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Sinclair Broadcast Group said that it closed on a number of deals to acquire and sell television stations nationwide.

The roughly $459.7 million in acquisitions adds two new markets for the company and additional stations in four markets where Sinclair already has a presence. Sinclair purchased seven stations from Newport Television. These include the following: WKRC in Cincinnati, Ohio; WOAI in San Antonio, Texas; WHP in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; WPMI and WJTC in Mobile, Alabama; KSAS in Wichita, Kansas, and WHAM in Rochester, New York. The company also acquired Newport's rights under the local marketing agreements with WLYH in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KMTW in Wichita, Kansas, as well as options to acquire the license assets. Sinclair also acquired WTTA in Tampa, Florida, which was previously operated by Sinclair as part of a local marketing agreement. It also purchased KBTV in Beaumont, Texas, which was previously owned by Nexstar Broadcasting. Sinclair also said that it closed on deals to sell its assets to Deerfield Media Inc. at KMYS in San Antonio and WSTR in Cincinnati, WPMI and WJTC in the Mobile market and KBTV in Beaumont. Sinclair will provide sales and other non-programming services to each of these five stations under shared services and joint sales agreements.

The Motion Picture Association of America released a study of the New York State Film Production tax credit and concluded that it generated $6.9 billion in economic spending and supported 28,900 jobs across all industries. The tax credit has been in effect since November 2004, and the MPAA study found that since then, spending in the state by producers has grown from $600 million in 2004 to $1.5 billion in 2001, up 155%.

More than two-thirds of hospitals surveyed for a new study reported that their nurses use their personal smartphones while on the job for personal and clinical communications. Still, IT support for those devices is lacking.

The report, from Spyglass Consulting Group, showed 69 percent of hospitals indicating that their nurses use their personal mobile devices. They're often used to fill in communication gaps with the technology provided by hospital IT departments – which some nurses find difficult to use and complain has limited functionality, researchers found.

According to Spyglass' "Point of Care Computing for Nursing" report:

• Nurses aren't using tablet computers. Ninety-six percent of hospitals interviewed believe that first-generation tablets weren't a good fit for bedside nursing. Specifically, it pointed to the iPad, which was hindered by issues related to durability, infection control, limited data entry and lack of native applications.
• Wireless network problems persist. Twenty-five percent of care providers interviewed were dissatisfied with the quality and reliability of the wireless network within their facilities, the report found, with researchers finding that hospital IT must provide a more reliable and scalable wireless infrastructure to support an increasing number of wireless users, devices and applications required at point of care.

Is Twitter more like a phone company or more like a newspaper? It's a laughably strained comparison — Twitter is Twitter, not some relic of a previous era — but the answer is central to understanding the pressures on large internet service providers to regulate what their users say. And as more and more speech takes place on the internet, the answer becomes more and more important: the future of free speech might have more to do with corporate censorship than the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is one of our country's most cherished institutions — and one of its most profoundly misunderstood. The confusion comes from those first five words: "Congress shall make no law." Congress isn't allowed to abridge your freedom of speech. That means the First Amendment only applies to the government, not private parties — as every kid eventually learns, your parents certainly don't have to respect your right to free speech. "Most first-year law students don't understand this point," says Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School. "They think their employer can't fire them because they criticized the president, and they're wrong." That also means that the First Amendment doesn't apply to Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or any other private messaging platform.