Breaking Bad (AMC)

The battle of the networks vs. cable providers reached a boiling point last night, when some 14 million viewers subscribed to DISH Networks were unable to watch the fifth season premiere of AMC's highly popular, uplifting show about overcoming cancer with meth labs, Breaking Bad.

Whether negotiations between DISH and AMC broke down because of a breach of contract (says AMC) or because the network was charging too much for its service (says Dish), the outcome is hurtful to both parties. The ratings for Breaking Bad will be skewed negatively in the short term, since Nielsen only counts people who watch Walt and Jesse make meth during their original time-slot.

Meanwhile, AMC is enticing viewers away from DISH Networks with some pretty clever tactics.

AMC announced Friday that in order not to punish their fan base for having the wrong cable provider, they would be streaming the first episode online to DISH patrons. But don't expect that tantalizing offer to last. From the press release:

 "In response to DISH’s recent drop of AMC to gain leverage in an unrelated lawsuit, the network will provide DISH customers access to the highly anticipated return of the Emmy® Award-winning drama “Breaking Bad” on Sunday, July 15, at 10PM EST. AMC is offering a special live stream of “Breaking Bad’s” season five premiere to all DISH subscribers on amctv.com. Beginning at 3 PM ET on Friday, July 13, DISH subscribers can register for access to the live stream at www.amctv.com/breakingbad4dish.

Every cable, phone and satellite company other than DISH carries AMC and its popular programming, including "Breaking Bad," "The Walking Dead," and "Mad Men," in their basic package. AMC wants its loyal DISH viewers to experience the excitement of the "Breaking Bad" premiere at the same time as their friends and neighbors, and we want to give DISH customers an extra week to switch providers so they can enjoy the rest of the season."

Unfortunately for DISH customers, they only have that one week grace period to find a new provider: next week's episode won't be streamed, leaving viewers scrambling to find a friend who has Time Warner Cable or DirecTV. Of course, that friend might want to make a trade, seeing as they will be missing channels of their own.

DISH meanwhile, is giving out free Rokus to angry customers, another sign that providers are less willing to acquiesce to the demands of popular networks, which want to increase the rate they charge for transmission. From the perspective of the distributors, they might lose a couple of subscribers, but it's better than letting Viacom or AMC squeeze them dry.

Of course, these free perks now are nice, but who will end up paying for these blackout sessions? Why you will, of course, since once the negotiations are resolved (and they will be), you'll just be charged more to watch shows about zombies, meth, and advertising executives going through existential crises.

Required Reading: "Attention Cable and Satellite Subscribers: This Network is Being Dropped Because Your Provider is Being a
Giant Douche."

Time Warner, Dish Network, and DirecTv: the summer of their discontent

Several of us watching Jersey Shore reruns  last night suffered a rude shock when DirecTv rudely cut off our programming at midnight. Of course, we had been warned--a vague phone call earlier in the day, a hushed, automated voice telling us to call back our service provider, which we didn't because we thought they were going to try to upgrade us again-- but DirecTv's  inability to negotiate with Viacom portends a summer of bad news, television-wise.

No matter who you pick to serve up your TV, it looks like you'll be getting screwed. Here's how it breaks down.

1. DirecTv:  Because of Viacom's demands of a 30 percent increase from the provider, which would equal roughly a billion dollars, networks like Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon are currently unavailable for viewing. Viacom is hitting back hard with viral advertisements:

2. Time Warner: Well, at least you'll be able to watch the Olympics. Hearst-- which owns several local syndicate channels including six ABC affiliates, four NBC stations, one CW station, and a CBS affiliate--are duking it out over retransmission consent fees (Hearst is asking for a 300 percent increase). Monday morning, the stations switched to other local affiliates.

What does that mean for you? Well, if you're in the zones where these are affected (Honolulu, Portland, Kansas City, Lincoln, Neb., Boston, and Pittsburgh), you're going to have to with a lack of Telemundo (among other networks). Still, the Olympics will be covered...Time Warner promises.

3. Dish Networks: Due to expensive rates and low ratings, Dish dropped AMC Networks--which include IFC and Sundance--at the 11th hour like they've threatened to so many times before (sorry, fans of Breaking Bad!). But wait! Dish is offering a consolation prize to its subscribers...Free Rokus! Of course, that won't help us find out what Walt and Jesse are up to this Sunday, but you can always purchase the episode on Amazon Instant Video...though you'll have to eat that cost yourself.

Having met maximum capacity, 137 Varick Street now has an eclectic collection of tenants that range from Alexander Gorlin Architects, online job search company TheLadders, and Scott Jordan Furniture.

Fully leased at 137 Varick Street.

Unity Construction Development, a construction management firm, signed a four year extension to bump up its total square footage to 3,100 from 2,000 square feet for the company’s fourth floor office. 

On the same floor, Paik Architecture and its affiliates—Paik Construction, Inc., Eckersley O’Callaghan & Partners LLC and PS Design LLC—agreed to a five-year lease for 2,988 square feet of space.

The NYU-Poly Varick Street Incubator, a entrepreneur development program run by The Polytechnic Institute of NYU, signed a three-year lease to relocate to 28,364 square feet of space in the building’s second and seventh floors. NYU-Poly moved from 14,000 square feet at 10 Hudson Square.

Trinity was represented by Marc Packman, Director of Leasing, and Tom Lynch in the company’s negotiations with Unity Construction and Paik Architecture. Peter Fontanetta represented Trinity in the NYU-Poly deal.

Drosen@Observer.com

The same year that Times Square became Times Square, the Astor Hotel opened for business. It was 1904, and The New York Times had just arrived in the neighborhood, erecting its headquarters on West 43rd Street. Like the paper of record of that day, The New York Herald, The Times wanted to paste its name on a piece of Manhattan. If not the respectable midtown square that bore its rival's flag, then The Times would settle for the next best thing: a patch of cramped factories and whorehouses rubbing up against the steadily encroaching theater district. That year also marked the long-awaited completion of the subway's first line, and with it, the masses came reeling through the Times Square turnstiles. By 1910, the square had undergone its first unlikely metamorphosis, transforming itself into an incandescent spectacle of acrobats and escape acts, vaudeville and ragtime—an electric Milky Way of gleaming signs.

With its ornate rooftop gardens and banquet halls, its unabashed gilded fervor, the Astor Hotel on Broadway became a point of congregation for the city's society crowd—mayors, industrial tycoons, socialites, ex-royalty. But the hotel was known best for its bar, a place where Times Square's true royalty, its showbiz luminaries, gathered to gossip and flirt, where Cole Porter could sip absinthe, kiss Monty Woolley and sing, "Have you heard that Mimsie Starr just got pinched in the Astor Bar?"

It was almost a century later that Times Square emerged from an even unlikelier transformation, but in many ways, the block between 44th and 45th streets stayed true to the spirit of Mr. Porter's swell party.

By 1999, at 3:30 on weekday afternoons, close to a million viewers nationwide would tune their televisions to MTV. Mostly aged 12 to 17, they were the very demographic Viacom executives were congratulating themselves for sinking Sumner Redstone's wizened teeth into. But it was the teenagers right outside Viacom's corporate offices that would turn out to have the far more lasting impact.

The throngs assembled beneath MTV's glass studio for the taping of Total Request Live endowed the show with the fervid pitch of religious hysteria. Mostly teenage girls, some of them held handmade signs, and all of them screamed. They'd made the pilgrimage to Times Square on the believer's gamble that they'd catch a glimpse of Britney Spears or 98 Degrees, or maybe even be among the chosen few ushered up to the second-floor studio. It took a few decades, a few revolutions in the saga of Times Square's reincarnation, but at the building that sprung from the ruins of the Astor Hotel, the cult of celebrity was alive and well.

At least, it was until recently. Total Request Live, the countdown music video show, made its final run in 2008, though it had ceased being live sometime before. Then, at the end of 2009, MTV shuttered the famous studio altogether. (Tween mall staple Aeropostale will take the retail space below it, though the studio remains empty.) While Viacom, which rents about 95 percent of 1515 Broadway, renewed its lease for roughly 1.27 million square feet of office space in 2008, the era of screaming teenagers on the street was over.

What happened, of course, was bigger than MTV, bigger than Viacom, bigger even then Times Square. But 1515 Broadway had a front seat to the glimmering spectacle.

When the Astor was razed in 1967 to make way for 1515 Broadway, a cry went up for the passing of a long-gone era's opulent relic. It didn't help that the tower that supplanted it was a glass-and-steel monolith so tall you had to be down the street to see its sole defining feature: concrete fins sprouting from the roof with all the manic zeal of a tinfoil cap.

The Astor may have helped launch Times Square's first glitz-bedazzled reincarnation, but the leviathan that replaced it presaged the next. The first tower to take advantage of the city's Times Square redevelopment subsidies, 1515 Broadway commenced the spasm of high-rise construction that enveloped the area in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, the district was filled with historic, derelict theaters, and it consistently placed both first and second in city felony rates (the area runs the fault line of two police precincts). In the name of redevelopment, city officials allowed unusually large office buildings to be built atop leveled theaters, with the one provision that a new theater be incorporated into the space.

In 1967, the developer Sam Minskoff & Sons acquired the Astor for $10.6 million. To design its successor, Minskoff commissioned Ely Jaques Kahn, a man whose architectural legacy is perhaps upstaged by his fictional one. In 1937, a budding, blocked novelist known as Ayn Rand spent six months in Mr. Kahn's office, volunteering as a file clerk while she worked out the elusive gaps in what would become The Fountainhead. Guy Francon, the social-climbing, mediocre architect, was inspired by her boss. By 1972, the 2 million-square-foot 1515 Broadway, with its conciliatory Minskoff Theater, stood in the Astor's place—a 54-story ode to moneymaking that would have done Rand proud.

As Times Square became the subject of a several-decades-long public debate, a site for the city to hash out its ideas about urbanism and development, 1515 Broadway embodied the district's fevered oscillations between entertainment and enterprise. In the 1980s, Alvin Ailey made its home in the building, but a change in ownership (Tishman Speyer purchased the building for $190 million-18 times what Minskoff paid for the Astor) pushed the dance company out to make way for more lucrative office space. The building also housed the below-ground Loews Astor Plaza, the largest single-screen movie theater in the country. In 2004, when the building was again bought and sold, this time to SL Green, the age of the multiplex had rendered the theater unprofitable.

Where once Times Square vaudeville acts had given way to the silver screen, in a curious inversion of history, it was a live concert hall, the Nokia, that replaced the Astor Plaza.

And then there is Viacom. Sumner Redstone began his memoir, A Passion to Win, with the pronouncement: "Viacom is me." The octogenarian mogul, whose age and ego are surpassed only by his litany of media acquisitions, likes to claim he'll never die. Which may explain his recent erratic plunges into the spotlight: The man who owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, CBS, Simon & Schuster, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, Comedy Central, Blockbuster and TV Land has carried on a highly public feud with his daughter over the future dominion of his empire, and—should there remain any doubt about who's running the show—he made a few very public firings, namely the longtime head of MTV and one Tom Cruise. When you own the media, publicity is, after all, somewhat easy to mistake for immortality. Or just as likely, Mr. Redstone's companies each harbor a bit of his leathered soul, through which, Voldemort-style, he really will live forever.

Viacom moved to 1515 Broadway in 1993, just as the media magnate was waging his unlikely battle to buy Paramount Pictures. Mr. Redstone won, of course (he always wins-winning is his passion), solving the minor complication of cash flow by purchasing Blockbuster. As the amoeboid conglomeration expanded, so did its square feet, rising up 1515 Broadway's glassy facade with every successive purchase.

With the passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress dismantled the regulatory framework set up in the 1930s, declaring a new world order in which, as Bill Clinton called it at the time, the "information superhighway" made the old rules obsolete, stifling competition and dragging like dead weights on the soul of free enterprise. The new rules set the scene for a seismic shift in the media landscape and sparked a bout of mega-consolidations. Time Warner subsumed Turner Broadcasting and CNN. Disney merged with ABC. Then in 1999, the F.C.C. decreed that companies could own more than one station in the same local market. That was the year that TRL reached its frenzied peak, and Mr. Redstone did the only logical thing: He merged his entertainment panoply with a major news network. In the biggest broadcast merger in history, Viacom acquired CBS.

In 1980, there were 50 principle media firms; by 2000, there were six. Evidence of the new media order was everywhere in Times Square. By that time, after several civic campaigns, a development-preservationist debate-histrionic even by New York standards-and numerous rounds of building incentives, Times Square had emerged from its brazen transformation. The porn shops and sideshows were shuttered, the corner delis pushed out, the seedy theaters rolled into a few shiny multiplexes. The towers got taller to accommodate the ranks of Disney, News Corp., Reuters, Bertelsmann, Condé Nast and Clear Channel, and the street got compressed further and further below.

The street itself became a kind of corporate big top where the ecstasies engineered in the buildings above cartwheeled and spun. The Times Square of the social fringe, of pimps and hustlers, of Diane Arbus' transvestites and dwarves, became a place of mainstream cultural convergence. In the new Times Square, safer, cleaner and less weird, electric words charged through you; ads spilled into news tickers; and the actors in sitcom promotions fixed you intently in their sights. Corporate executives could look down from their tinted towers and observe their board presentations in action, giddily refracted in the kaleidoscope of consumer desire.

But something else was happening, too. The crowds outside 1515 Broadway, crowds that had once been known to stop traffic, that bespoke a generational standstill for a handful of formula-sprung pop stars, suddenly and abruptly departed. People stopped waiting for Carson Daly or one of his equally awkward stand-ins to count down to their video; now they watched online. But instead of just watching, they were making things as well. Consumers were becoming producers, and the consuming and producing were becoming difficult to distinguish, remixing and mutating and deconstructing. Things were happening in the margins. It was weird and messy and shocking and banal and voyeuristic and tacky. It was often derivative, occasionally brilliant, and all of it human. It was a little like Times Square.

New York is a vertical city that leaves little room for the people on the street below. Only occasionally—say, when clamoring teenagers stop traffic for a glimpse of Beyoncé in the tower above—do the two spheres collide. But the new street is a virtual one, and the Sumner Redstones and Rupert Murdochs are already staking out their real estate. It's always been the invisible few that shape mass culture. Celebrities may be royalty, now as in the days of the Astor bar, but it's the figurehead sort, distracting us with its pomp and jewels while the driving forces mostly stay out of glass boxes. (Which is what makes it such an odd and fantastic spectacle when the invisible few come out to fire the figureheads.) Just as the Astors left their influence and family feuds imprinted across the city (the Waldorf and the Astoria, for instance, were originally two hotels, split between family factions), Mr. Redstone's feuds and whims are stamped across our mediascape.

Of course, no one really knows to what extent the endless weird conversation of the Internet can be commodified. If Times Square has taught us anything, it's that you can't buy weird; you can only supplant it.

Maybe that's why we're so nostalgic for Times Square, even Times Squares we've never known, why we argue and wring our hands over each metamorphosis: With its bizarre mutations and unending reinventions, Times Square has always been our way of talking about ourselves.

Even New York, a city that tears itself down and reconstructs itself at near lightning speeds, is made out of concrete and brick and glass. It's comprised of buildings that are hard and unyielding and leave little room for improvisation. A building can't contradict itself. A building can't be a conversation. Which leaves us with Times Square and its blaze of screaming signs. Never quite the square anyone wanted, always the runner-up and always truer just one incarnation ago, it will always, we can be certain, transform into something else. And when it does, we will wonder what it says about our city and what we've become.

egeminder@observer.com

He was leaving MTV Networks, he explained, to finish writing a musical. “I know you’re shocked,” Mr. Graden wrote to his colleagues. “A gay man who loves musicals.” Also: He’d be writing two books.

“If you look at the shows we have all created together … you can feel a tangible fascination with people on the brink of their next great adventure in life,” wrote Mr. Graden. “Over the last year, I woke up to the fact that I’m a character in my own personal reality show, and this is my time for that next transformation."

Roughly two months later, on a Wednesday morning in mid-August, Mr. Graden, who is 46, settled into a table at the London on West 54th. His latest journey in life, he said, began unexpectedly. A few years ago, he had to come up with a birthday present for a rich boyfriend. What do you give a guy who has everything? When he was growing up in the ’70s in the small town of Hillsboro, Ill., he had played keyboard in a cover band called Ace Oxygen & the Ozones. Now he decided to write his boyfriend a song.

Afterward, he kept going. “I got a Mac and got like 200 songs done,” said Mr. Graden. “I started thinking this would be kind of a cool musical, knowing full well that I have no idea what I’m doing and don’t have the proper training.”

Also, he had a career that kept him busy. As the entertainment chief of MTV networks music channels, he was overseeing the creative and business developments at multiple music and lifestyle channels, including MTV, MTV2, VH1, CMT and LOGO. At any one time, he had dozens if not hundreds of other people’s creative visions to try to nourish and grow and sustain in a harsh media environment. His personal creative impulses could wait.

Mr. Graden, who is a bottle-blond with an intense air of hyper-attentiveness, explained that he took his next step forward, musically, on his birthday. As a surprise present, his boyfriend at the time arranged for Mr. Graden’s two favorite playwrights, Liesel Reinhart and Steven Seagle, to assess the songs he had already written. A month or so later, they returned. “They had listened to everything and thought up story lines,” said Mr. Graden. “It took off from there.”

In January of 2009, Mr. Graden and his collaborators hosted their first listening party for their nascent musical, Limbo (“10 Defiant Hearts: 1 Unimaginable Decision”). They hired a cast of actors, invited some 200 guests to Mr. Graden’s house in Los Angeles and plied everyone with alcohol. When Mr. Graden heard the songs for the first time, he felt overjoyed. The next day, like hundreds of aspirational TV characters before him, he woke up determined to leave his day job. But how?

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Graden met with friend and media mogul Barry Diller at the IAC headquarters for some career advice. “He didn’t understand what all the drama was about,” said Mr. Graden. “He said, ‘Write down what you want to do. That’s your job.’”

Over the years, Mr. Graden had crafted countless development memos, mapping out various strategic plans for a range of TV channels in need of guidance, programming strategies and mission statements. Now, it was Mr. Graden’s chance to turn his executive skills inward. He wrote a roughly nine-page memo, mapping out a framework that would maximize his odds of creative success.

Thus began Brian Graden’s redevelopment of Brian Graden. 

“I wrote it all down, and I sort of backed into what my life would look like if writing for three hours a day and doing songs two days a week and making a TV show was my job,” said Mr. Graden.

He said he had already begun work on his nonfiction book, Phenomenon, which would investigate the business and artistry of “hit-making.” The book will recount his own experiences in television, including his role in developing the likes of South Park, Total Request Live, Jackass, and The Newlyweds. He will also be interviewing friends in Hollywood about their experiences feeding the zeitgeist. He plans to include sections on American Idol and Survivor.

The takeaway lessons, Mr. Graden said, should be applicable to the business world at large. He recounted a story about a friend who helped to create green ketchup for Heinz. “That was a huge explosion, and then 18 months later, every color was done and it was over,” said Mr. Graden. “There are so many businesses with arcs like that. It occurred to me that increasingly, everyone is in the hit business.”

In September, Mr. Graden will officially begin shopping the project to publishers. Depending on how the writing goes, Mr. Graden is also tentatively planning a second book, Phenomena, which will look at hit-making in a more spiritual framework.

Somewhere in the mix, Mr. Graden will likely recount his own dramatic bildungsroman—the story of how a hyper-sensitive kid, the elder of two brothers from a modest farming family in the Midwest, went on to become a top general in the cutthroat business of American entertainment.

MR. GRADEN HAD JUST graduated from Oral Roberts University and settled down in Tulsa, Okla., when he had a breakthrough. He was working as an accountant-consultant and was engaged to a woman. He felt trapped. Everything was wrong. Then one day, he was flipping through Newsweek and read an article about Harvard Business School. It was the ’80s. M.B.A.’s were cool. Mr. Graden saw his way out. “Business school is what set me on my creative path,” said Mr. Graden.

Last year, Mr. Graden wrote a chapter about his childhood for a book called Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing up Gay in America. But in the world of media executives, Mr. Graden is perhaps better known for his periodic, long-form studies dissecting the multi-variable calculus of TV development. In the spring of 2002, while serving as the president of programming for MTV and MTV2, Mr. Graden agreed to assess sister network VH1, which was struggling. Three weeks later, Mr. Graden banged out his magnum opus of memo writing, a gripping analysis of a complex system gone awry and a lucid prescription on how to fix it, which would seem to bode well for his future as a business writer.

Over the span of the 41-page document, Mr. Graden suggests more than 200 specific recommendations for how to revive VH1’s sagging fortunes. Along the way, he provides a mathematical model for the tracking and forecasting of ratings progress; unleashes a battery of snappy programming criticisms (“Watching Kid Rock serve French Fries holds up for about 60 seconds before it feels slightly desperate”); provides a realpolitik assessment of VH1’s schedule; and coins some nice turns of phrase (“in this ‘behind the scenes of everything’ age”…). The writing is at once rigorous and funny—a highly readable mix of quantitative and qualitative reasoning, playfully foxtrotting between the right and left hemispheres of Mr. Graden’s brain.

Several months later, Viacom put Mr. Graden in charge of restructuring VH1. Under his guidance, the channel took off. And some seven and a half years later, the memo lives on as something of an underground classic in the development community—the type of thing an up-and-coming VP would keep tucked away on his office bookshelf and turn to occasionally for inspiration.

One of Mr. Graden’s many devotees is Matt Stone. In the mid-’90s, Mr. Graden was working as a development executive at Foxlab studios when he became impressed with two young animators. He famously hired Mr. Stone and Trey Parker to create a video Christmas card, which gave rise to the viral hit “Jesus vs. Santa.” When Fox later passed on Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker’s animated series, Mr. Graden left the studio to help steer South Park into creation. 

Years later, Mr. Stone is one of the many people in Hollywood carefully tracking Mr. Graden’s career transformation. “Nobody has bitched more about studio people over the years than Trey and me,” said Mr. Stone. “But eventually you realize that a great network president isn’t the same as someone managing a tire factory. It’s that combination of an amazing analytical brain, and also being able to put yourself in creative people’s shoes. It’s a skill set that Brian possesses on an almost guru level.”

Lisa Sherman, who Mr. Graden hired to lead Viacom’s LGBT channel, LOGO, concurred. “He has a degree from Harvard Business School and yet has the most incredible creative instincts,” she said. “That combination in one person is pretty rare. He gives you guidance and then lets you follow your heart.”

“He gives more than lip service to the idea and the ideal of happiness,” added Mr. Stone. “When we were working together, he would always say that you have to set things up so that you’ll be long-term happy.”

So can Mr. Graden manage to follow his own blueprint?

He said he plans to keep his hand in the management game on a part-time basis. “This is the fun phase of being the cute girl at prom right now in Hollywood, where everyone wants to throw a lot of money at you to keep making TV and film,” said Mr. Graden. “I’d be kind of dumb not to take advantage of that window now.”

Recently, his name has surfaced in press reports about former NBC exec Ben Silverman’s new venture for Mr. Diller at IAC. But Mr. Graden said that when he met with Mr. Diller this past spring, no specifics were discussed. “There’s nothing in the works,” said Mr. Graden.

In the meantime, as his remaining time at MTV Networks ticks down, Mr. Graden continues to adjust to the life of developing projects on a much smaller scale. “It can take me like three hours to get down eight paragraphs,” said Mr. Graden. “But when I’m done, I’m all psyched and really proud, even though they’re tiny compared to the scope of what I did.”

Which is not to say that the transformation from development guru to developing writer is free from anxiety. Years ago, in his memo about VH1, Mr. Graden quoted Oscar Wilde: “The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” A hint of that sentiment remains in his current work.

The core character in Limbo, according to Mr. Graden, is a musician who can’t finish his musical. “Ultimately, he dies in a funny way, and wakes up in limbo,” said Mr. Graden. “We’re calling it a metaphysical comedy.”

fgillette@observer.com

In a handy little slideshow, The Business Sheet looks back to last year and reminds us how corporate New York holiday party season looked before decadent parties were canceled in favor of charity donations, small get-togethers, and extra vacation days. Some of their findings:

Morgan Stanley: Last year's bash was at Lotus--bottle service and all. This year the financial firm will forgo a holiday party in favor of donating the yearly party fund to charity (and getting some positive press.)

Viacom: Last year's party--attended by nearly 3,000 guests--was at Hammerstein Ballroom featuring a snowglobe filled with beautiful models playing Twister. Instead of a party, the company's employees--those still left standing--will enjoy two extra vacation days this year.

Google: Last year's party, held at the Rainbow Room, reportedly cost the company $300 per head, with spouses of employees invited to come along. This year's party will be split into two "smaller gatherings"--one for the engineers at a private loft, another for the sales staff at the Central Bark Boathouse. And no plus-ones. 

Goldman Sachs: Last year's party was at the BLVD club in Soho and attracted protesters angry about the company's contribution to the already developing sub-prime mortgage crisis. This year, no party.

UBS: The company announced that it was canceling its bash at the Museum of Natural History and will instead to donate $100,000 to charity.  But it still plans to quitely host a dinner at the Museum of Modern Art for its high net worth clients.

Mayor Bloomberg: The annual holiday dinner that Mr. Bloomberg holds for City Hall reporters has moved from his residence to Chinatown's Golden Unicorn restaurant. Reporters will have to pay $45 to attend. 

Dreier LLP: Considering that Marc Dreier, the managing partner of the firm, has recently been arrested in Canada, the company had to cancel its annual party at the Waldorf=Astoria. 

Estee Lauder: The cosmetics company canceled its party for the media at Nobu and will instead donate money in their guests' honor to the Dress for Success organization. 

Sunshine, Sachs & Associates: Last year's party at Room Service has been downgraded to a night of bowling at Lucky Strike for this PR firm that works with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck. 

The 1515 Broadway dealings have been among the most closely watched of the latter part of 2008, with the city's largest office landlord and its tenant locked in reportedly contentious negotiations for years. No word on what Viacom will be paying to stay in Times Square, but SL Green, according to Mr. Cuozzo, recently signed new leases at 1515 Broadway for $85 a foot.

“Now it costs a $1.50, and it’s about an inch-and-a-half narrower,” Mr. Bloomberg said of a daily copy of The Times. “I think you must have misunderstood—in this economy I’ve asked New Yorkers to do more with less, not charge more for less.”

New York has long prided itself on being the country’s media capital, home to the publishing and magazine heavies, the television networks and two national newspapers. But the long-term future for The New York Times and just about every other printed product looks grim, spurring questions of whether the city’s media dominance could soon wane.

To this end, the Bloomberg administration is launching an initiative to boost the media industry, as the city’s Economic Development Corporation is searching for a consultant to craft a report on the state of the industry and give recommendations to bolster its growth in coming years. The media industry is one of the largest in the city, accounting for more than 160,000 jobs and $15 billion in wages, and occupying more than 14 percent of Manhattan’s office space. EDC envisions the study as a yearlong effort that would include CEO round tables, workshops with industry professionals and suggested policy actions to bolster the industry.

“In terms of the study, the city is looking frankly to understand more about the trends, and what steps we can take,” said Steven Strauss, the EDC vice president leading the effort.

While its language is broad in its request for consultants, the city does not seem to be searching for suggestions on how to prop up dying mediums. Rather, EDC seems to be focused on receiving recommendations on how to help many of the old, “traditional media” companies heal their wounds and better adapt to the digital world, while also attracting and growing Internet and tech-focused firms. 

“This is aiming at media broadly defined, but we’re interested primarily in the transition from traditional media outlets into the electronic age,” Mr. Strauss said. The initiative comes as old-media firms in the city and region are bleeding.

Book publishing, print media and television have long been the pillars of the industry, occupying prominent spaces in high-rent midtown office buildings. Now all three are feeling pain as the Internet captures a growing audience, especially from magazines and newspapers, for which an online future already means far less lucrative advertising and little or no money from subscriptions.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newspaper circulation nationally was down this past quarter almost 5 percent from a year ago; according to Publishers Information Bureau, magazine advertising revenue was down 8.8 percent in just the third quarter; and in October, a series of unrelated cuts were announced at a host of New York-based publishing companies. Time Inc. said it would cut 600 jobs; Condé Nast said it would cut costs across the company by 5 percent and limit its new monthly business magazine, Portfolio, to 10 issues a year; Hearst is stopping publication of Cosmo Girl; and the publisher of Maxim, Alpha Media, is cutting 50 to 60 jobs and sending its back offices to Tennessee. (The city’s initiative was hatched before the recent cuts.)

While other portions of the media industry are seeing far more growth, it is clear that whatever transitions the industry as a whole goes through in the coming years, there will surely be pain, regardless of what steps government takes to mitigate it.

“We have to hope that in a certain way, we’re regenerating new limbs on the tree, and some of that is Huffington Post, and some of that is NYTimes.com,” said Richard Edelman, president of the large public relations firm Edelman. “It will be some combination of the new and the old.”

FROM TIME TO TIME the city launches studies to find ways to grow various industries locally; and though a survey of an industry on its own does not necessarily offer much value, the accompanying recommendations can lead to policy changes.

As with similar studies, recommendations from the media study could theoretically come in the form of tax break proposals, investments in education and changes to zoning regulations, among other areas under the city’s control. The film industry, for instance, has seen growth since 2004 as the city and state ratcheted up tax credits for film and television production, with the payrolls swelling from about $1.8 billion in 2003 to $2.5 billion in 2007, according to city figures.

The most recent high-profile study undertaken by the city was the so-called McKinsey report, a review of barriers faced by the financial industry completed by consultant McKinsey & Company. Its recommendations, released in early 2007, centered around keeping New York competitive with global rival London, and would probably have a less receptive audience today than a few months ago: The report called for loosening federal requirements and regulations on financial firms.

For now, with the media industry, the city seems to have established itself as a center of content, both digital and print. Newer new-media companies like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast are based in the city, as are the traditional outlets with a national and international presence: NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, the network news sites.

Today the broad media sector in its various forms—publishing, film, broadcasting, communications, cable, advertising—has been growing in recent years, but still, despite a major boom cycle, employment is down from just before the last recession. According to numbers from the state’s Department of Labor and the city, about 144,000 people were employed in the city’s private media sector in 2007, up substantially from 129,000 in 2005, but about 7 percent lower than the high of 155,000 seen in 2001. Publishing, television and radio broadcasting have seen minimal job growth in the past four years or so.

As for the future, the overall picture is mixed, as digital jobs should increase while traditional media jobs continue to dwindle, though total employment seems likely to decrease.

“Recently, with the exception of motion pictures, the sectors have been flat to declining,” James Brown, a labor market analyst with the state’s Department of Labor, said of media employment in the city.

The driving problem, at least with magazines and newspapers, is the declining ad revenues as advertisers and readers shift to the Internet.

“Right now, the ad revenues on the Web, compared to the ad revenues that are lost in print, is like comparing nickels to dollars,” said Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of the Daily News, who said he was bullish on the long-term future of New York as a media center. “In no way, at almost any newspaper that I know of, have the Web revenues, even though they’re going up consistently and continuously, and by big percentages, made up in real dollars what they are losing off of conventional advertising.”

PERHAPS NO AREA of the city better showcases the trends in the industry, positive and negative, than Hudson Square. In the past three years or so, media firms have flocked to the former printing district west of Soho, where office space is at a steep discount compared to midtown—some to shrink in new, low-cost space, and some to expand in the company of other creative firms. Newsweek, Viacom, WNYC and The New York Review of Books all have taken space in the area since 2006.

By and large, many of those media firms have come to take space in buildings owned by Trinity Real Estate, by far Hudson Square’s largest landlord.

“Over time, we’ve really made this a core of our strategy,” said Carl Weisbrod, president of Trinity, “to make this the hub of creative industries, and to make this neighborhood appealing to this industry and these clusters of industries on grounds other than price point.”

Despite the declining workforce of the larger, old publishing and print media companies, Mr. Weisbrod and many in the real estate and business communities do see the broader industry as one that will see much growth in the long term.

“With all creative industries, probably as with all industries, there are twists and turns,” Mr. Weisbrod said. “We really think that these kinds of companies are the ones that are creating jobs, and where the future of the city’s economy really lies.”

Indeed, New York is certainly well positioned. The advertising industry has a huge operation in the city; the young, creative and artistic population is high; and proximity to the country’s financial center never hurts for any industry.

For those who are confident in the media industry’s future, the Huffington Post stands as a poster child. A site that rivals the Drudge Report in traffic, the company has its base not in Washington, D.C., or California, but on two floors near the corner of Prince Street and Broadway, beside a Dean & DeLuca. 

“New York is a magnet for people who are creative and involved in both the culture and the politics of our time,” said founder Arianna Huffington, who herself is based at the company’s California offices. “What happens is a convergence: It’s not that new media is going to replace old media, but it’s really old media that really moves online.”

ebrown@observer.com

For the third Saturday in a row, locals were awoken by the shouts of protesters outside the E.65th street mansion of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. The group, which calls itself the Campaign for Corporate Responsibility in Entertainment, wants to change the way media companies portray black and Latino men and women in music videos , T.V, and movies. It's calling for media companies like Viacom to adopt universal standards prohibiting lyrical or visual content that is degrading, promotes violence, and stereotypes black and Latino men as hoodlums and thugs, and women as promiscuous. Sample slogan: "BET does not reflect me!"

"We're not a censorship group," Pastor De'Quincy M. Hentz of the Shiloh Baptist Church in New Rochelle, a leader of the campaign, told Media Mob. "We're all about free speech, and we believe that there are many people out their that have positive messages about the men and women of our community, and those are the messages that are being censored, by media companies that only allow negative messages about us to get out."

"I'm not a bitch or a whore!," cried one young woman. "And I'm tired of being portrayed as one!"

You can say one thing for all that noise: it sure got our attention.