Your medical chart could include exercise minutes

CHICAGO (AP) — Roll up a sleeve for the blood pressure cuff. Stick out a wrist for the pulse-taking. Lift your tongue for the thermometer. Report how many minutes you are active or getting exercise.

Wait, what?

If the last item isn't part of the usual drill at your doctor's office, a movement is afoot to change that. One recent national survey indicated only a third of Americans said their doctors asked about or prescribed physical activity.

Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest nonprofit health insurance plans, made a big push a few years ago to get its southern California doctors to ask patients about exercise. Since then, Kaiser has expanded the program across California and to several other states. Now almost 9 million patients are asked at every visit, and some other medical systems are doing it, too.

Here's how it works: During any routine check of vital signs, a nurse or medical assistant asks how many days a week the patient exercises and for how long. The number of minutes per week is posted along with other vitals at the top the medical chart. So it's among the first things the doctor sees.

"All we ask our physicians to do is to make a comment on it, like, 'Hey, good job,' or 'I noticed today that your blood pressure is too high and you're not doing any exercise. There's a connection there. We really need to start you walking 30 minutes a day,'" said Dr. Robert Sallis, a Kaiser family doctor. He hatched the vital sign idea as part of a larger initiative by doctors groups.

He said Kaiser doctors generally prescribe exercise first, instead of medication, and for many patients who follow through that's often all it takes.

It's a challenge to make progress. A study looking at the first year of Kaiser's effort showed more than a third of patients said they never exercise.

Sallis said some patients may not be aware that research shows physical inactivity is riskier than high blood pressure, obesity and other health risks people know they should avoid. As recently as November a government-led study concluded that people who routinely exercise live longer than others, even if they're overweight.

Zendi Solano, who works for Kaiser as a research assistant in Pasadena, Calif., says she always knew exercise was a good thing. But until about a year ago, when her Kaiser doctor started routinely measuring it, she "really didn't take it seriously."

She was obese, and in a family of diabetics, had elevated blood sugar. She sometimes did push-ups and other strength training but not anything very sustained or strenuous.

Solano, 34, decided to take up running and after a couple of months she was doing three miles. Then she began training for a half marathon — and ran that 13-mile race in May in less than three hours. She formed a running club with co-workers and now runs several miles a week. She also started eating smaller portions and buying more fruits and vegetables.

She is still overweight but has lost 30 pounds and her blood sugar is normal.

Her doctor praised the improvement at her last physical in June and Solano says the routine exercise checks are "a great reminder."

Kaiser began the program about three years ago after 2008 government guidelines recommended at least 2 1/2 hours of moderately vigorous exercise each week. That includes brisk walking, cycling, lawn-mowing — anything that gets you breathing a little harder than normal for at least 10 minutes at a time.

A recently published study of nearly 2 million people in Kaiser's southern California network found that less than a third met physical activity guidelines during the program's first year ending in March 2011. That's worse than results from national studies. But promoters of the vital signs effort think Kaiser's numbers are more realistic because people are more likely to tell their own doctors the truth.

Dr. Elizabeth Joy of Salt Lake City has created a nearly identical program and she expects 300 physicians in her Intermountain Healthcare network to be involved early this year.

"There are some real opportunities there to kind of shift patients' expectations about the value of physical activity on health," Joy said.

NorthShore University HealthSystem in Chicago's northern suburbs plans to start an exercise vital sign program this month, eventually involving about 200 primary care doctors.

Dr. Carrie Jaworski, a NorthShore family and sports medicine specialist, already asks patients about exercise. She said some of her diabetic patients have been able to cut back on their medicines after getting active.

Dr. William Dietz, an obesity expert who retired last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said measuring a patient's exercise regardless of method is essential, but that "naming it as a vital sign kind of elevates it."

Figuring out how to get people to be more active is the important next step, he said, and could have a big effect in reducing medical costs.

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Online:

Exercise: http://1.usa.gov/b6AkMa

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

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Asian shares steady, Basel ruling supports banks

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Asian shares outside Japan edged up on Monday, supported by data showing the U.S. economy continuing on a path of slow but steady recovery that had pushed Wall Street stocks to a five-year high.

Financial stocks were underpinned by a decision from global regulators on Sunday to give banks four more years and greater flexibility to build up cash buffers so they can use some of their reserves to help struggling economies grow.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> gained 0.1 percent, but Tokyo's Nikkei share average <.n225> retreated after touching a 23-month high in early trade and last stood down 0.4 percent. <.t/>

The MSCI benchmark's financial sector sub-index <.miapjfn00pus> gained 0.2 percent after the Basel Committee of banking supervisors agreed at the weekend to a relaxation of a draconian earlier draft of new global bank liquidity rules.

Shares in Japanese exporters were supported by a weaker yen, which was steady around 88.17 to the dollar, after the U.S. currency rose as far as 88.40 yen, its highest in nearly two-and-a-half years, on Friday.

The dollar ticked up slightly against the euro, which traded around $1.3060.

The U.S. benchmark S&P 500 index <.spx> closed at its highest level since December 2007 on Friday after data showed a steady pace of jobs growth and brisk expansion of the services sector in the world's biggest economy.

(Reporting by Alex Richardson; Editing by Eric Meijer)

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Chinese Newspaper, Southern Weekend, Challenges Censors

Pool photo by REUTERS/Wang Zhao

Xi Jinping at a meeting in Beijing in December. Unrest at an influential newspaper, Southern Weekend, has caught the public’s attention.

BEIJING — Turmoil at one of China’s leading newspapers is posing an early challenge to the measured political program of the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping, pitting a pent-up popular demand for change against the Communist Party’s desire to maintain a firm grip.

The unrest at the influential newspaper Southern Weekend began last week when censors appeared to have toned down the paper’s New Year’s letter to readers — traditionally a call for progress in the new year. That caused journalists and their supporters — including students at nearby Sun Yat-sen University — to issue open letters expressing their outrage.

“Our yielding and our silence has not brought a return of our freedom,” the students said in their petition on Sunday, according to a translation by Hong Kong University’s China Media Project. “Quite the opposite, it has brought the untempered intrusion and infiltration of rights by power.”

By Sunday night, the protests had transformed into a real-time melee in the blogosphere — a remarkable development in a country where protests of all kinds are tightly controlled and the media largely know the boundaries of permissible debate.

In this case, the newspaper’s economics and environmental news staffs appeared to declare that they were on strike, while editors loyal to the government shut down or took control of the paper’s official microblogs. One widely distributed staff declaration with 90 signatures said the publication’s microblogs were no longer authentic.

“I don’t know whether it will be a full strike, but I do know the joint statement about the confiscation of the Weibo account has widespread support,” said one former editor, referring to a microblogging site and speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The turmoil at the Guangzhou-based newspaper resonates especially strongly among politically aware Chinese because Mr. Xi chose southern China for a tour after taking power in November. He made a pilgrimage to nearby Shenzhen, where the father of China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, kick-started them two decades ago.

Indeed, Mr. Xi seems to be casting himself in the mold of Deng, who was known for bold economic reforms but who also brooked no opposition to the rule of the Communist Party.

The latest indication was a speech Mr. Xi made that also was published in newspapers on Sunday. Speaking to senior leaders, Mr. Xi repeatedly invoked Deng, especially on the need to adhere to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a phrase often used to mean a combination of pragmatic policies and one-party rule. He also praised the pre-reform era, in what appeared to be an effort to appeal to harder-line Communists.

But part of the reason for the clamor for reforms are hopes that Mr. Xi himself has raised. So far he has won praise by calling for China’s constitutional protections to be put in effect, ordering officials to cut pomp and setting in motion an anticorruption campaign.

These actions seem to have prompted the calls for even bolder reforms.

Beyond the unrest at Southern Weekend, editors of the edgy historical journal Yanhuang Chunqiu published a cover article last week arguing that the existing Constitution offered a basis for political reform and that the party’s failure to abide by it was a central cause of political instability. On Friday, the magazine’s Web site was shut down, with officials claiming that it had failed to update its registration.

A message posted by the journal about the shutdown was forwarded 31,000 times, provoking many scathing criticisms of the government. The chief editor, Wu Si, said the journal’s staff had filed the paperwork and could be back online in 10 days.

Optimists say they hope the measures against the two publications were the result of recalcitrant officials appointed by the departing team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, whose decade in power was marked by an overriding desire for stability. Many members of Mr. Xi’s team will not take office until the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in March, and it could take years for Mr. Xi to put allies into important positions of power.

“If Xi does not remove people and promote some officials, his new policies — if he has any — will be sunk by the old people,” said a senior editor at a top party newspaper who asked to remain anonymous because of the delicacy of the subject. “The conflicts between the old and the new have just emerged.”

Chinese politics since Deng’s time have been defined by similar tensions between liberalization and reaction. But Mr. Xi also confronts millions of increasingly outspoken Internet users whose outpourings can confound even China’s heavy censorship.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of media at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the public anger showed how expectations had risen. “Currently in China people are unusually sensitive to developments like this, and so the reaction has been quite intense,” Mr. Zhan said.

Some are less sure that the atmosphere is more open, saying the media shutdowns have occurred because Mr. Xi has avoided taking a clear position.

“There are still no clear rules on the media, and so officials stick to using their habitual ways to control the media,” said Li Datong, a prominent Chinese newspaper editor fired for his views. “There won’t be any change until Xi Jinping enunciates any ideas about major change.”

Other commentators doubt this will happen. They note that in previous jobs Mr. Xi upheld the status quo and that now that he has reached the pinnacle of his career he is unlikely to support systemic reform.

“This is a traditional viewpoint: if you change the emperor you’ll have a change of policy and maybe some new, hopeful things,” said the exiled Chinese political commentator Zhang Ping, who goes by the pen name Chang Ping. “But I don’t think this is likely, because you still have an emperor.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong.

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We Salute the First Baby Senator

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

RELATED: Claire McCaskill and How to Attack the Opponent You’re Rooting For

Here’s our suggestion to improve the (already pretty hilarious) swearing-in process for U.S. Senators: Each new member of Congress must bring a cute baby.

RELATED: Rand Paul Doesn’t Want You to Go to Jail for Smoking Pot

RELATED: Larry David’s Two-Minute Guide to Etiquette

Apparently the BBC has decided to market a line of lunch boxes specifically made for hungry polar bears. They are still working out the kinks: 

RELATED: Homer Simpson, Fox News Pundit; Books After Dark

RELATED: Bo Obama Stays On Message; Sarah Palin Can See HBO in Her House

The Golden Globes will be bittersweet this year. Don’t get us wrong — we’re really excited to watch Amy Poehler and Tina Fey entertain us. But we’ll also be also really sad when this thing is over because it means the end of these promos:

And finally, it’s Friday. And it’s time to dance. Enjoy your weekend. 

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Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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"Cliff" concerns give way to earnings focus

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors' "fiscal cliff" worries are likely to give way to more fundamental concerns, like earnings, as fourth-quarter reports get under way next week.

Financial results, which begin after the market closes on Tuesday with aluminum company Alcoa , are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results. As a warning sign, analyst current estimates are down sharply from what they were in October.

That could set stocks up for more volatility following a week of sharp gains that put the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> on Friday at the highest close since December 31, 2007. The index also registered its biggest weekly percentage gain in more than a year.

Based on a Reuters analysis, Europe ranks among the chief concerns cited by companies that warned on fourth-quarter results. Uncertainty about the region and its weak economic outlook were cited by more than half of the 25 largest S&P 500 companies that issued warnings.

In the most recent earnings conference calls, macroeconomic worries were cited by 10 companies while the U.S. "fiscal cliff" was cited by at least nine as reasons for their earnings warnings.

"The number of things that could go wrong isn't so high, but the magnitude of how wrong they could go is what's worrisome," said Kurt Winters, senior portfolio manager for Whitebox Mutual Funds in Minneapolis.

Negative-to-positive guidance by S&P 500 companies for the fourth quarter was 3.6 to 1, the second worst since the third quarter of 2001, according to Thomson Reuters data.

U.S. lawmakers narrowly averted the "fiscal cliff" by coming to a last-minute agreement on a bill to avoid steep tax hikes this weeks -- driving the rally in stocks -- but the battle over further spending cuts is expected to resume in two months.

Investors also have seen a revival of worries about Europe's sovereign debt problems, with Moody's in November downgrading France's credit rating and debt crises looming for Spain and other countries.

"You have a recession in Europe as a base case. Europe is still the biggest trading partner with a lot of U.S. companies, and it's still a big chunk of global capital spending," said Adam Parker, chief U.S. equity strategist at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Among companies citing worries about Europe was eBay , whose chief financial officer, Bob Swan, spoke of "macro pressures from Europe" in the company's October earnings conference call.

REVENUE WORRIES

One of the biggest worries voiced about earnings has been whether companies will be able to continue to boost profit growth despite relatively weak revenue growth.

S&P 500 revenue fell 0.8 percent in the third quarter for the first decline since the third quarter of 2009, Thomson Reuters data showed. Earnings growth for the quarter was a paltry 0.1 percent after briefly dipping into negative territory.

On top of that, just 40 percent of S&P 500 companies beat revenue expectations in the third quarter, while 64.2 percent beat earnings estimates, the Thomson Reuters data showed.

For the fourth quarter, estimates are slightly better but are well off estimates for the quarter from just a few months earlier. S&P 500 earnings are expected to have risen 2.8 percent while revenue is expected to have gone up 1.9 percent.

Back in October, earnings growth for the fourth quarter was forecast up 9.9 percent.

In spite of the cautious outlooks, some analysts still see a good chance for earnings beats this reporting period.

"The thinking is you need top line growth for earnings to continue to expand, and we've seen the market defy that," said Mike Jackson, founder of Denver-based investment firm T3 Equity Labs.

Based on his analysis, energy, industrials and consumer discretionary are the S&P sectors most likely to beat earnings expectations in the upcoming season, while consumer staples, materials and utilities are the least likely to beat, Jackson said.

Sounding a positive note on Friday, drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co said it expects profit in 2013 to increase by more than Wall Street had been forecasting, primarily due to cost controls and improved productivity.

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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In Russia, a Trendy Activism Against Putin Loses Its Moment

MOSCOW — As the final days of 2012 slipped away, no one at Denis Terekhov’s company was talking about the next antigovernment protest.

Compared with the same time last year — when Mr. Terekhov delivered an impromptu lecture on avoiding police detention — Moscow feels like Moscow again. Profits at this marketing firm have tripled, the corporate holiday party featured cocktails in an unnatural shade of blue, and his “office plankton,” as the city’s legion of desk workers are sometimes known, scattered to vacations as far as Bali and Paris.

Mr. Terekhov, who watched his employees as last year’s protests surged and ebbed, says it is now clear that they took part because it was fashionable, nothing more. They felt strongly about the anti-Putin rallies, he said, but “they also feel strong emotions about their iPhones.”

Still, judging from this group, it would be wrong to say nothing changed in the year that Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency. The fizzy excitement around last year’s street activism is entirely gone. But in its place is a deepening sense of alienation that poses its own long-term risk to the system.

Discussion of political activism in this office, an Internet marketing and communications firm called Social Networks Agency, is now coated with a rime of disappointment, as if a rare opportunity had been allowed to slip away. During the trial of the punk rock band Pussy Riot this past summer, Mr. Terekhov set aside one office as a screening room, where employees could watch a live stream of testimony with, as he put it, “laughter through tears.”

A space has been left by Pasha Elizarov, a project manager and opposition activist, who resigned and left Russia after investigators summoned him in connection with an inquiry into inciting a riot. He sent in his holiday greetings from Tanzania.

Their story is the story of a political season. Mr. Putin reclaimed the presidency last year in the face of unprecedented public opposition from people like these, young urban trendsetters who stepped in from the sidelines of politics to tell him his return was not welcome. The Kremlin acted to stop the protests; new laws prescribe draconian punishments for acts of dissent, and the courts have imprisoned a small number of activists. Mr. Putin and those around him have embraced a new, sharply conservative rhetoric, dismissing the urban protesters as traitors and blasphemers, enemies of Russia.

Last year’s protesters, who held out hope that Dmitri A. Medvedev would advance their agenda, are acutely aware that they are seen as outsiders. Irina Lukyanovich, 24, a copy editor who recently left the firm, said her peers were watching Russia’s leaders more closely now, and judging them more severely.

“It’s as if they are people from another planet,” Ms. Lukyanovich said. “It seems to me that in a year, the distance between them and us has gotten much greater.”

Yulia Fotchenko, an account director, sighed heavily when reminded of the elation she felt a year ago, when she stepped into the first large rally and her “consciousness was turned upside down.”

How does she feel now? Insulted, disappointed. As if nothing in Russia will change. She blames the protest leaders, who she said proved so unable to capitalize on the moment that the crowds will never trust them again. As for the sudden sense of community she felt, it proved fleeting.

“Suddenly we — a huge number of Internet hamsters — we decided that we had had enough, we got together and we went out,” Ms. Fotchenko said, using a slang term for Moscow’s digitally connected youth. “And then, whoops! We turned back into Internet hamsters, the leaders and all the rest of us. Because nothing happened.

“And now I feel despair which is even stronger, deeper, worse than it was before we began these actions,” she said.

Mr. Terekhov, 33, had been skeptical of the protests from the beginning, in part because he was left discouraged by his own brief career in opposition politics. A year ago, he made a point of warning his employees that by protesting they were facing serious risks, like riot police officers with truncheons. They needed to realize, he said, that “revolution is not a game.”

The risks went beyond truncheons, it turned out. On a Sunday evening in September, Mr. Terekhov received an e-mail from Mr. Elizarov, 27, the single high-profile political activist among his employees. Mr. Elizarov said he was resigning from his position as a project manager and was leaving Russia.

He had been summoned in a political prosecution, one that has been used to cast the protesters as dangerous radicals. So far, 19 people have been charged in the case dating to May 6, when a large anti-Putin march ended in a melee between the police and protesters. The only one to be sentenced, a man who inflicted no serious injury and cooperated with prosecutors, received four and a half years.

Investigators looked for Mr. Elizarov at home, and they then began to visit his relatives, one by one.

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How BuzzFeed Is Betting on Hollywood, Long-Form Writing to Grow

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Last January, BuzzFeed, then an aggregator of memes and cat videos, secured a $ 15.5 million round of venture capital to beef up a craft that most traditional media was downsizing: journalism.

It hired dozens of reporters and editors, opened bureaus in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and became a must-read for political junkies during the 2012 presidential election.

On Thursday, the company took another step.

It added adding a fourth round of capital investment – this time worth $ 19.3 million. And it plans to expand in two major ways: literary, long-form journalism like the kind practiced by New York magazine and the New Yorker, and – with two former Los Angeles Times staffers newly on board – its Hollywood coverage.

BuzzFeed’s been on a roll. According to the privately held company‘s internal traffic numbers, the 8 million unique monthly visitors it drew in 2008 has swelled to 40 million, and revenue for 2012 may triple that of 2011, a spokeswoman for BuzzFeed told TheWrap.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Tom Gara reported that some analysts place the company’s valuation at $ 200 million and say that revenues may reach $ 40 million this year.

Most of BuzzFeed’s traffic currently comes from its odd mix of news and eccentricity on the homepage. Friday morning, spotlighted stories ranged from J.J. Abrams screening his new “Star Trek” for a dying fan and Sen. Tammy Baldwin talking about breaking the glass ceiling to: “How to Murder Your Friend’s Facebook Page” and “Here Are Some Elephants Eating Christmas Trees.”

But there’s no question things are changing.

The first thing CEO Jonah Peretti did with his 2012 investment cash was hire Ben Smith, a Politico veteran, as the site’s first editor-in-chief. Smith then kicked off a hiring spree of reporters and got to work. Already BuzzFeed is beginning to break stories and get quoted by aggregators.

McKay Coppins, the site’s political editor, embedded with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign. John Stanton, a veteran reporter in Washington, was named BuzzFeed’s first D.C. bureau chief. Michael Hastings, the dogged journalist whose Rolling Stone exposé of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s private disagreements with President Obama over Afghanistan led to his resignation, joined the team.

Then, less than a year into its political foray, the site hired former Spin magazine chief Steve Kandell to make the push for longform journalism.

It began with an experiment – a 7,118-word post from last October titled “Can You Die From a Nightmare?” that garnered more than 115,000 hits. Another in October titled “Making Mitt: The Myth of George Romney” drew nearly 130,000 views. This convinced Smith and his team that literary journalism had a niche in the viral news market.

Despite the internet school of thought that briefer is better, Kandell said he has no plans to restrict stories’ word counts.

“If someone has a story that has to be 10,000 words, I don’t know why that couldn’t be,” Kandell said.

“I don’t think people necessarily have a certain fatigue level when it gets to a certain length and people start trailing out.”

Kandell says he plans in the coming months to start publishing at least one long-form story a week and may even start packaging and selling the stories as Amazon Kindle singles or as audiobooks.

Kandell assembled a “Best of 2012″ post for his nascent section of the site. The stories ranged from the tale of BuzzFeed’s own political editor Coppins, a Mormon, watching attitudes toward his and Romney’s religion change throughout the campaign to an inside look at the “Dark World of Online Sugar Daddies.”

Plans are to cover more foreign policy and national security issues from a Washington-centered perspective – and to add Hollywood into the mix. The only hands-off topic, apparently, will be international news.

“We’ve played around with ways to make world news more sharable, just like every editor at every publication,” he said, noting that readers liked a roundup of Instagram photos of the civil war in Syria. “It’s really hard, it’s not something we want to jump into without really knowing what we’re doing.”

As for Hollywood, BuzzFeed hired Richard Rushfield, former entertainment editor of LATimes.com, and ex-Times television editor Kate Aurthur, also a former Daily Beast staffer, to jump-start its bureau.

Smith said he plans to forge a presence in Los Angeles second only to its flagship New York bureau. A Hollywood vertical is expected to launch on January 7.

To that end, the site is entering a crowded space – one dominated by publications like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture and the Times – but Rushfield said he plans to cover entertainment through BuzzFeed’s social-web lens: If it’s irresistibly share-worthy, it’s publishable.

“We have a unique position, despite how crowded the beat is,” Rushfield told TheWrap, adding that they won’t be competing with trades over stories concerning studio executives and casting deals. “One of our advantages is that we are not going to be going after every single story that the trades are – we have more room to take the things that we think can be interesting. What BuzzFeed is about is writing news that will be of interest to the social web.”

Now the trick is to make all these editorial investments worthwhile financially.

Revenue growth from its advertising model has been climbing, chief operating officer Jon Steinberg told TheWrap.

Forgoing the usual banners and display ads, BuzzFeed offers its clients “branded content.” For example, Scope mouthwash sponsored a “listicle” on the most “courageous” mustaches.

To that end, the advertising team, which is made up of 20 people that report to Steinberg, works with brands from General Electric to Virgin Mobile to devise sharable pieces of content.

The ratio of advertorial to editorial content on the homepage is usually about one to every six or so stories,” he said.

Those branded-content headlines garner 10-20 times the click-through rates of blinking banner and display ads, Steinberg told TheWrap.

“You compare those ads in the 1950s to modern advertising, you realize how broken modern advertising is,” Steinberg said. “Most publishers and media companies say you can’t make money on modern advertising.”

But – though he declined to reveal exact numbers, as BuzzFeed is a private company – the model helped to increase revenue last year and has allowed the publication to focus solely on its advertising stream.

He said the company has no immediate plans to enter the conference business popular with online publications including the Business Insider, AllThingsD and TheWrap.

“This is our Google ad words,” Steinberg said of the innovative advertising tool that Google pioneered in the mid-2000s. “If we were Apple, this would be our manufacturing of great hardware products.”

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Courteney Cox: I'll 'Show My Boobs' on the New Season of Cougar Town

TV Watch

01/04/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Courteney Cox is taking the term "boob tube" literally.

The Cougar Town star, 48, whose show moves from ABC to TBS on Jan. 8, eagerly anticipates more um, revealing scenes once the program makes its way to the cable network.

"You will not see one scene that I don't show my boobs," Cox joked to reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association winter tour, according to Access Hollywood.

"You know what? I'm getting older, so I've decided at this point I'm taking less focus [on] the face, and focusing here," she added, pointing to her chest. "By the time I'm much older, I will just be absolutely nude. I think it's [going to] work for me, I hope."

The show's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, backed up Cox's comments. "There is one difference [with the show going to cable]," he said Friday. "I think I'm allowed to say … Courteney did declare this the year of her cleavage."

Still, the star isn't exactly baring it all. Although there is an episode themed "naked day" for Cox's character Jules and her on-camera hubby Grayson (Josh Hopkins), there will be no actual nudity on the show.

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