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[Commentary] Control the money, control those who use it. It’s the first thought that came to mind when I learned that Nielsen Holdings is acquiring Arbitron. This was ominously announced on the same day that Nielsen trumpeted its partnership with Twitter, to launch a social-media based measurement tool. Welcome to the Nielsen World Order.
Big Media’s once half-hearted outcries against Nielsen are today even more rarely voiced than they were five years ago. The silence deafens like a Minneapolis snowfall, while Nielsen continues to consolidate media measurement. As somebody who once considered entering the radio ratings industry, I’m chagrined but not surprised by Nielsen’s relentless and seemingly unchallenged pursuit for media currency domination.
Give Me Control Of Your Currency, And I Care Not Who Makes The Laws
Emma Gardner of the Economist Group presents a visual look back at digital publishing in 2012. No visual struck me more than a graph showing the extent of devastation to newspaper print ad sales since 2006: $20 billion in annual revenue, down the drain. In that time, digital ad growth has erased only 2% of the losses. How dreadful. Where did the digital money go? It went to new online marketplaces, and apps, and sites. And Google. Yeah, basically the money went to Google. In 2006, Google made $60 billion less than U.S. newspapers and magazines. Now it makes more ad money than all of U.S. print media combined.
The Scariest Thing About the Newspaper Business Isn't Print's Decline, It's Digital's Growth
Just weeks after T-Mobile announced it would eliminate smartphone subsidies in 2013, the company has a holiday deal to alleviate some of the up-front cost on popular smartphones. From Dec. 21 to 31, the operator is offering a rebate of up to $200 on the initial down payment for some devices. Customers that buy an eligible phone still qualify for the lower-priced Value Plan while paying off the rest of the hardware cost over the next 20 months. In some cases, this is a solid deal.
Before it drops subsidies, T-Mobile offers big smartphone rebate
[Commentary] Cellphone models are still being updated and replaced at an unprecedented pace that simply isn't sustainable.
Seven months is not a reasonable life cycle for any durable product. You wouldn't buy a new TV, game console, Blu-ray player, refrigerator, or car every seven months. In fact, if a manufacturer discontinued and replaced your TV after seven months, you'd be pissed. But it's like an addiction: carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need the high they get from the fleeting sales bump after the release of an incrementally new model, a bump that quickly flatlines. Hilarious price adjustments ensue; a $199.99 phone falls to $149.99, $99.99, $49.99, and eventually free over the course of a single year. And that leads to a traffic jam of phones and price points.
This industry is eating itself alive, and these nonsensical prices are an early warning sign. Carriers urgently need to incentivize OEMs to slow down, not speed up. While Apple — and to some extent, Samsung — stay even-keeled with a single flagship phone per year, the rest of the industry is still chasing its collective tail, confusing customers, and leaving a mess of the store shelves.
Let's be honest, your smartphone's price makes no sense
The shooting rampage in a Connecticut elementary school last week triggered a conversation different from those that followed other recent U.S. gun tragedies. In addition to an outpouring of emotion, social media and the opinion pages of newspapers were used immediately to tackle the polarizing issue of the nation's gun laws, according to a special report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
On both blogs and Twitter, the gun policy discussion accounted for almost 30% of the social media conversation examined by PEJ, exceeding even prayers and expressions of sympathy in the three days following the December 14 massacre that left 26 dead at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. And, within that discussion, calls for stricter gun control measures exceeded defenses of current gun laws and policies by more than two to one.
In Social Media and opinion pages, Newtown Sparks Calls for Gun Reforms
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is turning down the powerful chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, a surprise move in a chamber where senior senators are quick to snag the most influential positions on Capitol Hill. Sen Leahy began telling colleagues Dec 19 he would remain chairman of the Judiciary Committee — the panel that oversees the Justice Department, federal courts and hot-button constitutional issues — rather than take over Appropriations, which holds the purse strings of federal discretionary spending. The Appropriations spot opened up following the death of longtime Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who had served in the upper chamber since 1963. The committee will instead be chaired by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), a 25-year veteran of the Senate who will be the first woman to head the panel. With Leahy’s decision to stay at Judiciary, the next most senior member of Appropriations is Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who has not yet said whether he will run for a sixth term in 2014. But Sen Harkin appears to have decided to stay put running the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The position-swapping is more than just musical chairs. As committee chairs, senators have the power to schedule whatever legislation they want to consider, launch hearings and drive the national agenda on the issues they oversee.
Sen Patrick Leahy declines powerful Appropriations post
[Commentary] I've just begun a Senior Fellowship with the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at Saint Vincent College. For someone in my field, merely having my name in the same sentence as Mister Rogers is a heady, humbling experience. I'm too old to have grown up with him as a "television friend," but young enough that his work was seminal to my career choice.
Meeting Fred left an indelible impression. My first time, I was working at PBS. I'd heard he was visiting the children's programing department, and angled to be there when his meeting ended (funny how many others did the same!). It took only a brief exchange to know there was no "character" or artifice to Fred: he was Mister Rogers. I left with the oddest feeling (that others tell me they've also experienced) that it would have felt perfectly natural to confess my hopes and anxieties to this man I'd just met. Our other memorable encounter brought me to every public speaker's greatest nightmare: in an already high-pressure setting, I followed an iconic -- the iconic -- voice of my field, who had just brought the audience to a reverential hush and left them emotionally spent.
The Two Freds
Reading is foundational to learning and the information acquisition upon which people make decisions. For centuries, the capacity to read has been a benchmark of literacy and involvement in community life. In the 21st Century, across all types of U.S. communities, reading is a common activity that is pursued in myriad ways. As technology and the digital world expand and offer new types of reading opportunities, residents of urban, suburban, and rural communities at times experience reading and e-reading differently. In the most meaningful ways, these differences are associated with the demographic composition of different kinds of communities — the age of the population, their overall level of educational attainment, and the general level of household income. Several surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reveal interesting variations among communities in the way their residents read and use reading-related technology and institutions.
Reading Habits in Different Communities
Viewers are watching a growing share of video via Internet-based distribution systems. New digital content distribution services are having appreciable impacts on established media industries and network service providers in many OECD countries. The competitive landscape in media, already complex, will become even more multifaceted. Public policy frameworks in the media and telecommunications sector must be reviewed in light of these developments. This paper argues that convergence should be taken as the rule, rather than the exception. Careful application of best practices can address most policy concerns.
The Development and Diffusion of Digital Content
Time to Reflect
We are coming to the close of 2012 with heavy hearts. The senseless violence that ended the lives of 20 young children and 8 adults, including six heroic teachers and administrators in Newtown, Connecticut concerns all of us. As Americans, we all lost some innocence on that fateful day.
2012 – A Year of Highs and Lows
Personally and professionally, this year has been one for the books. In September, the United Church of Christ, Office of Communications, Inc., honored me with the Everett C. Parker Award in recognition of what they described as my “many years of leadership and support for promoting the public interest in traditional and digital media.” This recognition has special meaning for me, as Rev Parker truly is both a personal hero and an inspiration to all of us who fight for a just, democratic society. The Benton Foundation and our colleagues in the public interest community are all guided by the spirit of Rev. Parker as we work to ensure that everyone is able to enjoy the benefits made possible by 21st century telecommunications.
Also in September, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said that we need to connect the hardest-to-reach areas of the country and the least-advantaged consumers to the benefits of affordable, high-speed, high-capacity broadband. Sadly, 19 million of our fellow Americans still have no access to home broadband and roughly 30% of all Americans are still not connected to high-speed Internet services – services many of us take for granted. Those gaps have to be closed. For its part, the Benton Foundation has focused staff resources in two areas that we feel can help address broadband access and adoption challenges.
- Lifeline Modernization: Benton saw success in its work to strengthen the low-income support program of the Universal Service Fund. In late January, the FCC completed a modernization of the Lifeline program, addressing a number of concerns raised by a coalition of public interest and civil rights organizations led by Amina Fazlullah, Benton Policy Counsel. The Benton Foundation firmly believes that Lifeline must support the ability of low-income consumers to access broadband if they are to fully participate in 21st century society. The FCC agreed and is now in the process of selecting broadband pilot programs to help inform this transition. Benton suggested, and the FCC agreed, that lessons learned from the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) will be invaluable to modernizing Lifeline.
- In May, the Benton Foundation and Connected Living co-hosted a day-long examination of the challenges related to broadband adoption by low-income elderly consumers. Getting Seniors Online highlighted the work of several BTOP projects targeting low-income seniors. We also looked at one non-BTOP funded project in Miami which serves a multicultural community. Here’s a sampling of what we learned:
- Barriers to adoption for the elderly include anxiety. Projects reported that many seniors fear that they’ll break the computer or otherwise do something wrong.
- The elderly experience greater socio-economic disparities than other age groups.
- Effective approaches consider age tiers, rather than lumping seniors into a “65 years+” category.
- It is critical to include the elderly in planning successful program: “Do with, not for.”
Headlines Editor Kevin Taglang and Chief Technologist Jeremy Isett continue to add resources to help our audiences stay informed on the fast-moving and ever-changing telecommunications landscape. Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps became a monthly contributor to Benton’s Digital Beat blog, sharing his thoughts and insights on the hottest policy debates of the day. To nobody’s surprise, Commissioner Copps’ commentaries are must reads for policymakers and policy activists alike.
Benton maintains strong working relationships with a number of coalitions to further our mission. The Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition (PIPAC) is an effective advocate for political advertising disclosure requirements for television broadcasters, the importance of which became so apparent during the 2012 presidential election. Obscene amounts of money bought record numbers of political ads, yet TV viewers would be hard pressed to know who exactly paid to get their attention (and their vote) if not for the rules championed by PIPAC!
Strong public interest voices are needed now more than ever. Our field suffered great losses in 2012 with the closing of the Media Access Project (MAP) and the scaling back of the Media and Democracy Coalition. Led by our friend and colleague Andy Schwartman, MAP has been a force in the public interest community for nearly 40 years. As one of the few public interest law firms, MAP provided the field with some of the very best and most talented attorneys working on telecommunications and media policy issues. MAP alums are sprinkled across the public interest landscape and we’re richer as a result.
On a final personal note, I am grateful to have been appointed by President Barack Obama this year to the National Museum and Library Services Board, which governs the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In a sense, this appointment brings me full circle. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed me as Chairman of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and as Chairman of the first White House Conference on Library and Information Services, held in November of 1979. It is an honor to serve again to help inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement.
As we take on the challenges that 2013 will surely bring, Benton will continue to rely on the wisdom and expertise of our Board of Directors, the dedication and energy of our talented staff, and the rich resources of our allies in the field. We are truly enriched by the engagement of such a stellar group of individuals and organizations. We look forward to a very productive new year.
Charles Benton, Chairman