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December 2016

Can journalism be virtual?

[Commentary] While the promise of virtual reality has been present in research labs, the gaming industry, and science fiction for over 30 years, it’s only now that we have the computational power, screen resolution, and refresh rate to use VR in a small and inexpensive portable headset. This past year, a wide range of virtual reality headsets has entered the market. VR content is being created by movie studios, gaming companies, and journalists, and the largest technology enterprises in the world are investing significantly in virtual and augmented reality R&D. As Facebook and others begin researching and developing technologies that could augment our lives in significant ways, a new space is opening up for journalism. Journalism inside these new virtual worlds will require an entirely different set of skills and approaches, and will challenge three core journalistic concepts: representation, witnessing, and accountability.

[Taylor Owen is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the founder and editor of the international affairs site OpenCanada.org.]

AT&T-Time Warner: Is Bigger Badder?

The Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights held a hearing on AT&T’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner, a deal that would combine nation’s largest pay-TV provider, second-largest wireless company, and third-largest broadband provider with a media entertainment titan that among other things, owns HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT and Warner Brothers studios. A fun time was had by all.

Verizon General Counsel: We Still Support Net Neutrality

Verizon general counsel Craig Silliman says his company supports the principles of network neutrality, but the current fight is about "the jurisdictional hook the [Federal Communications Commission] used to get there." He also says zero rating is nothing new and likens it to Amazon’s free shipping. Verizon was a key player in the ongoing fight, having filed a court challenge to the initial, compromise, non-Title II approach to net neutrality rules that the FCC struck with other Internet service providers under then FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.

But Silliman pointed out that before the court decisions, Verizon had favored Congress weighing in and codifying the net neutrality principles to "put the whole Title II debate behind us." He suggested that the end game for some activists had always been Title II, so they fought a congressional solution. He said in hindsight—that being a new Donald Trump Administration almost certain to roll back Title II—that was probably a "bad political calculation." He said net neutrality principles are still important but can be protected in a "much smarter, much more efficient way" than the FCC's effort, which he characterized as trying to put square pegs into round holes and said applies broadly to issues of FCC jurisdiction, the sort of issues congressional action could have cleared up.

I Covered Tech for the Times for 28 Years, And Now My Time Is Over

[Commentary] Yes, I’m retiring from the New York Times. I’m certain that when the next corrupt president is impeached it will be because of the hard work and persistence of some new Woodward and Bernstein. Most of you know that before I became a reporter I was a political activist. I was part of a generation that was radicalized by the war in Vietnam.

At some point in the late 1970s I realized that I’d missed the memo and the movement I thought I was part of was no longer. No longer being a True Believer was good training for being a reporter. Fake news will come and go, but an independent press will always be the bedrock of a democracy.

[John Markoff is a former science writer for the New York Times]

Police Reform Can Start On Twitter

[Commentary] From July 2015 through August 2016, I interviewed dozens of New York Police Department (NYPD) leaders and employees, many anonymously, in an attempt to fully document the department’s adoption of Twitter and other online platforms. (The full case study was published by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.)

This adoption was a transformative move for the department and an attempt to balance crime prevention and community outreach — an effort, as NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said, to shift the police mindset from “warrior” to guardian.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

Does open government work?

Open government reforms have in recent years emerged as an area of intense activity and fervent hope for some of our largest societal aspirations: to improve public services, to expand public knowledge of governmental processes, to save public money, and to make government more participatory and inclusive. But does it actually achieve those objectives, and if so, under what conditions? In a word, does open government actually work?

In our new report, we assess the evidence. Drawing from hundreds of reports, articles, and peer-reviewed academic studies, we bring together the most rigorous research on open government reforms, including everything from right-to-information laws in India, to grassroots monitoring of health care in Uganda, to federal audits in Brazil, to election monitoring in Ghana, to school-quality report cards in the United States. From this extensive body of research, we derive six features of open government programs that give these reforms the highest likelihood of success.

Over-the-Top Confusion With Comcast

Comcast has said time and time again that offering a Over-the-Top-TV service outside its own footprint doesn’t make economic sense, and that it is content, for now, to focus on bumping video sub numbers in-footprint with X1, its next-gen platform. Did Comcast suddenly change its mind? Did the dim economics of a virtual multichannel video programming distributor service brighten overnight? One might wonder, given some headlines circulating today claiming that Comcast is developing its own online TV service that's akin to a DirecTV Now or Sling TV. The apparent confusion about what Comcast is planning, or isn’t planning, stems from an interview with Mike Cavanagh, Comcast’s SVP and CFO, conducted Wednesday at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference. The quote in question: “It’s coming.” And some took that to mean that what was "coming" was a new online TV service from Comcast. But when I looked back at that part of the conversation, the quote seems to be out of context. It wasn’t about a service from Comcast that is coming, but about the OTT competition that Comcast is facing, and will continue to face.

Inside the social media echo chamber

The Trump campaign of 2016 will doubtlessly go down as one of the most dramatic and sensational in history, especially considering Trump’s tendency to spark national controversy on Twitter. Although the president-elect’s style of social media usage is of a kind highly unusual in the political sphere, the rising importance of digital media in presidential campaigns cannot be solely attributed to one candidate. The use of social media as a major campaign strategy was first pioneered by President Barack Obama in the 2008 election and was repeated successfully in 2012. His strategy encompassed a range of elements, including Facebook, online fundraising, and a YouTube channel, paired with more traditional forms of outreach via phone and direct mail.

The millennial generation (those born between 1981 and 1998) has been a driving force behind the rise of social media and is attributed with tipping the scales in President Obama’s favor both election cycles. Given that social media has become an integral component of the political process during a time of dramatic polarization, there is a concern that the digital world has become a means to filter out opposing opinions from one’s personal online universe – creating an “echo chamber.” Data from the Pew Research Center reveal that the echo chamber is not necessarily born of a refusal to consider opposing viewpoints, but has developed out of the negative political climate and of the desire to avoid confrontation.

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