Talk Radio on WABC Shifts Focus to the Local

WABC-AM (770), which is owned by Cumulus Media, will introduce a new lineup on Thursday that emphasizes live and local programming, as its two most popular hosts, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, move to a rival station, WOR-AM (710).

Weekday programming at WABC will include the return of Curtis Sliwa’s and Ron Kuby’s show, “Curtis and Kuby,” from noon to 3 p.m., after an absence of more than six years, and, starting Monday, a one-hour program at 5 p.m. with Pat Kiernan, the NY1 television anchor.

Geraldo Rivera, who joined WABC in early 2012, will turn his focus to New York news in a two-hour live show at 10 a.m., as Cumulus announced in November. Michael Savage’s syndicated program, which has been heard in the evenings, will now run from 3 to 5 p.m. “Imus in the Morning,” with Don Imus, will continue from 6 to 10 a.m.

“We’re delivering on our pledge to invest in localized content that will entertain, inform and engage listeners while also providing advertisers unique opportunities to reach their customers on a sustained basis,” John Dickey, Cumulus’s co-chief operating officer, said in a statement.

The changes come as Cumulus tries to build its programming chest to compete against Clear Channel, whose 850 stations include WOR. Once a small player in the radio industry, Cumulus expanded greatly in 2011 when it bought Citadel Broadcasting for $2.5 billion, and it now operates about 460 stations.

Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Hannity, whose shows are syndicated to hundreds of stations by Clear Channel’s Premiere Networks division, are by far the country’s most popular talk hosts, and their combined presence helped make WABC the dominant talk outlet in New York. Talkers, a trade magazine, estimates that Mr. Limbaugh reaches more than 14 million listeners each week and Mr. Hannity 13.25 million.

Last year, however, Cumulus executives said millions of dollars were lost after advertisers withdrew from the shows, largely in response to Mr. Limbaugh’s ridicule of Sandra Fluke, an advocate of insurance coverage for birth control.

Mr. Limbaugh’s and Mr. Hannity’s shows left WABC at the end of 2013 as a result of complex negotiations between Cumulus and Clear Channel. Mr. Hannity’s show was dropped from dozens of Cumulus stations, while the syndication contract for Mr. Limbaugh was renewed at most stations, but discontinued at WABC. In New York, their shows are now heard on WOR.

“Curtis and Kuby,” which ran on WABC from 2000 to late 2007, will now compete against Mr. Limbaugh, and Mr. Savage’s show will be up against Mr. Hannity.

While none of the new figures on WABC have followings on the scale of WOR’s syndicated hosts, Cumulus is betting on the appeal of locally focused content to draw New York listeners.

Mr. Kiernan, who is on NY1 each weekday morning, said his show, which will include a co-host who has not been named, would be a recap of the major news and pop culture events of the day. He also emphasized the importance of local programming on the radio, as stations compete not only against one another but also against an ocean of media online.

“In an era when listeners can go off in so many different directions,” Mr. Kiernan said, “local is something you can’t take away from people.”

Pogue’s Posts Blog: How Ballmer Missed the Tidal Shifts in Tech

Prestigious Firms Plagued by the Economic Shifts They Have Ignored

The pink slip death began with the little people. The layoffs of lower-level associates, midsized firms shuttering, the rescinded offers, the law school debt, the lack of jobs. As the legal elite continued on with their party, the Reaper stood in the corner. A brief hush would fall over the room as he tapped the lesser nobility on the shoulder at regular intervals. Those who remained returned to their revelry. When he tapped Dewey on the shoulder, a murmur rippled through the room.

Advertising: National Geographic Channel Shifts Its Programming to TV Series

Courteney Monroe, the channel’s chief marketing officer, said its executives had worked since 2011 to switch its programming from being four-fifths documentaries and one-fifth series to four-fifths series and one-fifth documentaries. “It’s very hard to build a big, loyal audience without recurring series,” she said.

Those series include “Wicked Tuna,” about fishermen from Gloucester, Mass., and “Doomsday Preppers,” about Americans preparing for the end of the world, both introduced last year; “Brain Games,” introduced last month; and “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” which is set to premiere on Sunday. The channel, a joint venture begun in 2001 between the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks, also recently began producing factually based dramas, like “Killing Lincoln,” which ran in February.

The final episode of the current season of “Wicked Tuna” will be shown on Sunday, followed by the first episode of “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” which Ms. Monroe said makes the evening “the ideal launch for the new brand campaign.”

The channel’s strategy so far appears to have had mixed results: according to Nielsen, the Sunday night showings of “Wicked Tuna” during Season 1 averaged 805,000 viewers, climbing to 953,000 in Season 2 through May 5. Average viewership of Tuesday night showings of “Doomsday Preppers,” however, fell from 936,000 in Season 1 to 736,000 in the second season.

Created by the New York office of BBDO, part of the Omnicom Group, the advertising is the channel’s first new branding campaign since 2009. It includes three spots on three of the new series, each 30 and 45 seconds long. The first, based on “Doomsday Preppers,” depicts a birthday party for a little girl in an underground bunker, who receives a gas mask as a present.

The second spot features Dave Marciano, a fishing boat captain who appears on “Wicked Tuna,” anxiously awaiting a possible catch, while the third spot, promoting “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” follows two adventurers racing to catch an airplane through snowy, icy terrain.

All three ads also feature viewers immersed in the environment of each series, watching the action unfold alongside characters representing the series while dressed in sweat pants and nightclothes, and engaged in activities like brushing their teeth and eating. They are invisible to the characters.

There is also a fourth spot, in 60- and 90-second versions, showing segments of the other three. None of the spots has dialogue; each ends with the tagline, “The places we take you ... aren’t just on the map.”

Greg Hahn, an executive creative director at BBDO New York, said the agency “knew we needed to show some original content and to bring the viewer into it, but we didn’t want to show clips, or people at home watching TV.”

He added, “We wanted to show the emotional response of people to the programming. It’s not just about the geographic places it takes you but also the emotional places. National Geographic magazine and National Geographic Channel have a long history of taking you to exotic places, showing you new locations. We wanted to build off that, open up a new way of looking at the brand.”

The new advertising will first appear on Sunday night on National Geographic Channel in the United States; it will also appear, starting Thursday, on the channel’s Web site and its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

The spots will run in the future on sister channels of National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo WILD, which offers wildlife and natural history programming, and Nat Geo Mundo, a Spanish-language channel. They will also run later on National Geographic channels outside the United States, in 170 countries.

Prestigious Firms Plagued by the Economic Shifts They Have Ignored

The pink slip death began with the little people. The layoffs of lower-level associates, midsized firms shuttering, the rescinded offers, the law school debt, the lack of jobs. As the legal elite continued on with their party, the Reaper stood in the corner. A brief hush would fall over the room as he tapped the lesser nobility on the shoulder at regular intervals. Those who remained returned to their revelry. When he tapped Dewey on the shoulder, a murmur rippled through the room.

Prestigious Firms Plagued by the Economic Shifts They Have Ignored

The pink slip death began with the little people. The layoffs of lower-level associates, midsized firms shuttering, the rescinded offers, the law school debt, the lack of jobs. As the legal elite continued on with their party, the Reaper stood in the corner. A brief hush would fall over the room as he tapped the lesser nobility on the shoulder at regular intervals. Those who remained returned to their revelry. When he tapped Dewey on the shoulder, a murmur rippled through the room.

As Microsoft Shifts Its Privacy Rules, an Uproar Is Absent

Microsoft instituted a policy on Friday that gives the company broad leeway over how it gathers and uses personal information from consumers of its free, Web-based products like e-mail, search and instant messaging.

Almost no one noticed, however, even though Microsoft’s policy changes are much the same as those that Google made to its privacy rules this year.

Google’s expanded powers drew scathing criticism from privacy advocates, probing inquiries from regulators and broadside attacks from rivals. Those included Microsoft, which bought full-page newspaper ads telling Google users that Google did not care about their privacy, an accusation it quickly denied.

The difference in the two events illustrates the confusion surrounding Internet consumer privacy. No single authority oversees the collection of personal information from Web users by Internet companies. Though most companies have written privacy policies, they are often stated in such broad, ambiguous language that they seem to allow virtually any use of customers’ personal information.

Web companies like Microsoft and Google have been moving aggressively to expand their abilities to gather and sort information about individuals’ habits and interests — even as Congress, federal regulators and the Obama administration have been seeking ways to protect Internet users against unwanted privacy incursions.

Microsoft’s policy, which it calls its Services Agreement, allows it to analyze customer content from one its free products and use it to improve another service — for example, taking information from messages a consumer sends on Windows Live Messenger and using it to improve messaging services on Xbox. Previously, that kind of sharing of information between products would not have been allowed under Microsoft policies, which limited the use of data collected under one of its products to that product alone.

Microsoft has promised, however, that it will not use the personal information and content it collects to sell targeted advertising. It will not, for example, scan a consumer’s e-mails to generate ads that might interest the user. Google does that, and expanding its ability to draw on that content was part of the reason Google changed its privacy policy this year.

But the new Microsoft policy does allow for such targeted advertising. Microsoft promised not to do so in blog posts and e-mails informing its customers about the change, but not in the formal policy. That has some privacy advocates nervous.

“What Microsoft is doing is no different from what Google did,” said John M. Simpson, who monitors privacy policy for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit group. “It allows the combination of data across services in ways a user wouldn’t reasonably expect. Microsoft wants to be able to compile massive digital dossiers about users of its services and monetize them.”

Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, says the company’s plans are benign. He differentiates between the Services Agreement, also known as the terms of use, that was changed on Friday and the company’s Privacy Policy, which was last updated in April.

“Over the years, we have consistently informed users that we may use their content to improve the services they receive,” Mr. Evans said in a written statement. “For instance, we analyze content to improve our spam and malware filters in order to keep customers safe. We also do it to develop new product features such as e-mail categorization to organize similar items like shipping receipts in a common folder, or to automatically add calendar invitations.

“However,” he added, “one thing we don’t do is use the content of our customers’ private communications and documents to create targeted advertising. If that ever changes, we’ll be the first to let our customers know.”

Microsoft’s new services agreement affects only its free, Web-based products, not the software programs that individuals and companies buy off the shelf for home or business use. It covers Hotmail, and its related e-mail service, Outlook.com, but not the Outlook e-mail and calendar program that is individually loaded onto computer hard drives and widely used by corporations. Bing, its search engine, is covered, but Internet Explorer, its browser, is not.

Microsoft’s pledge not to use the data from its Web services to target advertising has some credibility, given the company’s broader privacy initiatives. The company has said it will include a “do not track” feature in its new Internet Explorer 10 Web browser that prevents online advertising companies from monitoring the browsing habits of users so they can target promotions. Microsoft has made “do not track” the default setting on the new version of Explorer, a move that has caused a firestorm among online advertising companies.