Shots Ring Out in Footage Recorded During Kenya Mall Attack

Video recorded during a militant attack in the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya was posted online by Chinese state television.

The Chinese state television network CCTV broadcast video it said was recorded by one of its reporters inside Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall as it came under attack from Islamist militants Saturday.

The video, which offers a glimpse of the panic during the attack, was recorded inside the mall’s Nakumatt supermarket. It shows customers fleeing and hiding as gunshots ring out.

The death toll, following a standoff between the gunmen and Kenyan forces, now stands at 68. Scores more were injured.

Strategies: With a Tweet, Twitter Starts a Debate

With a Tweet, Twitter Starts a Debate

“LISTEN, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?”

The Beatles put those coy words on vinyl half a century ago. When the song “Do You Want to Know a Secret” went to the top of the charts, any intimate secrets it may have contained were shared with millions of people, but no one seemed to care. It was a charming love song.

Now Twitter is showing that an updated version of the old Beatles playbook can be an effective P.R. strategy, at least for a while. While the company has come under some criticism for being coy, it has managed to spread the news of its initial public offering of stock without revealing much about its plans or its finances. In the process, it has become the most prominent example of a company making use of bipartisan legislation enacted during the 2012 presidential campaign season with promises that it would spur job creation by small businesses.

“We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the S.E.C. for a planned I.P.O.,” Twitter declared publicly on Sept. 12 in a not-so-secret message sent on its own network. And it added some boilerplate: “This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”

The news of the paradoxically secret I.P.O. went viral.

The company has made no other public comments about the offering, although it has reportedly engaged Goldman Sachs to serve as an underwriter. Except for that one tweet, Twitter has taken advantage of the cone of silence offered by the “Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups Act,” commonly known as the JOBS Act, the 2012 law that also takes innovative approaches to small-business issues other than I.P.O.’s.

The law, for example, includes provisions intended to encourage the crowdfunding of small businesses. And starting this week, it is scheduled to allow hedge funds to advertise to the general public for the first time. But regulations for many of its provisions are not yet in place. The I.P.O.’s nondisclosure provision is the most widely used part of the law so far.

It became law on April 12, 2012, in the middle of a tight presidential campaign that often revolved around the state of the economy and a glaring shortage of jobs. President Obama signed the bill with the explicit promise that it would henceforth be easier for many companies to go public. “That’s a big deal because going public is a major step towards expanding and hiring more workers,” Mr. Obama said during a signing ceremony in the Rose Garden. The bill would be “a game changer,” he said.

“It’s a big deal for investors as well,” he added, “because public companies operate with greater oversight and greater transparency.”

In the initial stages of going public, though, many companies have been using the JOBS Act to limit transparency. That’s because the law allows what it terms emerging growth companies to file an I.P.O. without publicly disclosing details about the business. That’s the provision Twitter used. It defines emerging growth companies as those with annual revenue of less than $1 billion, which is a very broad interpretation.

As of April, on the law’s first anniversary, 63 percent of all companies filling I.P.O.’s during the new law’s life used the confidentiality provision, according to a survey by Ernst & Young. Nearly all companies that have had I.P.O.’s in the last 30 years would have been able to use the provision, had it been in place.

From 1980 to 2012, 94 percent of American companies that have gone public had revenue of under $1 billion when they filed for I.P.O.’s, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, a University of Florida professor who is a leading expert on initial offerings. “Under that criterion, most I.P.O. companies would be classified as ‘emerging growth companies’ worthy of special help,” said Professor Ritter, who opposed the enactment of the JOBS Act.

THIS part of the legislation was intended to protect tender entrepreneurial firms from prying eyes that might deter them from going public and growing to maturity, said Kate Mitchell, a former chairwoman of the private I.P.O. Task Force, which played a role in the formulation of the legislation. She is also a former chairwoman of the National Venture Capital Association, which lobbied heavily for the measure. “For better and for worse, I helped draft that bill,” she said in an interview.

Under the nondisclosure provision, the financial secrets must eventually be revealed. Companies that offer shares to the public must make an open I.P.O. filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission â€" typically, 21 days before they begin a public-relations campaign to drum up support for their impending offering â€" that will be visible to all investors before they buy shares. Ms. Mitchell said the law was intended to help small, struggling companies expand and have an easier “on-ramp” to an offering.

A version of this article appears in print on September 22, 2013, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: With a Tweet, Twitter Starts a Debate.

Strategies: With a Tweet, Twitter Starts a Debate

With a Tweet, Twitter Starts a Debate

“LISTEN, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?”

The Beatles put those coy words on vinyl half a century ago. When the song “Do You Want to Know a Secret” went to the top of the charts, any intimate secrets it may have contained were shared with millions of people, but no one seemed to care. It was a charming love song.

Now Twitter is showing that an updated version of the old Beatles playbook can be an effective P.R. strategy, at least for a while. While the company has come under some criticism for being coy, it has managed to spread the news of its initial public offering of stock without revealing much about its plans or its finances. In the process, it has become the most prominent example of a company making use of bipartisan legislation enacted during the 2012 presidential campaign season with promises that it would spur job creation by small businesses.

“We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the S.E.C. for a planned I.P.O.,” Twitter declared publicly on Sept. 12 in a not-so-secret message sent on its own network. And it added some boilerplate: “This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”

The news of the paradoxically secret I.P.O. went viral.

The company has made no other public comments about the offering, although it has reportedly engaged Goldman Sachs to serve as an underwriter. Except for that one tweet, Twitter has taken advantage of the cone of silence offered by the “Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups Act,” commonly known as the JOBS Act, the 2012 law that also takes innovative approaches to small-business issues other than I.P.O.’s.

The law, for example, includes provisions intended to encourage the crowdfunding of small businesses. And starting this week, it is scheduled to allow hedge funds to advertise to the general public for the first time. But regulations for many of its provisions are not yet in place. The I.P.O.’s nondisclosure provision is the most widely used part of the law so far.

It became law on April 12, 2012, in the middle of a tight presidential campaign that often revolved around the state of the economy and a glaring shortage of jobs. President Obama signed the bill with the explicit promise that it would henceforth be easier for many companies to go public. “That’s a big deal because going public is a major step towards expanding and hiring more workers,” Mr. Obama said during a signing ceremony in the Rose Garden. The bill would be “a game changer,” he said.

“It’s a big deal for investors as well,” he added, “because public companies operate with greater oversight and greater transparency.”

In the initial stages of going public, though, many companies have been using the JOBS Act to limit transparency. That’s because the law allows what it terms emerging growth companies to file an I.P.O. without publicly disclosing details about the business. That’s the provision Twitter used. It defines emerging growth companies as those with annual revenue of less than $1 billion, which is a very broad interpretation.

As of April, on the law’s first anniversary, 63 percent of all companies filling I.P.O.’s during the new law’s life used the confidentiality provision, according to a survey by Ernst & Young. Nearly all companies that have had I.P.O.’s in the last 30 years would have been able to use the provision, had it been in place.

From 1980 to 2012, 94 percent of American companies that have gone public had revenue of under $1 billion when they filed for I.P.O.’s, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, a University of Florida professor who is a leading expert on initial offerings. “Under that criterion, most I.P.O. companies would be classified as ‘emerging growth companies’ worthy of special help,” said Professor Ritter, who opposed the enactment of the JOBS Act.

THIS part of the legislation was intended to protect tender entrepreneurial firms from prying eyes that might deter them from going public and growing to maturity, said Kate Mitchell, a former chairwoman of the private I.P.O. Task Force, which played a role in the formulation of the legislation. She is also a former chairwoman of the National Venture Capital Association, which lobbied heavily for the measure. “For better and for worse, I helped draft that bill,” she said in an interview.

Under the nondisclosure provision, the financial secrets must eventually be revealed. Companies that offer shares to the public must make an open I.P.O. filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission â€" typically, 21 days before they begin a public-relations campaign to drum up support for their impending offering â€" that will be visible to all investors before they buy shares. Ms. Mitchell said the law was intended to help small, struggling companies expand and have an easier “on-ramp” to an offering.

A version of this article appears in print on September 22, 2013, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: With a Tweet, Twitter Starts a Debate.

Disruptions: Gawker Wants to Encourage More Voices Online, but With Less Yelling

There are corners of the Internet that contain some of the most slimy and vitriolic stuff you could imagine, places where people snipe, jeer and behave like a frenzied mob. I’m talking about the comments sections of most Web sites.

While some outlets try to distance themselves from the anarchy of reader comments, it seems only natural that Nick Denton, the controversy-stirring founder and chief executive of Gawker Media, has decided to embrace and highlight them.

On Monday, Mr. Denton is set to announce updates to Kinja, a Web site his company has been building over the last few years. Kinja flips on its head the idea of comments and conversation below a story on Gawker Media’s Web sites, including Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Jezebel, which collectively have more than 36 million unique visitors a month.

When people sign up for Kinja, they are given their own Web address on the Gawker platform â€" similar to a Tumblr Web site â€" which becomes a collection of that person’s comments on stories. Kinja will also enable readers to write headlines and summaries â€" comments that have graduated from college, if you will â€" for stories on Gawker and even from other sites. Readers will then be able to use Kinja as a central hub for discussion on these stories, almost like their own chat room protected from the commenting maelstrom.

The decision to radically change comments is a bit of enlightened self-interest on the part of Mr. Denton. While it allows readers to be a bigger part of Gawker’s sites within a “conversation,” it also creates a home for people to vent, which could generate lots of clicks and, ideally, more advertising dollars.

Mr. Denton said this in a memorandum that leaked from the company last year, noting that page views were slowing on the company’s sites as people chose to discuss articles on Twitter and Facebook. In recent years readers have taken their conversations to more controlled environments, like social media outlets, where they can discuss things without less chance of getting into hissing matches with strangers.

Along with the updates to the comments service on Monday, Mr. Denton is set to unveil “a manifesto” of sorts that will outline Gawker’s plan to further blur the line between reporters and readers and explain readers’ rights. Among them, there is “the right to experience legible conversations” on the site.

Mr. Denton said the seeds of Kinja were planted in the late ’90s, when he was a journalist with The Financial Times in London. “The real story was never the one in the newspaper,” Mr. Denton said in an interview. “It was the discussion between the writers afterwards at a bar when someone said, ‘So, what really happened?’

“The dream of the early blogs was that through conversation we could tell the truth, and if we could discover the truth, we could then have conversations around that truth,” Mr. Denton said.

Sadly, it didn’t work out that way. As anyone who has slogged through YouTube or an article about anything even remotely contentious online knows, commenters are often like the drunken uncle no one wants to invite to the house for Christmas, but he shows up anyway.

“People forward stories they like and comment on stories they hate,” said Clay Shirky, an associate professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “Part of this comes from the fact that people in the media business regard comments only as consumers and they’ve never been able to accept the idea of participation.”

He added: “Nick wants to completely break that taboo by highlighting comments and placing them above the fold.”

But, as Mr. Denton said, his biggest challenge might not be helping people discover great conversation online, but rather, changing how people perceive online commentary.

A report released last week by researchers at Beihang University in China found that angry comments on the social network Weibo, which is similar to Twitter, spread much faster and farther through the network than happy posts.

Also, today’s commenting systems have a few variations. Comments may appear in chronological order or in reverse. Some sites have editors who approve comments before they are published and others allow readers to vote on comments so they can be moved closer to the top or far away from it. But no matter how the conversation is set up, nearly every site sticks the comments near the bottom of a page.

You know, where those crazies comment on things.

“Chronological lists in either direction are just about the worst form of ordering comments,” Mr. Shirky said. “Kinja seems to solve that; when it’s applied retroactively to comment threads, they have become distinctively better.”

This could, of course, all backfire. Kinja allows people to comment anonymously. Already, imitation commenters have pretended to be well-known bloggers from other Web sites. And some people, given a voice as loud as Gawker bloggers, could embarrass Mr. Denton’s employees by challenging their reported articles.

But Mr. Denton doesn’t seem too concerned. “I hope it happens,” he said in his usual, effusive manner. “It’s going to be uncomfortable, yet at the end of the process it’s going to make for much better journalism and much better journalists.”

While Mr. Denton may be thinking in page views first and truth-in-journalism second, it seems that both could profit.

“There are scandals in companies, local governments and in towns too small to have a newspaper,” he said. Kinja will give people a voice on Gawker to “help bring transparency to even the murkiest corners of corporations and government,” he said.

And Mr. Denton, it seems, is hoping that the murkiest corners of the Web, the comment sections, might be the place to solve those problems.

Disruptions: Gawker Wants to Encourage More Voices Online, but With Less Yelling

There are corners of the Internet that contain some of the most slimy and vitriolic stuff you could imagine, places where people snipe, jeer and behave like a frenzied mob. I’m talking about the comments sections of most Web sites.

While some outlets try to distance themselves from the anarchy of reader comments, it seems only natural that Nick Denton, the controversy-stirring founder and chief executive of Gawker Media, has decided to embrace and highlight them.

On Monday, Mr. Denton is set to announce updates to Kinja, a Web site his company has been building over the last few years. Kinja flips on its head the idea of comments and conversation below a story on Gawker Media’s Web sites, including Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Jezebel, which collectively have more than 36 million unique visitors a month.

When people sign up for Kinja, they are given their own Web address on the Gawker platform â€" similar to a Tumblr Web site â€" which becomes a collection of that person’s comments on stories. Kinja will also enable readers to write headlines and summaries â€" comments that have graduated from college, if you will â€" for stories on Gawker and even from other sites. Readers will then be able to use Kinja as a central hub for discussion on these stories, almost like their own chat room protected from the commenting maelstrom.

The decision to radically change comments is a bit of enlightened self-interest on the part of Mr. Denton. While it allows readers to be a bigger part of Gawker’s sites within a “conversation,” it also creates a home for people to vent, which could generate lots of clicks and, ideally, more advertising dollars.

Mr. Denton said this in a memorandum that leaked from the company last year, noting that page views were slowing on the company’s sites as people chose to discuss articles on Twitter and Facebook. In recent years readers have taken their conversations to more controlled environments, like social media outlets, where they can discuss things without less chance of getting into hissing matches with strangers.

Along with the updates to the comments service on Monday, Mr. Denton is set to unveil “a manifesto” of sorts that will outline Gawker’s plan to further blur the line between reporters and readers and explain readers’ rights. Among them, there is “the right to experience legible conversations” on the site.

Mr. Denton said the seeds of Kinja were planted in the late ’90s, when he was a journalist with The Financial Times in London. “The real story was never the one in the newspaper,” Mr. Denton said in an interview. “It was the discussion between the writers afterwards at a bar when someone said, ‘So, what really happened?’

“The dream of the early blogs was that through conversation we could tell the truth, and if we could discover the truth, we could then have conversations around that truth,” Mr. Denton said.

Sadly, it didn’t work out that way. As anyone who has slogged through YouTube or an article about anything even remotely contentious online knows, commenters are often like the drunken uncle no one wants to invite to the house for Christmas, but he shows up anyway.

“People forward stories they like and comment on stories they hate,” said Clay Shirky, an associate professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “Part of this comes from the fact that people in the media business regard comments only as consumers and they’ve never been able to accept the idea of participation.”

He added: “Nick wants to completely break that taboo by highlighting comments and placing them above the fold.”

But, as Mr. Denton said, his biggest challenge might not be helping people discover great conversation online, but rather, changing how people perceive online commentary.

A report released last week by researchers at Beihang University in China found that angry comments on the social network Weibo, which is similar to Twitter, spread much faster and farther through the network than happy posts.

Also, today’s commenting systems have a few variations. Comments may appear in chronological order or in reverse. Some sites have editors who approve comments before they are published and others allow readers to vote on comments so they can be moved closer to the top or far away from it. But no matter how the conversation is set up, nearly every site sticks the comments near the bottom of a page.

You know, where those crazies comment on things.

“Chronological lists in either direction are just about the worst form of ordering comments,” Mr. Shirky said. “Kinja seems to solve that; when it’s applied retroactively to comment threads, they have become distinctively better.”

This could, of course, all backfire. Kinja allows people to comment anonymously. Already, imitation commenters have pretended to be well-known bloggers from other Web sites. And some people, given a voice as loud as Gawker bloggers, could embarrass Mr. Denton’s employees by challenging their reported articles.

But Mr. Denton doesn’t seem too concerned. “I hope it happens,” he said in his usual, effusive manner. “It’s going to be uncomfortable, yet at the end of the process it’s going to make for much better journalism and much better journalists.”

While Mr. Denton may be thinking in page views first and truth-in-journalism second, it seems that both could profit.

“There are scandals in companies, local governments and in towns too small to have a newspaper,” he said. Kinja will give people a voice on Gawker to “help bring transparency to even the murkiest corners of corporations and government,” he said.

And Mr. Denton, it seems, is hoping that the murkiest corners of the Web, the comment sections, might be the place to solve those problems.