September 2012

New York Times closes on $300 million sale of About Group

The New York Times has completed its $300 million sale of The About Group to Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC, which operates online businesses including Newsweek, The Daily Beast and dating site Match.com, announced the deal last month. About.com provides information on a wide variety of topics and also operates ConsumerSearch.com and Calorie-Count.com. The site's content is written by paid experts known as guides. The New York Times said Monday that it anticipates receiving about $290 million from the sale and plans to use those funds for general corporate purposes. IAC says The About Group will become part of its search and applications segment.

Court Won't Block FCC Viewability Rule Decision

A Federal Appeals Court has dismissed a broadcaster petition to stay the Federal Communications Commission's viewability rule order. On Aug. 24, the FCC's Media Bureau denied the request by Agape Church Inc., London Broadcasting Company, the National Association of Broadcasters and Una Vez Mas to stay the decision, which takes effect in December.

The petitioners then sought a stay in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit until the court can hear a broadcaster challenge to the decision. The court denied a stay as well, saying only that the petitioners "have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review." Those would include demonstrating the likelihood of winning the appeal and suffering serious harm if the stay were not granted. The FCC in June voted to sunset the viewability rule, which means that, as of December, cable operators will no longer have to deliver dual analog and digital feeds of must-carry TV station signals to satisfy the FCC requirement that they be viewable to their subscribers.

Fox says it is Fit to be a FCC Licensee

News Corporation’s Fox Television Stations told the Federal Communications Commission that a petition to strip the company of its licenses for WTTG and WDCA Washington (DC) and WUTB Baltimore (MD) is fatally flawed.

The company wants the FCC to toss out the petition from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) and grant the license renewals. The response from Fox claims that the CREW petition is nothing more than a compilation of newspaper articles and documents compiled by authorities in the UK relating to the phone hacking investigation of News Corp. newspapers, which is ongoing. Lacking, Fox says, is any affidavit alleging facts about which CREW or any of its members has any personal knowledge. “The Petition does not contain allegations that any of the Stations has failed to serve the public interest – indeed it makes no reference whatsoever to the Stations’ performances – nor does the Petitioner claim that Fox or any of the Stations has violated a single FCC rule or regulation,” the filing states. Fox insists that it “does not mean to diminish the gravity” of the UK allegations, but notes that no entity owned by News Corp. has yet been found guilty of engaging in any misconduct. And it insists that the allegations against the UK newspapers would not meet the legal standard for the FCC to hold a different subsidiary of News Corp., Fox Television Stations, responsible for any wrongdoing.

FCC Task Force Goal: Use Of mHealth Should Be Routine Medical Best Practice Within 5 Years

The Federal Communications Commission plans to act on recommendations from a new mHealth Task Force report unveiled at an event hosted at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Chairman Genachowski announced that the FCC would collaborate with its federal partners and the private sector to meet the mHealth Task Force’s goal that mHealth technology be a routine medical best practice within five years. Chairman Genachowski also announced the establishment of a new position to coordinate the agency's health care efforts across the government.

At the event, the mHealth Task Force released its report outlining recommendations to the FCC, other federal agencies, and to industry, to accelerate the adoption of mHealth technologies for improved health outcomes and reduced costs across the health care system.

The mHealth Task Force recommendations are:

Goal 1: FCC should continue to play a leadership role in advancing mobile health adoption.
Goal 2: Federal agencies should increase collaboration to promote innovation, protect patient safety, and avoid regulatory duplication.
Goal 3: The FCC should build on existing programs and link programs where possible in order to expand broadband access for healthcare.
Goal 4: The FCC should continue efforts to increase capacity, reliability, interoperability and RF safety of mHealth technologies.
Goal 5: Industry should support continued investment, innovation, and job creation in the growing mobile health sector

Ads Slice Up Swing States With Growing Precision

Spend time watching TV in Colorado Springs (CO) and you'll feel as though Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are King Kong and Godzilla, planted at the foot of the Front Range mountains for an epic fight that still has seven weeks to go. This city is home to fewer than half a million people, yet campaign spending here has tripled since 2008, landing it among the top 10 advertising markets in the country. Colorado Springs provides a telling glimpse into the impact that political ads are having across the country in a year when the candidates and outside groups have blasted through every previous spending record.

Local News Leaves Americans in the Dark About Big-Money Politics

[Commentary] The political ad invasion is upon us. For the local stations that air these ads, it's a political goldmine. But what's a cash windfall for stations has become a nuisance for tens of millions of viewers who will have to endure thousands more political ads before Election Day arrives. But what obligations have the stations that air these ads? Are they offering any local news coverage to debunk the lies in ads? Are they exposing the deep-pocketed interests behind the groups -- some with deceptively friendly names like Americans for Prosperity and the Coalition of American Values -- that buy time?

To find out, Free Press took a deeper look at local news coverage in five cities -- Charlotte, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Tampa -- where ad spending has been the most intense. We inspected the political files of stations in these markets and pored over hundreds of hours of local news transcripts. In all five of these markets, we found that local newscasts ignored the political ads broadcast on their stations. In other words, they provided no local stories exposing the special interests behind these ads; only one station among the 20 surveyed devoted a couple minutes to investigating whether these ads told viewers the truth. When you stack that up against the thousands of political ads they aired, this shortfall in reporting is appalling.

Advocacy Group Urges Court To Reject Google's 'Miniscule' $22.5M Privacy Settlement

A deal that calls for Google to pay a $22.5 million civil penalty for tracking Safari users should be rejected, Consumer Watchdog argues in new court papers.

"The proposed settlement is markedly unusual and deficient," the organization says in papers filed on Friday with U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco. The group outlines specific complaints with the settlement. First, Consumer Watchdog says that the "miniscule" $22.5 million penalty -- estimated as less than 1/1000th of Google's ad revenue -- is too low to ensure that Google doesn't again violate users' privacy. Second, Consumer Watchdog argues that the settlement should include an injunction prohibiting Google from deceiving users about privacy. Google should be required to admit liability in the case, it believes.

Five Pilot Projects Receive Grants to Promote Online Security and Privacy

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced more than $9 million in grant awards to support the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).

Five U.S. organizations will pilot identity solutions that increase confidence in online transactions, prevent identity theft, and provide individuals with more control over how they share their personal information. NSTIC is a White House initiative to work collaboratively with the private sector, advocacy groups and public-sector agencies. The selected pilot proposals advance the NSTIC vision that individuals and organizations adopt secure, efficient, easy-to-use, and interoperable identity credentials to access online services in a way that promotes confidence, privacy, choice and innovation. NSTIC envisions an “Identity Ecosystem” in which technologies, policies and consensus-based standards support greater trust and security when individuals, businesses and other organizations conduct sensitive transactions online. The pilots span multiple sectors, including health care, online media, retail, banking, higher education, and state and local government and will test and demonstrate new solutions, models or frameworks that do not exist in the marketplace today.

The grantees of the pilot awards are:

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) (VA): $1,621,803
Criterion Systems (VA): $1,977,732
Daon, Inc. (VA): $1,821,520
Resilient Network Systems, Inc. (CA): $1,999,371
University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) (MI): $1,840,263

FCC to Back Away From a Majority of Its Indecency Complaints

The Federal Communications Commission is scaling back -- in a major way --its enforcement of indecency complaints. Chairman Julius Genachowski has ordered agency staffers to refocus enforcement efforts to target only the most explicit of the more than 1.5 million pending complaints. The decision was in response to the Department of Justice’s dropping Friday of a lawsuit complaining of indecency in a 2003 Fox broadcast of its reality show “Married by America,” which included scenes featuring suggested -- but pixilated -- nudity.

Medicare Bills Rise as Records Turn Electronic

When the federal government began providing billions of dollars in incentives to push hospitals and physicians to use electronic medical and billing records, the goal was not only to improve efficiency and patient safety, but also to reduce health care costs. But, in reality, the move to electronic health records may be contributing to billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare, private insurers and patients by making it easier for hospitals and physicians to bill more for their services, whether or not they provide additional care. Hospitals received $1 billion more in Medicare reimbursements in 2010 than they did five years earlier, at least in part by changing the billing codes they assign to patients in emergency rooms, according to a New York Times analysis of Medicare data from the American Hospital Directory. Regulators say physicians have changed the way they bill for office visits similarly, increasing their payments by billions of dollars as well. The most aggressive billing — by just 1,700 of the more than 440,000 doctors in the country — cost Medicare as much as $100 million in 2010 alone, federal regulators said in a recent report, noting that the largest share of those doctors specialized in family practice, internal medicine and emergency care.

Benton

Search