Looking to glean more advertising revenue from its streaming programming, National Public Radio stations are moving into more sponsorship messaging. An agreement with Triton Digital, a technology provide to traditional and online radio, will help to push more digital sponsorship with “audio sponsorship messages,” as well as providing measurement of that audience and sponsorship effect.
In a major push to shift the ad industry’s focus from the traditional age- and sex-based demographics that have been the foundation of media planning and buying for nearly 50 years, CBS and General Mills unveiled results of some extensive research demonstrating what a poor surrogate conventional demographics are for the actual consumers that marketers and agencies are trying to reach.
The studies, which are the culmination of more than a year of research conducted with a powerful new partnership between Nielsen and Catalina Marketing that integrates actual TV viewing from digital set-top devices with actual consumer product purchasing from grocery store scanner data, show that other lifestyle segments are far more precise for targeting consumers with media.
Out of 59 live petitions on We the People, 21, or about one third, date back to the site's first two weeks online and are still waiting for a promised response from the White House six months later.
Those petitions were all filed between Sept. 22, 2011 when We the People launched and Oct. 3, 2011, when officials raised the threshold for an administration response from 5,000 signatures to 25,000. Nine of the petitions date back to the first day We the People launched. A Frequently Asked Questions tab on the petition site states: "We will do our best to respond to petitions that cross the signature threshold in a timely fashion, however, depending on the topic and the overall volume of petitions from We the People, responses may be delayed." The White House was clearly overwhelmed by a flood of petitions during the site's first days, evidenced by the decision to quintuple the response threshold. And officials haven't ignored the site. They've gamely posted 55 petition responses since October.
[Commentary] On March 1, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order resolving a couple of things concerning the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules.
First, the motions panel denied the motion to hold in abeyance and referred the cases to a merits panel for briefing and oral argument. The motions panel declined to resolve the question about whether this constituted a rulemaking or license modification, so they deferred that question to the merits panel. On March 23, the merits panel got the ball rolling, sort of. As an initial step, the merits panel issued an order requiring all the parties (Petitioners, intervenors for both sides, FCC) to submit a proposed briefing plan (i.e., who gets to file what when). Responses to that order are due within 30 days of the order (i.e., April 23, as April 22 is a Sunday). This is typical for a case like this, but it does mean that an actual briefing schedule is unlikely until early May. Since none of the Petitioners requested an expedited proceeding, we should expect things to proceed at a normal pace for a case of this size and complexity. I would expect that Petitioners briefs will come due in the summer or early fall and we should wrap up briefing entirely by November. That means oral argument isn't likely until early 2013, with a decision probably 2 or 3 months after oral argument.
Open government watchdog groups are calling upon the White House to help resolve an apparent power struggle between the Justice Department and three other federal agencies over the creation of new websites for consolidating Freedom of Information Act requests and information. T
he tussle is over FOIA.gov, recently created by Justice, and a new FOIA Web portal being developed by the Environmental Protection Agency with assistance from the Commerce Department and the National Archives & Records Administration. Justice’s FOIA.gov, which is up and running, offers performance data on how FOIA requests are being handled governmentwide and contains links to agency FOIA reports. On the other hand, the developing multi-agency FOIA Web portal, expected to go public in October, would allow users to submit and track multiple agency FOIA requests from a central location. According to the watchdog groups, DOJ officials may have hindered broader participation in the three-agency FOIA Web portal project.
A rash of backward thinking appears to be taking hold in a number of states that might be better spending their time considering how to create modern technology jobs and skills at home.
Some states are considering how best to deploy modern high-speed Internet to ensure their local economies and residents are ready to compete in the global marketplace. But in other states, legislators are debating whether telephone service should be offered at all - leaving many observers wondering whether they would prefer to live in the 19th century, before Alexander Graham Bell's invention became ubiquitous. Arguments that alternate technologies can replace traditional telephone service leave rural advocates shaking their heads. Edyael Casaperalta of the Center for Rural Strategies, and coordinator of the Rural Broadband Policy Group, wonders, "How are these companies going to provide wireless Internet to a customer in a remote area when it requires a landline? Let's not forget many areas do not have access to wireless or other, newer technologies. This is why communities not only need access to traditional phone service, but need the chance to create their own high speed broadband networks where the private sector will not deploy it."
[Commentary] If I want to buy the hot new videogame Mass Effect 3 and have it delivered to my home in New Jersey, I have a few choices. I can go to Amazon.com and pay $59.99. Or I can go to BestBuy.com and pay $59.99, plus New Jersey sales tax of 7%, for a grand total of $64.19. Almost no one would choose to shell out the extra $4.20 that Best Buy (BBY) is charging, and therein lies the problem for traditional retailers.
It's the dirty not-so-little secret of online and catalogue shopping: Buy from a retailer that doesn't have a physical presence in your home state, and you avoid state and local taxes on your goods at the time of purchase. Technically, if I buy Mass Effect from Amazon (AMZN), I'm required to send my $4.20 to New Jersey's coffers on my own. Yeah, right. Plenty of people don't even realize they're supposed to be sending that money in -- I didn't before I wrote this column. (Amazon collects taxes in only five of the 50 states.) Ask any tax expert or economist what percentage of these taxes is ever collected from consumers, and he will tell you it's virtually zero. It's a great bargain for shoppers but a huge, unfair advantage for the online retailers, which have been beating up their brick-and-mortar counterparts for years. And it's a double whammy for state tax coffers: Not only do the online retailers not collect sales taxes on what they sell, but they are helping put chains like Borders and Circuit City out of business, shutting off what was once a spigot for state and local revenue.
Almost two years after more than $200 million in federal dollars were awarded to 18 broadband projects in Minnesota, some have encountered difficulties, including a dearth of fiber.
A cable drought has been caused by high demand from a crush of stimulus-induced broadband projects nationwide coupled with a Japanese earthquake a year ago that destroyed a major fiber manufacturing plant. There is a drive in Minnesota to bring high-speed Internet to the far reaches of the state, from Cook County in the Arrowhead to Freeborn County in the south, so rural areas can reap benefits related to economic development, education, high-tech medical services and more. Ideally, they would be completed as soon as possible, both for the sake of consumers and because broadband stimulus dollars come with deadlines. Eighteen local construction projects won federal grants and loans as part of the Recovery Act of 2009 totaling almost $229 million. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some will be owned by the public, while others will be built and run by small phone companies and electric coops. And they are at various stages of completion. The federal government's Recovery.gov website lists 14 as less than 50 percent completed, two as more than 50 percent completed and two as not yet started.
[Commentary] I've been fascinated by the lack of open Wi-Fi connections, not only in my neighborhood but pretty much anywhere I go. Ten years ago, it was so easy to latch on to free Wi-Fi that anyone traveling or in need of an emergency connection always had it at their disposal, despite the sketchy legality. These days, you are lucky to find one in 100 Wi-Fi connections that are not protected by passwords of some sort. The reason for the change is simple: the router manufacturers decided to make users employ security with the set-up software. As people upgraded to newer, faster routers, the wide-open Wi-Fi golden era came to an end. I see no way to reverse this trend of protected Internet since people see everything as a way to make a buck. I'm reminded of the era when pay toilets were ubiquitous, as onerous as that seems. I haven't seen a pay toilet for well over a decade, though, so it must have cost more to maintain than it was worth. I don't see that sort of thing happening with Wi-Fi. Secure Internet is here to stay. The golden age of free is done.
A year after the Arab Spring, National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin remains a rare breed. More journalists are using Twitter to find stories and connect with sources, but Carvin says few use it as he does. He sometimes writes for NPR’s website, but his Twitter activity rarely yields full articles. Instead, the nonstop chatter among his networked community serves as both process and product. “It’s not that I’m just using Twitter and integrating other forms of journalism,” he says. “It’s that I see Twitter as the newsroom where I spend my time.”
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