The Media Equation: Campaign Journalism in the Age of Twitter

For modern political reporters, the end of the day never arrives. There is no single narrative, only whatever is going on in the moment, often of little consequence, but always something that can be blogged, tweeted or filmed and turned into content.

In a study he did while at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard last spring, Peter Hamby, a political reporter at CNN, writes about the extent to which reporters in the bubble — on the bus, on the plane, at the rope line — have become “one giant, tweeting blob.”

Mr. Hamby is not some old geezer pining for the good old days. At 32, he is deeply immersed in the digital frontier of modern journalism — with a somewhat provocative presence on Twitter — and would never argue for going back to the good old days, which he and others say weren’t all that good anyway.

But there are implications to the new world, some of which go beyond the hermetic confines of the campaign media bubble. Because of the relentlessness of the schedule, the limited access and the multiplatform demands, many of the boys and girls on the bus are in fact boys and girls. And the bus they ride is Twitter.

According to Mr. Hamby, Mitt Romney’s campaign never came to terms with the new dynamic. Instead, his organization responded with a defensive crouch that fenced off the candidate from the very people he needed to reach.

“With Instagram and Twitter-primed iPhones, an ever more youthful press corps, and a journalistic reward structure in Washington that often prizes speed and scoops over context, campaigns are increasingly fearful of the reporters who cover them,” he writes in the report. (And sometimes the threat doesn’t come from the credentialed press — the “47 percent” video that nearly tipped over the Romney campaign was shot by someone who was on the catering staff at a fund-raiser.)

Zeke Miller, the very talented reporter for BuzzFeed (now of Time) was 2 years old when Bill Clinton was first elected president, and 22 when he was tasked with covering Mr. Romney.

“I never thought that age and talent were mutually exclusive, and Zeke did a great job,” Mr. Hamby said in a phone call from South Carolina where he was doing some reporting for the 2016 presidential campaign (speaking of things that are out of control) as the governors and potential candidates Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal wheeled through. “But campaign reporters are incentivized for speed and feeding the beast,” he said.

The reporters and editors Mr. Hamby spoke to for his 95-page report said that the Romney campaign’s decision to fence off its candidate and to staff its press effort with equally young people was a grievous tactical error. Because the staff on the bus or plane would not really confirm or deny anything, that left many idle hands that created much mischief. In an attempt to exercise total control over the message, the campaign lost all control in bits and pieces, so when things went wrong, as they did during Mr. Romney’s European visit, they went very, very wrong.

In his report, Mr. Hamby wrote that the growing role of so-called embeds, or television reporters attached to the campaign, had infuriated the Romney staff. Previously restricted to support roles for broadcast and cable news networks, the young journalists were suddenly weaponized by Twitter, their own blogs and video posts. In his report, Mr. Hamby calls the embeds “anthropomorphic satellite trucks.”

“If I had to pick three words to characterize the embeds, it would be young, inexperienced and angry,” an unnamed Romney adviser told Mr. Hamby.

Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, told me, echoing remarks she had made to Mr. Hamby, that “the Romney campaign had a natural mistrust of the press, in part because he had seen his father savaged in the press decades ago.” She continued, “Beyond the mistrust, there was an outright hostility. They simply did not deal with reporters, and sometimes it was nasty, and I think they paid a price.”

And they often did so at a very high velocity. The death of the hallowed political reporter Jack Germond a few weeks ago served as a vivid reminder that the hallowed day story — a totemic representation of How It Was — has given way to a mosaic of posts on Twitter and blogs that form a running, constantly updated feed.

According to the report, the Obama campaign did a much better job of adapting to those realities than the Republican opponent. Rather than just waiting to see what bad tidings Twitter might bring, the campaign was often in the thick of things.

“A negative story or provocative Web video could fly from the desk of an Obama staffer to BuzzFeed and onto Twitter in a matter of minutes, generating precious clicks and shares along the way,” Mr. Hamby wrote in the report.

David Axelrod spent a fair amount of time as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign watching things blow up on Twitter and pushing back and promoting agendas there as well.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

The Media Equation: Time Warner and CBS, Fighting for Themselves

It’s a significant inconvenience for viewers, but it is not the only irritation in the by-now-familiar rumbles between the companies that own the pipes and the companies that make the programming that goes into those pipes.

While it may be disappointing that some of us will miss a rerun of “Dexter” on Showtime, which is owned by CBS, or the network’s summer hit “Under the Dome,” what makes it worse is the suggestion by both sides that they are only trying to stick up for us. Blacked-out Time Warner Cable customers were confronted by the following propaganda on their screens:

“The outrageous demands from CBS, the owner of Showtime and TMC, has forced us to remove it from your lineup while we continue to negotiate for fair and reasonable terms.”

“Forced us ...” Really, Time Warner Cable? It seems more like the business negotiation you were having with one of your suppliers did not yield the desired result and you’ve chosen to turn up the heat.

Not to be outdone, a statement from CBS made sure everyone understood that the network was really doing the people’s work in responding to the news:

“CBS remains resolute in the pursuit of fair compensation for our programming and will use the full resources available to us to make sure that Time Warner Cable subscribers are aware of its shortsighted, anti-consumer strategy.”

There’s more where that came from — “disinformation,” “voodoo mathematics” and “wildly inflated percentages” — but you get the idea.

Here’s an idea for both parties: Leave us out of it.

We know that you are fighting over lucre, not our inalienable rights as cable consumers. Pretending that you are fighting on our behalf rather than in the interests of your shareholders and executives is infantilizing and unbecoming. CBS is coming off another record year, Time Warner Cable’s stock is storming along, and the fight over retransmission fees is about how the pie is sliced, nothing more.

We have all grown used to the respective parties turning programming on and off as the negotiating table requires, but your bombast is tired, your motives are transparent and it’s clear that the public dimensions of this business conflict are far down the list of priorities.

Writing in the comments section accompanying the news in The New York Times, one reader spoke for many of us:

“These games of chicken are depressingly common among cable companies and networks across the country — made all the more obnoxious by the marketing spin from both sides intended directed at customers they assume to be economic illiterates. They are nothing more than battles between media behemoths over who can stick their hands deeper into the pockets of the remaining viewers beholden to their dying business models.”So, as you were, guys. Continue to bash in each other’s heads all you want. Just don’t pretend this is a noble crusade for the consumer.

The Media Equation: VCR’s Past Is Guiding Television’s Future

First, an appeals court declined to rehear a case in which broadcasters sought to close down Aereo, a company that allows users to record and play back broadcast television over the Internet. And then last week, another appeals court declined to stop Dish Network, the satellite television company, from selling a service called Hopper, which lets viewers automatically skip ads.

The cases are far from settled, but the stakes could not be bigger. Broadcast television as we know it now stands on two legs: advertising and retransmission fees from cable providers. With Hopper skipping ads and Aereo allowing for distribution over the Internet without payment, profits might go dark.

But the legal cases also seem to defy a kind of common-sense logic: how can insurgents use programming created by someone else to their own ends without sharing revenue?

The answer could get very complicated, very fast, but let’s try to make it simple. The dawn of consumer-controlled television began with the clunky, whirring Sony Betamax in the 1970s. Networks and program providers didn’t like consumers making copies of their movies and TV shows, but a landmark Supreme Court case in 1984 held that taping and time-shifting on the part of viewers was “legitimate fair use.”

Everything we have seen since extends from that decision to let consumers into the driver’s seat. It helps to think of the digital video recorder as more of a capability than a device. Both Aereo, which uses antennas to record broadcast television, and Hopper, which records prime-time programming, can be considered DVRs in the cloud, and the cord going to each home happens to be very long (Aereo over the Internet) or comes via satellite signal (Dish).

In each instance, the courts have more or less held, the customers are doing the programming and recording, and as such, have the right to do so even if they are doing so remotely through a third party.

If a revolution is under way, it is happening in increments. The VCR in the corner gave way to the DVR on the set-top box, and now some of the recording lives in the cloud and is pulled down to a variety of devices, including televisions, tablets, computers and phones.

That new paradigm was affirmed in a more recent case that began in March 2006, when Cablevision announced that it would allow subscribers not only to record whatever they wanted, but to do so remotely on hard drives centrally maintained by the company. Despite the Betamax precedent, the television and movie industry promptly sued Cablevision, claiming that the cable company — not the consumer — was making the actual copy.

A district court in New York agreed, so Cablevision appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007. Consumer control took a big leap forward the next year, when the court decided in favor of Cablevision, ruling that the people pushing the buttons were the ones making the copies and that the playback of those recordings was not a public performance that infringed on copyright.

“We are in a transition period, migrating toward a world where you are going to get the content you want without commercials,” said Jonathan Band, a lawyer and advocate for consumer choice. “But the truth of the matter is that you are still going to have to pay. The only thing really being argued is who gets the money.”

To his point, Fox has sued Dish, asserting that the Hopper ad-skipping service violates copyrights and breaches contracts, not to mention that the service takes direct aim at its business model.

CBS, NBC and ABC have also been pushing back in a variety of ways. Last Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California denied an appeal from Fox over a federal judge’s decision last fall not to grant an injunction against the Hopper technology.

The judge writing the opinion, Sidney R. Thomas, held that the copies being made met the “fair use” standard set by the Betamax case. The opinion also pointed out that although Fox owned the copyright on the programs, it had no such claim on the commercials, so skipping them did not constitute infringement.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

The Media Equation: In New Orleans, Times-Picayune’s Monopoly Crumbles

A year after announcing a plan to reorganize The Times-Picayune of New Orleans into a more digitally focused enterprise that produced a newspaper just three days a week — enraging local residents — its owners have added a new innovation: they will go back to producing a printed product every day.

“We are excited about this opportunity to extend our daily reach in print,” an advertising executive at the newspaper said in the announcement.

You don’t say.

This daily newspaper thing may be catching on. Last week, The Philadelphia Inquirer announced that it would begin printing a Saturday edition again after a nearly two-year hiatus.

The much ballyhooed unmaking of daily newspapering seems to be unmaking itself, and there’s a reason for that. Most newspapers have hung onto the ancient practice of embedding prose on a page and throwing it in people’s yards because that’s where the money and the customers are for the time being.

The industry tried chasing clicks for a while to win back fleeing advertisers, decided it was a fool’s errand and is now turning to customers for revenue. But in order to charge people for news, you have to prosecute journalism.

The belief that historic monopolies will hold together just on the basis of inertia has proved to be wrong. Newspapers that have cut their operations beyond usefulness or quit delivering a daily print presence have suffered. The audience has to be earned every day.

Newspaper publishing will never return to the 30 percent plus margins it once had, but some people believe there is a business model. Warren E. Buffett thinks that a 10 percent return is reasonable, now that sale prices have sunk.

Clearly, commanding a market to change on a dime because it suits your business plan does not mean readers will obey. Just ask Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, which is back to where it started in New Orleans with The Times-Picayune.

Except that the name Times-Picayune, which had stood for quality and civic constancy for decades, does not mean the same thing anymore. The vaunted Web site that was to be the lifeblood of the new enterprise remains a creaky mess, and the newsroom has been denuded of remarkably talented people.

Several of those people, including the two former managing editors of the newspapers, have gone to work for The Advocate, the Baton Rouge daily that has introduced a New Orleans edition. With a new, rich owner, it has taken aim at the market The Times-Picayune once owned.

Advance made its decisions up against some very dark trends in the business, but they were made with the dead-eyed arrogance of a monopolist in a much-changed world. Columbia Journalism Review described The Times-Picayune’s strategy of the last year as a “rolling disaster.”

It’s been a jaw-dropping blunder to watch. Advance misjudged the marketplace — the whole city and state went ballistic when the changes were announced — and failed to execute a modern digital strategy. Now it is in full retreat with new competition.

The company endlessly complicated what had been a simple proposition that has worked since the newspaper’s founding in 1837: deliver a printed bundle of its best efforts every day for a fixed price. The new distribution plan is hard to explain, but I will do my best.

On Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, a broadsheet called The Times-Picayune will be available for home delivery and on the newsstands for 75 cents. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a tabloid called TPStreet will be available only on newsstands for 75 cents.

In addition, a special electronic edition of TPStreet will be available to the three-day subscribers of the home-delivered newspaper. On Saturdays, there will be early print editions of the Sunday Times-Picayune with some breaking news and some Sunday content.

There’s more, but you get the idea — or not. It’s an array of products, frequencies and approaches that is difficult to explain, much less market.

The move was clearly defensive, unveiled the day before John Georges, the new owner of The Advocate, announced that it would expand its incursion into New Orleans. Since early fall, The Advocate has been publishing The New Orleans Advocate, with 20,000 subscribers.

Mr. Georges, a successful businessman who had less success running for governor of Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans, held a news conference on May 1 where he was accompanied by the governor, Bobby Jindal, and the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu. It was an indication that the home team had chosen sides and the once-beloved Times-Picayune was on the wrong side of the field.

Last July, Senator David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, wrote a brutal letter to Steven Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

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The Media Equation: For Media Moguls, Paydays That Outstrip Other Fields

Leaders in other industries may be well paid, but as the accompanying chart shows, they earn far less than their media counterparts.

Consider: the top 20 companies in the United States ranked by market capitalization include no media companies. But according to figures assembled for The New York Times by Equilar, which compiles data on executive compensation, media companies employ seven of the top 20 highest paid chief executives.

The names are familiar and the numbers are large: Leslie Moonves of CBS ($60,253,647), David M. Zaslav of Discovery Communications ($49,932,867), Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney ($37,103,208), Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom ($33,396,104), Jeffrey L. Bewkes of Time Warner ($25,670,263), Brian L. Roberts of Comcast ($25,087,379), and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation ($22,418,292).

Mr. Moonves was the third highest paid executive in 2012, bested by Larry Ellison, who made $96.2 million as head of Oracle, and Robert Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, whose recently announced compensation came to $64.9 million, although much of it is in the form of stock options that vest over five years.

(Activision produces video games like Call of Duty, so depending on how you define media, he might be the highest paid in the industry.)

Mr. Moonves may be in a league of his own, but he is hardly the only chief executive banking hefty compensation. The data indicates that average pay of the 10 highest paid chief executives for media companies was about $30 million, more than the captains of technology or finance and other industries, who average $6 million to $14 million less.

Median pay for the top 20 media executives rose 10 percent in 2012, adding to a very tall stack. Not bad for a legacy industry that is supposedly under sustained attack from insurgents and secular challenges.

Many media companies file their proxy statements at the last possible minute, perhaps part of an effort to avoid ending up on annual surveys of executive compensation, like the one The Times did at the beginning of April. But now that everyone is accounted for, it’s clear that being a king in the media realm comes with a very lucrative crown.

A few important caveats. The margins in the media business can be spectacular when things are going well — operating income at CBS for 2012 was $2.98 billion — which explains in part why the chief executive at Kraft, which is about the same size as CBS and had net earnings of $1.64 billion, makes $6.8 million, not $60 million like Mr. Moonves. Making cheese is fine, but running a media outfit that sells cheese through commercials is where the money is.

Clearly, the market had a crush on media stocks last year. The stock price of CBS rose 42 percent in 2012 while Mr. Zaslav oversaw a 55 percent rise at Discovery. Corporate boards have employment agreements that are usually generous when the arrows on the charts are pointing sharply upward.

“David’s compensation is almost entirely tied to stock appreciation,” said David C. Leavy, a spokesman at Discovery. “With the market continuing to value Discovery’s global growth prospectives, there has been tremendous value creation for shareholders.”

Media companies are prospering by selling their content through all kinds of windows with some raking in cable and retransmission fees that just keep growing. Most major players drove their stock price up 30 percent or more, partly because of excellent results and generous stock buybacks. As might be expected, the vast majority of the compensation comes in the form of performance incentives, as opposed to salary. (Although some of those incentives are very generously structured.)

And it would be churlish to suggest that running a huge company in an industry full of big bets, big egos and big challenges is simple. The media business requires mastering various platforms, multiple divas and, increasingly, myriad foreign markets.

But approving the right projects while monetizing those assets through various channels of distribution is not akin to creating a hardware market, as Apple did, or reinventing the advertising model, as Google has. An average annual compensation of $30 million seems like an entrepreneurial reward being paid out for management execution.

The compensation numbers can add up quickly, especially in an industry that is madly spinning off divisions. Companies may get smaller as they are split into discrete units — Viacom and CBS are two halves of what used to be one orange, as are Time Warner and Time Warner Cable — but the payouts continue to storm along.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

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The Media Equation: Cable TV’s Shift to Darker Dramas Proves Lucrative

We used to turn on the television to see people who were happier, funnier, prettier versions of ourselves — people like Mary Tyler Moore, or Ashton Kutcher. But at the turn of the century, something fundamental changed and we began to see scarier, crazier, darker forms of the American way of life.

Pinning down a realignment in the zeitgeist is dicey business, but more than a few people might point to Feb. 7, 1999. On that night on HBO, a character named Tony Soprano went with his daughter, Meadow, to inspect a college. It’s an oft-deployed television trope, but this time it came with a mind-altering twist. While at a gas station on the way to the college, Tony spotted a former associate who had become an F.B.I. informant and entered witness protection. In between the quotidian tasks of touring the campus, Tony hunted the man down and used his bare hands to kill him.

Rather than being revolted, audiences and critics began to chatter, and the episode, the fifth in the first season of “The Sopranos,” won an Emmy for outstanding writing in a dramatic series. The rest was television history.

It was not only a profound shift, but a highly lucrative one as well. Built on lush portraits of human pathology, subscription- and ad-supported cable channels gradually became hotbeds of quality and profits, even as broadcast networks withered.

Click on ambitious cable channels now, and you will find a high school science teacher who makes meth when he is not dissolving his enemies in vats of acid (“Breaking Bad”); a successful Madison Avenue advertising executive whose entire life is a lie (“Mad Men”); a forensics investigator who is a serial killer on the side (“Dexter”); and another New Jersey gangster, this one in Atlantic City, who is also very much the family man (“Boardwalk Empire”).

It has been a winning formula, but the execution risk is high. In “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” to be published in July by Penguin Press, the author, Brett Martin, suggests that the manic and dark shows, which were so riveting for audiences, were produced by men — and they were mostly men — who were as tortured and sometimes as despotic as the antiheroes they hung their plots on.

Mr. Martin suggests that there is a fundamental lesson about where greatness comes from. If you want to create original programming, you are going to have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of some very original characters. Artists, and that’s what they were, require a wide berth, even when tens of millions of dollars is at stake.

In this new order, writers suddenly became director-producers, filling their writing rooms with talented cronies, who may or may not have had television experience. Crews would stand by for days while the creators mulled details and handed out freshly printed pages of entire new scenes. Directors, studio executives, even the actors themselves became game pieces in the creator’s effort to build a television version of the universe he saw in his head.

“This isn’t like publishing some lunatic’s novel or letting him direct a movie. This is handing a lunatic a division of General Motors,” one television veteran told Mr. Martin, remaining anonymous presumably because he or she hoped to make more television — and more money — with said lunatics.

What becomes remarkable in retrospect is not just the rise of a new kind of storytelling, but the realization that an entire industry was built and controlled by writer-producers, men who typed for a living. Among others, Mr. Martin recounts the rise of David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos”; David Milch, who came out of “NYPD Blue” to create “Deadwood”; David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who created “The Wire”; and Matthew Weiner, a “Sopranos” alumnus who conjured “Mad Men.”

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The Media Equation: In Boston, CNN Stumbles in Rush to Break News

It’s a common impulse, although less common than it used to be. The news audience has been chopped up into ideological camps, and CNN’s middle way has been clobbered in the ratings. The legacy networks’ news divisions can still flex powerful muscles on big stories, and Twitter and other real-time social media sites have seduced a whole new cohort of news consumers.

But the biggest damage to CNN has been self-inflicted — never more so than in June, when in a rush to be first, it came running out of the Supreme Court saying that President Obama’s health care law had been overturned. It was a hugely embarrassing error.

Still, when big news breaks, we instinctively look to CNN. We want CNN to be good, to be worthy of its moment. That impulse took a beating last week. On Wednesday at 1:45 p.m., the correspondent John King reported that a suspect had been arrested. It was a big scoop that turned out to be false.

Mr. King, a good reporter in possession of a bad set of facts, was joined by The Associated Press, Fox News, The Boston Globe and others, but the stumble could not have come at a worse time for CNN. When viewers arrived in droves — the audience tripled to 1.05 million, from 365,000 the week before, according to Nielsen ratings supplied by Horizon Media — CNN failed in its core mission.

It was not the worst mistake of the week — The New York Post all but fingered two innocent men in a front-page picture — but it was a signature error for a live news channel.

CNN has been in the middle of a rehabilitation ever since Jeff Zucker was appointed at the end of last year to run CNN Worldwide. Until now, the defining story in the Zucker era had been a doomed cruise ship that lost power and was towed to port, where its beleaguered passengers dispersed. This week, CNN seemed a lot like that ship.

It’s clear after a busy week that Mr. Zucker can hire all the talent he wants, broaden the scope of their coverage and freshen the look of the joint, but if the network continues to whiff on the big stories, all of that will be for naught. Two people I spoke to at the network, which featured a lot of good work and tireless reporting when it wasn’t getting it wrong, called the error “devastating.”

Twitter and commentators vibrated with umbrage — “Breaking News Is Broken” suggested a headline on Slate — all asking some version of how can this keep happening.

Here’s how: As a general practice, wall-to-wall live television reporting is perilous. Maybe instead of the constant images of police tape, television news should frame their own coverage with a virtual version, indicating that viewers proceed at their own risk.

Despite the suggestion otherwise, people who are on the air talking about the news cannot report while they are doing it. Producers make hundreds of decisions on the fly. The incrementalism and vamping required to fill the hours — “Again, as we have been saying, Anderson ... ” — makes everyone desperate to say anything vaguely new.

Throughout the week, I saw anchors and reporters staring at their phones, hoping a new nugget might arrive to give them something to say. (Memo to television executives everywhere: news is a better product when presenters look at the camera.) And the live environment means that at a certain point, the bosses have to quit shouting into the ear piece, trusting their staff and crossing their fingers.

Several people involved in reporting the Boston bombing case said the story presented particular challenges. In a large-scale assault on public safety, the audience wants to know everything, right this second. Yes, they want you to be accurate, but the implicit promise of a 24-hour news service is that it will happen quickly.

The pressure to produce is ratcheted up accordingly. Editors and producers begin leaning on their reporters, and they, in turn, end up in the business of wish fulfillment, working hard to satisfy their audience, and meeting the expectations of their bosses. It creates a system in which bad reporting can thrive and dominoes can quickly fall the wrong way.

In the instance of the Boston story, the scope of the crime, the number of victims and the fact that it smacked of terror on American shores provoked a vast law enforcement response at the federal and local level. A multiagency array of command centers and responsibilities created a target-rich environment for reporters. But it also created an unwieldy patchwork of sources, all operating in the fog of war, albeit a domestic one.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

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The Media Equation: In 2013, Engineering a Reversal of Fortune for Media Leaders

In business, all years are critical — make a big mistake and you won’t have the chance to make another one. But in the media, wave after wave of transformation mean the coming year is particularly important.

Insurgents are racing over the hills; margins, along with the advertising sales that drove them, are tumbling; and people consume media content at a time, place and, often, at a cost of their choosing. Forget New Year’s resolutions. We’re talking imperatives, a to-do list that requires eating your Wheaties and then some. So on the last day of 2012, it’s worth looking at a group of leaders who confront very steep hills to climb in the year that ends in lucky 13.

LAURA LANG, C.E.O. OF TIME INC.

Hired a year ago from a digital advertising firm to head Time Inc., Time Warner’s magazine behemoth, Ms. Lang was optimistically viewed as an out-of-the-box answer to the knotty problem of making a print company dance in a digital era.

Twelve months later, the honeymoon, if there ever was one, is over. Advertising has quickly gone backward at the publisher, and the nascent efforts in mobile and video Ms. Lang has championed will not fill the crater anytime soon.

Time Inc., an industry leader in print subscriptions, has yet to find a way to wring money from consumers on the Web. Ms. Lang has been slow in articulating a business strategy and building a team to execute it, and at some point, the people who hired her will start checking their watches.

JEFFREY ZUCKER, PRESIDENT OF CNN WORLDWIDE

Of all the people on this list, Mr. Zucker, whose appointment was announced in November, probably has the best chance of showing progress. After all, he will take over a business that makes $600 million, all while doing not much of anything right.

Fixing any one of CNN’s manifest problems — mornings that are not competitive, evening ratings that are deeply embarrassing and a late-night transplant in Piers Morgan who is being rejected by the viewing public — will make him look like a genius.

Most important, to me at least, is that CNN master the Big Story. The network, often useful on breaking international news, has fumbled on signature domestic events including the Newtown school shooting. Call me old-fashioned, but fewer breathless, informationless stand-ups from reporters and more actual reporting may be a good place to start.

MARTHA STEWART, FOUNDER, MARTHA STEWART LIVING OMNIMEDIA

A nice little franchise that overshot after going public, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia resembles a troubled aircraft that is madly switching pilots while chunks of the plane are flying off.

Big write-downs caused third-quarter losses to exceed total revenue; after all of five months, the chief executive said she would step down; and the company just cut two of its magazines, Whole Living and Everyday Food, as stand-alone products.

Add in the fact that the Hallmark Channel declined to renew the daily “Martha Stewart Show,” and you have a lot less media coming out of a company named Omnimedia. Most of the profits now come from merchandising, but even those are imperiled.

The company signed a deal with J. C. Penney to sell branded Martha Stewart products last year, which was a coup, except that Macy’s accused the company of already selling it those rights and promptly sued. The stock fell to $2.50 a share from over $4.50 at the start of the year. Clearly, it’s going to take more than a few well-placed floral arrangements to make this company look pretty again.

ROBERT THOMSON, C.E.O. OF NEWS CORPORATION

A trusted Rupert Murdoch lieutenant who took over as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal in 2008, Mr. Thomson overcame the skepticism of the staff with an acute eye for news. The result was a more general interest newspaper that was a hit with readers. And now that News Corporation has been split into two divisions, publishing and entertainment, Mr. Thomson will make the leap to the business side and become the chief executive of the publishing unit.

Running those assets without the support of Fox News and “Avatar” will be a challenge, which became clear this month when the company said in a filing that its publishing businesses lost $2.1 billion in the fiscal year that ended June 30. Those losses came largely from $2.8 billion in charges mostly related to closing News of the World in Britain in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

The remaining print assets — including newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The Times of London, and HarperCollins, a book publisher — will be folded in with a number of fast-growing Australian pay-television assets, which should give the newly formed division some financial cushion.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

The Media Equation: Chasing Lance Armstrong’s Misdeeds From the Sidelines

Every once in a while, the outliers are right. This is a story of how a group of people at the low end of bicycle racing used the Web and social media to take back custody of their sport from powerful dopers and liars and their enablers in the media.

In the last 15 years, there has not been a better sports story than Lance Armstrong: a pro cyclist is stricken by cancer, triumphs over the disease and goes on to conquer his sport, winning the Tour de France seven times in a row. Armstrong then used the luster of his victories to turn LiveStrong, a foundation he started for cancer victims, into a household name worn on the wrists of many. It was a story the press, and the reading public, could not get enough of.

The problem with mythical ascents is that they are often followed by spectacular falls, precisely because they are myths.

On Oct. 10, the United States Anti-Doping Agency released a report that laid out in breathtaking detail how Lance Armstrong had organized a systematic doping program for his team. Mr. Armstrong waived his right to contest the findings, and last Monday, the International Cycling Union stripped him of the Tour de France titles he won from 1999 to 2005.

For those of us who paid only casual attention, his abasement — he has been dropped by Nike and other sponsors and has stepped down as chairman of LiveStrong — came as a deep shock. Sure, there was a steady hum of suspicion along the way, but Armstrong had never failed a drug test, and his steadfast denials were always dutifully reported.

Besides, there was a heroic narrative to be nurtured, and mainstream reporters pretty much stuck to the script — either because they were invested in the legend or were worried about maintaining access to one of the most important figures in sports. There were early and vocal dissenters, including Paul Kimmage, an Irish journalist and veteran of cycling coverage, David Walsh, and Juliet Macur of The New York Times. But for the most part, the journalists who seemed to know the most about professional cycling told us the least. To doubt Armstrong was to doubt the American dream, to effectively be “for cancer,” as his legion of defenders would claim.

But amid the conspiracy of silence, often enforced by Armstrong or his lawyers, according to the report, a small group of dedicated cycling enthusiasts took to blogs and Twitter. His otherworldly accomplishments, they wrote, were a monument not to the power of human spirit, but to the remarkable effectiveness of EPO, an oxygen-enhancing hormone. On Twitter, critics behind handles like @TheRaceRadio, @UCI_Overlord and @FestinaGirl jabbed at Armstrong’s denials and the sport’s leadership.

More important, NYVelocity, a tiny hobby blog that mostly covered the New York bike racing scene, helped pull back the blankets on the Armstrong legend. The blog published a satirical comic, “As the Toto Turns,” to savage effect, and in a series of postings it made the case that pro cycling was corrupt and that Mr. Armstrong’s denials masked a wilderness of lies.

Andy Shen founded the site in 2004 with two friends, Alex Ostroy and Dan Schmalz. Mr. Shen is a commercial photographer and amateur racer, not a journalist. But in 2009, after watching in growing disgust as evidence mounted along with the denials, he published a groundbreaking 13,000-word interview with Dr. Michael Ashenden revisiting the results of drug tests from Armstrong’s 1999 Tour de France victory.

The interview with Dr. Ashenden, an Australian exercise physiologist who had helped develop EPO tests for pro cycling, was full of arcane chemistry, but his findings were clear and damning: EPO was present in the samples and the pattern demonstrated systematic doping.

The link to the interview became a kind of beacon on the Web, posted over and over on racing forums in an effort to inject science into a very emotional debate.

“Bike racing is a niche sport, and then suddenly someone like Armstrong comes along and makes it 10 times bigger and no one wanted to be the one who went after him,” Mr. Shen said over lunch last week. “Everyone in the industry depended on him or was afraid of him.”

Some mainstream journalists have continued to stand by Armstrong, including Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post, who wrote a book with him, but many others have issued mea culpas for buying the lie. John Leicester, the international sports columnist for The Associated Press, called himself “a dope” and said he wished he had “told the story better.”

Mr. Shen said he felt bad for reporters who had to choose between gaining access to Armstrong or risk being frozen out. He had no access to lose, no ax to grind.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 28, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed Wired magazine as a publication for which Bill Gifford had written about Lance Armstrong.

The Media Equation: Print’s Poetry Still a Draw for the Publisher Felix Dennis

Felix Dennis, the British magazine publisher, took America by storm in the 1990s with Maxim, a bawdy men’s magazine with models whose garments always seemed on the precipice of falling off. The formula was so successful, he also started Stuff, a little brother brand, and Blender, a music magazine.

In 2007, Mr. Dennis sold the magazines to Alpha Media, backed by Quadrangle Capital Partners II, a private equity firm, for $250 million. The bottom dropped out of the category, Stuff was folded into Maxim, Blender ceased publication, Maxim hemorrhaged ads and employees and its owners defaulted on their loans.

Mr. Dennis, who built and sold computer magazines in America when the category was hot, had done it again. After selling Maxim, he repaired to England with a big bag of loot, though he did hang on to The Week, a low-cost print aggregation of news done by others, which has outlasted the print version of Newsweek. In 2011, he also bought Mental Floss, a smarty pants magazine and Web site aimed at a young, connected demographic.

Mr. Dennis, who has invested aggressively in digital operations in Britain and elsewhere, is intent on proving there is still life left in print. With a keen understanding of readers and a deft touch for timing, he’s proud that he’s still able “to be a nuisance to the rest of the business.”

“I have sold at the top of market several times,” he cackled. “Nobody remembers how long I’ve been at this. I love the media game. Love. It.”

He also happens to be a best-selling poet in his native England. In a documentary, “Felix Dennis: Millionaire Poet,” that is out right now, Tom Wolfe is seen reading three of his poems. A ruffler of feathers and professed “bearded dwarf,” Mr. Dennis knows his way around a quip and tends to dole them out at a very high frequency.

He was once invited to give the annual Delacorte Lecture to the students at Columbia Journalism School and advised them to ignore advertisers — they are merely “guests” — and focus on readers. “They are my bread, my butter, my caviar and my Gulfstream jet. Actually, I always rent the private jets. My rule is, if it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. It’s cheaper in the long run.”

But he is oddly chaste about the death of the print version of Newsweek, a magazine which he had constantly slagged as a bloated, beside-the-point publication.

“I have always been a fan of Tina,” he said, referring to Tina Brown, the editor, “and thought she brought a sense of fun to magazines, but there was no way that was ever going to work out. It had huge costs at a time the economics would not support it.”

He added: “You’ll get no triumphalism from me. I was a subscriber, believe it or not, and it’s never good when a magazine goes away.”

Even though he believes that American magazines are overedited and overstaffed — “No one else in the world takes so many people to make magazines” — Mr. Dennis says that there is nonetheless a lot of life left in printed products here. “No woman or girl is going to want to spend time looking at pretty dresses on the Internet,” he said. “Vogue is going to be around for a long time to come.”

Mr. Dennis, 65, got his start selling magazines on Kings Road in London and worked his way over to the editorial side at Oz magazine, where he quickly ran afoul of British obscenity laws and was charged with “conspiracy to corrupt public morals.” The verdict against him and his co-defendants — they were convicted of two lesser charges — was eventually overturned.

He then got in early on the computer craze with a raft of hobby magazines, although to this day he does not use e-mail and carries no cellphone.

The Media Equation: Challenging the Claims of Media Bias - the Media Equation

No, in their view, the mysterious drop can only be explained by the fact that the mainstream media have their collective liberal thumb on the scale, in terms of coverage and, more oddly, polling.

On Sunday, Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, got right to the point.

“It goes without saying that there is definitely media bias,” Mr. Ryan told “Fox News Sunday.” “I think most people in the mainstream media are left of center and, therefore, they want a very left-of-center president versus a conservative president like Mitt Romney.”

And ostensibly tendentious coverage was cited last Wednesday in a letter addressed to the “Biased News Media” and sponsored by the Media Research Center, which defines its mission as “holding the liberal media accountable for shamelessly advancing a left-wing agenda.” The letter said in part: “This election year, so much of the broadcast networks, their cable counterparts and the major establishment print media are out of control with a deliberate and unmistakable leftist agenda.”

It was signed by conservative royalty, including Brent Bozell, Gary Bauer, Ed Meese, Tony Perkins, Rush Limbaugh and Richard Viguerie. It included a list of chronic offenses and concluded, “It is time the American people turn you who are offending off, once and for all. You have betrayed their trust.”

The mainstream media are frequently indicted suspects when the rink tilts against conservative causes. But it seems worth pulling apart that notion, especially in a landscape where ownership of the megaphone is increasingly up for grabs.

Back when Spiro Agnew went after the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” most people got their news from three networks and a handful of national newspapers. Network news still pulls in more than 20 million viewers nightly, and newspapers still matter in spite of their business struggles, but their influence is waning as thousands of new sources of information bloom.

As the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press pointed out last week, digital news has surpassed radio and newspapers and is quickly catching up to television. Social networks are soaring as a source of news, and since 2010, the report said, “there has been a sharp decline in the proportion of Americans who got news yesterday only from a traditional news platform — from 40 percent then to 33 percent currently.”

Even if legacy media still maintained some kind of death grip on American consciousness, it would be hard to claim that the biggest players in those industries are peddling liberal theology.

Think about it. What is the No. 1 newspaper in America by circulation? Why, that would be The Wall Street Journal, a bastion of conservative values on its editorial pages and hardly a suspect when it comes to lefty news coverage. (Though it’s worth pointing out that the paper has published some very tough coverage of Mr. Romney.)

What about radio? Three of the top five radio broadcasters — Mr. Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the recently departed Michael Savage — have outdrawn NPR’s morning and evening programs by a wide margin. In cable television, Fox News continues to pummel the competition.

Many Republicans see bias lurking in every live shot, but the growing hegemony of conservative voices makes manufacturing a partisan conspiracy a practical impossibility.

Let’s be fair. It’s not as if everyone who believes there is a liberal bias needs to be fitted for a tinfoil helmet. But the trope is losing traction, partly because there are many robust champions of the right, which gives conservatives the means to project their message far beyond the choir.

It’s hard to picture conservatives as disenfranchised in the fight for attention from the news media, not after a campaign season in which the audition for the Republican nomination seemed to include some combination of hosting and making guest appearances on Fox News. Another thing about the media blame game? It doesn’t work. Newt Gingrich ran hard against the news media and that didn’t turn out so great.