Disappointing Fall for ‘Rock Center,’ a News Program With Big Ambitions

The ambitious NBC newsmagazine was scheduled to be shown for the final time on Friday night. Within NBC News, employees expressed a sense of disappointment — not so much in the quality of the program, but that it was not rated highly enough to remain on the network schedule. To those who invested much in producing the show, its demise raises doubts about whether any new newsmagazine can succeed on network television these days.

To that point, Rome Hartman, the founding producer of “Rock Center,” said in an interview: “I hope that’s not true. I sure hope that somebody figures it out.”

“Rock Center” was the first new prime-time newsmagazine to be introduced by any network since CBS added “60 Minutes II” in 1998. Mr. Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” had been eager to try something in prime time, and when Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in 2011, he got his chance. For Comcast, giving the go-ahead to “Rock Center” was, among other things, a way to provide clear support to the network news division it had just acquired.

The newsmagazine had its premiere on Halloween. Unlike CBS’s “48 Hours” and NBC’s “Dateline,” which are mainly about crimes and court cases, “Rock Center” presented a wide array of stories each week and was closer to the “60 Minutes” model than anything else on television. But the comparisons to “60 Minutes” were rarely complimentary; “It’s a very hard standard to match,” Mr. Hartman said.

More important, “60 Minutes” was able to find its footing four decades ago, before the days of cable and Internet competition. It has a protected Sunday night time slot that often gets a big ratings lift from sporting events that are shown beforehand.

“60 Minutes II,” on the other hand, was canceled in 2005. And “Rock Center” was canceled in May, shortly before NBC announced its schedule for the television season that starts in September. With an audience that sometimes slipped below three million people, the network could not justify another season of “Rock Center.”

At a time when audiences have far more choices than ever before, online as well as on TV, the people involved with “Rock Center” may have simply overestimated the public’s appetite for taped news stories in prime time. Said one former NBC executive: “You can’t launch a serious newsmagazine anymore. Those potential viewers, if they’re around, they’re watching cable news.”

There is no shortage of niche news and information programming on cable. CNN, for instance, will show a new documentary series from Morgan Spurlock this Sunday. HBO recently granted a second season to a youthful newsmagazine, “Vice,” and OWN has “Our America,” hosted by Lisa Ling. These programs, though, do not have the sweep of a network newsmagazine.

If the decision to cancel “Rock Center” was not surprising, it was still dismaying to Mr. Williams and to others on the staff, some of whom will lose their jobs after Friday’s final broadcast. (Many others will be absorbed by other NBC News programs.) One staff member said Mr. Williams felt insulted by the network’s decision; another said what pained Mr. Williams most were the layoffs. Staff members were told not to talk to the news media, so those who did speak did so on condition of anonymity.

An NBC spokeswoman said on Thursday that Mr. Williams was not available for an interview about the program’s accomplishments. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the end of “Rock Center.”

Staff members expressed pride in the program, asserting that it was a rare outlet for interviews and investigations that lasted longer than a few minutes. (Typically the program had three to five stories an hour. Once in a while the hour was devoted to a single subject, like one show titled “Mormon in America.”)

Groupon Narrows Its Loss After String of Disappointing Results

The company also reported that its net loss in the first quarter narrowed from a year earlier.

Shares of Groupon jumped 10.6 percent, or 59 cents, to $6.18 in after-hours trading.

Groupon said its first-quarter revenue rose 7.5 percent, to $601.4 million, from $559.3 million a year earlier. Groupon was expected to generate revenue of $590 million, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

The company posted a net loss of $4 million, or 1 cent a share, in the latest quarter, compared with a net loss of $11.7 million, or 2 cents a share, a year earlier.

Consolidated segment operating income, a closely watched measure of Groupon’s profitability, came in at $51.2 million in the latest period. Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, was expecting this figure to be about $26 million.

Groupon’s North American revenue jumped 42 percent, while international revenue fell 18 percent.

“Revenues were slightly better than expected, with North America growth a lot better, while international is definitely still slower,” said Aaron Kessler, an analyst at Raymond James.

The company, one of the most celebrated Internet market debutantes of 2011, fired Andrew Mason, its co-founder and chief executive, in February after a string of disappointing results wiped out three-quarters of its market value. Groupon, which has lost several other key executives, is seeking a new permanent chief executive.

Ted Leonsis, the company’s interim co-chief executive, said on Wednesday that Groupon’s board had formed a special committee that had begun a search for a new chief.

Groupon’s current leadership team is “gelling very very nicely,” giving the search committee more time to find “the ideal long-term C.E.O.,” Mr. Leonsis said in a conference call with analysts and investors.

Groupon shares hit a record low late last year, but have rallied strongly since then, partly because Tiger Global, a top technology-focused hedge fund firm, took a stake of about 10 percent in the company.

Under Mr. Leonsis, and his counterpart, Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon is trying to turn around its struggling European business, while continuing to expand in the United States. Analysts expect a slimmed-down company under the new leadership.

After Disappointing Reports, Zynga Bets on Draw Something 2

The company continues to lose money, employees and gamers, who no longer want to play its games. Analysts soberly warn that Zynga desperately needs a series of new mobile hits to improve its profitability and restore some of the luster of its earlier years. Earnings reports in recent quarters have been dismal.

This quarter was no exception. The company reported that its revenue was down 18 percent from the year-ago quarter, results that prompted shares to slip in after-hours trading. Zynga’s number of daily active users, or people who logged into its games once a day, dropped 21 percent. However, it did report a small profit.

But the company hopes that a new game, which it is releasing Wednesday evening, will be the beginning of a new chapter — one flush with profits and praise from users — that will help it regain some of the footing in the gaming industry that it helped shape.

The new game is a sequel to Draw Something, the popular, turn-based drawing game that has entertained millions of players who sketched images for their friends in a modified, touch-screen version of Pictionary. Last March, Zynga paid $180 million to buy Draw Something, which was created by a New York start-up, Omgpop. Then it watched as players lost interest in the once popular game and took their time elsewhere.

Although the company says the game still has millions of users worldwide, it is betting that the new version will bring back former fans who had become bored.

The success of Draw Something 2 is more about salvaging the remains of an expensive acquisition. It is a crucial test to see whether Zynga can spin any of its former traction on the Web to mobile — essential if the company wants to remain relevant and continue as a competitive gaming company in the future.

Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, a global trading firm, said it is normal for players to lose interest, especially when there is no shortage of games across an assortment of consoles, phones, tablets and hand-held devices. None of the top games currently charting in the iTunes App Store are games developed by Zynga, he said, but rather by relatively unknown upstarts.

“Why aren’t those Zynga games?” he said. “Why can’t they make great hits on mobile? They are saying they are a mobile-first company and, yet, they haven’t been able to launch a hit mobile game.”

For the new game, Zynga added new drawing tools and accessories as well as features that make Draw Something 2 more closely resemble a social network, with buttons to allow them to share their creation on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In addition, users can find and follow other people who are playing the game, browse their shared drawings and “like” and comment on them.

Zynga has also enlisted celebrities on this version of the game, including the pop performers Will.i.am and Carly Rae Jespen, so that their fans can see their drawings through the application as well.

“We want to reactivate people who played and loved Draw Something 1 but lapsed,” Travis Boatman, a senior vice president of mobile at Zynga, said in an interview at the company’s New York headquarters.

Zynga is going all out for the release of the new game, with a partnership with Universal Pictures around the coming animated film “Despicable Me 2” to show related advertisements in the game as well as base drawing challenges around the movie.

Caitlin Turosky, a marketing manager at Zynga, said advertising deals like that one had great potential. Zynga currently makes money by showing ads in the free versions of its games, by selling premium versions of its games and by allowing players to make in-app purchases. But eventually, Ms. Turosky said, the company could even show players advertisements based around the topics and objects they are sketching.

Zynga is also experimenting with games using real money , but those efforts are largely located in the United Kingdom.

In the company’s earnings report, it said it earned just a penny a share, or $263.6 million in revenue. During the same quarter of last year, the company reported revenue of $321 million. Even so, the company beat analysts’ expectations, who estimated that the social gaming giant would report revenue of $203 million and a loss of 4 cents a share. But Wall Street was unimpressed; the stock fell slightly in after-hours trading. The company also posted a modest profit of $4.1 million, compared with a loss of $85 million in the year-ago quarter.

“They’ve been going through a rough couple of quarters,” said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner Research who follows the company.