Advertising: Ad Agency Goodby, Silverstein Opens a New York Office

AN advertising agency is rewriting a lyric of “New York, New York” to proclaim, “If I can make it anywhere, I’ll make it there.”

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a leading agency with headquarters in San Francisco, is opening an office in New York. The office, temporarily located at 7 World Trade Center, gives Goodby, Silverstein, which was founded in 1983, a New York presence for the first time.

It is the agency’s second office outside of San Francisco, after one in Detroit that opened in 2010 as Goodby, Silverstein, which is owned by the Omnicom Group, began creating campaigns for the Chevrolet division of General Motors.

Two senior executives have relocated from San Francisco to lead the New York office, which will employ 15 to 25 people. They are Christian Haas, 39, who becomes partner and executive creative director, and Nancy Reyes, 37, who becomes associate partner and managing director.

The agency is occupying the temporary space while its permanent location, 200 Varick Street at Houston Street, is being remodeled. Plans call for an opening in April.

The office opens with work from current clients like Comcast, Elizabeth Arden, Google and YouTube. Goodby, Silverstein’s other clients include Adobe, the California Milk Processor Board, Cisco, Frito-Lay, the National Basketball Association, Nestlé and Sonic. Ms. Reyes and Mr. Haas say they are eager to look for new business in New York with the help of the agency’s co-chairmen and creative directors, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein.

In the “Mad Men” era, only a handful of American ad agencies with heavyweight creative credentials were located outside New York, a city so widely regarded as the heart of advertising that the phrase “Madison Avenue” became shorthand for the industry.

That changed in the 1970s as the business began to decentralize, partly because the dire financial and quality-of-life problems in New York led many talented executives to pursue careers elsewhere. Agencies like Goodby, Silverstein became known almost as much for not being in New York — opting instead for cities like Austin, Tex.; Boston; Los Angeles; Miami; Minneapolis; Portland, Ore.; Richmond, Va.; and San Francisco — as for the ads they created.

Some of those agencies eventually added New York outposts. Some opened in New York but later retreated, and some still eschew New York. But declining to take a bite out of the Big Apple is becoming less appealing, primarily because New York has overcome the perception issues that once cost it so dearly.

“We just lose so many people to New York,” Mr. Goodby said in a phone interview last week from San Francisco. “It’s crazy not to access that.”

The executives who founded agencies outside New York did so to “kindle a ‘creative shop’ feeling,” Mr. Goodby said: a feeling they did not believe they could cultivate in a city dominated by giant, tradition-minded agencies. “I don’t think Rich and I felt we needed a New York office,” he said. “In fact, it was more unique to not have one.”

In his presentations to prospective East Coast clients, Mr. Goodby normally includes a slide that addresses why the agency has its headquarters on the West Coast. It reads: “You call it distance. We call it perspective.”

“I think I’m going to ask to have that slide retired,” he said, laughing.

Goodby, Silverstein was started as Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein by three colleagues at Hal Riney & Partners in San Francisco. The third founder, Andy Berlin, left for New York in 1992, three months after Omnicom acquired the 62.5 percent of the agency that it had not already owned, and he has spent the rest of his career there.

There was talk then that Omnicom would transform the agency into its third worldwide network, joining DDB and BBDO, in an expansion that would start with the opening of an office in New York. But a year later, Omnicom bought TBWA International, now TBWA Worldwide, and made that its third network instead.

“San Francisco is so livable, but there’s nothing like New York,” Mr. Silverstein said in an interview last week in Midtown Manhattan, at which he was joined by Mr. Haas and Ms. Reyes. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Go East, young man, go East.”

The executives acknowledge the risks of the move. They do not want other agencies to conclude that Goodby, Silverstein is trying to ride in like the cavalry to rescue Madison Avenue. “There’s nothing wrong with what’s going on in New York,” Mr. Silverstein said. “New York doesn’t ‘need’ another ad agency.”

Likewise, Ms. Reyes said, “there’s nothing wrong with what’s going on at Goodby, Silverstein in San Francisco.”

What became clear was that Goodby, Silverstein was losing prospective employees to New York. It was “less about them saying, ‘I’ve got to go to that agency in New York,’ than, ‘I want to be in New York,’ ” Mr. Silverstein said.

In fact, he said, a major reason he and Mr. Goodby finally decided to open an office in New York was that Ms. Reyes and Mr. Haas had confided that they wanted to move there.

Mr. Haas has worked in São Paulo, Brazil, in addition to San Francisco, but he has never worked in New York. “São Paulo is, in a weird way, kind of like New York,” he said, but “the energy, the buzz” of New York are difficult to duplicate.

Ms. Reyes worked at New York agencies like D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles and Ogilvy & Mather before leaving in 2003 to join Goodby, Silverstein.

In the last decade, “we lost lots of people in San Francisco to New York,” she said. “We’ll call on them.”

Read More..

The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

Read More..

Slipstream: Legislation Would Regulate Tracking of Cellphone Users

THERE are three things that matter in consumer data collection: location, location, location.

E-ZPasses clock the routes we drive. Metro passes register the subway stations we enter. A.T.M.’s record where and when we get cash. Not to mention the credit and debit card transactions that map our trajectories in comprehensive detail — the stores, restaurants and gas stations we frequent; the hotels and health clubs we patronize.

Each of these represents a kind of knowing trade, a conscious consumer submission to surveillance for the sake of convenience.

But now legislators, regulators, advocacy groups and marketers are squaring off over newer technology: smartphones and mobile apps that can continuously record and share people’s precise movements. At issue is whether consumers are unwittingly acquiescing to pervasive tracking just for the sake of having mobile amenities like calendar, game or weather apps.

For Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, the potential hazard is that by compiling location patterns over time, companies could create an intimate portrait of a person’s familial and professional associations, political and religious beliefs, even health status. To give consumers some say in the surveillance, Mr. Franken has been working on a locational privacy protection bill that would require entities like app developers to obtain explicit one-time consent from users before recording the locations of their mobile devices. It would prohibit stalking apps — programs that allow one person to track another person’s whereabouts surreptitiously.

The bill, approved last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers’ locations.

“Someone who has this information doesn’t just know where you live,” Mr. Franken said during the Judiciary Committee meeting. “They know the roads you take to work, where you drop your kids off at school, the church you attend and the doctors that you visit.”

Yet many marketers say they need to know consumers’ precise locations so they can show relevant mobile ads or coupons at the very moment a person is in or near a store. Informing such users about each and every ad network or analytics company that tracks their locations could hinder that hyperlocal marketing, they say, because it could require a new consent notice to appear every time someone opened an app.

“Consumers would revolt if this was the case, and applications could be rendered useless,” said Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who promulgated industry arguments during the committee meeting. “Worse yet, free applications that rely on advertising could be pushed by the consent requirement to become fee-based.”

Mr. Franken’s bill may seem intended simply to protect consumer privacy. But the underlying issue is the future of consumer data property rights — the question of who actually owns the information generated by a person who uses a digital device and whether using that property without explicit authorization constitutes trespassing.

In common law, a property intrusion is known as “trespass to chattels.” The Supreme Court invoked the legal concept last January in United States v. Jones, in which it ruled that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment — which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure — by placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car for 28 days without getting a warrant.

Some advocacy groups view location tracking by mobile apps and ad networks as a parallel, warrantless commercial intrusion. To these groups, Mr. Franken’s bill suggests that consumers may eventually gain some rights over their own digital footprints.

“People don’t think about how they broadcast their locations all the time when they carry their phones. The law is just starting to catch up and think about how to treat this,” says Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco. “In an ideal world, users would be able to share the information they want and not share the information they don’t want and have more control over how it is used.”

Even some marketers agree.

One is Scout Advertising, a location-based mobile ad service that promises to help advertisers pinpoint the whereabouts of potential customers within 100 meters. The service, previously known as ThinkNear and recently acquired by Telenav, a personalized navigation service, works by determining a person’s location; figuring out whether that place is a home or a store, a health club or a sports stadium; analyzing weather and other local conditions; and then showing a mobile ad tailored to the situation.

Eli Portnoy, general manager of Scout Advertising, calls the technique “situational targeting.” He says Crunch, the fitness center chain, used the service to show mobile ads to people within three miles of a Crunch gym on rainy mornings. The ad said: “Seven-day pass. Run on a treadmill, not in the rain.”

When a person clicks on one of these ads, Mr. Portnoy says, a browser-based map pops up with turn-by-turn directions to the nearest location. Through GPS tracking, Scout Advertising can tell when someone starts driving and whether that person arrives at the site.

Despite the tracking, Mr. Portnoy describes his company’s mobile ads as protective of privacy because the service works only with sites or apps that obtain consent to use people’s locations. Scout Advertising, he adds, does not compile data on individuals’ whereabouts over time.

Still, he says, if Congress were to enact Mr. Franken’s location privacy bill as written, it “would be a little challenging” for the industry to carry out, because of the number and variety of companies involved in mobile marketing.

“We are in favor of more privacy,” Mr. Portnoy says, “but it has to be done within the nuances of how mobile advertising works so it can scale.”

A SPOKESMAN for Mr. Franken said the senator planned to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress. It is one of several continuing government efforts to develop some baseline consumer data rights.

“New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy and many people may find the trade-off worthwhile,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote last year in his opinion in the Jones case. “On the other hand,” he added, “concern about new intrusions on privacy may spur the enactment of legislation to protect against these intrusions.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

Read More..

Ex-Officer Is First in C.I.A. to Face Prison for a Leak

Christaan Felber for The New York Times

John Kiriakou with his daughter Kate at home in Arlington, Va., last month. He has struggled with how to explain to his children that he will be going away.

WASHINGTON — Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

Timeline

Leak-Related Cases Prosecuted During the Obama Administration

Christaan Felber for The New York Times

Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.

Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.

Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”

On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.

In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.

Mr. Kiriakou, 48, earned numerous commendations in nearly 15 years at the C.I.A., some of which were spent undercover overseas chasing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He led the team in 2002 that found Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist logistics specialist for Al Qaeda, and other militants whose capture in Pakistan was hailed as a notable victory after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He got mixed reviews at the agency, which he left in 2004 for a consulting job. Some praised his skills, first as an analyst and then as an overseas operative; others considered him a loose cannon.

Mr. Kiriakou first stumbled into the public limelight by speaking out about waterboarding on television in 2007, quickly becoming a source for national security journalists, including this reporter, who turned up in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment last year as Journalist B. When he gave the covert officer’s name to the freelancer, he said, he was simply trying to help a writer find a potential source and had no intention or expectation that the name would ever become public. In fact, it did not surface publicly until long after Mr. Kiriakou was charged.

He is remorseful, up to a point. “I should never have provided the name,” he said on Friday in the latest of a series of interviews. “I regret doing it, and I never will do it again.”

At the same time, he argues, with the backing of some former agency colleagues, that the case — one of an unprecedented string of six prosecutions under President Obama for leaking information to the news media — was unfair and ill-advised as public policy.

His supporters are an unlikely collection of old friends, former spies, left-leaning critics of the government and conservative Christian opponents of torture. Oliver Stone sent a message of encouragement, as did several professors at Liberty University, where Mr. Kiriakou has taught. They view the case as an outrage against a man who risked his life to defend the country.

Whatever his loquaciousness with journalists, they say, he neither intended to damage national security nor did so. Some see a particular injustice in the impending imprisonment of Mr. Kiriakou, who in his first 2007 appearance on ABC News defended the agency’s resort to desperate measures but also said that he had come to believe that waterboarding was torture and should no longer be used in American interrogations.

Bruce Riedel, a retired veteran C.I.A. officer who led an Afghan war review for Mr. Obama and turned down an offer to be considered for C.I.A. director in 2009, said Mr. Kiriakou, who worked for him in the 1990s, was “an exceptionally good intelligence officer” who did not deserve to go to prison.

Read More..

Plane Carrying Vittorio Missoni Lost Near Venezuela

A small plane carrying four Italian tourists, including the head of the Missoni fashion business, disappeared off the coast of Venezuela on Friday morning, prompting a sea and air search that continued Saturday.

Vittorio Missoni, 58, an owner of the family-run label famed for its zigzag knitwear, and his wife, Maurizia Castiglioni, were aboard the plane, which was missing after takeoff from the island resort of Los Roques, the company confirmed Saturday. The plane was bound for the international airport near the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, normally a half-hour trip.

Venezuelan officials said that four passengers and two crew members were aboard.

The interior minister, Néstor Reverol, said Friday night on Venezuelan television that the plane, a BN2 Islander, took off from Los Roques at 11:29 a.m. and that its last known position was 10 nautical miles south of Los Roques, an archipelago that is a popular destination among wealthy Europeans, particularly Italians.

The Missoni family is widely revered in the Italian fashion industry for its kaleidoscopic patterns applied over the years to sweaters, home furnishings, beach towels and even water bottles. A wildly popular collaboration with Target in 2011, which revitalized international interest in the label, included a Missoni-print bicycle.

The company was founded in the 1950s by Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, who by the 1970s were among the most prominent designers in Italian fashion. Their three children — Vittorio, Angela and Luca — took over the company in the 1990s, when the family business had lost some of its appeal, and they are credited with turning it around.

Missoni’s sales have been reported as modest, around $100 million annually, but the label has the prominence of a far bigger business as a result of the family’s dashing personalities. Mr. Missoni spearheaded the brand’s global expansion, first as general director of marketing and then as the company’s top executive in Italy and the United States.

A spokeswoman for Missoni said that the family had been informed by the Venezuelan Consulate that the plane had disappeared, but that they had not given up hope as the search continued. Italian news media staked out the company headquarters in Sumirago, Italy, in the foothills of the Alps, where the management met on Saturday. The news agency Ansa reported that family members were congregating in their nearby villa, while Luca Missoni had flown to Venezuela.

The company’s offices in Milan were closed on Saturday, but an employee, who declined to give her name, was answering the phones “because a lot of employees are calling to get information,” she said. “But we have very little news to tell them.”

Several Italian news broadcasts led with the disappearance of Mr. Missoni, noting that small planes have repeatedly taken Italian tourists to their deaths off Los Roques. One plane, carrying 14 people, 8 of them Italian, disappeared five years ago, on Jan. 4, 2008.

Mr. Missoni, an avid sport fisherman, and his wife were on vacation with friends, according to the company. The other passengers have been identified in Italian news reports as Elda Scalvenzi and Guido Foresti.

The Missoni siblings jointly own the company. Vittorio has managed the company’s commercial and manufacturing operations; Angela is the designer; and Luca the creative director.

Part of Mr. Missoni’s strategy has been to focus on the Missoni lifestyle, opening about 40 stores around the world and creating advertising campaigns featuring many of the family’s glamorous members. In one image, Margherita Missoni, a daughter of Angela, appears with Ottavio and Vittorio, who are relaxing on a zigzag weave couch. The family’s compound in Sardinia has been featured in countless articles.

In 2005, the company created a successful fragrance business with Estée Lauder and, under Mr. Missoni’s direction, expanded into the hotel business with the Rezidor Hotel Group. The first Hotel Missoni opened in Edinburgh in 2009.

William Neuman contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

A new rule imposed by the F.D.A. would establish different standards for ensuring the purity of water that touches fruits and vegetables.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

A new rule imposed by the F.D.A. would establish different standards for ensuring the purity of water that touches fruits and vegetables.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..

Media Decoder Blog: Hulu's Chief Is Leaving, Raising Questions About Its Future

8:39 p.m. | Updated
Jason Kilar, the Web wizard who turned Hulu from a punch line into a popular source of online video, said on Friday that he would step down as the site’s founding chief executive in the next three months.

The announcement is certain to turn up the volume on something that’s a constant hum in the media industry: speculation about the future of Hulu — and if it has one at all. Its owners, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast and the News Corporation, also run the ABC, Fox and NBC networks, and they do not agree about what to do with the Web site. Perversely, the more popular Hulu becomes, the more of a problem it is for the owners, since it may be taking viewers and advertising dollars away from their core television businesses.

Mr. Kilar never saw it that way, however. He was Hulu’s best advocate, sometimes clashing with the network executives on Hulu’s board and arguing that they had to keep investing in the site, since television’s future will surely involve Internet distribution.

For many Americans, that future is already here: Hulu’s streams of TV shows attract 30 million unique visitors a month via computers and untold millions more via tablets and Internet-connected television sets. Three million pay for Hulu Plus, its subscription arm — not bad for a start-up once ridiculed as “ClownCo.”

Mr. Kilar declined an interview request on Friday. In an e-mail message to employees, he gave no indication why he was moving on or what he might do next. “My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I’ve ever made,” he said.

He said his departure would take effect within the first quarter of the year. No successor was named.

Mr. Kilar, a former executive at Amazon, has in the past been mentioned for a number of prominent jobs in Silicon Valley. He was a top candidate last year for the chief executive position at Yahoo, but Hulu said he declined to be considered. The job later went to Marissa Mayer, a longtime Google employee.

His departure comes just several months after the only independent owner of Hulu, Providence Equity Partners, sold its 10 percent stake, originally bought for $100 million, for $200 million. Mr. Kilar and other employees also sold their stakes in the company at that time, netting Mr. Kilar about $40 million, according to an executive with knowledge of the transaction.

On Friday, there was widespread praise for Mr. Kilar for steering Hulu through sometimes turbulent seas. “He defied enormous odds, built from scratch one of the top five digital video brands, created two viable and growing businesses (free and pay) and got his well-deserved payday — not bad for five years’ work,” J. B. Perrette, who used to help oversee NBC’s investment in Hulu and now runs Discovery Communication’s digital operations, said in an e-mail.

That said, Mr. Kilar’s announcement did not entirely surprise many in the industry. During his tenure, he sometimes clashed with the owners on Hulu, exemplifying the divide between new, disruptive modes of distribution like the Internet and the more traditional operations at major media companies. As the parent companies pulled back on the amount of ABC, Fox and NBC programming provided to Hulu, the Web site invested in original content to fill the gaps and attract attention. That investment effort continues, led by one of Mr. Kilar’s deputies, Andy Forssell, but many in the industry say they believe that Hulu’s future remains fuzzy.

An internal memo obtained by Variety in August showed that the owners may want to change their agreements with Hulu so that it is no longer the exclusive distributor of repeats of television shows like “The Office” and “Family Guy.” That way, the owners could also sell repeat rights to online video services like YouTube, Netflix or Amazon.

Some of the owners also wanted more advertisements on the site, which had revenue of about $700 million last year but is not yet believed to be profitable. Much of the revenue came from Hulu Plus, and therein lies another fault line: the owners may concentrate on the paid part to the detriment of the free streaming part.

The owners had no comment about any of that on Friday, though. Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, called Mr. Kilar an integral part of the Hulu story and said in a statement, “We are proud of his achievements, we appreciate what he’s built, and we share his confidence in his team’s ability to drive Hulu forward from here.”

Rich Tom, the site’s chief technology officer, will also depart in the first quarter.

This month, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, predicted that News Corporation would seek to acquire its competitors’ stakes in Hulu in 2013. Comcast, he said, has no managerial control of Hulu and Disney “appears increasingly less interested” in the site.

In August, News Corporation said that Jonathan Miller, the company’s chief digital officer since 2009 and a vocal champion of Hulu, would leave the company. Mr. Miller represented News Corporation on the Hulu board and had helped the media company broker a stake in Roku. News Corporation has had some high-stakes stumbles in technology with both Myspace and its tablet-only publication, The Daily, which has led some analysts to expect the company to tread cautiously with future digital investments like Hulu. And Chase Carey, the No. 2 to the chief executive of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, is said to be less enamored with the service.

Mr. Murdoch, however, praised Mr. Kilar for “building Hulu into one of the leading online video services available today.” He added, “It’s incredibly well positioned for the road ahead.”

Read More..

Exports of U.S. Gas May Fall Short of High Hopes

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Cheniere Energy is building a facility for liquefied natural gas in Cameron Parish, La. It is the first to secure an export license.

HOUSTON — Only five years ago, several giant natural gas import terminals were built to satisfy the energy needs of a country hungry for fuels. But the billion-dollar terminals were obsolete even before the concrete was dry as an unexpected drilling boom in new shale fields from Pennsylvania to Texas produced a glut of cheap domestic natural gas.

Now, the same companies that had such high hopes for imports are proposing to salvage those white elephants by spending billions more to convert them into terminals to export some of the nation’s extra gas to Asia and Europe, where gas is roughly triple the American price.

Just like last time, some of the costly ventures could turn out to be poor investments.

Countries around the world are importing drilling expertise and equipment in hopes of cracking open their own gas reserves through the same techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling that unleashed shale gas production in the United States. Demand for American gas — which would be shipped in a condensed form called liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G. — could easily taper off by the time the new export terminals really get going, some energy specialists say.

“It will be easier to export the technology for extracting shale gas than exporting actual gas,” said Jay Hakes, former administrator of the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration. “I know the pitch about our price differentials will justify the high costs of L.N.G. We will see. Gas by pipeline is a good deal. L.N.G.?  Not so clear.” 

Even the terminal operators acknowledge that probably only a lucky few companies will export gas because it can cost $7 billion or more to build a terminal, and then only after a rigorous federal regulatory permitting process. The exploratory process to find a suitable site for a new terminal alone can take a year and cost $100 million, operators say, and financing can be secured only once long-term purchase agreements — 20 years or more — are reached with foreign buyers.

“It’s a monumental effort to put a deal together like this, and you need well-heeled partners,” said Mark A. Snell, president of Sempra Energy, which is based in San Diego and is applying for permits to turn around a Hackberry, La., import terminal for export. “There are only a handful of people who can do this kind of thing.”

At least 15 proposed terminal projects have filed regulatory applications to export gas, and if all were approved, they could export more than 25 billion cubic feet a day, equivalent to more than a third of domestically consumed natural gas.

Environmental advocates say that kind of surge in demand would produce a frenzy of shale drilling dependent on hydraulic fracturing of hard rocks, an industrial method they say endangers local water supplies and pollutes the air. Dow Chemical, a big user of natural gas, and some other manufacturers express concerns that an export boom could threaten to raise natural gas prices for factories and consumers and, ultimately, kill jobs.

Opponents are already lobbying the Obama administration to reject most of the planned terminals, and protests have already occurred. Sempra, Exxon Mobil, Cheniere Energy and others have already built import terminals on the Gulf of Mexico. With docking facilities and giant gas tanks already built on land they had acquired and received permits for, they have a huge advantage over companies that have not yet built terminals. Cheniere, the only company to secure an export license, already has entered long-term purchase agreements for its L.N.G., and several other companies are only a few steps behind.

Dominion Power, which operates a nearly idle import terminal near Cove Point on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, is also expected to proceed with a conversion to exports, since it is strategically located near the mid-Atlantic gas fields of the Marcellus Shale.

“You have got to be able to change, adapt as changes take place in the world,” said Michael E. Gardner, manager of the Cove Point plant.

The companies with import terminals now wanting to export won a victory in December when an Energy Department report said exports of L.N.G. could produce $30 billion a year in export earnings without driving up domestic gas prices significantly.

Many energy specialists expect the Obama administration to approve several export license applications in the next couple of years, and exports could begin as soon as 2015.

The plans for a gas export boom are based on the theory that cheap American gas will remain cheap for decades while Asian and European gas supplies remain tight and expensive. Global demand for natural gas is expected to expand for decades as nations seek a replacement for coal, nuclear energy and increasingly expensive oil, energy specialists say.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington.

Read More..

DealBook: After Decades of Public Service, Judge Jones Joins Zuckerman Spaeder

Barbara S. Jones, a federal judge and a former prosecutor, is stepping down from the bench to join the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder.

In an interview, Ms. Jones, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said that her last day as judge was Friday and that she would start at Zuckerman Spaeder later this month.

“I’ve been in public service for more than 40 years, the last 17 on the bench,” Judge Jones said. “I’m ready to try something new.”

Judge Jones, 65, has never worked in a law firm, not even during a summer internship. A graduate of Temple University’s law school, she spent the first half of her career as a prosecutor in three offices — the Justice Department’s organized crime strike force, the United States attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney’s office. President Bill Clinton, acting on the recommendation of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, nominated her for a judgeship in 1995.

She presided over a wide range of cases, including the 2005 trial of Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, and the 1997 trial of Autumn Jackson, a woman who tried to extort millions of dollars from the entertainer Bill Cosby. Both resulted in convictions.

Judge Jones also heard the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard, finding that the companies had violated antitrust laws.

While some defense lawyers viewed the former prosecutor as pro-government, many more said that she had been evenhanded in her rulings. In November, she meted out relatively lenient sentences to three men from Mali who had pleaded guilty to terrorism charges that involved a conspiracy supporting Al Qaeda. Justifying her sentence, she noted that the men had been driven by financial motives and difficult family circumstances rather than ideology.

“Barbara is smart, dedicated and understands both the letter and objectives of the law,” said Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney in Manhattan and now a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton. “She also understands people and brings real humanity to everything she does.”

In Zuckerman Spaeder, Ms. Jones joins a law firm that has expanded its Manhattan office over the last year. A litigation boutique with headquarters in Washington, the firm recently hired three prominent lawyers for its New York presence: Steven M. Cohen, a former top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo; Andrew E. Tomback, a former partner at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; and Paul Shechtman, a criminal defense lawyer who, as a young prosecutor, was supervised by Ms. Jones.

The firm has about 90 lawyers and is known for its criminal defense work. William W. Taylor III, a partner in the firm’s Washington office, was part of the team that successfully defended Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, against charges that he had sexually assaulted a hotel maid.

“Being able to attract a lawyer like Judge Jones validates what we have been doing since we relaunched the New York office,” Mr. Cohen said.

On the bench, Judge Jones was known for her efficiency, low-key manner and wry sense of humor. She is also a very popular figure around the federal courthouse, partly because of the blowout holiday party that she throws almost every year for the entire building. Judge Jones hosted her final party two weeks ago, where she could be seen dancing amid the security guards and court reporters and wearing a Santa hat emblazoned with the logo of her beloved New York Yankees.

“I’ve always been awed by the power and responsibility that comes with being a judge and don’t expect to have that ever again,” Ms. Jones said. “But I’ve never been a private citizen and am excited to go out into the world.”

Read More..