Advertising: Self Magazine Widens Its Focus for a Younger Audience

WHAT’S the point of having Michelle Obama’s triceps if you can’t show them off in a smart sleeveless sheath?

That seems to be the thinking behind a remake of Self magazine, the Condé Nast publication best known for teaching women how to crunch their abs, tone their thighs and eat the right foods.

Self is broadening its tight focus on exercise and wellness to become a more general lifestyle magazine infused with more beauty and fashion, an effort that will include editorial changes, a new look for the cover and logo and licensing agreements.

“We think there’s a shift in how women think of their bodies and beauty,” said Laura McEwen, the vice president and publisher of Self. “Being fit and fashionable are really one.”

According to Ms. McEwen, the magazine’s typical reader is in her mid-30s with a median household income of $75,000 a year; the rebranded magazine is meant to appeal to the generation of women 18 to 30 who are obsessed with social media. “The magazine is being edited for the women who think in 140 characters,” she said, referring to the character limit of a Twitter post.

That editorial shift can be most felt in the chatty headlines created for subsections in the magazine and its bolder, fashion-focused images. One section, “It’s a Thing,” highlights new trends (in March, the color will be lemon yellow). Others include “You Look Awesome in That,” featuring fashion coverage, and “Just Shoot Me Now,” which doles out advice to readers in embarrassing situations.

Self finds itself between two of its biggest competitors in women’s fitness magazines.

The magazine, which has a total print circulation of 1.5 million readers, had a slight increase in advertising dollars, but not ad pages, last year. Advertisers spent $163.2 million on ads in the magazine in 2012, a 1.8 percent increase from 2011, when they spent $160.2 million.

Total ad pages declined 2.3 percent to 905.4 in 2012 from 926 in 2011, according to data from the Publishers Information Bureau. Online, the magazine has 6.9 million unique visitors a month, executives said, with a fifth of that traffic coming from the social media content sharing site Pinterest.

Shape magazine, which is owned by American Media, claims a similarly strong print circulation of 1.63 million readers, but has had a tough time sustaining advertising dollars. The fitness and lifestyle magazine suffered an 18.4 percent decrease in advertising revenue from 2011, when advertisers spent $206.8 million, to 2012, when they spent $168.8 million on the magazine. The total number of ad pages in the magazine decreased 22.7 percent from 2011 to 2012.

Women’s Health, which is owned by Rodale, showed a 12.3 percent increase in paid advertising from 2011 to 2012, and a 6.8 percent increase in ad pages for the same period. In 2011 the magazine reported a circulation of 1.6 million.

Self magazine, its Web site and its mobile site will be divided into three main sections that focus on body, looks and lifestyle. The new look, which will make its debut this week, includes a larger font for the title and a clean white background. The changes will be consistent across all platforms.

Readers will also be able to download a new mobile application, called Self Plus. When users hover their phones over pages tagged with icons promoting the app, they can watch videos and skim through photo galleries and other content.

Millennial women, said Lucy Schulte Danziger, the editor in chief of Self, have “this sense that you want to be really healthy, but you also want to go drink martinis with your friends.” (To that end, the March issue will include a calorie-counting game on matching cocktails with bar food without blowing your diet.) “It’s trying to have fun. It should be fun; this is not rocket science,” she said.

Self’s last makeover was in 2010, when it overhauled its design, updated its logo and tweaked section headlines.

Beyond the latest editorial changes is a range of marketing efforts to get the word out. Print and digital ads will run in Condé Nast magazines like Allure, Glamour and Lucky and on taxi tops in New York City. Digital ads will also run on DailyCandy.com and Refinery29.com.

The March issue of Self, featuring the dancer Julianne Hough on the cover, will be available in print on Feb 19. Ms. Hough is the lead actress in the new film “Safe Haven.” Self will also be the co-host at a premiere party for the film on Monday in New York City.

The brand has also licensed its name to a new line of fitness gear including yoga mats and kettlebells and is considering extending that to healthy food products. Self is also capitalizing on its annual event, “Self Workout in the Park,” by announcing a college-themed contest, “Self Workout on the Quad,” where college students who participate most heavily with the Facebook “Workout in the Park” social game can win an event at their school.

Sponsors for the event include Garnier, Reebok, Calvin Klein, LaRoche-Posay, LeSportsac, Luna Bar and Club Med. Ads promoting the contest will be shown on HerCampus.com.

“This is clearly a strategy not only to reach young women readers where they’re at right now, but also to be more attractive to advertisers,” said Laura Portwood-Stacer, a visiting assistant professor of media, culture and communication at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University. “It seems to tap into this trend of fitness lifestyle consumption that you see a lot now.”

One new advertiser is LeSportsac, which in addition to sponsoring the workout events, will advertise in the April issue of Self.

“Seeing where the consumer is going today is very much lifestyle,” said Paula Spadaccini, the marketing director for LeSportsac. “They don’t just aspire to wear Christian Louboutin and be very fashionable. They also aspire to be fit and cook healthy recipes.”

Walter Coyle, the president of Pedone, an independent advertising agency, said that some of his clients like Burt’s Bees, the beauty product line, and Essie, the nail polish brand, will continue to advertise in Self, and that other clients including Clarins and Lacoste were considering it. “Whenever a formidable magazine like Self reimagines its position in the marketplace, it’s something everyone is going to look at,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 11, 2013

An earlier version of this column misidentified the owner of the magazine Women’s Health. It is owned by Rodale, not Meredith.

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Ambitious makeover planned for old housing project

Denise Penegar puts a little extra effort into the teenage girls, the ones who've dropped out of high school to care for their firstborns.

Don't be afraid, the outreach worker tells them. Come down to the housing project's community center, get your GED and some job skills. Change your life.

"I was one of those girls," said Penegar, now 51 and still living in Jordan Downs, the Watts housing project where she was born.

Sometimes, she imagines how different her life might have been if someone had knocked on her door when she was 17, caring for her first baby. What would it have meant just to have "someone who is here who can help pick me up"?

Penegar is on the front lines of a bold social experiment underway at Jordan Downs, a project notorious to outsiders for its poverty, blight and violence but seen by many longtime residents, for all its problems, as a close-knit community worth preserving.

In the last year, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has begun an effort to transform Jordan that could cost more than $600 million. The plan is to turn the complex of 700 aging units into a mixed-income community of up to 1,400 apartments and condominiums, with shops and restaurants and fancy touches such as native plant gardens. The city hopes to draw in hundreds of more-affluent residents willing to pay market rate to live side by side with the city's poorest.

Spurred by changes in federal funding and policy, such "mixed use" developments have sprung up in place of infamous housing projects all over the country. But experts say Jordan is taking an approach that has not been tried on this scale.

Typically, public housing residents are moved out ahead of the bulldozers, scattered to search for new shelter. In Los Angeles, the housing authority has promised that any of the 2,300 Jordan residents "in good standing" can stay in their old units until the day they move into new ones. The project is to be built in phases, beginning with units on 21 acres of adjacent land purchased by the authority in 2008 for $31 million.

To ease the transition, the city has dispatched "community coaches" like Penegar, along with teachers, social workers, therapists — even police officers whose charge is not to make arrests but to coach youth football and triathlon teams.

In essence, officials intend to raze the buildings, not the community — and radically change its character.

It will be an enormous challenge, with success likely to be measured in tiny increments.

Only 47% of adults at Jordan reported any wages to the housing authority last year. As in many urban projects, poverty and social ills have multiplied through the generations, leaving some residents unfamiliar with opportunities and expectations beyond the neighborhood. Some rarely leave the area.

Before inviting in new neighbors with expectations of safety and comfort, the housing authority has begun flooding Jordan Downs with social services. Many of the programs are focused on women, because more than 60% of Jordan Downs' tenants live in households headed by single mothers. But men are targeted too — for job training and lessons in parenting, for instance.

By December, 10 months into the effort, more than 450 families had been surveyed by intake workers and 280 signed up for intensive services.

"Most people would say it's ambitious, but I think it's essential," said Kathryn Icenhower, executive director of Shields for Families, the South Los Angeles nonprofit that is running many of the new programs under a more than $1-million annual contract with the housing authority.

It is unknown, however, how effective the social services will be, how easy it will be to draw in wealthier residents and how many millions of dollars the federal government — a major source of funding — will provide.

Already, the housing authority has picked a development team — the for-profit Michaels Organization and the nonprofit Bridge Housing, both with respectable track records in other cities. But with financing still uncertain, it is unclear exactly how many units will be built or how much various occupants would pay.

Ultimately, a working family could pay hundreds of dollars more in rent than unemployed tenants next door for a nearly identical unit. Officials say they do not expect Watts to draw the same kind of high-income residents as the former Cabrini Green project in Chicago, which sat on prime real estate near downtown. But Jordan is in a convenient location, near the intersection of the 105 and 110 Freeways; and in a high-rent city like Los Angeles, even the steepest rates at Jordan are likely to seem a bargain.

Despite the onslaught of social services and some palpable changes — including a 53% plunge in the violent crime rate at Jordan last year — financial risks abound.

Later this spring, the authority plans to put in an application for $30 million from the federal government's Choice Neighborhoods Program as seed money. Without it, the project could be delayed.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Wings of the Seagull Nebula

This image shows the intricate structure of part of the Seagull Nebula, known more formally as IC 2177. These wisps of gas and dust are known as Sharpless 2-296 (officially Sh 2-296) and form part of the “wings” of the celestial bird. This region of the sky is a fascinating muddle of intriguing astronomical objects — a mix of dark and glowing red clouds, weaving amongst bright stars. This new view was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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Israeli Says Syria Twisted Comments by Rebel Supporter

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A public relations controversy erupted Saturday after a leading Israeli newspaper published comments from a brief interview with the leader of Syria’s main exile opposition group.

The news media outlets of the Syrian government, and its ally Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, reported that the opposition leader had declared that Israel had “nothing to fear” from a rebel-led Syrian government. Moreover, the reports said, the opposition was working with other countries to keep Syria’s chemical weapons away from Hezbollah, which he called a “son of the devil.”

But the opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, never said any of that, according to the article in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and its author, a prominent Israeli defense expert, Ronen Bergman.

Sheik Khatib was quoted in the article reiterating the opposition’s promise to keep Syria’s chemical arsenal out of “the hands of unauthorized elements,” and it was the international community, he said, not Israel, that had “nothing to fear.”

When Sheik Khatib realized that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli — after glancing at his business card — he abruptly ended the conversation, Mr. Bergman said in a Skype interview, repeating what he had written.

The original article was published only in Hebrew — and only in print — so it was the Arabic and English versions put out by the Syrian government and Hezbollah that raced around the Internet on Saturday, provoking outrage from government supporters and opponents at Sheik Khatib, who posted a message on his Facebook page denying that he had given the interview.

Yet the episode appeared to have been more than a simple misunderstanding. Syria’s conflict is not only a shooting war but also a propaganda war. Pro-government media apparently could not resist the chance to bolster their contention that the rebellion had been promoted by Israel and the West to punish Syria and its president, President Bashar al-Assad, for taking uncompromising positions against Israel.

“Unfortunately, the original text was less exciting,” Mr. Bergman said. “I would be happy if he would say something like, ‘Yes, we will make peace with Israel’ — then I would get the front page.” As it was, the article elicited little reaction in Israel.

But misrepresentation of the article suggested that it hit a nerve on one issue. An unnamed opposition member, not Sheik Khatib, called Hezbollah “sons of the devil,” according to Mr. Bergman, and said the rebel coalition was working with other countries to ensure that “not one piece of military equipment, not chemical weapons and not any other item, will pass into their hands.”

Syria is Hezbollah’s main conduit for arms, and Hezbollah has backed Mr. Assad’s bloody crackdown at great cost to its popularity in the wider Arab world.

Although Mr. Bergman said the opposition member was offering his own opinion and not presenting official policy, his comments bolstered the widely held view that a rebel-led government might halt the shipment of Iranian arms through Syria to Hezbollah. Hezbollah, a Shiite group and political party, is also concerned about the rise within the rebel movement of extremist Sunni jihadists who view Shiites as apostates.

The misleading reports appeared to be an attempt to further divide the opposition. Sheik Khatib found himself fending off critics from within the anti-Assad movement who objected to his even speaking with an Israeli reporter, though by all accounts he did not initially realize that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli.

It was the second time in a month that Sheik Khatib found himself on the defensive. He recently proposed talks with members of Mr. Assad’s government, but had not built political support for the proposal.

On Friday, Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, gave the first official response to the proposal, saying that the government would negotiate with any opposition members who agreed to lay down their arms.

On Saturday, Mr. Assad named new cabinet ministers for oil, finance, social affairs, labor, housing, public works and agriculture, as Syria faces growing economic problems and shortages of electricity, fuel and bread.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.

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DC Comics Turns the Occupy Movement Into a Superhero Title

Eighteen months after the phrase first entered the collective public consciousness, the plight of the 99 percent is coming to mainstream superhero comics — via a new series from the second biggest publisher in the American comic industry, which just happens to be a subsidiary of a multi-national corporation that makes around $12 billion a year. Irony, anybody?

In May, DC Comics will launch two new series taking place in their mainstream superhero universe that offer different insights into the class struggle in a world filled with superheroes, alien races and inexplicable events. The Green Team, written by Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures creators Art Baltazar and Franco, with art by Ig Guara, revives an obscure 1975 concept about teenage rich kids who try to make the world a better place with their outrageous wealth. In an interview promoting the series, Franco promised that it would address questions like “Can money make you happy?” and “If you had unlimited wealth, could you use that to make the lives of people better?”

Obviously, this is one of the more fanciful series DC will be publishing.

But while DC is promoting The Green Team series as the adventures of the “1%,” its companion title, The Movement, is teased as a chance for us to “Meet the 99%… They were the super-powered disenfranchised — now they’re the voice of the people!”

“It’s a book about power,” explained The Movement writer Gail Simone. “Who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse. As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”

“The thing I find fascinating and a little bit worrisome is, what happens when a hacktivist group whose politics you find completely repulsive has this same kind of power and influence,” she elaborated in an interview at Big Shiny Robot. “What if a racist or homophobic group rises up and organizes in the same manner?”

While the concept is ambitious, the idea that a comic capable of living up to the book’s populist inspiration could come from DC Entertainment still strikes some as unlikely. Matt Pizzolo, the editor of the Occupy Comics anthology, told Wired that “though DC Comics did help launch Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s seminal anarchist epic V For Vendetta over two decades ago, it’s unlikely they would do so today. Between dismantling Vertigo and frankensteining Watchmen, the past year has demonstrated DC isn’t a safe place for bold creators who want to tell the kinds of stories that would inspire things like Occupy, rather than just cash in on them.”

Still, Simone says that the use of the iconography and language of a real-world populist movement is deliberate, promising that the book will reflect today’s decentralized political world and offer ”a slice of rarity that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books.”

This wouldn’t the first time that DC has attempted to offer pre-packaged populist rebellion, of course; in addition to the aforementioned publication of the anti-establishment V For Vendetta, the company’s Vertigo imprint also published Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, a series centering around an international organization struggling against forces of authority and repression that included anti-corporate themes.

Only time will tell whether The Movement will live up to the subversive examples of these earlier books, or just end up a well-intentioned piece of topical super heroics that trades on, and commodifies, a real political movement.

The Movement #1 will be available in both print and digital formats on May 1, while The Green Team #1 will be released on May 22.

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Mary J. Blige honored by Vibe at pre-Grammy party

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Babyface called her an icon; Diddy said she was like a sister; and Anita Baker credited her for helping secure her latest Grammy nomination.

There was no shortage of superlatives bestowed on Mary J. Blige on Friday night as Vibe magazine celebrated the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul’s career, which has now spanned for more than two decades.

“She’s a musical soulmate, she’s my sister, she’s one of my best friends in the world,” said Diddy, who has worked with Blige since the beginning of her career. “Mary is our queen. … There is no one to come after her.”

Blige was feted during Vibe’s first Impact Awards, which coincided with the magazine’s 20th anniversary. The event included guests like MC Lyte, Jermaine Dupri and Queen Latifah. Blige appeared to wipe away tears at moments as she was lauded by one guest after another.

Babyface, who wrote one of Blige’s biggest hits, “Not Gon’ Cry,” recalled being a little intimidated by the idea of working with Blige, whom he saw as a tough New Yorker.

“Mary walked in and she was so sweet … and so respectful and totally melted me right there,” he said.

Diddy recalled how Blige worked with him after he got fired from one of his first high-profile jobs in the industry and when no else one would, and also said she was one of his best friends.

One of the more emotional tributes came from Baker, who was a childhood idol of Blige’s. Baker thanked Blige for seeking her out for collaborations and helping a new generation discover her music.

“That kind of generosity is non-existent in our business,” said Baker, who is nominated for a Grammy at Sunday’s awards. “This Grammy nomination that I have is in great part because you spoke my name into the 21st century.”

Latifah noted the personal transformation of Blige, who overcame substance abuse and other obstacles to become one of music’s leading role models.

“For me when I look back at you and the journey you’ve taken, I find you to be extremely inspirational and aspirational, especially to young women,” Latifah said.

When Blige got up to accept her honor, she thanked everyone for embracing her throughout her career, even during her very public missteps. She also thanked people for accepting her imperfections. She recounted a story about being sent to charm school early in her career by handlers who thought she needed to smooth over her rough edges. But Blige was not a good student.

“I just walked out and I never went back,” Blige said. “I’m glad I didn’t go back because I don’t think that I would have had an impact on anyone’s life had I lived someone else’s life.”

Blige recently starred as Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, in the Lifetime movie “Betty & Coretta” co-starring Angela Bassett.

___

Online:

http://www.maryjblige.com

___

Follow Nekesa Mumbi Moody on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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Strategies: At Dell, a Gamble on a Legacy

IN 1984 — the year Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook creator, was born — Michael S. Dell started a tech company in his dorm room, dropped out of college and changed the world.

By making personal computers that were powerful, reliable and inexpensive, and by selling directly to buyers who customized their PC features, Mr. Dell revolutionized his industry.

“The original PC industry was long on people with great technical ideas but short on people who were able to turn those ideas into opportunities — into products that people really wanted,” said Timothy Bresnahan, a Stanford economist. Along with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as well as Scott Cook of Intuit, Mr. Dell was one of those few great innovators, he said. “These people are very rare.”

Mr. Dell’s early achievements were formidable, but unless his latest effort to turn around his company is successful, the Dell legacy today is very much in doubt. Last week, along with Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm, he made a $24.4 billion buyout offer for his company — an apparent bet that, without the scrutiny of public shareholders, he can get Dell back on track.

Dell, the company, has been losing ground for years as the industry it once dominated has undergone upheavals that its founder failed to foresee. “The very nature of technology is that it changes a lot,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “And Michael has conceded publicly that he has missed some big changes — he failed to foresee smartphones or tablets — and both of these shifts have been highly detrimental to the PC world.”

He has lagged in a crucial area of corporate strategy as well, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee in San Francisco. While Mr. Dell has always been attuned to the needs of corporate clients, he is 20 years behind I.B.M. in embracing a strategic shift to enterprise software and services, Mr. Wu said: “That’s a higher-margin business that Dell would like to go after, but I.B.M. and others have got tremendous leads. It will be very difficult for him to catch up.”

If Dell shareholders accept an offer price of $13.65 a share, Mr. Dell, who is contributing his stake of more than 14 percent in the company plus hundreds of millions more, would end up with more than 50 percent of the new company’s equity, Mr. Sacconaghi estimated. Mr. Dell, who declined to comment for this article, would control the company without being subject to the day-to-day pressures of the stock market, which has pummeled Dell shares because its earnings have weakened.

While Dell reports that 50 percent of its revenue is directly related to PCs, Mr. Wu says the figure is 70 to 80 percent when indirect revenue, like that for computer monitors, printers and services, is included. “The company has made big investments in other areas, but it’s still mainly a PC company,” he said.

That’s a big problem for several reasons. Once considered the low-cost provider in the field, Dell now faces lean Asian competitors like Lenovo, Asus and Acer that make PCs more cheaply and accept lower profit margins. Yet these companies, particularly Lenovo, have also garnered praise for making excellent computers, not merely well-priced ones. At the same time, Dell’s vaunted reputation for quality and service has waned.

Lenovo, which makes the ThinkPad line of notebook computers formerly sold by I.B.M., “has been picking up corporate customers from Dell,” Mr. Wu said.

THEN there is a deeper issue: the entire PC industry is stagnant at best. Worldwide PC shipments declined 4.9 percent in the fourth quarter, versus the year-earlier period, according to Gartner, a market research firm. Consumer preferences are shifting. With the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets — segments where Dell is absent or very weak — consumers aren’t replacing PCs as often.

“We don’t expect people to abandon PCs, but they won’t rely on them as much in the future,” said Mikako Kitagawa, a Gartner analyst. Dell’s share of this no-growth market has been shrinking, to 10.2 percent worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2012, from 12.2 percent the previous year, Gartner said.

Facing such headwinds, Mr. Sacconaghi said, Dell hopes to “hold PC profits flat or, worst case, down 5 percent a year, while they grow the rest of the business to more than offset that.” But the market is skeptical. Dell’s shares fell 30 percent in the 12 months before Jan. 14, when reports of an imminent buyout appeared.

The leveraged buyout will layer $15 billion of new debt on the company. Microsoft, with which Dell has had close ties, is providing $2 billion. Because interest rates are extraordinarily low, servicing all that debt should be manageable, assuming that Dell maintains its current cash flow, Mr. Sacconaghi said.

It’s not clear how much the debt load will constrain Dell’s investments in research and development. Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor, said a study for which he was a co-author found that after leveraged buyouts, most companies maintained their ability to innovate, largely by focusing research in “their core competencies.”

In other words, he said, “Dell might be able to prosper after a buyout; it would depend on how Michael Dell manages the company.”

Is the price being offered for the company fair? It’s often unwise to bet against company insiders, especially founders like Mr. Dell, who may be presumed to know their companies’ value better than outside investors.

Consider John W. Kluge, who took Metromedia private in 1984 in a $1.1 billion leveraged buyout. Mr. Kluge, Metromedia’s founder, promptly liquidated it, selling television stations (to Rupert Murdoch) and sundry assets like the Harlem Globetrotters and the Ice Capades. In the end, Mr. Kluge tripled his take — to the chagrin of many former shareholders.

Mr. Kluge, who died in 2010, wasn’t interested in preserving his company or revolutionizing an industry, however. He merely wanted to make money. “When we buy an asset, we look at it as a return on the investment,” he said in 1980.

For Mr. Dell, whose name is on the door, other factors may be in play. “Another chapter is still to be written,” Mr. Bresnahan said. Money will be part of it. So will the Dell legacy.

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Big Bear locked down amid manhunt

The bustling winter resort of Big Bear took on the appearance of a ghost town Thursday as surveillance aircraft buzzed overhead and police in tactical gear and carrying rifles patrolled mountain roads in convoys of SUVs, while others stood guard along major intersections.

Even before authorities had confirmed that the torched pickup truck discovered on a quiet forest road belonged to suspected gunman Christopher Dorner, 33, officials had ordered an emergency lockdown of local businesses, homes and the town's popular ski resorts. Parents were told to pick up their children from school, as rolling yellow buses might pose a target to an unpredictable fugitive on the run.

By nightfall, many residents had barricaded their doors as they prepared for a long, anxious evening.

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"We're all just stressed," said Andrea Burtons as she stocked up on provisions at a convenience store. "I have to go pick up my brother and get him home where we're safe."

Police ordered the lockdown about 9:30 a.m. as authorities throughout Southern California launched an immense manhunt for the former lawman, who is accused of killing three people as part of a long-standing grudge against the LAPD. Dorner is believed to have penned a long, angry manifesto on Facebook saying that he was unfairly fired from the force and was now seeking vengeance.

Forest lands surrounding Big Bear Lake are cross-hatched with fire roads and trails leading in all directions, and the snow-capped mountains can provide both cover and extreme challenges to a fugitive on foot. It was unclear whether Dorner was prepared for such rugged terrain.

Footprints were found leading from Dorner's burned pickup truck into the snow off Forest Road 2N10 and Club View Drive in Big Bear Lake.

San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said that although authorities had deployed 125 officers for tracking and door-to-door searches, officers had to be mindful that the suspect may have set a trap.

"Certainly. There's always that concern and we're extremely careful and we're worried about this individual," McMahon said. "We're taking every precaution we can."

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Big Bear has roughly 400 homes, but authorities guessed that only 40% are occupied year-round.

The search will probably play out with the backdrop of a winter storm that is expected to hit the area after midnight.

Up to 6 inches of snow could blanket local mountains, the National Weather Service said.

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Gusts up to 50 mph could hit the region, said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Moede, creating a wind-chill factor of 15 to 20 degrees.

Extra patrols were brought in to check vehicles coming and going from Big Bear, McMahon said, but no vehicles had been reported stolen.

"He could be anywhere at this point," McMahon said. When asked if the burned truck was a possible diversion, McMahon replied: "Anything's possible."

Dorner had no known connection to the area, authorities said.

Craig and Christine Winnegar, of Murrieta, found themselves caught up in the lockdown by accident. Craig brought his wife to Big Bear as a surprise to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. Their prearranged dinner was canceled when restaurant owners closed their doors out of fear.

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