With 2 Hit Series Ending, a Transformed AMC Is at a Crossroads

It was less than a decade ago that the AMC network was known solely as a vintage movie site, if it was known at all, and seemed destined to sit out the creative revolution taking place on cable television.

The network was so nondescript, said Charlie Collier, AMC’s president, that it was often confused with the movie theater chain or the bowling supplies seller.

But over the last six years, the network has ridden the critical acclaim of two dramas, “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men” — along with record-setting ratings for a third drama, “The Walking Dead” — to a new identity as a purveyor of sophisticated, dark television drama.

Now “Breaking Bad,” the hugely discussed series about a teacher turned drug kingpin, starts its final run of episodes next Sunday, and “Mad Men,” its partner in impact on the cultural zeitgeist, is also down to its own final season. That leaves AMC  at the crossroads of celebration and challenge.

Even as they revel in the klieg lights shining on the last season of “Breaking Bad” (one prominent television producer, Damon Lindelof of “Lost,”  offered $1 million — facetiously, in a Twitter message — for a sneak peek at the first of the new episodes), AMC executives acknowledge that their two departing shows will be near-impossible acts to follow.

“I would love to say there’s no pressure,” said Joel Stillerman, head of original programming for AMC, “but that would be a lie.”

AMC has been preparing for this sea change, ramping up its roster of potential new series and reconfiguring its business model to take advantage of the elevated stature the channel now enjoys.

“Everyone is saying this is the moment for AMC’s future,” Mr. Collier said. “I would say it is a moment.”

It would seem to be a moment to seize for AMC. The channel has never before been as popular a destination for top creative talent, and has never made as much money. The network has 67 projects in development, by far the most in its history.

Financially, AMC has secured advertising sales for the new television season that, according to its estimates, are nearly 20 percent higher than last year, to go with a similar rise in the subscriber fees from cable companies. Mr. Collier did not disclose the total figures, but said, “All revenue streams are on the upswing.”

In addition, the success of the two departing dramas, along with “Walking Dead,”  has enabled AMC to shift from licensing its shows from outside studios to insisting on ownership in future series, a transformation that means “much more upside, a lot more money,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG Research.

“We have mass and distinction,” Mr. Collier said. “That’s the mother lode.”

It has ratings, too. In the past season, “Walking Dead” averaged 8.2 million viewers for its initial broadcast, but that grew to 15 million after seven days. “Mad Men” averaged 1.6 million on its first night, but that grew to 4 million after seven days. “Breaking Bad” had an audience of 1.7 million in its first airing, and expanded that to 3.9 million after seven days.

Now all the network has to do is keep it going.

Mr. Collier expressed a high degree of confidence that it could build on its success, based on how far AMC — owned by AMC Networks, which also owns the Sundance Channel and IFC — has traveled in the last seven years. Before that, the channel had no special identity beyond its slate of older movies, and no cachet with younger audiences.

Vince Gilligan, 46, a respected writer from “The X-Files,” had a vague sense of AMC as the movie channel with commercials, he said. When he wrote an uncompromising pilot script with a lead character developing cancer and shifting from teaching high school to cooking crystal meth, he was unsurprised that networks like HBO and Showtime “were not remotely interested.”

 Then his agent told Mr. Gilligan he had offered the script to AMC. His reply mixed skepticism with dripping sarcasm: “I said: ‘Why didn’t you send it to the Food Network? It’s a show about cooking, after all.’ ”

 AMC not only bought the show, it promised creative freedom. “I didn’t believe a word they said,” Mr. Gilligan.

How Tom Donohue Transformed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Nor does Mr. Donohue show much deference to the current president of the United States. The chamber’s headquarters sit across Lafayette Square from the White House, and in May 2010, with unemployment near 10 percent, Mr. Donohue festooned the building’s grand, Corinthian-columned facade with four banners spelling J-O-B-S in red, white and blue block letters, each 23 feet, 4 inches high.

Three years later, the banners are still up. During a recent interview in his office, an expansive suite with black walnut paneling, Mr. Donohue offered a blunt explanation for why he hung the sign facing President Obama’s home. “So he’d have to look at it every day,” he said, lowering his voice to a theatrical growl.

That the head of the chamber would openly relish needling the president of the United States speaks to the wholesale transformation that this 101-year-old trade association has undergone on Mr. Donohue’s very aggressive watch.

Over the last 16 years, Mr. Donohue has used his considerable talent for fund-raising to build the once-struggling chamber into a free-enterprise research outfit, Supreme Court advocacy group and lobbying powerhouse. The chamber’s lobbying operation alone spent $136 million last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; the next-biggest spender, the National Association of Realtors, spent less than a third of that.

At 74, with his Kennedyesque mop of white hair and a Brooklyn accent, Mr. Donohue comes off as part street fighter, part showman and part head of state. He zips around town in a chauffeured Lincoln and flies around the globe in leased private jets. His salary, $4.9 million in 2011, makes him the second-highest-paid trade association chief in Washington, after the head of the Edison Electric Institute, according to CEO Update, a trade magazine.

“He’s got a little theater in him,” Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman and a onetime amateur actor, says of Mr. Donohue.

“He’s like the Energizer Bunny,” said John W. Bachmann, senior partner at Edward Jones and the past chairman and current treasurer of the chamber’s board, calling Mr. Donohue’s salary a “bargain.”

Yet, while increasing the group’s influence, Mr. Donohue has also plunged the business lobby into partisan politics. That move has infuriated many Democrats, made some local chambers uneasy and produced an embarrassing flop in the last Congressional elections. The chamber spent millions in an unsuccessful bid to wrest the Senate from Democrats; of 12 chamber-backed Republicans, nine lost.

“They got their clock cleaned,” said Mr. Tauzin, an outside adviser to Mr. Donohue. “It was a bold idea. Bold ideas either succeed boldly or fail dismally. In this case, I think Tom would tell you it was a dismal result.”

Not one to back down, Mr. Donohue has ordered his political team to “figure out what happened” and to try harder in 2014, said Scott Reed, his senior political adviser. But publicly, Mr. Donohue is changing the subject. He has always been a man of big ambitions, and his latest is to secure an immigration overhaul, long a priority for business. A deal he cut with Richard L. Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., on a new visa program for low-skilled workers helped produce a bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in May.

Mr. Donohue rarely mentions President Obama by name, and in casual conversation allows that he had a better relationship with another Democrat, Bill Clinton. (“You get in a big fight with him one morning, and then two days later you’d be over there for a drink.”) He refers to Mr. Obama as “the president across the street” — a phrase that Mr. Reed says is “not a disrespectful thing,” but a reflection of Mr. Donohue’s position.

“That’s the institution speaking,” he said.

Immigration is one issue, at least, on which the chamber and the Obama administration might come together. Businesses of all stripes want the immigration system improved. High-tech companies like Facebook want access to skilled foreign workers. Large-scale farms want to hire Mexican and other migrants. Small businesses want a stronger electronic employment verification system, to shift the burden of making sure workers are legal to the government and away from employers.

It is now up to Mr. Donohue to deliver. And while he waves off talk of retirement — “If you see me in a box with flowers around it, I’m only thinking about retiring” — there is no question that an immigration bill could be a legacy item, a capstone to his long career.

WHILE big, wealthy companies help keep the chamber afloat — “We have to raise $5 million a week to run this place,” Mr. Donohue says — advocating for small business is perhaps more popular with the public. So one morning in April, Mr. Donohue could be found holding court at America’s Small Business Summit, the chamber’s annual gathering for small-business owners, who come to network and lobby their lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Like all things Donohue-related, the meeting was a slick production, with hefty corporate support and Washington-insider speakers like Michael V. Hayden, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist. In the exhibit hall, representatives of T-Mobile and FedEx handed out trinkets.

Mr. Donohue used his keynote address to exhort the audience to “defend and advance a free-enterprise system” whenever it “comes under attack” and to give politicians in Washington — the words “Republican” and “Democrat” never pass his lips — a piece of their minds.

“It’s about time,” he thundered, “that our leaders in Washington start making the tough decisions that we pay them to make!”

Port Chester, N.Y., Is Transformed by Immigration

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. — Nearly 20 years after he arrived penniless in this country from Mexico, Moises owns two restaurants, with a third on the way. He has five employees, an American wife and a stepdaughter. His food even has a following on Yelp.com.

What Moises does not have is American citizenship, or even a green card permitting him to reside legally in the United States. So he inhabits an economic netherworld, shuttling among his establishments on the bus and train because he cannot get a driver’s license and making do without bank loans or credit cards even as he files for zoning permits and incorporation papers.

While the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally are often portrayed as dishwashers, farmhands, gardeners and other low-paid service workers, increasingly they are also business owners and employers. That is one reason economists say opening the door to entrepreneurs like Moises — whose last name is being withheld because of the risk of deportation — could give the American economy a shot in the arm.

The most prominent feature of the proposed immigration bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators last month would provide residents of the United States who overstayed their visas or arrived illegally before Dec. 31, 2011, a long and winding path to citizenship, one that would probably take more than a decade to complete. But less noticed is that the legislation would offer such residents much more immediate provisional status, enabling them to work and travel legally.

That status would make it easier for immigrants here illegally to open businesses, buy big-ticket items like homes and cars and negotiate raises. All of these help explain why immigration reform is one of the few things economists on the left and right generally agree on these days.

While there is considerable debate about whether increased immigration depresses wages on the low end of the pay scale, most experts say allowing more new immigrants and offering a more secure legal footing for workers who are currently in the country illegally would bring the nation broad economic gains.

“We need more legal immigration,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Additional human capital results in more growth.”

Lawrence F. Katz, a liberal professor of economics at Harvard who is among those who say that immigration can push down pay for workers directly competing with new immigrants, nevertheless supports the argument that a freer flow of people from other nations would foster more growth. “No doubt some individuals are harmed,” he said, “but the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Some conservative skeptics, though, see a steep price in a broad amnesty, largely because of increased spending on social services and entitlements.

The pluses and minuses of more immigration are evident in this working-class village of 29,000 about 30 miles north of Midtown Manhattan that shares a border with affluent Greenwich, Conn.

A wave of Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, has transformed downtown Port Chester, which fell on hard times in the 1980s and ’90s after factories and mills closed and an older generation of Italian immigrants moved away or died off.

Today, 59 percent of the village’s population is of Hispanic origin, said Christopher Gomez, Port Chester’s director of planning and development. From 1990 to 2010, Port Chester’s population jumped by 17 percent, twice as fast as Westchester County as a whole.

The immigrant influx, he said, has become the “lifeblood” of the town. “I don’t know where we’d be without it.”

Mexican and Peruvian restaurants dot the downtown streets, while immigrant-owned stores and markets offer goods from Ecuador and services like money transfers to Guatemala and other Central American countries.

The predominance of Spanish-speaking customers has forced older businesses to adapt. Chris Rubeo, the owner of Feinsod Hardware on North Main Street, hired several Spanish-speaking workers to help him compete with a nearby Home Depot and lure Hispanic contractors and builders.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, 1926 - 2012: Arthur O. Sulzberger, Publisher Who Transformed Times, Dies at 86

Barton Silverman/The New York TimesRemembering Arthur Ochs Sulzberger: As publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger saw the paper through a trying strike, expanded its sections and printed the Pentagon Papers.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died early Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger in 1992, the year he relinquished the position of publisher to his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.  The portrait in the background is of his grandfather, Adolph S. Ochs, who bought The New York Times in 1896. More Photos »

His death, after a long illness, was announced by his family.

Mr. Sulzberger’s tenure, as publisher of the newspaper and as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company, reached across 34 years, from the heyday of postwar America to the twilight of the 20th century, from the era of hot lead and Linotype machines to the birth of the digital world.

The paper he took over as publisher in 1963 was the paper it had been for decades: respected and influential, often setting the national agenda. But it was also in precarious financial condition and somewhat insular, having been a tightly held family operation since 1896, when it was bought by his grandfather Adolph S. Ochs.

By the 1990s, when Mr. Sulzberger passed the reins to his son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., first as publisher in 1992 and then as chairman in 1997, the enterprise had been transformed. The Times was now national in scope, distributed from coast to coast, and it had become the heart of a diversified, multibillion-dollar media operation that came to encompass newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations and online ventures.

The expansion reflected Mr. Sulzberger’s belief that a news organization, above all, had to be profitable if it hoped to maintain a vibrant, independent voice. As John F. Akers, a retired chairman of I.B.M. and for many years a Times Company board member, put it, “Making money so that you could continue to do good journalism was always a fundamental part of the thinking.”

On Saturday, President Obama praised Mr. Sulzberger as “a firm believer in the importance of a free and independent press, one that isn’t afraid to seek the truth, hold those in power accountable and tell the stories that need to be told.”

Mr. Sulzberger’s insistence on independence was shown in his decision in 1971 to publish a secret government history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. It was a defining moment for him and, in the view of many journalists and historians, his finest.

In thousands of pages, this highly classified archive detailed Washington’s legacy of deceit and evasion as it stumbled through an unpopular war. When the Pentagon Papers were divulged in a series of articles in June 1971, an embarrassed Nixon administration demanded that the series be stopped immediately, citing national security considerations. The Times refused, on First Amendment grounds, and won its case in the United States Supreme Court in a landmark ruling on press freedom.

Mr. Sulzberger reshaped The Times. In the mid-1970s, another financially difficult period in which he might have chosen to retrench, he expanded the paper to four sections from two, creating separate sections for metropolitan and business news and introducing new ones oriented toward consumers.

They were a gamble, begun in the hope of attracting new readers, especially women, and advertisers.

Some critics dismissed the feature sections as unworthy of a serious newspaper. But the sections — SportsMonday, Science Times, Living, Home and Weekend — were an instant success, without compromising the paper’s hard-news core. They were widely imitated.

Over the next two decades, a billion-dollar investment in new printing facilities made still more innovations possible, among them a national edition, special regional editions and the daily use of color photos and graphics.

“Adolph Ochs is remembered as the one who founded this great enterprise,” Richard L. Gelb, a longtime member of the Times board, said in 1997, when Mr. Sulzberger stepped down as chairman. “Arthur Ochs Sulzberger will be remembered as the one who secured it, renewed it and lifted it to ever-higher levels of achievement.”

Even while the enterprise was put on a secure financial footing, ultimate control never passed from the Sulzberger family. It managed to avoid the internal strife and jealousies that tore apart other newspaper dynasties and traumatized their companies.

At Mr. Sulzberger’s death, The Times was being run by a fourth generation of his family, a rarity in an age when the management of most American newspapers is determined by distant corporate boards. A family trust, unaffected by his death, guarantees continued control by Adolph Ochs’s descendants.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the New York Times stock holdings owned by Sulzberger family members. The family’s total holdings are 15 percent; they do not own 15 percent of Class A shares.