April 2011

Hollywood is picking sides for its first all-out brawl since its writers’ labor feud in 2007. And oddly, Christopher Dodd, once a powerful senator from Connecticut and now the film studios’ chief spokesman, has mostly been out of the fray.

The blow-up is between studios and theater owners over a plan to slip some movies into homes through on-demand video shortly after they arrive in theaters. For Dodd, the new chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, it is the first industry crisis since he started in late March. Dodd acknowledges that both his relative inexperience and the need to stay out of business decisions made by individual studios has kept him largely out of the battle. “Each company has to make up its own mind.” Studios, exhibitors and filmmakers are arguing about the future of the business, and whether people in coming years will be more likely to watch movies in theaters or in increasingly sophisticated home setups mimicking the quality, immediacy and, perhaps, cost, of today’s theatrical experience. Last week, four studios — Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Warner Brothers — took the first step in their arrangement with DirecTV to release films two months after their theatrical release. The first premium on-demand offering came on Thursday, as DirecTV offered Sony’s “Just Go With It,” with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, for $30. Two dozen filmmakers, including James Cameron and Peter Jackson, fired back with an open letter criticizing the experiment as a threat to theaters. The fight separated allies who had recently joined to spend billions of dollars to upgrade theaters for digital and 3-D projection, and had used their combined political might to thwart proposed trading in a financial exchange based on box office revenue. The rift underscores how little Dodd or anyone else can do to buffer the jolts in a film business where the greatest challenges are not the labor disputes or public policy battles that were wrangled by past Hollywood statesmen like the MCA chairman Lew R. Wasserman or the long-serving MPAA chief Jack Valenti.

Today, Google says mobile searches are growing as quickly as Web searches were at the same stage in the company’s early days, and they are up sixfold in the last two years. Google has a market share of 97 percent for mobile searches, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use.

Now that it dominates the field, Google is throwing its burly computing power and heaps of data at new problems specific to mobile phones — like translating phone calls on the fly and recognizing photos of things like plants and items of clothing. “I feel like a parent the second time around feels,” said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search. “You saw your first child grow at an amazing pace, and here we are with our second child, mobile, growing at the same pace and showing the same signs.” Google has been slow to seize some newer Web business opportunities, most notably social networking. Investors have criticized the company for dragging its feet when it comes to figuring out how to make money in new fields. But mobile is an exception. Last year, Eric Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, said Google’s philosophy was “mobile first,” meaning it would build products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs.

“This is the place that Google is essentially betting its future on,” said Karim Temsamani, Google’s head of mobile advertising, a role created in September. Still, Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly enough to create new mobile products or ads.

A look at the role English-language newspapers play in many Eastern European capitals, particularly in countries with repressive policies toward publications in the local language.

Distributed free in racks at bars and hotels, the papers blend nightlife reporting for tourists with hard-hitting news aimed at a highbrow audience of businesspeople and diplomats. In Ukraine and Russia, these newspapers come under less scrutiny than their local counterparts, which made the move to muffle reporting at The Kyiv Post unusual. English-language newspapers like The Moscow Times, The Prague Post, The Budapest Times, The Slovak Spectator, The Baltic Times and The Krakow Post have been springboards for a generation of American journalists interested in working in the former East Bloc — though not in the servile role of many local publications.

With little fanfare, the State Department has abandoned America.gov – an ambitious digital project launched three years ago to promote Democracy abroad – and shifted its resources to social media projects.

A message on the front page of America.gov informs visitors that, as of March 31, the site is not being updated and will be archived. A notice directs visitors seeking information on US foreign policy to the range of US embassy and consulate websites or State.gov. The manpower once devoted to the site, provided through the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), is being redirected towards the department’s “social media assets,” which use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. IIP Deputy Assistant Secretary Duncan MacInnes called it shift to a “more proactive” web engagement strategy.