in the past have often been adversarial over issues of piracy and control.

So-called graduated response programs like the Copyright Alert System have been tried in other countries, with mixed results. France’s Hadopi law, passed in 2009, set up a system of three “strikes,” culminating in a fine. More than a million warnings have been issued through that plan, but a recent government report said that its effects were “hard to evaluate precisely.”

Media Decoder Blog: Andrew Sullivan Leaving Daily Beast to Start Subscription Web Site

3:06 p.m. | Updated Andrew Sullivan, the prolific writer who has built up his following for his blog “The Dish” first at the TheAtlantic.com and then at the Daily Beast, announced on Wednesday he is striking out on his own with a Web site dependent entirely on subscription revenue.

Mr. Sullivan said in an announcement posted on “The Dish” that starting on Feb. 1, he plans to charge readers $19.99 a year or whatever they might want to pay to subscribe to his site. He said that he spent the last dozen years blogging and trying to figure out how to make his venture profitable. He tried pledge drives for six years and then shifted to partnering with larger institutions like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. He said he decided to make this change now since his contract with the Daily Beast was finished at the end of 2012.

“We felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism,” Mr. Sullivan wrote. He added “the only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.”

Mr. Sullivan is starting his new company, Dish Publishing LLC, with his two colleagues and executive editors, Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner. Mr. Sullivan said that he has received the support of Tina Brown, the Daily Beast’s editor in chief, and Barry Diller, its owner, to keep “The Dish” on the Daily Beast Web site through Feb. 1. Then the site will shift to his old address, www.andrewsullivan.com.

Mr. Sullivan said in an e-mail message that he could have remained at the Daily Beast under a new contract. But he said that as he and his two partners started negotiating, they “began to see the overpowering logic of real independence.”

He added that the Dish is going to stay in New York City, where he and his two business partners are based, “for the foreseeable future.” He added, “We need to be together as a group.”

In his announcement, he wrote that the new venture had decided not to depend on advertising for revenue because of “how distracting and intrusive it can be, and how it often slows down the page painfully.” He added that advertisers also require too much effort for a small company. “We’re increasingly struck how advertising is dominated online by huge entities, and how compromising and time-consuming it could be for so few of us to try and lure big corporations to support us,” he wrote.

Media Decoder Blog: Al Jazeera Is Said to Be Acquiring Current TV

5:48 p.m. | Updated Al Jazeera is putting the final touches on a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago.

If the deal is completed, Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Rather than simply use Current to distribute its English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel based in New York, according to people with knowledge of the deal negotiations. The channel may be called Al Jazeera America. Roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States, while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English.

Al Jazeera may absorb some Current TV staff members, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But Current’s schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring.

For Al Jazeera, the impending acquisition is a coming-of-age moment. A decade ago, the Arabic-language channel was reviled by American politicians for showing video tapes and messages from al Qaeda members and sympathizers. Now it is acquiring an American channel.

“They really want to be able to compete for American viewers, and they have to find some way to get on,” said Philip Seib, the director of the center on public diplomacy at the University of Southern California and the author of “The Al Jazeera Effect.”

Mr. Seib said access to Americans is important both for economic reasons, for the channel’s advertisers, and for “the journalistic legitimacy of their venture.”

The plan will bring Al Jazeera, which is financed by the government of Qatar, into closer competition with CNN and other news channels in the United States.

To date, the country’s cable and satellite distributors have been reluctant to carry Al Jazeera English. It is available in just a handful of cities, including New York and Washington. To change that, Al Jazeera has lobbied distributors, called for a letter-writing campaign by supporters and promoted its widely praised coverage of the Arab Spring.

Acquiring Current TV, and thus its distribution deals across the country, would solve this dilemma for Al Jazeera, at least partially.

Current is hard to find on many cable lineups, and some analysts say it’s at risk of being dropped by some companies because of low ratings, but it would give Al Jazeera a foothold on the country’s cable and satellite service lineups. Then Al Jazeera could revamp the channel and promote it as a new American-based news source.

Representatives for Current TV and Al Jazeera did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There was no immediate word about the sale price.

Current was conceived in 2005 after Mr. Gore and another co-founder, Joel Hyatt, bought the small cable news channel Newsworld International. Current’s owners, along with Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, include several venture capital firms and two major distributors, Comcast and DirecTV.

After several years in obscurity showing viewer-submitted videos and documentaries, Current tacked to the left in 2011 with the hiring of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. A year later, Mr. Olbermann was fired, but a liberal minded channel made in his image remained. The channel now simulcasts liberal radio shows in the morning and features news-talk shows in the evening by Joy Behar, Eliot Spitzer, Jennifer Granholm and others.

None of the shows have drawn significant audiences. On a typical night in 2012, about 42,000 people were watching the channel, according to Nielsen. Mr. Spitzer quipped to a reporter from Mediabistro last month, “Nobody’s watching, but I’m having a great time.”

At the end of October, Current confirmed that it was considering selling itself. Mr. Hyatt said in a statement at the time, “Current has been approached many times by media companies interested in acquiring our company. This year alone, we have had three inquiries. As a consequence, we thought it might be useful to engage expertise to help us evaluate our strategic options.”

The New York Times Company mulled a bid for the channel, but decided not to do so.

In recent months, uncertainty has plagued the staff of Current, which is based in San Francisco. Mr. Spitzer, the 8 p.m. host, remarked that someone needed to buy the channel. Ms. Granholm, the 9 p.m. host, renewed her contract for just three months. Plans for new programming at other hours have stalled. After the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., the channel replayed the gun documentary “Bowling for Columbine” dozens of times.

If the deal is completed, Current’s programming will continue for about three months. Then an international feed of Al Jazeera English will be simulcast on the channel. Sometime later in 2013, the rebranded Al Jazeera news channel, with 60 percent American programming, will start.

Al Jazeera intends to open new bureaus across the United States to support the American programming. The news operation currently has bureaus in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago.

Media Decoder Blog: Tribune, Bankruptcy Over, Is Expected to Sell Assets

 6:12 p.m. | Updated

Analysts and prospective buyers are preparing for horse trading to begin over the Tribune Company’s newspapers now that the company, whose holdings include The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, has emerged from bankruptcy protection.

Tribune, which completed its bankruptcy paperwork on Monday, has not announced the sale of any assets, but it is likely to do so in the next several months so it can streamline its business, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of DeSilva & Phillips, a media banking firm.

The troubled state of the newspaper industry makes those assets most likely to be sold, he added. Less clear, however, is whether the company will sell them all at once or by region, for example selling The Chicago Tribune with Chicago magazine.

“The company is too large and complex right now, coming out of bankruptcy,” Mr. Phillips said. “What’s needed is a more focused strategy.”

Aaron Kushner, chief executive of Freedom Communications and publisher of The Orange County Register in California, confirmed on Monday that he was eager to buy Tribune’s newspapers. He would not say whether he had had any specific conversations with Tribune Company executives.

He said that from what he had gleaned from bankruptcy court filings and public pension documents, it seemed likely that Tribune would sell its newspapers as a group. That is because the company has such enormous and complex pension obligations and corporate overhead that it would be difficult to untangle them and sell properties individually.

“We’re interested in all of the papers, though obviously, from an outside perspective, we have not seen the numbers,” Mr. Kushner. “If papers are sold, someone has to be responsible for the pensions.”

The company’s reorganization plan was approved in July by the United States Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. It received final approval from the Federal Communications Commission in November.

The announcement on Monday ended a four-year process for the company. Its assets were tied up in court while the media industry continued its digital transformation. In a letter to employees, Eddy Hartenstein, the company’s chief executive, acknowledged that the last four years “have been a challenging period.”

“You have been resilient, dedicated to serving the company, our customers and your fellow employees,” he said. ”You are what sets Tribune apart from our competitors.”

The company also announced a seven-member board. The directors include Mr. Hartenstein and Peter Liguori, a former chief operating officer of Discovery Communications, who is expected to be named chief executive. Bruce Karsh, a founder of Oaktree Capital Management, which is a major shareholder in the company, also sits on the board, as does Ross Levinsohn, a former interim chief at Yahoo.

Tribune said it expected to resolve details about board members’ responsibilities at its first meeting in the next few weeks. The company is emerging from bankruptcy protection with a $300 million loan to finance its continuing operations, as well as a $1.1 billion loan to finance its reorganization. According to a company statement, Tribune plans to give former creditors 100 million shares of new class A common stock and new class B common stock.

The end of the bankruptcy has led to plenty of speculation about who might buy Tribune’s newspapers, with names like Rupert Murdoch and David Geffen floated as contenders. Mr. Phillips said he was skeptical that Mr. Murdoch would be a serious bidder because his company had so much else on its plate.

“I would think they would take a look,” said Mr. Phillips. “But when it comes to stepping up and making a substantial offer, I would be surprised. They’re already splitting off the publishing business from the entertainment business.”

He said that Mr. Geffen, too, would probably not acquire Tribune properties “unless the price is really attractive, because he’s not someone who has run a newspaper company previously. So I think it will be more of a challenge. The price he’s probably willing to pay based on advice from his advisers is going to be lower than what someone else is willing to pay.”

Mr. Kushner praised Tribune’s board and said he expected that “one of the first things that they’ll be trying to figure out is how the different parts of the Tribune company really work well together or separately.”

Mr. Kushner, who bought The Orange County Register last summer, said he was focused on buying large metropolitan newspapers. He said that while Tribune newspapers appeared to be profitable, how they would remain profitable was unclear, as with many newspapers.
At The Register, Mr. Kushner said, he tried to increase revenue by strengthening relationships with subscribers.

For example, he said, the newspaper gave its readers more value by increasing its pages 40 percent in the last year. It also spent $12.4 million sending $100 checks to its subscribers that they could in turn make payable to favorite local nonprofit groups. He said enhancing a paper’s relationship with subscribers would help drive subscriptions and, ultimately, advertising.

“Our basic view is that we add more value,” said Mr. Kushner. “This is the only path that we can have revenue grow.”

Media Decoder Blog: Irving Azoff to Leave Live Nation

Irving Azoff, the executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, the concert and ticketing giant, is leaving the company, Live Nation announced on Monday.

As part of his exit, Liberty Media, already one of Live Nation’s largest shareholders, will buy 1.7 million of Mr. Azoff’s shares, giving Liberty a 26.4 percent stake in Live Nation. According to recently filed corporate disclosure documents, Mr. Azoff controlled about 2.6 million shares in Live Nation, either directly or through a family trust.

Mr. Azoff, 65, has been one of the most powerful executives and artist managers in music for four decades, and Live Nation has been only his most recent endeavor. Along with Michael Rapino, who remains the company’s chief executive, Mr. Azoff helped organize the merger in early 2010 of Live Nation — then largely a concert promotions company — and Ticketmaster, which also included Mr. Azoff’s Front Line management business.

Live Nation will continue to own Front Line, but Mr. Azoff will take some of his longtime management clients with him, including the Eagles, Christina Aguilera, Van Halen and Steely Dan. Mr. Azoff said that leaving would relieve him of what he described as burdensome corporate duties, and let him work again in his preferred mode as an entrepreneur.

“It’s no secret that I haven’t been a fan of public companies for some time,” Mr. Azoff said by phone from Mexico, where he was spending the holidays. “I looked at my calendar for the beginning of next year and I was able to clear 90 days for things that went into dealing with a public company, which I can now devote to productive work.”

He cited “taxes and estate planning” as the reasons for leaving on the last day of the year.

Mr. Azoff will join the board of Starz, the cable television company also owned by Liberty Media. Mr. Azoff also serves on the boards of Clear Channel Communications and the media and entertainment company IMG.

Live Nation announced Mr. Azoff’s departure after the market closed on Monday, but news of it was first reported by Bloomberg News before the end of the trading day. Live Nation’s stock closed at $9.31, up about 3.7 percent for the day.

Live Nation did not announce who would be taking over as chairman in Mr. Azoff’s absence.

In addition to its holdings in Live Nation, Liberty has a major stake in Sirius XM Radio, and has spent the last several months in the process of taking that company over. But when asked whether he might take over from the recently departed Mel Karmazin as chief executive of Sirius, Mr. Azoff scoffed.

“I’m never going to work for a public company again,” he said. “Any public company.”

Media Decoder Blog: Arbitron Deal Extends Nielsen's Reach Into Consumer Habits

With its $1.26 billion acquisition of Arbitron, announced on Tuesday, Nielsen is buying much more than the most widely followed radio ratings service. It is also extending its already substantial reach into the overlapping forms of media through which people consume their entertainment and news, and spend their money — information that is essential to advertisers.

Nielsen is best known for its television ratings, but its various branches also track an array of consumer product sales, like books and music, as well as consumers’ habits online and through their mobile devices. Just on Monday, for example, Nielsen announced a new system with Twitter to rank TV shows by their levels of social-media chatter.

Arbitron, meanwhile, has remained primarily focused on radio consumption, which has held surprisingly strong in the Internet age as people stay plugged in to their favorite radio stations, particularly while driving.

According to Arbitron’s most recent statistics, more than 241 million people in the United States, or about 92 percent of the population ages 12 and over, listen to the radio each week. And unlike television, the vast majority of the ads on broadcast radio are for local businesses.

Through the deal with Arbitron, Nielsen should be able to track even more of consumers’ media consumption and buying habits. In a presentation to investors and Wall Street analysts, Nielsen said that by adding Arbitron’s radio data to its portfolio, it would be able to increase the total amount of time in a given day it could track the listening and viewing habits of the average American to seven hours from the current five.

“That is a very big deal when your job is to measure how consumers ultimately form and change behaviors,” David L. Calhoun, Nielsen’s chief executive, said in a conference call. “And it’s that linkage of buy and watch that ultimately allows us to provide those insights.”

In early trading, Arbitron’s shares shot up by nearly 24 percent, reflecting the premium Nielsen will pay for the shares; Nielsen’s stock was up about 1.3 percent. Nielsen is active in more than 100 countries and last year had $5.5 billion in revenue. Arbitron is a much smaller company, but has substantial profit margins; last year it generated $53 million in net income on $422 million in revenue.

As some analysts see it, the challenges for the combined companies will include measuring the growth of online audio and linking Arbitron’s value for local advertising with Nielsen’s more extensive and national data.

For now, Internet radio services like Pandora are not measured by Arbitron in “apples to apples” terms alongside broadcast radio stations, which Pandora has complained puts them at a disadvantage with advertisers and media-buying agencies. But those measurements may become essential as online listening grows and is embraced by even the biggest radio broadcasters, like Clear Channel Communications.

Laura Martin, an entertainment and media analyst with Needham & Company, said that Nielsen’s expertise and its aggressive push into online markets could be an advantage in exploiting Arbitron’s local radio data.

“It’s interesting that they will have the management I.Q. of Nielsen in charge of local advertising possibilities,” Ms. Martin said. “The Internet is moving at the speed of light, and the next big promise of advertising cash is sitting in local. In Nielsen’s hands those relationships may turn into something that Arbitron didn’t think of.”

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Media Decoder Blog: Murdoch Publishing Wing Shows Loss of $2.1 Billion

Potential investors got a glimpse of the financial challenges that Rupert Murdoch’s soon-to-be spun-off publishing company could face. In a regulatory filing, News Corporation said its publishing businesses lost $2.1 billion in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

The disclosure was filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, as the media conglomerate prepares to split its publishing assets from its more lucrative entertainment segments. The new, stand-alone company will retain the name News Corporation and include newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The Times of London; the HarperCollins book publisher; and a handful of fast-growing Australian pay-television assets.

The entertainment company, which will be called the Fox Group, will include 20th Century Fox studios, Fox Broadcasting and cable channels like Fox News and FX. That company has annual revenue of more than $23 billion.

The losses in the publishing business came largely from $2.8 billion in impairment and restructuring charges, mostly related to the closure of the tabloid News of the World in Britain, which was shut in July 2011 after revelations of widespread phone-hacking. Revenue at the publishing business fell to $8.65 billion in fiscal year 2012, from $9.1 billion a year earlier.

The S.E.C. Form 10 filing moves the company closer toward the split and gives shareholders a better idea of what the stand-alone publishing company, called the “New News Corporation” in the report, will look like financially when the spinoff is completed in mid-2013.

The company warned investors that “newspaper and advertising circulation revenues have been declining, reflecting general trends in the newspaper industry.” In addition to industrywide headwinds, the company said illegal activity at its British newspapers “could damage the New News Corporation’s reputation and might impair its ability to conduct its business.”

As additional civil lawsuits related to phone hacking are filed in Britain, News Corporation said it “is not able to predict the ultimate outcome or cost associated with these investigations.”

The fallout from the phone-hacking scandal, and an investor base that increasingly expressed disapproval of the newspaper business, prompted Mr. Murdoch to announce the split of his $60 billion media conglomerate in June.

“The filing of the Form 10 is another important step forward in the evolution of our company and in the establishment of two independent global leaders in Fox Group and the new News Corporation,” said Mr. Murdoch, who serves as chairman and chief executive of the combined News Corporation.

Earlier this month Mr. Murdoch said Robert Thomson, a confidant and the former managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, would serve as chief executive of the new News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch will continue to serve as chairman of both companies and chief executive of the Fox Group.

In his new role Mr. Thomson, 51, will have a base salary of $2 million with a performance-based $2 million bonus, according to the filing.

In addition to hundreds of newspapers on several continents, the publishing company will also include Australia’s RealEstate.com.au; Fox Sports in Australia; 50 percent of Foxtel, the No. 1 pay-TV provider in Australia; and 44 percent of Sky Network Television in New Zealand. Analysts expect those businesses to drive profits and support some of the weaker newspapers.

Fox Sports had revenue of $3.6 billion and Foxtel of $2.5 billion in 2012. Those results were not included in the publishing company’s 2012 earnings, but will contribute to the new company’s bottom line.

Media Decoder Blog: Awaiting Merger With Random House, Penguin Settles E-Book Case

Penguin, trying to ensure a clean slate before its planned merger with Random House, announced late Tuesday that it was settling a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice over the pricing of e-books.

In a terse statement the company said, “Penguin has always maintained, and continues to maintain, that it has done nothing wrong and has no case to answer.”

Nevertheless, the company said, it was agreeing to settle because of the impending merger between Random House, a division of the German media company Bertelsmann, and Penguin, a division of the English conglomerate Pearson. That deal, in which Bertelsmann will assume 53 percent control of the new company, was announced this past October as the publishing industry begins to consolidate to try to better meet the online challenge from Amazon.

The company said in its statement, “It is also in everyone’s interests that the proposed Penguin Random House company should begin life with a clean sheet of paper.”

In April, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit accusing five major publishing houses and Apple of conspiring to fix the price of e-books. These five had moved from a wholesale pricing model that allowed retailers to charge what they wanted to a system that allowed publishers to begin setting their own e-book prices, what was known as “agency pricing.”

The publishers had been looking for a way to prevent Amazon from pricing books below their actual cost, a practice that they said would hurt the entire industry over time. But the government said that the publishers “conspired” in e-mails, in telephone conversations and at lavish dinners to keep e-book prices artificially high.

Three big publishing houses — HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette — settled with the Justice Department, but Penguin, Macmillan and Apple decided to fight the charges, until Penguin reversed course on Tuesday.

In the terms of a settlement that a judge approved in September, the three publishers that settled agreed to end contracts with Apple and with e-book retailers that contained restrictions on their ability to set prices, and agreed not to make such restrictive contracts for the next two years.

In May, when Penguin filed its response in United States District Court in New York, it argued that it was Amazon that treated books as “widgets.” It further argued that Amazon was “predatory” and a “monopolist” and that the government’s case was based on “innuendo.”

Penguin said in its statement on Tuesday that it still believed that agency pricing was just. “Penguin continues to believe that the agency pricing model has encouraged competition among distributors of both e-books and e-book readers and, in the company’s view, continues to operate in the interest of consumers and author.” it said.

The terms of the settlement with the Justice Department were not available, but people with knowledge of the details said that they were the same as those received by the other three publishers.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post carried an erroneous byline.