In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less that have amounted to fully half of the $340 million he has collected so far. But records show that one-third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more: a total of $112 million, more than Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries, raised in contributions of that size. Behind those larger donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama “bundlers,” fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000 each, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers. While his campaign has cited its volume of small donations as a rationale for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election, Mr. Obama has worked to build a network of big-dollar supporters from the time he began contemplating a run for the United States Senate. He tapped into well-connected people in Chicago prior to the 2004 Senate race, and once elected, set out across the country starting to cultivate some of his party’s most influential money collectors. He courted them with the savvy of a veteran politician, through phone calls, meals and one-on-one meetings; he wrote thank-you cards and remembered birthdays; he sent them autographed copies of his book and doted on their children. The fruits of his efforts have put Mr. Obama’s major donors on a pace that almost rivals the $147 million raised by President Bush’s network of Pioneers and Rangers in contributions of $1,000 or larger during the 2004 primary season. Given his decision not to accept public financing, Mr. Obama is counting on his bundlers to help him raise $300 million for his general-election campaign and another $180 million for the Democratic National Committee. An analysis of campaign finance records shows that about two-thirds of his bundlers are concentrated in four major industries: law, securities and investments, real estate and entertainment. Lawyers make up the largest group, numbering roughly 130, with many of them working for firms that also have lobbying arms. At least 100 Obama bundlers are top executives or brokers from investment businesses: nearly two dozen work for financial titans like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. About 40 others come from the real estate industry. The biggest fund-raisers include people like Julius Genachowski, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission and a technology executive who is new to political fund-raising; Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer of UBS Investment Bank; James A. Torrey, a New York hedge-fund investor; and Charles H. Rivkin, chief executive of an animation studio in Los Angeles. “It’s fairly clear that this is being packaged as an extraordinary new kind of fund-raising, and the Internet is a new and powerful part of it,” said Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute. “But it’s also clear that many of the old donors are still there and important.” The care and feeding that top Obama fund-raisers have received underscores their significance to his campaign. Members of his National Finance Committee who fulfill their commitment to raise at least $250,000 are being rewarded with trips to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Finance committee members participate in conference calls with top campaign officials every other week. The fund-raisers meet quarterly, often with Mr. Obama dropping in. He lingered after the most recent meeting in June in Chicago, telling his staff he wanted to thank every person in the room. Some fund-raisers who knocked on doors for Mr. Obama in places like Indiana, Iowa and Pennsylvania got to spend time with Mr. Obama backstage before and after speeches on primary nights. His fund-raisers invariably say their support for him is not rooted in any kind of promise of access, but rather their belief in him. “This is about Barack Obama and changing the direction of our country,” said Jonathan B. Perdue, a business consultant in Mill Valley, Calif., who has raised more than $250,000 for Mr. Obama’s campaign. Mr. Obama has pledged not to accept donations from lobbyists or political action committees registered with the federal government. But some top donors clearly have policy and political agendas. Hedge-fund executives, for example, have bundled large sums for Mr. Obama at a time when their industry has been looking to increase its clout in Washington. Kenneth C. Griffin, chief executive officer of Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, has collected more than $50,000 for Mr. Obama. But Mr. Griffin, whose $1.5 billion in income in 2007 made him one of the country’s highest-paid hedge-fund executives, has given generously over the years to Republicans as well, and he recently helped to hold a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain. Citadel has spent more than $1.1 million, dating back to 2007, in lobbying against higher tax rates for hedge-fund gains. (Mr. Obama has supported the higher tax rates.) Similarly, Paul Tudor Jones, a billionaire hedge-fund manager from Connecticut, has raised more than $100,000 for Mr. Obama. But he also gave to Mr. McCain, to Rudolph W. Giuliani and to Mitt Romney. Mr. Jones, who has given more than $900,000 over the last decade to federal candidates and political organizations, helped form a trade association that has fought hedge-fund regulation. Many fund-raisers sit on the campaign’s array of policy working groups, getting a chance to weigh in on policy positions and speeches. Mr. Genachowski, a Harvard Law School classmate of Mr. Obama, leads the technology working group. Fund-raisers from private equity and hedge funds sit on Mr. Obama’s economic policy group. Despite Mr. Obama’s image as a newcomer, many of his bundlers are Democratic Party stalwarts, including people who were some of the top fund-raisers for Senator John Kerry in 2004. At least 58 of them appear to have personally made more than $100,000 in contributions to federal candidates and committees over the last decade. Updated bundler lists released recently by the McCain and Obama campaigns show that they have similar numbers of high-dollar fund-raisers. The Obama fund-raising operation is meticulously organized. Bundlers are assigned tracking numbers, and the finance staff sends them quarterly reminders of how they are doing in meeting their goals. “There’s no price for admission,” said Alan D. Solomont, a top Democratic fund-raiser in Boston who made his fortune in the nursing home industry and has given more than $1.5 million to Democratic candidates and causes. “We value every donation and every donor equally. But we are a performance-based organization. We want everybody to feel like they’re included, but at the same time we’re not here to have tea together.” Mr. Obama began courting many of his fund-raisers soon after he burst upon the national scene with his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Mr. Solomont, a major fund-raiser both for Mr. Kerry and for Bill Clinton during their presidential runs, received a call on his cellphone in February 2005, a year after Mr. Obama’s election to the Senate, from a member of his staff who asked if he would like to get together with Mr. Obama. They met for Chinese food in Washington the following week, and Mr. Obama scored points with Mr. Solomont when he pointed out that they had both been community organizers earlier in their careers. “I’ve been involved in politics a long time,” Mr. Solomont said. “Nobody’s bothered to know that about me.” Early that same year, Mr. Obama attended a dinner in the Bay Area for about 20 major Kerry supporters. The dinner was organized by Mark Gorenberg, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was Mr. Kerry’s single biggest fund-raiser, after Mr. Obama’s staff members contacted him. Several of those on hand, including Mr. Gorenberg and John Roos, head of a Silicon Valley law firm, became among the earliest and biggest check collectors for Mr. Obama’s presidential bid. In 2006, Mr. Obama became a vice chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, giving him the opportunity to campaign across the country and to cultivate other potential benefactors. When his book “The Audacity of Hope” came out later that year, his staff members organized book parties at the homes of major Democratic donors. In December, Mr. Obama visited the New York office of the billionaire investor George Soros to court a roomful of high-powered Democratic fund-raisers, hoping to lure some of them away from Mrs. Clinton. Not everyone was swayed, but Mr. Obama won over Orin Kramer, a hedge-fund executive from New Jersey, and Mr. Wolf, the UBS executive, both of whom are now among Mr. Obama’s biggest fund-raisers. Mr. Obama signed on as his finance director Julianna Smoot, who had led fund-raising for Senate Democrats and, before that, for Senator Tom Daschle when he was majority leader. With guidance from Ms. Smoot, a key part of the campaign’s fast start was its success in scooping up top former Kerry fund-raisers, including Lou Susman, a Chicago investment banker who was Mr. Kerry’s national finance chairman, and Kirk Wagar, a lawyer in Miami who became Mr. Obama’s finance chairman in Florida. Even so, the initial meeting of Mr. Obama’s national finance committee, held in Chicago the day after he officially announced his candidacy, was a relatively small affair, numbering about 75 people. Penny Pritzker, the billionaire heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune whom Mr. Obama asked to become his finance chairwoman, challenged the group to double in size. The number of bundlers ballooned quickly. The Obama campaign made important inroads among affluent people under age 45, including Silicon Valley engineers and hedge-fund analysts, many of whom had not been on the political radar screen. Donations in June, the latest month for which Mr. Obama has disclosed his donors to the Federal Election Commission, illustrate the double-barreled nature of the campaign’s fund-raising. Mr. Obama brought in nearly $31 million in contributions of less than $200, his best month for small donations. But he also collected more than $12 million in contributions of $1,000 or more, the most since the first half of 2007. The share from large contributions appears poised to increase, as Mr. Obama has stepped up his fund-raising schedule. “In 2007, the campaign relied on the tried and true methods like fund-raisers, for both large- and small-dollar donors, with the candidate or his surrogates, and the Internet largely financed it in 2008,” said Kirk Dornbush, the president of a biotech firm and a top fund-raiser in Atlanta. “When you combine the traditional fund-raising methods with the continued online contributions, you have a very, very powerful fund-raising engine.”

This year’s presidential campaign has drawn more voter interest than any other race in generations. For mainstream news media, however, capitalizing on that interest has been hit or miss, though not for lack of trying. Cable news ratings have risen sharply, with record viewership for debates and growing numbers for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Sites including MSNBC.com and CNN.com have set new records for views of online videos. A trade association for newspapers has placed advertisements telling campaign managers that “newspapers deliver voters.” But many media companies are struggling to translate campaign coverage into repeat readers and viewers — or revenue. The presidential primary debates had little lasting impact on TV ratings, and some magazines say that issues with candidates on the cover show only a modest bump in newsstand sales. More noticeably, the broadcast networks’ evening newscasts — the traditional standard-bearers of television news — have been unable to stop their long-term ratings declines, even during the hotly contested primaries. The newscasts on NBC, ABC and CBS had an average combined audience of 23.7 million viewers from January to June, down 2 percent from the same time period in 2007. That decline came despite expensive efforts to remain competitive. The networks have produced special series about the candidates and kept reporters on the campaign trail. Most recently, Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News,” Charles Gibson of “World News” on ABC and Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News” all traveled with Senator Barack Obama as he toured the Middle East and Europe, yet household ratings for each of those three newscasts were flat compared with the previous week. Jon Banner, the executive producer of “World News,” suggested that the ratings, especially during the slow summer months, might have slid further were it not an election year. He added that the heightened interest in the election can benefit many media entities without taking away from others. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” he said. It is true that the amount of news Americans consume has grown over the last few years, as has the number of news sources. The lineup of Web sites, newscasts and publications that jockey for attention and advertising dollars continues to expand. Three months before the election, one clear winner of the cycle so far is The Politico, an upstart news organization founded in January 2007. The Politico, with nearly 70 editorial employees, publishes a 26,000-circulation newspaper three days a week in Washington, D.C. But it is Politico’s round-the-clock online news reporting and analysis that have made it a must-read for a large audience outside the Beltway. Politico.com averaged 2.5 million unique visitors a month in the first half of 2008, more than all but 13 American newspapers, according to Nielsen Online. The Politico has benefited from profound changes in the way people get news, according to Jim VandeHei, the executive editor and co-founder. People look for news far more often during the day, they are far more likely to seek multiple sources as well as favorite bloggers and writers, and they are far more interested in watching video online. “The difference between ’04 and ’08 is like walking into a different century,” he said. “Virtually everybody who comes to us also goes to The Post or The Times or Drudge or Yahoo or Google. Having a sole source of news — those days are over.” A spring poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 17 percent of Americans learn about the campaign via the Internet on a typical day, more than double the number that did in the spring of 2004. But traffic on Internet news sites has grown steadily for years, making it hard to say how much of this year’s rise is attributable to the election. (Nor does it mean that online publications are translating page views into dollars. Politico still gets most of its revenue from ads in its printed newspaper, placed by interest groups hoping to influence the paper’s powerful readers.) Charlie Tillinghast, the president of MSNBC.com, said he believed that at least part of his site’s success is election-related. In December, weeks before the first primaries, MSNBC.com’s traffic surpassed the 30 million visitor mark. It has held up since then, attracting 37.6 million visitors in June, when the final nominating contests were held. For news Web sites, the most significant change from 2004 is the amount of video being consumed. Compared with previous election years, “the video players are better, the video quality is much better, and the overall user experience is vastly improved,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “It’s actually a pleasant experience, whereas before, users suffered a little pain to watch online video.” On YouTube, the Internet’s most popular video site, political commercials are far more popular than news reports. John McCain’s recent ad tying celebrities like Britney Spears to Senator Obama has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times. Cable news has been a huge beneficiary of the campaign cycle. An analysis of Nielsen ratings by Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of CNN, shows cable with a 58 percent share of all news-viewing on television, up from 50 percent in 2004. (Page 2 of 2)     As the nominating contests played out in the first half of 2008 and the cable networks showed two dozen candidate debates, CNN had, on average, 32 percent more 25- to 54-year-old viewers than during the same period in 2004, while MSNBC (starting from a much smaller base) averaged 73 percent more. The Fox News Channel showed a 17 percent decline compared with the same time period, but still had more viewers than the other news channels.

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The Politico, a news organization started by John Harris, above left, and Jim VandeHei, has benefited from the campaign.

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Times Topics: Barack Obama

Times Topics: John McCain

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Record-breaking spending on political ads has helped local TV stations, though it only partly offsets a slump in the general ad market. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, the likely nominees, are each spending about $6 million a week on television ads, mostly on local TV in battleground states, particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. During the prolonged primary season, many more local markets enjoyed a taste of campaign advertising dollars. “Local stations were seeing primary money late into the season that had never seen a dime before — states like South Dakota, Montana, North Carolina,” said Jack Poor, the vice president for marketing at the Television Bureau of Advertising. Among magazines, Newsweek, where the campaign is a bread-and-butter topic, reports that issues with Senator McCain or Senator Obama on the cover have been among its best sellers, but that is not saying much, because its sales do not vary greatly based on cover photos. Rolling Stone and Us Weekly also had moderately higher-than-average sales with their Obama covers. The audience for newspaper Web sites rose sharply this year, even as the printed papers continued to lose circulation. Nielsen figures compiled for the Newspaper Association of America show that in an average month in the first half of 2008, 66.3 million Americans visited a newspaper Web site, a 12.2 percent increase from the first half of 2007. Again, how much of that growth stems from the campaign, and how much from factors like better video on those sites, is unclear. Newspapers still get less than 10 percent of their ad revenue from the Internet, so vast online audiences do not mean financial success. With so many outlets covering the campaign, standing out is hard, but some are still trying. The British Broadcasting Corporation is renting a bus and intends to drive across the country between the conventions and the election. Other outlets that do not regularly feature political news are trying to cash in on the election interest. In the July week that “Access Hollywood” showed a four-part interview with Mr. Obama’s family, the entertainment show had a 20 percent increase in viewers. Senator Obama’s family has also been featured in Us Weekly and People magazines. Attention like that has led to accusations from the McCain campaign that Senator Obama has become the media darling of the election, raising the question of whether mainstream media outlets risk longer-term declines if they are seen to favor one candidate. For instance, ratings for MSNBC, which has been singled out by the McCain campaign as being pro-Obama, have risen, largely because of Mr. Olbermann’s program. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” has had its audience of 25- to 54-year-olds double in the last two years. The audience of “Hardball With Chris Matthews” has also jumped significantly. Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, said that the election is emblematic of a larger shift away from broadcast news and toward cable, a trend that he expects will keep viewers tuning in after Election Day. “More and more, the news game is being played out on cable,” he said. Single broadcasts, however, do not seem to have any aftereffects. After Mr. Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s Sunday morning show, moderated an April debate between Senators Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, they were widely criticized for emphasizing scandal over substance. But neither the debate nor the harsh criticism that ensued seemed to affect ABC’s ratings. The numbers for “World News” edged up in the days after the debate, but soon returned to normal.

Tags:INTERNATIONAL NEWS US WORLD AFFAIRS

This year’s presidential campaign has drawn more voter interest than any other race in generations. For mainstream news media, however, capitalizing on that interest has been hit or miss, though not for lack of trying. Cable news ratings have risen sharply, with record viewership for debates and growing numbers for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Sites including MSNBC.com and CNN.com have set new records for views of online videos. A trade association for newspapers has placed advertisements telling campaign managers that “newspapers deliver voters.” But many media companies are struggling to translate campaign coverage into repeat readers and viewers — or revenue. The presidential primary debates had little lasting impact on TV ratings, and some magazines say that issues with candidates on the cover show only a modest bump in newsstand sales. More noticeably, the broadcast networks’ evening newscasts — the traditional standard-bearers of television news — have been unable to stop their long-term ratings declines, even during the hotly contested primaries. The newscasts on NBC, ABC and CBS had an average combined audience of 23.7 million viewers from January to June, down 2 percent from the same time period in 2007. That decline came despite expensive efforts to remain competitive. The networks have produced special series about the candidates and kept reporters on the campaign trail. Most recently, Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News,” Charles Gibson of “World News” on ABC and Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News” all traveled with Senator Barack Obama as he toured the Middle East and Europe, yet household ratings for each of those three newscasts were flat compared with the previous week. Jon Banner, the executive producer of “World News,” suggested that the ratings, especially during the slow summer months, might have slid further were it not an election year. He added that the heightened interest in the election can benefit many media entities without taking away from others. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” he said. It is true that the amount of news Americans consume has grown over the last few years, as has the number of news sources. The lineup of Web sites, newscasts and publications that jockey for attention and advertising dollars continues to expand. Three months before the election, one clear winner of the cycle so far is The Politico, an upstart news organization founded in January 2007. The Politico, with nearly 70 editorial employees, publishes a 26,000-circulation newspaper three days a week in Washington, D.C. But it is Politico’s round-the-clock online news reporting and analysis that have made it a must-read for a large audience outside the Beltway. Politico.com averaged 2.5 million unique visitors a month in the first half of 2008, more than all but 13 American newspapers, according to Nielsen Online. The Politico has benefited from profound changes in the way people get news, according to Jim VandeHei, the executive editor and co-founder. People look for news far more often during the day, they are far more likely to seek multiple sources as well as favorite bloggers and writers, and they are far more interested in watching video online. “The difference between ’04 and ’08 is like walking into a different century,” he said. “Virtually everybody who comes to us also goes to The Post or The Times or Drudge or Yahoo or Google. Having a sole source of news — those days are over.” A spring poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 17 percent of Americans learn about the campaign via the Internet on a typical day, more than double the number that did in the spring of 2004. But traffic on Internet news sites has grown steadily for years, making it hard to say how much of this year’s rise is attributable to the election. (Nor does it mean that online publications are translating page views into dollars. Politico still gets most of its revenue from ads in its printed newspaper, placed by interest groups hoping to influence the paper’s powerful readers.) Charlie Tillinghast, the president of MSNBC.com, said he believed that at least part of his site’s success is election-related. In December, weeks before the first primaries, MSNBC.com’s traffic surpassed the 30 million visitor mark. It has held up since then, attracting 37.6 million visitors in June, when the final nominating contests were held. For news Web sites, the most significant change from 2004 is the amount of video being consumed. Compared with previous election years, “the video players are better, the video quality is much better, and the overall user experience is vastly improved,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “It’s actually a pleasant experience, whereas before, users suffered a little pain to watch online video.” On YouTube, the Internet’s most popular video site, political commercials are far more popular than news reports. John McCain’s recent ad tying celebrities like Britney Spears to Senator Obama has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times. Cable news has been a huge beneficiary of the campaign cycle. An analysis of Nielsen ratings by Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of CNN, shows cable with a 58 percent share of all news-viewing on television, up from 50 percent in 2004. (Page 2 of 2)     As the nominating contests played out in the first half of 2008 and the cable networks showed two dozen candidate debates, CNN had, on average, 32 percent more 25- to 54-year-old viewers than during the same period in 2004, while MSNBC (starting from a much smaller base) averaged 73 percent more. The Fox News Channel showed a 17 percent decline compared with the same time period, but still had more viewers than the other news channels.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

The Politico, a news organization started by John Harris, above left, and Jim VandeHei, has benefited from the campaign.

Related

Times Topics: Barack Obama

Times Topics: John McCain

MSNBC.com is offering interactive graphics.

Record-breaking spending on political ads has helped local TV stations, though it only partly offsets a slump in the general ad market. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, the likely nominees, are each spending about $6 million a week on television ads, mostly on local TV in battleground states, particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. During the prolonged primary season, many more local markets enjoyed a taste of campaign advertising dollars. “Local stations were seeing primary money late into the season that had never seen a dime before — states like South Dakota, Montana, North Carolina,” said Jack Poor, the vice president for marketing at the Television Bureau of Advertising. Among magazines, Newsweek, where the campaign is a bread-and-butter topic, reports that issues with Senator McCain or Senator Obama on the cover have been among its best sellers, but that is not saying much, because its sales do not vary greatly based on cover photos. Rolling Stone and Us Weekly also had moderately higher-than-average sales with their Obama covers. The audience for newspaper Web sites rose sharply this year, even as the printed papers continued to lose circulation. Nielsen figures compiled for the Newspaper Association of America show that in an average month in the first half of 2008, 66.3 million Americans visited a newspaper Web site, a 12.2 percent increase from the first half of 2007. Again, how much of that growth stems from the campaign, and how much from factors like better video on those sites, is unclear. Newspapers still get less than 10 percent of their ad revenue from the Internet, so vast online audiences do not mean financial success. With so many outlets covering the campaign, standing out is hard, but some are still trying. The British Broadcasting Corporation is renting a bus and intends to drive across the country between the conventions and the election. Other outlets that do not regularly feature political news are trying to cash in on the election interest. In the July week that “Access Hollywood” showed a four-part interview with Mr. Obama’s family, the entertainment show had a 20 percent increase in viewers. Senator Obama’s family has also been featured in Us Weekly and People magazines. Attention like that has led to accusations from the McCain campaign that Senator Obama has become the media darling of the election, raising the question of whether mainstream media outlets risk longer-term declines if they are seen to favor one candidate. For instance, ratings for MSNBC, which has been singled out by the McCain campaign as being pro-Obama, have risen, largely because of Mr. Olbermann’s program. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” has had its audience of 25- to 54-year-olds double in the last two years. The audience of “Hardball With Chris Matthews” has also jumped significantly. Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, said that the election is emblematic of a larger shift away from broadcast news and toward cable, a trend that he expects will keep viewers tuning in after Election Day. “More and more, the news game is being played out on cable,” he said. Single broadcasts, however, do not seem to have any aftereffects. After Mr. Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s Sunday morning show, moderated an April debate between Senators Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, they were widely criticized for emphasizing scandal over substance. But neither the debate nor the harsh criticism that ensued seemed to affect ABC’s ratings. The numbers for “World News” edged up in the days after the debate, but soon returned to normal.

Tags:INTERNATIONAL NEWS US WORLD AFFAIRS

HOW did Hollywood lose Steven Spielberg? Late last month, DreamWorks, the boutique movie studio that Mr. Spielberg co-founded in 1994, let it be known that it had found a way to exit its unhappy three-year marriage with Paramount Pictures. Reliance ADA Group, a Mumbai conglomerate, was nearing a deal to give the dream workers $550 million to form a new movie company. That Mr. Spielberg and his business partner David Geffen had found an investor wasn’t surprising. Mr. Spielberg is a superstar. DreamWorks had made it clear for months — via public comments and private grousing fed into the Hollywood grapevine — that they hated being part of Paramount and were going elsewhere as soon as it was contractually allowed. But there was still an element of shock: Hollywood could not come up with a rich enough deal for Mr. Spielberg, the most bankable director in the business and a “national treasure”? His last movie alone, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has sold $743 million in tickets and is still playing in theaters around the world. For that matter, there wasn’t anybody on Wall Street willing to write a blank check for the guy with “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” on his résumé? The pending deal with Reliance underscores some realities about Mr. Spielberg — mainly that he has become so expensive that few public companies can afford him. Mr. Spielberg’s standard deal, on par with other blue-chip talent, is 20 percent of a movie’s gross from the first ticket sold, although he agreed to a somewhat less aggressive paycheck on the latest “Indiana Jones” installment to offset its high budget. And there’s another whisper coming from Hollywood’s highest echelons. It’s a sensitive topic — and one that Mr. Spielberg’s associates find hugely insulting — but one that bears consideration: How long before the A-list director, at 61, is a little, well, Jurassic? SUCH talk is rooted in sour-grapes justifications for losing Mr. Spielberg to Reliance, his allies say, noting his huge list of projects on the horizon. Among them are potential blockbusters like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” which he will produce. He’s also pursuing more cerebral projects like an Abraham Lincoln film with a script written by the “Angels in America” playwright Tony Kushner. Even so, Mr. Spielberg’s representatives had been talking with potential backers for months, said three people involved who requested anonymity for fear of angering the powerful director. The Spielbergians had casual chats with companies including Sony and the News Corporation. Hollywood-friendly banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were also in the mix. Hollywood’s seeming inability to close a deal with Mr. Spielberg highlights the shift toward a more corporate, buttoned-down movie business. Just a few years ago, bragging rights often drove business decisions. Steven Spielberg is available? Back up the money truck. We want that jewel in our crown no matter what the cost. And studio bosses could justify such ego-driven loss leaders: In the entertainment business, talent draws talent. Associates of Mr. Spielberg say they have not seriously entertained any Hollywood overtures, something corroborated by Ron Meyer, the president of NBC Universal. “We have not been given the opening to be in business with DreamWorks,” said Mr. Meyer, adding that the studio would jump at the chance given “the opportunity and the right deal.” But now that the big studios are all firmly embedded in big corporations, profit margins are the obsession. Add in skyrocketing star salaries and ballooning marketing costs, which have hammered margins, and pop go the sweetheart deals. “Big names don’t carry the same weight they used to,” said Harold L. Vogel, an independent media analyst. DVDs also have a starring role in the reluctance to take on risk. After years of blistering growth, domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, according to Adams Media Research, the first annual drop in the medium’s history. While DVDs are still a big business, any decline is cause for great concern, because DVD sales can account for as much as 70 percent of revenue for a new film. When DVDs were soaring, studios had an incentive to own projects outright. Recently, they’ve been going the other way, trying to share ownership to protect themselves. Indeed, the DVD situation combined with other business challenges — the arrival of widespread Internet streaming being one of the thorniest — has studios so panicked that all their executives chatter about these days is mitigating risk. Hardly a time to double down on a fat deal with Mr. Spielberg. Studios are also increasingly focused on out-of-the-park franchise films that sell overseas. The DreamWorks slate is a little patchy — namely because Mr. Spielberg and Stacey Snider, the company’s chief executive, believe in delivering a mix of prestige films and blockbusters. Along with “Norbit,” the sophomoric Eddie Murphy smash that sold $159 million in tickets, come films like “Things We Lost in the Fire,” a drama starring the Oscar-winner Halle Berry that sold about $8.4 million in tickets. Chip Sullivan, a corporate spokesman for DreamWorks, declined to comment. He said Ms. Snider was on vacation and unavailable. Mr. Spielberg, via a spokesman, declined to comment. Bruce Ramer, the director’s longtime lawyer (Mr. Spielberg named the mechanical shark in “Jaws” after him), also declined to comment. As for Wall Street, the firm belief in Hollywood is that the arrival of Reliance marks the end of the private equity and hedge fund boom that has propped up the industry. With the capital markets in turmoil, terms have tightened substantially for movie deals. Investors are demanding faster payback schedules, better guarantees and even a say in how movies are made and marketed. None of that is acceptable to the DreamWorks team. Mr. Spielberg, who has directed more than 50 films, also wants to control his own destiny; at this point in his career, say friends, his accomplishments have earned him the right to have 100 percent control over his movies. Autonomy and ownership are paramount, and, at the moment, overseas investors are the most likely to allow Mr. Spielberg to write his own ticket, say studio executives. In some ways, Reliance marks a return to the past. Studios have over the last decade tapped American investors — DreamWorks began with backing from Paul Allen, a founder of Microsoft — but foreign investors, notably Germans, were a big source before that. THE deal with Reliance is not done. People involved in the talks, which are private, say that work is progressing but that no deal is likely to be signed for several weeks. In addition to the $550 million in equity — which may inch higher during negotiations — DreamWorks is seeking access to a $400 million line of debt financing. And Hollywood will still have a chance to nab a piece of the storied director. After negotiations with Reliance wrap up — if they wrap up — Mr. Geffen and Mr. Spielberg will start looking for a distribution deal with one of the big studios, most likely Universal Pictures or 20th Century Fox. Will Mr. Geffen and Mr. Spielberg see a bidding war? Probably, but it depends on what kind of terms they want. Tags:INDIA INTERNATIONAL NEWS MONEY SUCCESS US WEALTH WORLD AFFAIRS

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far. The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors. Viacom also said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside lawyers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google. Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or fall unexpectedly into the hands of third parties. “These very large databases of transactional information become honey pots for law enforcement or for litigants,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P. or Internet protocol address. Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities. The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there, according to comScore. Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube. Google and Viacom said they had had discussions about ways to further protect users’ anonymity, but as of Thursday evening the two companies had yet to agree on how to do that. “We are investigating techniques, including anonymization, to enhance the security of information that will be produced,” said Michael D. Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel. Mr. Fricklas said Viacom would not have direct access to the data, and that its use would be strictly limited by the court order. Viacom would not, for example, chase down users who had illegally posted clips from “The Colbert Report.” “The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisers who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube and Google,” Mr. Fricklas said. In a letter sent Thursday, Google’s lawyers pressed their counterparts at Viacom to accept a more limited set of data. “We request that plaintiffs agree that YouTube may redact user names and I.P. addresses from the viewing data in the interests of protecting user privacy,” wrote David H. Kramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In a response, a Viacom lawyer wrote that Viacom was “committed to working with Google” on the privacy issue. Interestingly, Google has rejected demands by privacy groups for more stringent protections for I.P. address records, saying that in most cases the addresses cannot be used to identify users. Yet Google argued that YouTube viewing data should be kept from Viacom, in part, to protect the privacy of its users. Judge Louis L. Stanton of the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, referenced Google’s past statements on I.P. addresses to conclude that its “privacy concerns are speculative.” “It is an ‘I told you so’ moment,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. Other privacy advocates said they welcomed Viacom’s commitment to limit its use of the information, but they remained concerned about user rights. “Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group. That right is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee. Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people. In 2006, after AOL released for research purposes the search records of thousands of anonymous users, reporters from The New York Times were able to track down one person by analyzing her search queries. Mr. Opsahl said anonymous viewing habits may similarly yield clues about the identity of viewers. Viacom wants the viewing data in part to help it determine the extent to which YouTube’s success was built on the popularity of copyrighted clips that were illegally posted to the site. Outside experts say that without the data it would be virtually impossible to pin that down. Judge Stanton agreed that the information could help Viacom make its case. “A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiff’s vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial noninfringing use defense,” he wrote. Tags:INTERNATIONAL NEWS Internet US web

Oh what a circus, oh what a show, America has gone to town, Over the death of a mineral called cheap gasoline. We’ve all gone crazy, Mourning all day and mourning all night, Falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right. … WITH great apologies for the above to the greatest librettists and musical show composers of all time, the guys who brought us “Evita,” let us sit down upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of a beloved hydrocarbon. Now, what I am about to say may shock you. As of this spring in our country, before the immense climb in gasoline prices, the purchase of gasoline and oil amounted to barely 2 percent of national income. Barely 2 percent. Suppose the prices have risen by one-fourth since then. Now gasoline and oil would be roughly 2.5 percent of the total. Or look at it another way. As of this spring, gasoline and oil and heating oil together amounted to about 2.5 percent of total personal consumption expenditures in this great country. Considering the recent price increases, these goods might account for slightly more than 3 percent of such expenditures now. (All of these calculations come from numbers in the March report to Congress from the Council of Economic Advisers.) We are talking about several hundred billion dollars here. I could have a lot of fun with that money, rescuing lost dogs and cats, but it’s not enough to shake the foundations of the nation, at least not a nation of this size. Certainly, it’s not enough to affect even vaguely the incomes of upper-class or upper-middle-income people. The average driver travels about 12,000 miles a year, and if he or she gets 15 miles per gallon (not good mileage at all), the annual gasoline bill would have been about $3,200 a month ago and maybe $3,600 now (if the vehicle uses premium). For people who make a half-million dollars a year, that’s pennies. The increase from a year or two ago also means little to them. The problem comes in another, staggering set of government numbers. (Economists argue about the validity of using these numbers over long periods, but they capture the sorrow of the situation.) Get this, friends: from 1947 to about 1973 — from the days from the great Harry S. Truman to the great Richard M. Nixon — real hourly pay for nongovernment workers rose by about 40 percent. The peak year was the one before R.N. left for San Clemente in 1974. Since then, real wages both hourly and weekly for all nongovernment workers, on average, have fallen by about 5 percent, very roughly. There are all kinds of reasons for this, ranging from the larger size and different composition of the labor force to the devastating foreign competition in manufacturing, which tends to set a limit on other wages as well. But the trend is dismal. The average private worker now earns very roughly $600 a week, not counting fringe benefits. For this worker, gasoline might well account for close to one-tenth of his or her earnings. If the price of gas goes up 25 percent, the effect is serious. To put it mildly, people making $600 a week do not have a lot of leeway on spending. As I see it, the problem is not the price of oil generally. (I think that the price will decline somewhat before long, but the long-term trend is very much up.) The problem is the stagnation of wages. Please bear in mind that the numbers I gave are averages. Skilled workers make much more. Lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, accountants, dentists — they all make more. ( I just paid two dentists a total of more than $10,000 — I am not kidding — to have one poor old tooth get a root canal and a crown, and I’m not finished with that miserable tooth yet. I paid for 90 percent of it out of my own pocket. I do earn more than the ordinary citizen, but nothing by Wall Street standards.) But, obviously, a heck of a lot of workers make less. Imagine what it means to minimum-wage workers for gasoline to surge past $4 a gallon. What is to be done? The federal government can do little to make the price of oil fall in the short run, except, perhaps, for one basic thing: balance the budget. The world price of oil is denominated in dollars. The dollar is weak for many reasons, but a big one is the immense budget deficits run by our government. If President Bush and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama were to stand together in front of a camera and solemnly swear that they would balance the budget in four years, even if it required tax increases on people earning millions, the dollar would rise against the euro, and oil would fall in dollars. But that will not happen. So the only thing for workers to do is to drive less, buy fuel-efficient cars and trucks and, above all, whip their children into a frenzy to get more education. Not many doctors and lawyers are worried about the high price of gasoline. Not many people at hedge funds are worried about filling the tanks of their Bentleys. WE need more human capital in our labor force and more efficiency in fuel use. These will have to reverse the trend in real wages and the real cost of gasoline. Balancing the budget would be good, too, but I won’t hold my breath. Meanwhile, it’s all a bit discouraging — especially the trend for wages. But we will get through it, just as we get through everything else, one adaptive, smart American at a time. Tags:DIESEL INTERNATIONAL NEWS Internet PETROL US WORLD AFFAIRS

Bill Gates is retiring, sort of. He is still only 52, and he is going off to spend more time guiding the world’s richest philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He will still be Microsoft’s chairman and largest shareholder, but Friday is his last day as a full-time worker at the software giant, marking the unofficial end of his career as a business leader. And what a career it has been. Mr. Gates has been an animating force behind the personal computer revolution, helping to build a huge global industry and engineer blockbuster products like Windows and Office, used every day in offices and homes around the world. The Harvard dropout was the wealthiest person on the planet for years — worth more than $100 billion in 1999 — though his fortune is now about half that because of the decline of Microsoft’s shares and his continued donations to his foundation, which is focused on global health and education. Despite his success, Mr. Gates is moving on as the company he co-founded in 1975 is struggling to find its way. The center of gravity in technology has shifted from PCs to the Internet, altering the old rules of competition that were so lucratively mastered by Microsoft. For millions of users, mobile devices like cellphones are beginning to edge out PCs as the tool of choice for many computing tasks. And Google, the front-runner in the current wave of Internet computing, has wrested the mantle of high-tech leadership from Microsoft. Although Mr. Gates will spend one day a week at the company, it will be up to his successors, led by Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, to master the challenges of the Internet or watch Microsoft’s wealth and stature in the industry steadily erode. “Bill’s legacy is Windows and Office, and that will be a rich franchise for years to come, but it’s not the future,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Still, the Gates legacy is impressive. In addition to the software itself, Mr. Gates and his company have fundamentally shaped how people think about competition in many industries where technology plays a central role. Today, there are more than one billion copies of the Windows operating system on PCs around the world. Industry experts and economists say that Windows is not necessarily the best or most admired software for running the basic operations of a personal computer — Apple’s Macintosh can claim the most devout fan club. But Mr. Gates grasped and deployed two related concepts on a scale no one ever had in the past: the power of network effects and the value of establishing a technology platform. Put simply, the network effect describes a phenomenon in which the value of a product goes up as more people use it. E-mail messaging and telephones are classic ex