June 2011

Jill Abramson, a former investigative reporter who rose to prominence as a Washington correspondent and editor, will become the next executive editor of The New York Times, succeeding Bill Keller, who is stepping down to become a full-time writer for the paper. The move was accompanied by another shift in senior management. Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief and former editor of The Los Angeles Times, will become the managing editor for news. Abramson will become the first woman to be editor of the paper in its 160-year history.

Over the course of Keller’s tenure, the paper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes and expanded its online audience to some 50 million readers worldwide. But the economic downturn and the drift of readers and advertisers to the Web also forced the paper to lay off members of the news staff and tighten budgets considerably.

The escalating fight over TV sports rights reaches its biggest battlefield next week, as NBCUniversal pushes to extend its track record of Olympic broadcasting wins, and ESPN and Fox aim to spoil it.

On June 6 and 7, the TV broadcasters will bid for exclusive U.S. television rights for the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games, one of the few spectacles guaranteed to draw big, live TV audiences at a time when consumers are spreading their attention across a growing number of TV channels and online video sites. The bidding, which is expected to be tighter than in years' past, also marks an effort by the International Olympic Committee and its TV broadcasters to find a way to make televising the Games profitable again. The old model of focusing coverage on one flagship broadcast channel has been broken by the steep increases in rights fees, which have risen faster than advertising rates. The media companies are each sending fleets of executives to Switzerland to make their pitches. And each is taking a different approach.

Trying to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. Looking to fend off new competition with Verizon over the iPhone. The looming spectrum crunch and the shift away from unlimited data pricing. Too bad there is nothing to talk to AT&T executive Ralph de la Vega about.

AT&T's data network won't be on par with Verizon Wireless' until 2013 or 2014, de la Vega said. AT&T has yet to launch its faster fourth-generation cellular technology but has plans to do so in the second half of this year. The first cities to get the 4G LTE service will be Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. The launch will come at least seven months after Verizon Wireless', which began rolling out in December. De la Vega says the proposed merger will improve the quality of AT&T's network because it will be able to use T-Mobile's cell sites. Major cities, such as New York and San Francisco, should see the most significant benefits, he said. Building a new cell site in San Francisco takes two to three times longer than in other cities, he said.

[Commentary] The Pentagon is developing a new cyberwarfare strategy that calls for the use of military force — including conventional weapons — in response to certain kinds of damaging online attacks on U.S. institutions. That's fine in theory; if foreign agents launch a cyberattack on, say, the nation's electrical grid, it may be both reasonable and proportionate to fire missiles at, say, the attacker's energy supplies. But as recent hacks and phishing attacks on Google's Gmail service and on defense contractor Lockheed Martin indicate, the theory may not translate well to the murky, messy reality of what's happening online.

It's no surprise that the United States would reserve the right to use force against those who threaten it through the Internet. That's standard operating procedure for governments around the world in response to any new type of attack. The Obama administration stated its position simply in the International Strategy for Cyberspace policy paper released May 17, which declared that the United States "will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country." But what constitutes an act of cyberwarfare? When would a military response be appropriate? And what are the rules of engagement? These are questions that U.S. administrations and defense officials have been struggling to answer for more than a decade. Last month the White House sent Congress a broad cybersecurity proposal that would have the government designate which companies control critical infrastructure, identify the ones subject to the greatest threats and declare which risks they must guard against. It would not, however, have the government tell them how to ward off cyberattacks or take control of critical facilities in the event of a cyberwar. Instead, it would require those companies to have cybersecurity plans that passed muster with independent evaluators. It's a modest but important step in response to a glaring cybersecurity gap that Congress should move quickly to fill.