May 2008

Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley conceded defeat to challenger Bernie Lunzer, who reportedly won the guild presidency with 55.8% of the vote, according to final returns. urged the new leadership to "heal whatever rifts there are" with the Guild's parent group, Communication Workers of America, who were targeted by Lunzer's campaign: "The campaign run by the other side was an attack on the CWA, that needs to be repaired." The Guild's new officers pledged to pay particular attention to improving media companies' profitability in ways that don't harm workers.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_con...

Qwest Communications International is asking a federal agency to obey a 2005 court order for reforms that Qwest hopes will give it more access to a pot of money subsidizing rural phone and broadband service. The Denver-based telecommunications company petitioned the Federal Communications Commission on May 5 to follow a 3-year-old 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling ordering reforms in a program reimbursing telephone companies billions of dollars for serving rural areas. The agency hasn't formally responded. The petition by Qwest is another gambit to get more of the $4.2 billion of "universal service fund" money, and tie some of it to providing rural broadband service. The way the rules are written now, Qwest is largely shut out from the fund despite having some of the nation's least populous states in its 14-state service territory.
http://masshightech.bizjournals.com/masshightech/othercities/denver/stor...^1636774

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the latest Congressional effort to curb the spread of child pornography on the Internet, a 2003 law that makes it a crime to offer or solicit sexually explicit images of children. The law, known as the Protect Act, applies regardless of whether the material turns out to consist solely of computer-generated images, or digitally altered photographs of adults, or even if the offer is fraudulent and the material does not exist at all. “Offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography are categorically excluded from the First Amendment,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the 7-to-2 majority. The law at issue was a response to a Supreme Court ruling in 2002, a decision that found unconstitutional an earlier law that prohibited simple possession of purported child pornography even if the material turned out not to depict real children. The First Amendment was violated by a law that “prohibits the visual depiction of an idea,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in the 2002 decision. Justice Scalia said on Monday that by limiting the crime to the “pandering” of child pornography, the new law represented “a carefully crafted attempt to eliminate the First Amendment problems we identified” in the earlier decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/washington/20scotus.html?ref=todayspaper
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While gloom haunts the newspaper industry in the United States and Europe, the business is flourishing in much of the developing world. New newspapers -- some backed by governments, others by business moguls and international conglomerates -- are springing up from Rwanda to Tajikistan, attracting readers and advertising money. In many of these markets, rising literacy rates dovetail with growing disposable income to create millions of potential readers. Circulation is rising by double-digit percentages at existing papers, while some Western media companies are forging partnerships and trying their hand at start-up companies as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/business/worldbusiness/20newspapers.ht...
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