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Citing an unnamed newspaper industry insider, Crain’s New York Business reported today that News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch “is believed to have set his sights on Newsday.” Murdoch was reportedly interested in a joint operating agreement between Newsday and his New York Post last year. But the idea went nowhere when Sam Zell took Tribune private in a deal worth $8.2 billion.
Others expressing interest in buying the tabloid are said to include Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real-estate developer and publisher who owns the New York Daily News, and James Dolan, whose family controls Cablevision, the cable television operator, the New York Times reported.
Talk of the possible sale of Newsday surfaced today as Tribune reported a fourth-quarter loss of $79 million. The company acknowledged it may have to sell assets as it struggles past a highly-leveraged December deal that took the company private.
The dismal results come three months after chairman and CEO Zell, a real estate mogul with no experience in the newspaper business, led a buyout of the struggling company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, among other newspapers, local television stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
At the time, Zell said he planned to sell the Cubs and related assets, but wanted to keep most of the rest of the company intact. He also said that additional downsizing was not the answer to historic changes in the newspaper industry. But in the three months since, he has cut jobs, citing falling advertising revenue and a tanking economy.
Tribune said today it has “begun a strategic review of certain Tribune assets to determine whether capital can be more effectively redeployed into our core operations or toward reducing our outstanding leverage.”
One day into his term as governor of New York State, David A. Paterson, in a kind of preemptive act, disclosed his past marital infidelities.
Advising Paterson for sure is a well-connected lawyer and former Jesuit priest, perhaps just the right person to help deal with an issue that mixes political and moral realities.
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Charles J. O’Byrne, who holds the title of chief of staff and secretary in the Paterson administration, is a Kennedy family friend who is seen by observers as a smart, caring, but tough political practitioner.
“He was one of the few naturals in politics I have ever met,” Ethan Geto, who worked with O’Byrne on the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign, told The New York Observer.
“I think his background prepared him in one critical way. Charles is extremely empathetic. He can really put himself in the shoes of another human being.”
Born in New York City, O’Byrne, 48, graduated from Columbia University in 1981 and Columbia Law School in 1984.
While he was in law school, O’Byrne met and became friends with Stephen Smith Jr., the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy.
After law school, O’Byrne spent a few years at Rosenman & Colin LLP, a New York City law firm, before leaving to study for the priesthood, becoming a novice in the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit order, in 1989.
O’Byrne took his vows as a Jesuit in 1991 and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1996.
That same year, he married John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in a ceremony on Cumberland Island, Ga.
In 1999, O’Byrne was the presiding priest at a memorial Mass in New York City for John and Carolyn Kennedy after they died in a plane crash.
Later in 1999, O’Byrne unofficially left the Jesuit order. He was dismissed officially in 2002.
In September 2002, O’Byrne caused some scandal with a first-person article in Playboy entitled, “Sex & Sexuality: One Man’s Story About Religious Life and What Seminaries Really Teach About Sex.”
In the article, O’Byrne portrays his fellow seminarians as men who entered the religious life with “little or no sexual experience.”
As recalled by O’Byrne, the seminarians made up for lost time. “There was sex all around me,” he writes, “including relationships between Jesuits.”
O’Byrne describes himself as not so much shocked by the sexual activity as he is disturbed by what he sees as the order’s hypocritically advocating celibacy but allowing sexual activity.
Not surprisingly, the Playboy story caused “resentment” toward O’Byrne, one priest told Jason Horowitz of the Observer.
O’Byrne joined the Dean campaign in 2003. And after Dean left the race in 2004, he volunteered in New York City educational programs.
He then went to work for Paterson, a Democrat who was serving as the minority leader of the New York state Senate. O’Byrne filled various roles before becoming then Paterson’s acting chief of staff.
After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2006, Paterson named O’Byrne his chief of staff at an annual salary of $140,000.
According to columnist Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Paterson turned to O’Byrne on March 10, soon after he got word that then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been implicated as a client of a prostitution ring.
“Boy, I’m not sure how he gets out of this,” Paterson told O’Byrne.
“This is not going to work out for him,” O’Byrne replied.
Two days later, Spitzer announced he would resign. A week later, Paterson was sworn in as governor with O’Byrne looking on.
Lauder, chairman of the museum board and of Estee Lauder Companies, is contributing $131 million to the Whitney, with most of the gift going to the art museum endowment.
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The Lauders rank as a first family of the New York art world. Leonard Lauder’s brother, Ronald S. Lauder, is chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art and a co-founder of the Neue Galerie.
By jingling the coins in his pocket, Leonard Lauder may prompt other Whitney trustees to increase their support. Among the board’s many wealthy members:
· Wall Street financier Thomas H. Lee, who is also a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. His wife, Ann Tenenbaum, is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a member of the New York City Art Commission. The couple were also major benefactors of the Dia:Beacon, on the Hudson north of New York City.
· Wilbur Ross, who is in the midst of a $1.1 billion deal to buy H&R Block’s Option One mortgage servicing business
As Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. is cast as Public Enemy No. 1 by some commentators for his rants against the white establishment, it’s worth remembering that his congregation belongs to a liberal mainline Protestant denomination in America with a long history of offending people.
The United Church of Christ, a blend of four historic Protestant traditions, traces its origins to the first church to take a stand against slavery in 1700, the first to ordain a woman in 1853, the first to publish an inclusive-language hymnal in 1995 and first to support same-sex marriage in 2005, according to a church website. Its 2004 television ads promoting its open door to blacks and gays was rejected by television networks CBS and NBC, which deemed them too controversial. (Story continues below interactive map.)
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But even within that tradition, Wright is considered radical. The rebellious son and grandson of Baptist ministers, he was part of a group of black intellectuals such as James Cone, author of Black Theology and Black Power, who believed that blacks shouldn’t have to choose between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. They preached an Afro-centric Christianity that combined Christian principles with a strong social action agenda.
When Wright arrived on the rough-and-tumble south side of Chicago in 1972, Trinity United Church of Christ was clearly losing in the competition for young, black men’s hearts to the Nation of Islam and black liberation groups despite its recently-adopted slogan, “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.” Over the next three decades, Wright transformed it into a megachurch with almost 8,000 members with dozens of community services, including day care, a credit union and a drug-and-alcohol program. When he retired last month, the church was the denomination’s largest.
Wright’s screeds against America and white powerbrokers, his post-911 sermon that America had brought the attacks on itself and his praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan are now well known thanks to the constant loop of snippets playing on cable television.
Less well known is how he also informally advised Chicago’s only black mayor Harold Washington, considered a political role model for Obama, and also, the combative relationships he often had with more doctrinally conservative black ministers in Chicago, described in Obama: From Promise to Power, by Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell.
Mendell said that Obama first noticed the church in 1985 because of the “Free Africa” sign that Wright had posted out front to protest apartheid, and quotes Wright describing their open-ended talks about faith, politics, race and social change.
“Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it’s like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that’s it,” Wright said. “… He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment, and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith … I was not threatened by those questions.”
Obama credits Wright for his embracing Christianity, and says he took the title of his book, Audacity of Hope from a sermon Wright preached.
What he doesn’t say is that he used Wright as a sounding board for questions about politics as well as faith. Mendell describes how, in 2002, a dejected Obama went to see Wright after returning from Washington where he attended the annual Congressional Black Caucus conference trying to garner support for his bid for the U.S. Senate.
“He had gone down there to get support and find out who would support him, and found out it was just a meat market,” the pastor told Mendell. “He had people say, ‘If you want to count on me, come to my room. I don’t care if you’re married. …He was, like, in shock … He comes back shattered. I thought to myself, ‘Does he have a rude awakening coming his way.’”
Mendell notes that Trinity United is considered by some Chicago blacks to be “the church of elites,” attracting celebrities like the rapper Common, TV talk mogul Oprah Winfrey, as well as academics from the nearby University of Chicago. On Sundays, BMWs and Audis create traffic jams on 95th Street.
But the church was undergoing its own generational shift. Wright retired last month, and the top post was assumed by Otis Moss III, a Yale-educated former track star whose style is much more like that of the church’s most famous member, than of its former fire-and-brimstone pastor.
Moss, too, is the son of a Baptist minister – Otis Moss Jr., who preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and who was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. But while he, too, is said to connect strongly to young people, his cool, intellectual approach is less likely to catapult him to notoriety on cable television. In 2005, the magazine The African American Pulpit named him one of the “Twenty to Watch” ministers under forty.
Video-streaming newcomer Hulu, a joint effort between NBC Universal and Fox, opened to the public last week after a four-month trial period. It provides full-length TV episodes and movies to be viewed for free online.
Content providers have granted Hulu permission to post the shows, so videos aren’t flagged or taken down because of copyright infringement, which often happens on YouTube. However, the site does not allow users to upload their own videos.
When it comes to video quality, Hulu gives YouTube a run for its money. The high-resolution videos load instantly. Navigating the site is easy, with quick links to embed and email videos, turn off background lighting and or the video full screen. The only inconvenience is a short advertisement at the start of each clip. Story continues below interactive map
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The biggest draw to Hulu may be the full-length movies that can be streamed. More than 100 movies are currently available, and Hulu is adding more content periodically. Some of the most popular movies viewed so far have been Ice Age, The Girl Next Door, The Jerk, Dude, Where’s My Car?, and Sideways.
Sidestepping a potentially nasty proxy fight, the New York Times Company announced yesterday that it would give two seats on its board to a pair of hedge funds seeking to increase investor profits.
Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners have spent more than $500 million since December to buy a 19-percent stake in the family-controlled company, becoming the Times’ largest public shareholder. The funds had originally proposed four nominees to the board, saying they wanted to push the Times to unload holdings outside of its core business, such as a stake in the Boston Red Sox, and to invest more aggressively in its Internet operations.
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The agreement marks the first time since the Times Company was taken public in 1967 that it has accepted directors nominated by outsiders, according to Times Company executives
What, if anything, seating dissident investors means for the Times remained unclear. A two-class stock structure gives the Sulzberger family control of a majority of the board, and the Harbinger-Firebrand group has said that it has no plan to challenge that control.
Galloway, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who owns a Long Island estate complete with outdoor showers and a volleyball court with bleachers, made his fortune in the late 1990s by founding and flipping gift-site RedEnvelope.
A profile in Conde Nast Portfolio, entitled “Boardroom Braveheart,” described how he teams up with capital investors such as Harbinger, who ”provide the financial muscle, while he does the tire-kicking, letter-writing, and shareholder-swaying.” Galloway reportedly gets about 10 percent of the profits from the deal, in addition to the board seat if it’s successful, but assumes little financial risk.
The profile also quoted a graduate student in his class at NYU. describing his brash style. “He’s a jackass,” the student said. ”He’s not afraid to call you out if he thinks you don’t know what you’re talking about. But it works.”
Like most newspaper companies, the Times has been socked by circulation declines and the migration of advertising to the Internet. The company’s assets include About.com, the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, a string of smaller newspapers, majority ownership of a new high-rise headquarters building in Manhattan, and the minority stake in the Boston Red Sox.
The Times has fended off activist investors in the past, including an attempt last year by Morgan Stanley Investment Management to eliminate the dual-tiered share structure, but they owned a smaller percentage of shares.
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