BuzzFeed Takes Steps to Add Foreign News Coverage

BuzzFeed, the swiftly growing social news site, has decided it is time to move beyond top 10 lists, animal videos and political coverage. It is going foreign.

Ben Smith, the editor in chief of the social news site BuzzFeed.

The site recently posted a hiring notice for a foreign editor that said BuzzFeed wanted “to build a new kind of national security and world news coverage.”

Ben Smith, the editor in chief, confirmed that the foreign editor was the beginning of a new line of coverage. He said he expected to have as many as six reporters work with the new editor, with some in Washington, some covering topical issues and a couple based overseas, most likely in Cairo and Mexico City to start.

Mr. Smith said adding more extensive foreign coverage was a natural step in the company’s expansion, but he added that the timing was prompted by the Boston Marathon bombings. The resulting interest, he said, showed him the site was becoming a breaking news source for users.

“People have increasingly come to us for news like during the Boston bombings,” he said. “Now we have an audience that wants to learn what’s going on in the world.”

BuzzFeed is following other digital sites that have added dedicated foreign correspondents. The Huffington Post has operations in Canada, Britain, Spain, France and Italy, with editions opening in Japan and Germany this year. While most of the employees are from media outlets that are in essence licensees, there are at least some Huffington Post workers at every site, said Peter Land, a spokesman for the parent company, AOL.

Still, it is not a common practice. Mashable, another news site, has employees overseas but they do not specifically cover foreign news. Instead they allow the Web site to track digital trends there. Mr. Smith said he hoped to use the foreign correspondents in imaginative ways — for example, to cover news on gay marriage internationally.

H.P. Chairman Steps Down as 2 Resign From Board

The move may give Meg Whitman, H.P.’s chief executive, a little more breathing room in her long and painful effort to turn the technology giant around. H.P. is one of the biggest technology companies in terms of sales, but for years it has been marked with financial losses, bungled acquisitions, and turbulence in the executive ranks and boardroom.

Ms. Whitman, who took over in September 2011, has said H.P. will return to modest profitability in 2014 and have robust growth in the years after.

“The pressure is on Meg,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Bernstein Research. But, he said, a housecleaning of the board “bought her a year.”

Mr. Lane, who will continue to serve on the board, will be temporarily succeeded by Ralph Whitworth, an activist shareholder who joined the H.P. board in November 2011. He has been a champion of Ms. Whitman.

No successors for the departing board members — John H. Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson — were immediately named. The two, who barely survived re-election to the board at a meeting in late March, are expected to serve until May.

During the shareholders meeting, Mr. Whitworth took the unusual step of indicating, while voting for directors was under way, that some board members would soon step down.

“All boards should evolve, certainly when they’ve had the recent past this one does,” he said. “You can expect some evolution of the board over the coming years — months, maybe.”

It is not clear whether this comment swayed some votes toward Mr. Hammergren and Mr. Thompson, two of the longest-serving board members. Mr. Hammergren received 54 percent of the vote and Mr. Thompson 55 percent. Mr. Lane was re-elected with 59 percent of all votes cast. Other board members had majorities of over 90 percent.

“Having under 60 percent is not a vote of confidence,” Mr. Sacconaghi said. “They worked hard to secure support, and in the end they barely got a majority for these three people. It reflected the sins of the past.”

Mr. Lane said the vote was a major reason he was stepping down.

“After reflecting on the stockholder vote last month, I’ve decided to step down as executive chairman to reduce any distraction from H.P.’s ongoing turnaround,” he said in a statement issued on Thursday by H.P.

In the same statement, Mr. Whitworth said Ms. Whitman “is leading a herculean turnaround, so most of all, we must build and maintain the best possible leadership structure for Meg and H.P.’s entire team to succeed.”

Mr. Lane and the other two board members were publicly criticized for their oversight of H.P., including a spectacularly expensive acquisition that later failed, both before and after the shareholder vote. On Thursday, their critics were quick to praise their resignations.

“Directors must be willing to ask tough questions, challenge assumptions and have the capacity to walk away from a deal that is unlikely to add value for shareholders,” said ISS, a proxy advisory firm that opposed Mr. Lane. “That clearly didn’t happen at H.P., and shareholders hold Mr. Lane accountable for that failure.”

The New York City comptroller, John C. Liu, another critic of the company, said in a statement, “H.P.’s board got the message.” He added, “This a good day for H.P., its board and its share owners.” The New York City pension fund has over $100 million in H.P. stock.

Mr. Hammergren, who as chief executive of the McKesson Corporation is one of the highest-paid chief executives in the United States, has served on H.P.’s board since 2005. He was on the board while it was at the center of a scandal involving spying on journalists, board members and employees, and during the 2010 resignation of Mark Hurd as chief executive after he admitted to improper relations with a contract employee.

Mr. Hurd’s successor, Léo Apotheker, lasted less than a year. He was hired without meeting or speaking with most members of the board. As chief, he agreed to pay $11.1 billion for Autonomy, a British software company and mused publicly about whether to sell H.P.’s personal computer business. He was succeeded by Ms. Whitman a month after those actions.

Late last year, H.P. took a more than $8 billion accounting charge in conjunction with the Autonomy purchase. It contended that it had been misled about the health of the company.

Mr. Thompson, a principal of Aquiline Capital Partners and a former chairman of Wachovia, joined the H.P. board in 2006, after the spying scandal. Mr. Lane, a former president of Oracle and a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, joined the H.P. board in 2010. He was a vocal supporter of Mr. Apotheker.

A Victory for Google as F.T.C. Takes No Formal Steps

By allowing Google to continue to present search results that highlight its own services, the F.T.C. decision could enable Google to further strengthen its already dominant position on the Internet.

It also enables Google to avoid a costly and lengthy legal war of attrition like the antitrust battle that Microsoft waged in the 1990s. That fight took an enormous toll on Microsoft and opened the door for competitors like Google to become the technology sector’s new leaders. Now, a weakened Microsoft was among those most vocal in complaining that Google was unfairly abusing a monopolistic position to thwart its rivals.

Google, which attracts 70 percent of all search queries in the United States, has used its search business, which generates billions of dollars in profit annually from advertising, to expand into businesses that include maps, restaurant reviews and travel bookings. Competitors worry that the F.T.C.’s decision will allow Google to continue to make inroads at their expense.

The decision sets up a potential conflict with European officials, who are working with Google to resolve similar concerns about the way the company operates its search engine in Europe, where it is even more dominant than in the United States.

Web search has become vital to the success of many businesses. Being ranked higher in search results can mean a great deal more traffic and revenue; being ranked lower can hurt both. Google has long claimed that it uses a neutral algorithm for search queries, something that competitors disputed.

But Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said that “While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an F.T.C. challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law.”

The five-member commission voted unanimously to close its investigation without bringing charges, although some staff members argued vigorously that Google should face sanctions for using online search results to draw consumer traffic to its own services. The F.T.C. said it had found that Google’s practices improved its search results for the benefit of users and that “any negative impact on actual or perceived competitors was incidental to that purpose.”

Google did agree to make some minor changes to its search practices related to search advertising. The F.T.C. said those commitments were enforceable if the company violated them, but the agreement avoided a formal consent decree or litigation, weapons that the F.T.C. had available.

One F.T.C. commissioner, J. Thomas Rosch, said in a partial dissent that the commission would not be able to hold Google to its promises in any meaningful way, as it might do through a contempt proceeding or a fine.

Competitors said the war was not over. Fairsearch.org, a group of Google rivals including Microsoft, said Thursday’s action left the F.T.C. “without a major role in the final resolution to the investigations of Google’s anticompetitive practices by state attorneys general and the European Commission. The F.T.C.’s inaction on the core question of search bias will only embolden Google to act more aggressively to misuse its monopoly power to harm other innovators.”

In a less-watched part of the investigation, which will have a less direct impact on consumers, the commission found that Google had misused its broad patents on cellphone technology, and it ordered Google to make that technology available to rivals. That order may benefit phone manufacturers that use either Google’s Android operating system or competing systems. Some F.T.C. officials said that in the long run, the sanctions could be a bigger victory for consumers, encouraging the development of more innovative devices.

But the broadest impact of the F.T.C.’s action is to present more competitive challenges to companies that do specialty searches, for things like travel or shopping. Consumers will continue to see what has now become familiar on Google — the presence of results that link to Google’s other businesses. When a consumer searches for “airfare to Los Angeles,” for example, the most prominent results are generated by Google’s own travel business, rather than by the likes of Expedia, Priceline or Kayak.

On the company’s Web site, David Drummond, a senior vice president at Google and its chief legal officer, wrote, “The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition.”

Mr. Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman, called Google’s lifting of content from other Web sites “the most troubling of its business practices related to search and search advertising.” The company agreed to stop taking its rivals’ content, particularly reviews of things like restaurants or consumer products, for use in its own specialized search results.

Yelp, a consumer review site, complained that Google took parts of its reviews and placed them in its own results. When competitors objected, Google threatened to remove them entirely from results, something Mr. Leibowitz said “is clearly problematic and potentially harmful to competition because it might harm incentives to innovate.”

Google also agreed to stop contractual restrictions that prevented small businesses from advertising on competing search platforms.

Last year, some F.T.C. staff members pushed hard in reports to the commission that the company’s actions constituted “unfair methods of competition,” an area that, like that of antitrust, is policed by the F.T.C. But the trade commission faced a struggle in proving malicious intent — that Google changes its search algorithm to purposely harm competitors and favor itself.

Antitrust lawyers say anticompetitive behavior cannot be proved simply by showing that a change in the algorithm affects other Web sites and causes sites to show up lower in results, even though studies have shown that users rarely look beyond the first page of search results.

Bits Blog: Anonymous Steps Up Attacks on Israeli Sites

Hackers stepped up attacks on a number of Israeli Web sites on Friday, including Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the municipal Web site for Tel Aviv.

The attacks are part of a broader campaign that the hacker collective Anonymous is calling #OpIsrael. The group says the attacks are in retaliation for Israeli military strikes on Hamas on Wednesday.

The campaign, which began at 3 a.m. New York time on Thursday — with coordinated attacks on several Israeli Web sites, including those of an Israeli Defense Forces blog and a  private Israeli surveillance and security company — showed no signs of slowing on Friday.

By Friday, Anonymous hackers claimed to have defaced more than 600 Israeli Web sites, many belonging to private companies. They also claimed credit for taking down a Tel Aviv municipal site, tel-aviv.gov.il, and said, in Twitter posts, that they had deleted the Web databases for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Bank of Jerusalem.

While the former site was still offline Friday afternoon, the latter appeared to be functioning normally.

DealBook: Go Daddy Chief to Step Down, as a K.K.R. Executive Steps In

July 31, 9:43 a.m. | Updated When the Go Daddy Group announced on Monday that its chief executive, Warren Adelman, was stepping down, the Web hosting company didn’t have far to go to find an interim replacement.

It plucked an executive from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, one of its owners.

Go Daddy named Scott Wagner, a senior member of K.K.R.’s Capstone division, as its interim chief while it looks for a permanent new leader. While the company didn’t name a reason for Mr. Adelman’s stepping down, it said that the executive will remain at the company as a special adviser for strategy and global policy.

It is the biggest management change at Go Daddy since the company’s $2.25 billion leveraged buyout last year by K.K.R., Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures. At the time, Go Daddy was seeking financial backers who would help support its efforts to grow, especially internationally.

It’s been growing since then, reaching more than $1.1 billion in sales last year and expanding its presence in markets like India.

But since being taken over, the company once known for risqué advertising featuring scantily clad spokeswomen like Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels has been toning down its rebellious spirit as well. A new commercial nods to Go Daddy’s history of using buxom spokeswomen, but also brings in a decidedly less sexy employee to emphasize the company’s technological stability.

For the time being, Go Daddy will also be headed by a decidedly unflashy chief. Mr. Wagner leads the North American operations of K.K.R.’s Capstone unit, an internal consulting arm focused on improving portfolio companies’ performances. A veteran of the Boston Consulting Group, he has been working with Go Daddy on its international expansion efforts.

“I look forward to working with the innovative and long-tenured management team at Go Daddy,” Mr. Wagner said in a statement. “We will keep enhancing the ways we enable and empower small businesses to grow their online presence.”

But while Mr. Wagner is stepping in, he isn’t seeking to hold onto the job permanently, according to a person briefed on the matter.