NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – One winner in 2012′s political races already has been decided: local television stations.

Spending on TV advertising likely will mount to historic levels as candidates again blanket airwaves with commercials pitching their virtues or bashing their opponents. The hard-fought, and expensive, battles will provide a welcome windfall for TV stations, particularly in the most tightly contested states that will decide if President Barack Obama wins re-election or loses to his yet-to-be-decided Republican opponent.

Forecasters are calling for spending on political advertisements to increase up to 30 percent this year compared with 2008, setting a new record and reflecting, in part, a response to the landmark “Citizens United” 2010 Supreme Court ruling, which ended most restrictions on donations by corporations and unions. This is the first presidential election since the ruling.

The decision fostered the creation of Super PACs, fundraising committees that can spend money to support a candidate but cannot officially coordinate with campaigns. Republican Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, Restore Our Future, has raised at least $12.2 million, while Obama’s Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, has raised at least $3.2 million, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website associated with the nonpartisan group Center for Responsive Politics.

Around 85 percent of the money that is raised and spent on advertising historically goes toward local broadcast TV. In 2012, that could total between $2.5 billion to $3.0 billion, said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

“Television advertising remains a message weapon of choice to most campaigns,” Goldstein said. “Every year is a record.”

Spending in 2012 should easily beat the mark of $2.4 billion in the 2010 mid-term elections, the first to include Super Pac money and a cycle that featured no presidential race on the ballot but saw gubernatorial and Senate contests in big, expensive states such as California, Texas and New York. By comparison, about $2.1 billion was spent on local broadcast TV commercials in 2008 — before the creation of the new rules governing Super Pacs.

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – The Daily News of New York has hired former News of the World editor Colin Myler as its editor in chief, an appointment that is certain to add spice to the newspaper’s long and heated rivalry with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Myler, who replaces Kevin Convey, had long been a close lieutenant of Murdoch, serving as managing editor of the New York Post before he was brought to London in 2007 to clean up the scandal-plagued News of the World.

The hiring of Myler, 59, means he will now be in direct competition with Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the New York Post and owned the News of the World until it closed this past summer.

Myler will start his job January 10.

“The New York Daily News is a great institution of American journalism which will only get better under the leadership of Colin,” publisher Mort Zuckerman said in a memo on Wednesday announcing the hiring.

The Daily News, the largest-circulation daily newspaper in New York, has been engaged in a long, expensive and often nasty competition with the New York Post. Myler served as executive editor and managing editor of the New York Post from 2001 to 2007.

“He was quite successful at the Post,” said British media commentator Steve Hewlett. “He knows the market very well. He’s won his spurs in that marketplace, and also of course he has no reason to thank Rupert Murdoch for anything now.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New York Times Co is nearing a sale of 16 regional newspapers spread across the Southeast and California to Halifax Media Holdings, it said on Monday.

The possible sale, news of which comes just days after New York Times Co announced the sudden retirement of its chief executive, is the latest in a series of steps the company has taken to cut costs and focus on its most important newspapers and their websites.

With a weekday circulation of about 430,000, the newspapers included in the Times Co’s regional media group are largely scattered across the U.S. Southeast and California. Among them are the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Ledger, Star-Banner, The Gainesville Sun and News Chief in Florida; Herald-Journal in South Carolina; and The Press Democrat in California.

The Boston Globe, which the Times Co had previously considered selling, is not among the papers that make up the regional media group and thus is not part of the proposed sale.

As a group, the regional papers have struggled recently because of weak local retail and national advertising, partly reflecting the broad struggles of the economy. In the first nine months of the year, the group had a combined revenue of $190 million, down about 6.7 percent from the prior year.

If the deal is completed, the papers, which have collectively won five Pulitzer Prizes, will become part of Halifax Media. That company owns The Daytona-Beach News Journal, among other papers and media businesses across the south.

The Times Co confirmed it was in talks to sell the newspapers after reports surfaced in the media, including JimRomenesko.com. The journalism website displayed a screenshot of the Halifax Media Group’s corporate website that pre-emptively showed it as the owner of the Times Co’s regional papers.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Janet Robinson, the outgoing chief executive of The New York Times Co, understood the dynamics of the print publishing business. But the newspaper business isn’t what it used to be.

Rather, publishing is now a complicated Venn diagram of digital advertising, online subscriptions, and video, all designed to offset the declining fundamentals of print.

In this new world, Robinson’s results were mixed.

For instance, in 2005, the year after being named CEO, Robinson signed off on the roughly $400 million acquisition of About.com, a website that relies on user-generated expert content to surface high in search results. But About.com has struggled of late as a result of competition from Demand Media and others, as well as changes made by Google to its search algorithm. As a result, About’s revenue plummeted almost 21 percent in the third quarter due to declines in cost-per-click and display advertising.

The About Group was largely responsible for the Times Co’s 4.5 percent decline in overall digital revenue in the third quarter.

Moreover, the Times Co’s first attempt at a paid digital model under its own banner, a service called Times Select that asked readers to pay for access to its opinion columnists, failed. Executives learned from the mistakes of that experiment, however, and the subsequent meter-modeled pay wall instituted at the flagship New York Times, which grants readers access to 20 articles per month for free before requiring them to pay for additional content, is so far considered a success.

Still, even that has its critics, who complain that the model is too pricey and that the company is, as Morningstar analyst Joscelyn MacKay put it, “pricing in assumptions that are way too lofty.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Janet Robinson will step down as chief executive of the New York Times Co at the end of the month after a seven-year run in which she attempted to steer the company through one of the harshest business environments it has ever faced.

The New York Times, which in addition to its flagship paper publishes The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, among others, will begin a search for internal and external candidates to replace Robinson, 61. Until then, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. will oversee the company.

News of Robinson’s departure coincides with the retirement of Martin Nisenholtz, the company’s longtime digital leader, at the end of the year, meaning the Times Co will start 2012 without a CEO or digital boss.

The Times Co gave no explanation for Robinson’s sudden departure, which caught analysts as well as company insiders by surprise. Speculation among industry observers and the analyst community centered on the company’s faltering stock price, which has declined more than 80 percent since Robinson was appointed CEO in December 2004. This year alone, shares are down nearly 25 percent, a performance that has frustrated investors.

Times Co shares, which had traded in the mid-$30s during one point in Robinson’s tenure, closed trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange up 1.8 percent, or 13 cents, to $7.53.

“It is very unusual to have a long-time CEO suddenly announce her leaving within two weeks with no replacement,” said Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur. “She’s done a lot of good things but at the end of the day the stock price is the ultimate measure of success.”

In a recent interview, Robinson said she considered it a “mandate to increase shareholder value,” but argued she had done so through building a “multiplatform company” even during a period of “economic uncertainty and secular pressures.”

Dec 12 (Reuters) – Intel Corp (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) warned that fourth-quarter results would miss its previous forecast due to hard disk drive supply shortages caused by floods in Thailand.

Thailand said last month that output of hard disk drives fell 52.4 percent in October from a year earlier as the worst flooding in 50 years swamped factories. [ID:nL4E7M91KZ]

Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, said quarterly revenue is now seen at $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million, down from a previous forecast of $14.7 billion. Analysts’ average forecast is $14.65 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Intel said non-GAAP gross margin is expected to be around 65.5 percent versus previous expectations of 66 percent.

The company said that it anticipated sales of personal computers to be up in the fourth quarter from the third quarter.

Intel said it “expects hard disk drive supply shortages to continue into the first quarter, followed by a rebuilding of microprocessor inventories as supplies of hard disk drives recover during the first half of 2012″.

Hendi Susanto, research analyst at Gabeli & Co., said he was not surprised Intel had lowered its outlook, considering rival Texas Instruments (TXN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) last week cut its fourth-quarter forecast.[ID:nN1E7B70IV]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Rather than cheering along in a soccer stadium or basketball arena, today’s biggest sports fans can probably be found sifting through spreadsheets in a quiet corner office.

That’s because sports represent one of the few businesses that keeps getting better for media companies, providing an important buffer against an otherwise uncertain economy. Even as Americans struggle, they keep tuning in to sports. Scandals and labor strife seemingly have done nothing to subdue their passion.

At least for now, fans keep paying up for costly TV packages, such as “Sunday Ticket,” DirecTV’s (DTV.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) National Football League offering. Advertisers, too, seem willing to pay top dollar to buy commercial time during sports. Some of the 30-second spots for the upcoming Super Bowl cost upward of $3.5 million.

Media and sports executives who spoke this week at Reuters Global Media Summit see no signs consumers are losing their appetites for sports or cutting back in tough economic times.

“Content is king, and sports content is the king of kings,” said Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber. “Every time our industry thinks it’s reached a peak, something happens which surprises.”

When soccer governing body FIFA sold U.S. broadcast rights for the World Cup for about $1.2 billion this year, up from $40 million a decade ago, Garber said he was “astounded.”

Others were just as shocked at the deal ESPN inked with the National Football League last September. The network agreed to pay $1.9 billion a year to keep “Monday Night Football” games through 2021, about 73 percent more than Walt Disney Co’s (DIS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) ESPN had previously paid the league.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The National Football League, fresh off a blockbuster television deal with ESPN, is confident it can win healthy price hikes when it sits down soon to negotiate new contracts with CBS, NBC and Fox, a top executive said on Wednesday.

“I think in the next year or so we will have these deals done,” said Brian Rolapp, head of the NFL’s media business, of impending negotiations with its broadcast partners on the Sunday package of games. The NFL’s current contracts with CBS Corp, News Corp’s Fox and Comcast Corp’s NBC expire after the 2013 season.

Rolapp added that once those deals were done the league will look at selling the TV rights to a new package of Thursday night games.

The NFL in September announced an eight year, $15.2 billion extension with Walt Disney Co’s ESPN for Monday Night Football. The deal, which included additional rights beyond just the TV broadcast, represented a roughly 73 percent increase over the previous contract.

“We think what ESPN paid is an indication of the strength of our product,” Rolapp said, speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit in New York.

ESPN’s willingness to pay what amounts to nearly $2 billion a year underscores the importance of live sports, and particularly the NFL, to TV networks.

Sports is almost always watched live by viewers, which is of immense importance to advertisers and separates it from most programming such as dramas and comedies that are often recorded and watched later.