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An emergency motion by Aurelius Capital Management to stay Tribune Co.'s emergence from bankruptcy for six months -- without putting up a required $1.5 billion bond -- was denied by a U.S. District Court in Delaware. That decision gives Aurelius, a New York-based hedge fund and junior creditor in the nearly four-year-old bankruptcy case, until Wednesday to come up with the money. If that deadline passes, Tribune Co. can begin to move forward under the reorganization plan confirmed last month by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Carey to hand ownership to its senior creditors.

[Commentary] It’s a reasonable enough question: does the roll out of high speed broadband increase economic growth? If it does, if there’s more than just the private gains that users themselves capture then this might make a decent case for there to be subsidy of the installation of such national infrastructure. This paper from Arthur D Little and Ericsson (who, err, make broadband equipment so might safely be assumed to have an interest in the matter) claims that there is such an effect. It is absolutely true that if you build it they will come. We would undoubtedly find new things to do with 100 Mbits, even the 1 Gbit systems being tested in places. But we still do not know, we can only hope, that those new things would justify the costs of building such systems. We do know however, that the move from none to 2 Mbits, or from 256 k to 2 M, does indeed produce those growth dividends. Thus, in a world with constrained resources that is where we should be aiming our support. Not at all in laying fiber optic to every corner of the land: rather in putting in alternative, presumably mobile, solutions to the gaps in the current network.

Facebook and Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo increasingly provide Americans their gateway for news, but the bulk of voters who catch up on current events daily turn to traditional sources, particularly local television stations, according to a nationwide poll.

Traditional news sources on TV and in print also remain more trusted than the burgeoning alternative ecosystem of blogs, late-night comedy shows and social media outlets, the USC Annenberg/Los Angeles Times Poll on Politics and the Press found. The survey confirms a few widely suspected divides: Democrats and the young tend to be more trusting of a variety of media, while Republicans and older news consumers are more skeptical. Despite mixed feelings, though, the voters surveyed said by more than 2 to 1 that they got useful and important information from the media. The USC/Times poll found that with a welter of new media alternatives available, there was only one source that a majority of registered voters turned to at least daily: local television news. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said they watched their local TV news that often. That gives local stations considerably more reach than the second-most-common news source: local newspapers, in both their print and online versions. About 39% of those surveyed said they routinely turned to the local paper.

If you ask an Internet ad guy to defend himself—to explain why you, dear Web surfer, should feel comfortable letting him serve you ads based on everything you do online—you’ll likely hear two arguments.

First, he’ll tell you that targeted ads are simply the cost of doing business on the Web. It takes billions to build and maintain sites like Google and Facebook, and you don’t pay a dime to use them. Parting with some of your private information—and agreeing to tolerate, if not always click on, some ads—is your end of the bargain.

But it’s the ad guy’s second argument that’s supposed to clinch the deal. That argument goes like this: Don’t worry, you’ll like the ads! This is the grand promise of Internet marketing. When they work like they should, ad gurus say, Web ads won’t annoy you with pitches for stuff you’d never buy but instead will delight you by introducing you to products and services that you never knew you really wanted.

Over the years I’ve spoken to many marketing and privacy people at big tech companies, and they all tell some version of this story. Before the Internet, advertising was broken. Companies would waste billions to broadcast messages to people who weren’t interested in their wares, and because we all understood that most ads weren’t selling stuff we’d ever buy, we’d ignore most of the pitches sent our way. The Internet promised to change all that, transforming the enormous advertising industry from something that was mostly wasteful into a hyperefficient, hypereffective commercial matchmaker. It’s a great theory. And then you launch your browser, load up any site, and you’re bombarded with the ugly reality. Why are Internet ads so crappy? Why are they so often so creepy? Other than those tiny text ads that show up alongside your search results—which have truly revolutionized the ad business—most commercials you see online don’t seem to know anything at all about you or what you might buy.