September 2009

Saying that he is a "big newspaper junkie," President Barack Obama expressed hope Friday that newspapers can find their way through the financial crisis in which most are now mired. In an Oval Office interview with editors from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, the president spoke of the vital role journalism and newspapers play in American society. "Journalistic integrity, you know fact-based reporting, serious investigative reporting, how to retain those ethics in all these different new media and how to make sure that it's paid for, is really a challenge," President Obama said. "But it's something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy." Across the country, newspapers are struggling to maintain readership and advertising revenue that has been lost to the Internet. Thousands of journalists have been laid off, and over the past year several newspapers have closed. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver shut down, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer moved to the Web, and several large newspaper corporations filed for bankruptcy, including the Tribune Company, which operates the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. President Obama said he has noted the trend. "I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context," he said, "that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding. "What I hope is that people start understanding if you're getting your newspaper over the Internet, that that's not free. And there's got to be a way to find a business model that supports that." Craig Aaron, senior program director of Free Press, said, "President Obama's leadership is needed to put the future of journalism on the national agenda. Now is not the time for bailouts, but it is a moment for forward-looking policies that will support local and diverse media ownership, encourage experiments and innovations, and invest in a world-class public media system. Our concern should not be for newspapers -- or not just newspapers -- but rather for newsrooms and keeping reporters on the beat."

While building out publicly facing data repositories, government agencies should cleanly separate the user interface layer from the data being presented, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) advises in a draft report on maintaining open government data. "External parties can create new and exciting interfaces that may not be obvious to the data publishers. For that reason, do not compromise the integrity of the data to create flashy interfaces," the report states. "If you must create an interface, then publish the data separate from the interface and ensure external parties have direct access to the raw data, so they can build their own interfaces if they wish." The paper, titled "Publishing Open Government Data," is one of the first deliverables from the newly formed W3C eGovernment Interest Group, the mission of which is to help governments around the world share standards-based best practices.

At a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies event in Washington, Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn said "merely making broadband available to all sectors of this nation is simply not enough. While it can be said that most of the country is currently wired for some kind of broadband, a large percentage of Americans - and a disproportionate number of African Americans - have not adopted broadband in their homes." She identified price as one barrier to adoption, but pointed to research identifying additional obstacles. She said it is the FCC's challenge to figure out exactly why those Americans who could otherwise afford broadband decide not to use it. "In the telecom world, we are always talking about the "last mile": the physical piece of wire, or fiber, or cable that takes the network out to the customer premises. But when it comes to broadband, I tend to think of the last mile not as a mile, per se, but rather as two half miles. Yes, we have to make sure that broadband infrastructure reaches everybody. But as we know, deployment is only half of the battle. The other half - the other half-mile, if you will - is all about whether or not the consumer chooses to engage with the technology. We can extend broadband infrastructure to every single person in America, but if the consumer says "no, thanks," have we really made progress? Is that consumer better off? Is the country better off?"

[Commentary] You can draw a straight line between the popularity of Facebook and a developing boom in Internet infrastructure. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it has 300 million subscribers. The fantastic growth of the company is mirrored by the rapid advancement of Twitter and many other web services that have spawned ecosystems of their own. While these services get most of the media attention, a much bigger story is what lies beneath — the Internet's infrastructure and the grid that powers it. "We have entered this new era where essentially everything is on all the time," Alan Meier, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently told The New York Times. And increasingly, everything is connected to the Internet. The biggest impact is being felt by the electricity grid. The power consumed by servers alone doubled between 2000 and 2005 to about 123 billion kilowatt-hours. Data center power use is likely to increase another 76 percent by 2010, according to Jonathan Koomey, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley and Stanford University. I can't imagine the energy implications of what's coming next.