October 2018

While most schools in the US boast broadband access these days, there is a homework gap—the problem created when students who use digital learning in class can’t get online at home to finish up their schoolwork. There isn’t going to be a silver bullet on this issue, said Susan Bearden, chief innovation officer at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), during a panel at the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition conference.

In the leadup to the Federal Communications Commission's historic vote in Dec 2017 to repeal all network neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency. The FCC did nothing to try to prevent comment stuffing and comment fraud, and even after the vote, made no attempt to help the public, journalists, policymakers actually understand what Americans actually told the FCC about the repeal of the 2015 Open Internet Order. This report aims to help make that clear. This report used the 800,000 comments identified as semantic standouts from form letter and fraud campaigns.

For residents in thousands of communities across the country – inner-city neighborhoods, affluent suburbs and rural towns– local newspapers have been the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information that can affect the quality of their everyday lives. Yet, in the past decade and a half, nearly one in five newspapers has disappeared, and countless others have become shells – or “ghosts” – of themselves. Our research found a net loss since 2004 of almost 1,800 local newspapers.