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The Supreme Court agreed to consider how much deference to give federal agencies in setting their own jurisdictions, in two combined cases that could affect the ability to deploy wireless telephone services nationwide. At issue is the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to step in and help further the placement of wireless communications facilities when state and local governments failed to act on tower-siting applications fast enough. Cities including Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Arlington, Texas, as well as the New Orleans City Council, said that interfered with their power to enforce local zoning standards.

The cases are City of Arlington et al v. U.S., No. 11-1545; and Cable, Telecommunications, and Technology Committee of the New Orleans City Council v. FCC, No. 11-1547.

Media General has a buyer for its Tampa Tribune newspaper, with new company Revolution Capital Group agreeing to acquire the paper and its associated digital products for $9.5 million. The sale has closed.

The Tampa Tribune was Media General's largest and second-oldest newspaper. After its deal with Berkshire Hathaway for 63 papers back in May, this week's sale means Media General no longer owns newspapers. Marshall Morton, president and CEO of Media General, called it a "bittersweet day" for the media giant. "With this transaction, we complete the transformation of Media General's business model to one focused on broadcast television and digital media," he said. "We believe our future prospects are strong, based on operating 18 top-ranked local television stations in growing and important markets, mostly in the Southeast. In addition, our financial position was greatly strengthened this year as a result of our new financing arrangement with Berkshire Hathaway." Morton noted that Media General has stations in four of the key battleground states for the presidential election: Ohio, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.

If you think you can avoid the ceaseless barrage of political ads by merely avoiding the television at all costs and keeping your telephone silenced, think again.

Politicians and their campaign managers know you too well, and they know you have to consume content somewhere. They’ll be damned if they’ll let a little thing like the internet get in the way of letting you get to know them just as well. We call it big data in the age of the ubiquitous web, but the truth is that politicians have been amassing files on potential voters for at least a decade. Some experts credit the strategy to Bill Clinton’s reelection team in 1996, which decided to focus its efforts on winning over swing voters rather than the entire electorate. George W. Bush took it even further, narrowing his focus down to swing-voter Republicans so as to maximize resources even more efficiently. All of this required a tremendous amount of data mining to figure out who these people were, where they lived and what they cared about.

As of late September, 88% of registered voters own a cell phone of some kind -- and significant numbers of these voters are using their mobile devices to get information about the 2012 election, to interact with the campaigns, and to converse with other voters about political issues:

• 27% of registered voters who own a cell phone have used their phone in this election campaign to keep up with news related to the election itself or to political issues in general.
• Three quarters of these cell-owning registered voters use their phone to send or receive text messages, and within this group:
• 19% have sent text messages related to the campaign to friends, family members, or others
• 5% have signed up to receive text messages directly from a candidate or other group involved in the campaign
• 5% say that they have received unwanted election-related text messages that they did not sign up to receive