The New Old Age Blog: A New Commission: Time to Cheer or Yawn?

The fate of the Class Act, which would have established the nation’s first voluntary public long-term care insurance program, was sealed in 2011 when the Obama administration shut it down, essentially calling it unworkable.

As long as the language remained part of the Affordable Care Act, supporters allowed themselves to hope, or perhaps fantasize, that the administration might return to the subject. How to care for an aging population, and who pays for that and how, are questions that won’t go away.

But Congress quietly administered the coup de grâce last month, during the fiscal cliff negotiations. The budget deal stripped the Class Act language from the Affordable Care Act. R.I.P.

In its place — thanks to the intervention of Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia — the negotiators created a Commission on Long-Term Care, charged with developing plans for “a comprehensive, coordinated and high-quality system” ensuring long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities.

Its 15 members — three picks each for the president, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the House speaker and minority leader — face a tight deadline. Within six months, they are supposed to recommend legislative or administrative actions, including actual legislative language. Then bills are to be introduced in both houses of Congress on the very next day they are in session.

Which sounds like urgency, but is it? Even Connie Garner, the longtime Kennedy staff member who directs the advocacy group called Advance Class, was skeptical. “What can you really do in six months?” she said. Actuaries and policy types had been working on the Class plan for 19 months before the plug was pulled. “And so what if you introduce a bill?” she went on. “You can introduce stuff and nothing happens.”

So when Advance Class held its monthly board meeting a few days after the Class Act officially bit the dust, Ms. Garner figured this push for a national long-term care approach was dead, along with her organization. She had prepared a valedictory, praising the group for at least putting the issue on the national agenda.

“But they said, ‘No, we’re going to keep Advance Class going; we’re going to fight the long fight,’ ” she recalled. So on we go.

Discouragingly, the commission has already hit delays: Its members were to be named within 30 days of the budget deal’s enactment, but only the Congressional Democrats have made appointments.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, nominated a veteran health policy scholar, Judy Feder, who is now at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute; the labor executive Laphonza Butler, who heads California’s United Long-Term Care Workers Union; and Javaid Anwar, a Nevada internist.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, appointed Bruce Chernof, chief executive of the SCAN Foundation, which promotes quality care for the elderly; Judith Stein, founder of the Center for Medicare Advocacy; and George Vrandenburg, a retired corporate lawyer who has put his philanthropic muscle behind Alzheimer’s causes.

We have heard nothing yet from the White House or the Republican Congressional leadership.

Maybe that barely matters. “I can’t imagine anything coming out of this commission that won’t be totally forgotten a year from now,” said Jesse Slome, executive director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance. “How many commissions have there been?”

Yet one thing that he and the proponents at Advance Class can agree on — maybe the only thing — is that this issue demands attention.

Otherwise, Mr. Slome says, we are stuck with what we have when it comes to older people who might need expensive care for 30 years, and disabled people who might need care for even longer. And what we have, he said, amounts to “a little here, a little there, a little Medicare, a lot of Medicaid, a little long-term care insurance and a lot of unpaid family caregiving.” (I would say very little long-term care insurance, and a vast amount of unpaid family care.)

Discussing the future of Medicare and Medicaid without including long-term care is pointless, Mr. Slome added. Ms. Garner notes that she meets frequently with Republicans and that they never dismiss the issue as unimportant.

Well, there’s a start.

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

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The New Old Age Blog: A New Commission: Time to Cheer or Yawn?

The fate of the Class Act, which would have established the nation’s first voluntary public long-term care insurance program, was sealed in 2011 when the Obama administration shut it down, essentially calling it unworkable.

As long as the language remained part of the Affordable Care Act, supporters allowed themselves to hope, or perhaps fantasize, that the administration might return to the subject. How to care for an aging population, and who pays for that and how, are questions that won’t go away.

But Congress quietly administered the coup de grâce last month, during the fiscal cliff negotiations. The budget deal stripped the Class Act language from the Affordable Care Act. R.I.P.

In its place — thanks to the intervention of Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia — the negotiators created a Commission on Long-Term Care, charged with developing plans for “a comprehensive, coordinated and high-quality system” ensuring long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities.

Its 15 members — three picks each for the president, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the House speaker and minority leader — face a tight deadline. Within six months, they are supposed to recommend legislative or administrative actions, including actual legislative language. Then bills are to be introduced in both houses of Congress on the very next day they are in session.

Which sounds like urgency, but is it? Even Connie Garner, the longtime Kennedy staff member who directs the advocacy group called Advance Class, was skeptical. “What can you really do in six months?” she said. Actuaries and policy types had been working on the Class plan for 19 months before the plug was pulled. “And so what if you introduce a bill?” she went on. “You can introduce stuff and nothing happens.”

So when Advance Class held its monthly board meeting a few days after the Class Act officially bit the dust, Ms. Garner figured this push for a national long-term care approach was dead, along with her organization. She had prepared a valedictory, praising the group for at least putting the issue on the national agenda.

“But they said, ‘No, we’re going to keep Advance Class going; we’re going to fight the long fight,’ ” she recalled. So on we go.

Discouragingly, the commission has already hit delays: Its members were to be named within 30 days of the budget deal’s enactment, but only the Congressional Democrats have made appointments.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, nominated a veteran health policy scholar, Judy Feder, who is now at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute; the labor executive Laphonza Butler, who heads California’s United Long-Term Care Workers Union; and Javaid Anwar, a Nevada internist.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, appointed Bruce Chernof, chief executive of the SCAN Foundation, which promotes quality care for the elderly; Judith Stein, founder of the Center for Medicare Advocacy; and George Vrandenburg, a retired corporate lawyer who has put his philanthropic muscle behind Alzheimer’s causes.

We have heard nothing yet from the White House or the Republican Congressional leadership.

Maybe that barely matters. “I can’t imagine anything coming out of this commission that won’t be totally forgotten a year from now,” said Jesse Slome, executive director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance. “How many commissions have there been?”

Yet one thing that he and the proponents at Advance Class can agree on — maybe the only thing — is that this issue demands attention.

Otherwise, Mr. Slome says, we are stuck with what we have when it comes to older people who might need expensive care for 30 years, and disabled people who might need care for even longer. And what we have, he said, amounts to “a little here, a little there, a little Medicare, a lot of Medicaid, a little long-term care insurance and a lot of unpaid family caregiving.” (I would say very little long-term care insurance, and a vast amount of unpaid family care.)

Discussing the future of Medicare and Medicaid without including long-term care is pointless, Mr. Slome added. Ms. Garner notes that she meets frequently with Republicans and that they never dismiss the issue as unimportant.

Well, there’s a start.

---

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

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In Japan, the Fax Machine Is Anything but a Relic

Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

Yuichiro Sugahara, whose company delivers bento lunchboxes, mostly through fax orders.

TOKYO — Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology — the fax machine — that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.

Last year alone, Japanese households bought 1.7 million of the old-style fax machines, which print documents on slick, glossy paper spooled in the back. In the United States, the device has become such an artifact that the Smithsonian is adding two machines to its collection, technology historians said.

“The fax was such a success here that it has proven hard to replace,” said Kenichi Shibata, a manager at NTT Communications, which led development of the technology in the 1970s. “It has grown unusually deep roots into Japanese society.”

The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011.

Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country’s deep attachment to the fax machine, which the nation popularized in the 1980s. A decade ago, he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted.

Today, his company, Tamagoya, is thriving with the hiss and beep of thousands of orders pouring in every morning, most by fax, many with minutely detailed handwritten requests like “go light on the batter in the fried chicken” or “add an extra hard-boiled egg.”

“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” said Mr. Sugahara, 43.

Japan’s reluctance to give up its fax machines offers a revealing glimpse into an aging nation that can often seem quietly determined to stick to its tried-and-true ways, even if the rest of the world seems to be passing it rapidly by. The fax addiction helps explain why Japan, which once revolutionized consumer electronics with its hand-held calculators, Walkmans and, yes, fax machines, has become a latecomer in the digital age, and has allowed itself to fall behind nimbler competitors like South Korea and China.

“Japan has this Galápagos effect of holding on to some things they’re comfortable with,” said Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian who is writing a book on the machine’s rise and fall. “Elsewhere, the fax has gone the way of the dodo.”

In Japan, with the exception of the savviest Internet start-ups or internationally minded manufacturers, the fax remains an essential tool for doing business. Experts say government offices prefer faxes because they generate paperwork onto which bureaucrats can affix their stamps of approval, called hanko. Many companies say they still rely on faxes to create a paper trail of orders and shipments not left by ephemeral e-mail. Banks rely on faxes because, they say, customers are worried about the safety of their personal information on the Internet.

Even Japan’s largest yakuza crime syndicate, the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, has used faxes to send notifications of expulsion to members, the police say.

After the deadly earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011, there was a small boom in fax sales to replace machines that had been washed away. One of the hottest sellers is a model that is powered by batteries so it will keep working during power failures caused by natural disasters.

At Tamagoya, Mr. Sugahara has turned his company’s reliance on the fax and standard telephones into an art form. Every morning, orders for about 62,000 lunches pour in, about half by fax. Most of those lunches are cooked and put onto trucks even before the last order is taken. A small army of 100 fax and telephone operators carefully coordinate deliveries, and fewer than 60 lunches — or 0.1 percent — are wasted.

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

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IHT Rendezvous: Hanging of Militant Raises Questions in India

In my latest column in the International Herald Tribune, I argue that the Indian justice system, which includes shoddy police investigations and the powerful influence of political calculations, is not competent nor fair enough to grant India the moral right to hang a man, assuming that any society can have such a right in the first place.

Page Two

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

On Saturday, a militant who is widely known in India as Afzal Guru, was hanged in a secret operation. The hanging, which was his punishment for assisting five terrorists who had attacked the Indian Parliament in 2001, has raised a number of issues, most of them questions that supporters of human rights have raised since 2004 when he was sentenced to death by the highest court in the land. They believe that he did not receive a fair trial, that he was a convenient scapegoat, that he was a minor player in a crime that the Indian state was not good enough to fully investigate, that he did not deserve to be hanged according to the evidence that was available.

They had solid reasons to say all this, but one of Afzal Guru’s misfortunes was that the liberal voice in India has progressively lost its power and influence because it has lost its credibility with the state, the news media and the fast changing Indian urban middle class.

In the past, when the liberals took on the state over dams or other developmental projects, or minority rights or the armed activities of tribal gangs that sought their own revolutions, they have been more preoccupied with maintaining their ideological positions and their love for the underdogs than with the practicality of hard facts. So, even though the Indian state’s handling of the Afzal Guru’s case was disgraceful, the voice of the liberals had become too feeble, dull and predictable to intimidate the state. The liberals are seeing their constituency shrink even in mainstream English journalism in India, and they have themselves to blame for this.

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Media Decoder Blog: Comcast Buys Rest of NBC in Early Sale

8:53 p.m. | Updated Comcast gave NBCUniversal a $16.7 billion vote of confidence on Tuesday, agreeing to pay that sum to acquire General Electric’s remaining 49 percent stake in the entertainment company. The deal accelerated a sales process that was expected to take several more years.

Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, said the acquisition, which will be completed by the end of March, underscored a commitment to NBCUniversal and its highly profitable cable channels, expanding theme parks and the resurgent NBC broadcast network.

“We always thought it was a strong possibility that we’d some day own 100 percent,” Mr. Roberts said in a telephone interview.

He added that the rapidly changing television business and the growing necessity of owning content as well as the delivery systems sped up the decision. “It’s been a very smooth couple of years, and the content continues to get more valuable with new revenue streams,” he said.

Comcast also said that NBCUniversal would buy the NBC studios and offices at 30 Rockefeller Center, as well as the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Those transactions will cost about $1.4 billion.

Mr. Roberts called the 30 Rockefeller Center offices “iconic” and said it would have been “expensive to replicate” studios elsewhere for the “Today” show, “Saturday Night Live,” “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and other programs produced there. “We’re proud to be associated with it,” Mr. Roberts said of the building.

With the office space comes naming rights for the building, according to a General Electric spokeswoman. So it is possible that one of New York’s most famous landmarks, with its giant red G.E. sign, could soon be displaying a Comcast sign instead.

When asked about a possible logo swap on the building, owned by Tishman Speyer, Mr. Roberts told CNBC, that is “not something we’re focused on talking about today.” Nevertheless, the sale was visible in a prominent way Tuesday night: the G.E. letters, which have adorned the top of 30 Rock for several decades, were not illuminated for an hour after sunset. But the lights flickered back on later in the evening.

Comcast, with a conservative, low-profile culture, had clashed with the G.E. approach, according to employees and executives in television. Comcast moved NBCUniversal’s executive offices from the 52nd floor to the 51st floor — less opulent space that features smaller executive offices and a cozy communal coffee room instead of General Electric’s lavish executive dining room.

Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in early 2011 by acquiring 51 percent of the media company from General Electric. The structure of the deal gave Comcast the option of buying out G.E. in a three-and-a-half to seven-year time frame. In part because of the clash in corporate cultures, television executives said, both sides were eager to accelerate the sale.

Price was also a factor. Mr. Roberts said he believed the stake would have cost more had Comcast waited. Also, he pointed to the company’s strong fourth-quarter earnings to be released late Tuesday afternoon, which put it in a strong position to complete the sale.

Comcast reported a near record-breaking year with $20 billion in operating cash flow in the fiscal year 2012. In the three months that ended Dec. 31, Comcast’s cash flow increased 7.3 percent to $5.3 billion. Revenue at NBCUniversal grew 4.8 percent to $6 billion.

“We’ve had two years to make the transition and to make the investments that we believe will continue to take off,” Mr. Roberts said.

The transactions with General Electric will be largely financed with $11.4 billion of cash on hand, $4 billion of subsidiary senior unsecured notes to be issued to G.E. and a $2 billion in borrowings.

Even with the investment in NBCUniversal, Comcast said it would increase its dividend by 20 percent to 78 cents a share and buy back $2 billion in stock in 2013.

When it acquired the 51 percent stake two years ago, Comcast committed to paying about $6.5 billion in cash and contributed all of its cable channels, including E! and some regional sports networks, to the newly established NBCUniversal joint venture. Those channels were valued at $7.25 billion.

The transaction made Comcast, the single biggest cable provider in the United States, one of the biggest owners of cable channels, too. NBCUniversal operates the NBC broadcast network, 10 local NBC stations, USA, Bravo, Syfy, E!, MSNBC, CNBC, the NBC Sports Network, Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, and a long list of other media brands.

Mr. Roberts and Michael J. Angelakis, vice chairman and chief financial officer for the Comcast Corporation, led the negotiations that began last year with Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, and Keith Sharon, the company’s chief financial officer. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Centerview Partners and CBRE provided financial and strategic advice.

The sale ends a long relationship between General Electric and NBC that goes back before the founding days of television. In 1926, the Radio Corporation of America created the NBC network. General Electric owned R.C.A. until 1930. It regained control of R.C.A., including NBC, in 1986, in a deal worth $6.4 billion at the time.

In a slide show on the company’s “GE Reports” Web site titled “It’s a Wrap: GE, NBC Part Ways, Together They’ve Changed History,” G.E. said the deal with Comcast “caps a historic, centurylong journey for the two companies that gave birth to modern home entertainment.”

Mr. Immelt has said that NBCUniversal did not mesh with G.E.’s core industrial businesses. That became even more apparent when the company became a minority stakeholder with no control over how the business was run, according to a person briefed on G.E.’s thinking who could not discuss private conversations publicly.

“By adding significant new capital to our balanced capital allocation plan, we can accelerate our share buyback plans while investing in growth in our core businesses,” Mr. Immelt said in a statement. He added: “For nearly 30 years, NBC — and later NBCUniversal — has been a great business for G.E. and our investors.”

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Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

Read More..

Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

Read More..

Advertising: Small Rival Music Service Takes Aim at Pandora

ONE of advertising’s great (or at least most amusing) traditions is the challenger attack ad, in which a field’s No. 2 (or No. 3) player tries to distinguish itself by taking aim at the leader. When artfully done it can have a great effect, as in Avis’s long-running “We try harder” campaign against Hertz, or Samsung’s recent ads mocking the obedience of iPhone fans.

The latest example is in digital music services, with Pandora as the Goliath and its much smaller competitor Slacker in the role of David with the 30-second sling.

In an online-only spot that will start running Wednesday, a young woman at a coffee shop vexes everyone in earshot when she opens a blue “Pandora’s box” — labeled “P,” like Pandora’s app icon — and unleashes a singularly annoying song.

“It plays that over and over again,” the woman complains to a friend, who blames Pandora’s “small music library” for the repetition. With Slacker helpfully loaded on her phone, the friend points out that Slacker has 10 times as many songs, and other features, too.

Like Pandora, Slacker offers free, ad-supported Internet radio and has two tiers of premium service. Listeners can eliminate ads for a $4 monthly subscription, and $10 a month also adds features that — like Spotify and other “on-demand” services — let users play any song they choose.

Since its founding in 2006, however, Slacker has struggled to stand out. With four million monthly users, 560,000 of them paying, its audience is a fraction of Pandora’s, which is more than 65 million a month; Clear Channel Communications has nearly 50 million online listeners through its station sites and iHeartRadio app.

To promote itself among such formidable competition — and to introduce a revamped version of its site — Slacker wants to show that it tries harder.

“We had to be very honest with where we were in the marketplace,” said Craig Rechenmacher, Slacker’s chief marketing officer. “We had to be disruptive in the marketplace, and we needed something that targets our competitors and the holes in their service.”

Slacker will spend $5.5 million on media placements this year, Mr. Rechenmacher said. In addition to the video spot, by Liquid Advertising, the campaign will include display ads by the agency Questus, and they will run on music and pop-culture sites like YouTube, Vevo, Brooklyn Vegan and College Humor.

The ads show off what Slacker says is its human touch, with playlists created by music experts and stations featuring D.J.’s and commentators. Pandora caters to listeners’ tastes through a secret algorithm that analyzes each song’s musical “genome.” (Others, like Songza, have grown quickly through expert programming, but Pandora is the field’s leader by far.)

“When we did research on our core users, what they love the most, what came back was the idea that it felt like somebody was home,” said Jack Isquith, Slacker’s senior vice president of strategic development. “There was someone who loves music at the controls.”

The campaign is also evidence of a slow change in the marketing of digital music services, many of which have avoided advertising in favor of online word-of-mouth (and, of course, lots of free music). Pandora, for example, is often featured in commercials by its partners, like car companies, but has made none of its own.

“It costs a lot of money to build a brand if you didn’t hit it luckily through viral channels, like Pandora did,” said David Hyman, the former chief executive of the music service Mog, which was sold last year to Beats Electronics.

The biggest force in promoting digital music over the years, music executives say, was Apple’s iTunes and iPod commercials. Rhapsody, too, has run dozens of television ads, including a memorable one with Jay-Z in 2009.

For the most part the recent wave of streaming services has not been heavily advertised, but that is changing as the field grows more competitive. Last year, Rdio, a subscription service, did a multimillion-dollar campaign that included billboards in Times Square. Spotify, which has grown quickly but has not fully penetrated the mainstream market, recently hired its first agency of record, Droga5 — the former agency of Rhapsody.

For its campaign, Slacker wanted to focus on how digital services serve consumers. In the coffee shop video, the patrons align with the demographics of the service — 18 to 44 years old, and slightly more females than males, said Will Akerlof, the chief executive of Liquid Advertising — and visibly express their reactions to the music playing.

To find a sufficiently irritating soundtrack, the agency looked at a 2007 Rolling Stone magazine feature, “The 20 Most Annoying Songs,” Mr. Akerlof said, and recorded a techno-pop version of the folk song “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” in the style of Rednex’s version from the mid-1990s (No. 13 on the list).

That lighthearted approach, with a focus on the consumer, has been missing from many digital-music ads, Mr. Isquith said.

“The approaches of many of the people in the space has been, ‘Hey, we’re standing next to big stars,’ or, ‘Hey, we’ve got the slickest, most cutting-edge tech product,’ but that’s not why people use it,” he said.

“Our ads,” Mr. Isquith added, “are meant to say that this is a great listener experience that will delight you.”

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Pope Makes First Public Appearance Since Decision to Resign

Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press

Pope Benedict XVI arrives for his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Wednesday.

VATICAN CITY — In his first public appearance since the stunning announcement of his resignation two days ago, Pope Benedict XVI said on Wednesday he had made his decision “in full liberty for the good of the church” because he no longer had the strength needed to carry out the duties of the papacy.

Clad in simple, white robes and skull-cap at a general audience in the Vatican, the pope spoke as Christians began the 40-day period of fasting and prayer preceding Easter, which begins on Ash Wednesday. Later he was scheduled to celebrate the Ash Wednesday mass at St. Peter’s, an event described by his aides as likely to be his final major mass in the huge basilica before his retirement on Feb. 28.

The announcement on Monday signalled the first papal resignation in almost 600 years.

A cheering crowd greeted the pope with a standing ovation as he entered the Vatican’s cavernous Paul VI audience hall which has a capacity of around 8,000 people.

Before reaching his decision, the pope said he had prayed and examined his conscience for a long time. Referring to the papacy, he said he had been “well aware of the seriousness of this act, but also aware of the fact that I am no longer capable of carrying out Peter’s Ministry with the strength needed.”

“The certainty that the church belongs to God supports and illuminates me, and Christ will always give his guidance and care. I thank you all for your love and prayer with which you’ve accompanied me. Please keep praying for the pope and the church,” he said to loud applause. “I felt it almost physically throughout these days that were not easy for me. Keep praying for me, for the church and for the future pope. The Lord will guide us.”

The pope’s appearances on Wednesday offered his followers a chance to see and hear him before he withdraws into a far more sheltered life in a convent within the Vatican walls where an apartment has been prepared for him.

Still unclear, however, are some of the practical consequences of Benedict’s decision, Vatican officials acknowledged Tuesday, from how the former pope will be addressed, to what to do with the papal ring used to seal important documents, traditionally destroyed upon a pope’s death.

Officials also disclosed on Tuesday that the pope had been fitted with a cardiac pacemaker a decade ago but said this had not been a major health issue and had not contributed to his reasons for resigning.

“There are a series of questions that remain to be seen, also on the part of the pope himself, even if it is a decision that he had made some time ago,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said at a news conference. “How he will live afterward, which will be very different from how he lives now, will require time and tranquillity and reflection and a moment of adaptation to a new situation.”

On Wednesday, thousands of Catholics gathered for a glimpse of the pope, including Francesca Meggiorini, from Verona, who had brought her four children with her because, she said, “this is special. I wanted my kids to be present. The pope was a man whose simple words went straight to the heart. So it’s wonderful for my children to be here. I think this experience will remain in their memory.”

Kevin Murphy, on a pilgrimage from Saint Benedict School in Bury St. Edmunds in eastern England, called Benedict “a great moral and spiritual leader.” And Fabio Semeraro, a ballet dancer from Rome, said he came to see the pope “because it’s an important event. You get attached to a pope, but then again, after there will be another.”

The Ash Wednesday mass, to be held later on Wednesday, usually takes place in a church on the Aventine Hill. But this year it will be conducted in St. Peter’s to allow a greater number of the faithful to attend, Father Lombardi said. Even though the Code of Canon Law allows popes to resign, the occurrence was rare enough to have caught Vatican officials off guard, including on issues like the protocol and potentially awkward logistics of having a former pope and his successor share a backyard.

Elisabetta Povoledo reported from Vatican City, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

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DealBook: S.E.C. Nominee Mary Jo White Discloses Law Firm Wealth

It is no secret that the partners at the white-shoe law firms Debevoise & Plimpton and Cravath, Swaine & Moore earn a decent living. The financial disclosure form of Mary Jo White, the Obama administration’s pick to become the next chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, reveals just how decent.

Ms. White and her husband, John White, have amassed at least $16 million, according to the filing. Ms. White, 65, heads the litigation department at Debevoise; Mr. White, 65, is co-chairman of the corporate governance practice at Cravath.

As part of her disclosures, Ms. White also explained how she would deal with potential conflicts of interest. In a surprise move, she wrote that her husband would convert his partnership at Cravath from equity to nonequity status.

While many large corporate law firms have nonequity partners, meaning they hold the title of partner but have no ownership stake, each of Cravath’s 87 partners has equity in the firm. As a nonequity partner, Mr. White will receive a fixed salary and an annual performance bonus, according to the filing.

Ms. White also said that, for the time she serves as the S.E.C.’s chairwoman, Mr. White would not communicate with the commission on behalf of Cravath or any client in connection with rules proposed by the S.E.C. Such a restriction is not immaterial for Cravath, as Mr. White has vast experience in securities law and deep connections to the S.E.C., having served as the director of the commission’s corporation finance unit from 2006 to 2008.

The disclosure form contained a number of other revelations. Mr. White has investments in three hedge funds, including a vehicle managed by Och-Ziff, a large publicly traded investment firm started by a former Goldman Sachs partner. He will divest his interest in all three funds upon her confirmation, according to the filing.

The couple also owns 40 acres of farmland and unsold crops in Pocahontas County, Iowa, that are valued at $100,000 to $250,000.

As for Ms. White, a former United States attorney in Manhattan, she received more than $2.4 million as a Debevoise partner last year, according to the filing. And she said that she planned to retire as a Debevoise partner upon becoming S.E.C. chairwoman, at which point she would enjoy the benefits of the firm’s lucrative retirement plan. The disclosure says that Ms. White will receive a monthly lifetime retirement payment of $42,500, amounting to $510,000 annually.

However, instead of making a monthly retirement payment for the next four years while she runs the commission, Debevoise will make a lump-sum payment within 60 days of her appointment, the filing disclosed.

The Whites’ net worth is most likely far greater than $16 million, which represents the low number in a range of possible amounts. Government officials are required to disclose their net worth only within broad ranges.

For instance, the Whites own seven different investments — including a Vanguard high yield bond fund and a Vanguard emerging markets fund — worth $1 million to $5 million. At the low end, those seven funds would be worth $7 million; but at the high end, they would be valued at $35 million.

Ms. White also said that she would avoid some matters for a period of time that involve her former clients, a list that includes JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and UBS.

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