July 2015

[Commentary] Here are the raw numbers: In 2014, the workforce at daily newspapers in the United States was 36,700. In 2015, it's 32,900. That's a 10 percent drop --in one year! Ten years ago, there were 54,100 people working at daily newspapers; that's a 39 percent drop over the last decade. Now, yes, it is true that the ASNE numbers document only people working for daily newspapers. So, the Washington Post is included but Buzzfeed, for example, is not. There are more than 32,000 people working in newsrooms and as journalists in the country. Even so, the decline documented above is staggering; there's simply no way that the growth in online-only publications has made up for the massive erosion in daily newspapers.

No matter what you think of the media -- and, judging from polling, most of you don't think much of it -- this data is very bad news for accountability in our political system (and elsewhere). The less people watching, the lower the likelihood that attempts to skirt rules and laws get flagged. The less people watching, the more willing people are to try things they might never do if they knew someone was tasked with keeping an eye on them. The rapid decline in the number of journalists employed by daily newspapers isn't just bad news for members of the media. It's a very bad thing for society too.

In 2000, nearly half of Americans didn't use the Web. Now that the figure stands at 15 percent, it's clear we've come a long way. But these remaining holdouts are likely to be the hardest to reach, because you can't just throw money at them. Of non-Internet users surveyed in 2013, just 19 percent cited the cost of Internet or owning a computer as an obstacle to adoption. Many more, 34 percent, said they didn't find the Internet relevant to them. Thirty-two percent said the Web was too difficult to use. Federal studies have shown that although 10 million disconnected Americans might be willing to get online at the right price, that still leaves some 27 million people for whom price is practically irrelevant to their decision to stay offline.

As the rest of us use the Internet to do homework, find jobs, make friends, get the news, earn a living, learn new skills, buy groceries, organize politically and do a seemingly endless range of other activities, encouraging the disconnected to hop online has become a national priority. New programs are being launched all the time in Washington to expand Internet access, sometimes by federal agencies that would appear to have nothing to do with the Internet.

"If you build it, they will come," goes the adage. But for these folks, simply building out the Internet isn't enough; convincing them that the Web could help them grow is crucial to getting them online. And it's not merely a matter of waiting for old fuddy-duddies who don't "get it" to die off: As the data show, older people have been among the quickest to adopt the Internet among the disconnected population. By contrast, there are real structural challenges (poverty and inequality) that are keeping younger, less socially mobile populations from becoming America's next great inventors or scientists or civil servants. And those people matter, too.

While they aren't even suing over a music recording or motion picture, the Georgia's copyright complaint can be seen as equally nitpicky. Georgia claims that a legal rebel, Public.Resource.org, is publishing and making it easy for others to copy the physical text and accompanying annotations of Georgia's state law -- the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.

"We had a similar showdown with Oregon but no court case," said Carl Malamud, a Californian and the man behind the site. "They did the civilized thing and held hearings and then decided that the law belongs to the people." The state's Code Revision Commission maintains that PublicResource.org is not entitled to reproduce the annotated version of Georgia’s code. Georgia is essentially saying it is not OK to copy and distribute the texts of the state's laws if those texts are accompanied with the state-owned summaries of what the law actually means. Keep in mind, it remains totally kosher to distribute and copy the actual text of the state's laws. Again, it depends on where you line up on the debate.

The White House’s US Digital Service team, which is approaching its first birthday and has staffed up over the past year with top techies from Silicon Valley, is getting tight-fisted treatment from lawmakers in the spending bills being hashed out on Capitol Hill. The Obama Administration’s plan to embed similar digital tech teams at agencies across government has also run into congressional penny pinching, even as lawmakers say they support the teams’ role in turning around troubled government IT projects.

The Senate appropriations committee approved an annual spending measure that would grant USDS just one-third of the new funding President Barack Obama requested to scale up the “stealth startup” team. The Senate Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill OK’d a $5 million increase for the Office of Management and Budget’s IT fund, which is currently operating with a $20 million budget. The Administration had sought an additional $15.2 million for 2016 to support the growth of the White House tech team and other governmentwide IT initiatives. The House appropriations committee, meanwhile, has recommended nixing new digital service funding. The Senate committee didn’t specify why lawmakers decided not to fully fund the Administration’s request, although annual caps on agency spending -- the result of a 2011 bipartisan budget deal, which the White House wants to renegotiate -- limit the amount of new spending.