August 2013

President Barack Obama has the surveillance leak response down pat: Wait a couple of days after a rough story, then tell reporters most of what they already know. What the White House hasn’t done is get ahead of the story.

The Administration’s pattern was in full effect Aug 21, when it got lapped by the National Security Agency news cycle. While three senior officials were explaining newly declassified documents that were largely reported by the Washington Post last week, reporters wanted to know details about a fresh Wall Street Journal NSA scoop from the morning. Basic crisis management dictates that you push out as much information about the story as possible as soon as possible, but the White House’s public relations effort has been complicated by its inability to predict the next wrinkle to the story. It doesn’t know what revelations are coming next — or when. That makes it difficult for the President to maintain credibility when telling the American people they have nothing to fear about the programs.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious plan to provide Internet access to billions of people around the globe will face challenges that extend far beyond solving technical and financial issues.

In announcing a partnership dubbed Internet.org, Zuckerberg outlined several technology-based strategies for reducing costs in order to extend affordable Internet service to 5 billion people around the globe who are not currently online. But nonprofit groups that have been focused on bridging the global digital divide have reported that such efforts inevitably run into problems including economics, culture, education and corruption. These groups have found that even when access is available and affordable, it can still be a struggle to persuade people to take advantage of it. In the US, for instance, scholars and government officials have found that issues such as race, class and education can be difficult to overcome.

Yahoo! attracted more U.S. visitors than Google during July for the first time since May 2011, indicating that turnaround efforts by Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer are gaining traction.

More than 196 million Web users spent time on the largest U.S. Web portal’s sites during the month, up 21 percent from a year earlier, ComScore said. That’s 4.3 million more than Google, operator of the world’s most-popular search engine, up less than 1 percent. The report doesn’t include Tumblr, which Yahoo bought earlier this year, or mobile users, ComScore said.

[Commentary] Scan across just about any radio dial in the entire country, and you'll hear exactly the same big city, big corporate programming: Rush Limbaugh, Fox Sports, Top 40, NPR.

But what about local programming? Where are the reporters covering the city council or the county board of supervisors? High school football or Little League? Bake sales or community events? This kind of homegrown programming was once the heart and soul of radio. It formed a public square that informed listeners about the community's very identity. We've missed that spirit of radio since 1996, when Bill Clinton and Congress decided to allow a few national companies to program the entire nation with their corporate choices of music, sports, and political talk, local needs be damned.

But thanks to activists ranging from the Philadelphia area Prometheus Radio to the Davis, California non-profit Common Frequency, the true heart and soul of radio may be coming back -- if people in local communities choose to be the media they want to hear.