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US newspapers last year lost $10 in print advertising sales for every dollar gained online, according to the Pew Research Center. That was worse than 2010, when newspapers lost $7 in print advertising for every dollar made from digital. Could the New York Times, which recently cut the number of its newspaper’s free articles people can read on its site to 10 a month from 20, finally be onto something?
Is it finally flexing the pricing power it has with loyal readers to get paid for all the journalism it invests in? Although the company has been a case study in financial mismanagement, it is now generating an average of $250 annually for every digital subscriber, according to Barclays Capital. If the Times can continue to add paying readers to its rolls, while squeezing more out of its print subscribers, it just might have what it takes to offset declines in print—and now digital—advertising. Might. This realization might be 19 years too late. And it won’t necessarily apply at less indispensable publications, which have spent a decade gutting their content. But any hint of good news is welcome in the post-apocalyptic business of journalism in 2012.
Bridging the News Industry's Digital Divide
The Federal Communications Commission will hold an Open Meeting on Friday, April 27, 2012. The FCC will consider:
- a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that protects consumers by adopting and proposing additional rules to help consumers prevent and detect the unlawful and fraudulent placement of unauthorized charges on their telephone bills.
- a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking inviting comment on whether to allow noncommercial educational broadcast stations to conduct on-air fundraising activities that interrupt regular programming for the benefit of third-party non-profit organizations.
- a Second Report and Order that increases transparency and improves public access to community-relevant information by moving the television broadcast station public file from paper to the Internet.
- a Report and Order establishing a regulatory framework for channel sharing among television licensees in connection with an incentive auction of spectrum.
- a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking comment on proposals to reform and modernize how Universal Service Fund contributions are assessed and recovered.
FCC Confirms April 27 Agenda
While law enforcement organizations across the country may be tracking people using their cellphones, police are finding willing partners in wireless phone companies, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer said.
Many cellphone companies have created departments and even online portals to help law enforcement request location data on people, often without a warrant, ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said during a taping of C-Span's "The Communicators." She pointed to an ACLU survey of local police agencies released earlier this month that found that some carriers, such as Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile charge law enforcement for the data. "I think the cell phone companies owe their customers a more clear picture of how the government and potentially others are accessing their data," Crump said. The information collected and stored by wireless carriers are the real privacy problem, John Jay College professor Dennis Kenney said during the show.
ACLU: Wireless Carriers Enable Warrantless Cellphone Tracking
The federal government, law enforcement and wireless carriers recently announced the creation of a new database that will attempt to make stolen smartphones unusable, and therefore less valuable.
The Federal Communications Commission, police chiefs and wireless carriers said the new database will record a unique identifying number for each device, similar to a car’s vehicle identification number. When a smartphone is stolen, the device’s owner will be able to call his or her wireless carrier, which in turn will block the device from being reactivated on any carrier’s network. But the planned system could have some surprising consequences, industry observers say.
Harry Sverdlove, CTO of security vendor Bit9, said that although government intervention on this issue is beneficial for consumers, it ultimately could be a bigger boon for phone carriers and manufacturers. Since the database would block a device from reactivation, Sverdlove said, more smartphones would need to be purchased, thus increasing revenue for the manufacturers. “By preventing phones from being reused illegally, that’s good for [the manufacturers],” Sverdlove said. “It’s to their benefit.”
Stolen Smartphone Database: Good for Consumers?
The growth of electronic health record systems and the push to integrate digital technology into electrical grids is adding security threats and "new failure modes to the world we live in," Dan Geer, chief information security officer at CIA venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, warned.
The ways that our day-to-day operations have become tied with the Web is creating an Internet ecosystem that is "too big to fail," Geer argued. Geer was famously dismissed from his position as chief technology officer at the boutique security firm @stake, after authoring a 2003 study on the security implications of Microsoft's monopoly in the software industry. "Remember that the Internet was built by academics, researchers, and hackers -- meaning that it embodies the liberal cum libertarian cultural interpretation of American values, namely that it is open, non-hierarchical, self-organizing, and leaves essentially no opportunities for governance beyond protocol definition," Geer said. "Anywhere the Internet appears, it brings those values with it." In this landscape, over-complex IT systems pose a problem: they prevent people from seeing how closely connected different parts of a system are, and that a fault in one part could bring the rest of it down, he said. It is important then, that backup processes are instituted, in the event of system failures.
The Internet has become too big to fail, says In-Q-Tel's Dan Geer
In a new twist on political disclosure, California may soon require bloggers to report financing from campaigns.
The proposal, by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, is believed by state election officials here to be the first of its kind in the nation. The election officials are calling for new requirements for blogger contributions from both candidate and ballot initiative campaigns. Current state law requires campaigns to disclose payments to bloggers, but the bloggers are under no obligation to reveal who has given them money. Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the commission, said that initially the disclosure requirement would be voluntary but that such disclosures work best if required by law. She compared the proposal to guidance by the Federal Trade Commission that bloggers praising a product reveal if they are being paid by a company.
California: Bloggers should disclose political pay
Location services company Navizon has a new system, called Navizon I.T.S., that could allow tracking of visitors in malls, museums, offices, factories, secured areas and just about any other indoor space.
It could be used to examine patterns of foot traffic in retail spaces, assure that a museum is empty of visitors at closing time, or even to pinpoint the location of any individual registered with the system. But let's set all that aside for a minute while we freak out about the privacy implications. Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don't. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn't realize that, using proprietary new "nodes" from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon's.
If You Have a Smart Phone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move
The Broadcasting Board of Governors renewed its commitment to a long-term strategy to reach more people in countries with limited or no media freedom, discussed concrete means to expand audiences in China and Latin America, and explored further ways to save taxpayer funds by consolidating administrative costs.
The consolidation would combine certain behind-the-scenes functions at the media outlets supported by grants from the BBG — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The top management of these grantees, together with key BBG senior staff, teamed up to produce a plan based on directions from the Board in a resolution passed in January. Their work will be reviewed by all Board members and discussed at a meeting of the Strategy and Budget Committee in late May. The interim report is to be posted for public comment by May 1.
Strategy, Serving Audiences And Saving Money Top The Agenda At BBG Board Meeting Board Forges Ahead With China Strategy, Adapted To Modern Media Environment And Audience Needs (BBG – China)
[Commentary] Is it any wonder the United States lags behind the rest of the world in broadband Internet cost and service? We're home to Google, Apple and other tech trendsetters, but when it comes to wiring people for Net access, we're the tortoise to Europe's and Asia's hare.
The Federal Communications Commission issued a report last year showing that the U.S. ranks 12th for broadband service such as cable and DSL connections, outpaced by South Korea, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Britain, Canada and Germany. Meanwhile, a 2010 report by the Technology Policy Institute found that while broadband prices had dropped overseas as much as 40% in recent years, prices in the United States were barely budging. Pretty sad for the country that invented the Internet. So why are we such slowpokes? A 2010 report by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society came up with a ready answer: government regulation, or a lack thereof.
Internet service customers paying for inefficiency
A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites. Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names. The timeline of the activity tracks USA TODAY's reporting on the military's "information operations" program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticized even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored.
Misinformation campaign targets USA TODAY reporter, editor