February 2009

An about-face by social networking site Facebook last week regarding its terms of service headed off a complaint to federal regulators prepared by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The Wednesday decision to restore Facebook's original policy and its commitment to a more transparent, participatory process regarding future changes to its operating procedure came hours before the watchdog group planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. The EPIC filing was supported by more than a dozen consumer and privacy organizations, officials said.

Every publication now must compete with every other around the globe, many of which are willing to offer their content for free. They also face competition from thousands of aggregators, who take journalists' content, monetize it for their own profit, and, in many cases, give little or nothing back to its originators. That's been true for years now, but the election is over, and we're still staring into an economic abyss that offers little hope that publications -- not to mention TV and radio -- will have time to manage decline while they figure out what's next. What to do? The media grandees weighing in had plenty of solutions (micropayments! Pay walls! ISP taxes! Nonprofit status!), but they can be distilled into two distinct camps: those who believe that consumers can be made to pay -- even a penny -- for content and those who don't.

The National Security Archive and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington were disappointed when, just a day after the inauguration, the government moved for dismissal of long-running litigation over millions of lost Bush-era e-mails. In a response brief filed Friday, the Archive blasted White House claims that recovery was under control as based on "untested scraps of evidence," and urged a federal court to compel archivists to request the intervention of the Attorney General under the Federal Records Act. The watchdog groups filed suit under the FRA after learning that problems with the White House e-mail journaling system had led to the loss of some 5 million messages between 2003 and 2005. The law makes the preservation of all such official communications mandatory. In January, the government argued that suit had been rendered moot thanks to the preservation of backup tapes that will permit the eventual restoration of almost all the lost data. Not good enough, say lawyers for the watchdog groups, because the restoration process is still ungoing, and the risk of the loss of records remains. The law, their brief argues, is clear about the required remedy: the White House and National Archives must call on the Attorney General to step in to ensure compliance with the statute. Moreover, they claim that the evidence provided to establish that the danger of deletion has passed is inadequate—and that the attempt to establish mootness at this late date amounts to little more than a bit of legal slight of hand, because it asks the court to preemptively resolve the very question that would be at issue in any decision on the merits of the case.

[Commentary] After roughly 36 percent of local TV stations switched early to all-Digital TV signals last week, the FCC received more than 70,000 complaints in the first two days. 70,000 complaints in just two days. Based on these developments, you would think that the early DTV switch was a major disaster. Despite local stations' insistence on switching early to save money, it would appear that their viewers were not ready, as many people warned. But good luck in finding that story in many of your nation's top trade and consumer publications, particularly if they are owned by companies that also own local TV stations which desperately want the switch to occur now. There were several examples of newspapers owned by companies that own local TV stations printing digital TV stories that seemed more appropriate for a collection of short novellas. But it wasn't just the consumer press that seemed to go into the tank on this story. If you read the nation's leading TV trade publications, you would think the early switch went as smooth as silk. So, what's happening here? Why are so many publications seemingly so eager to portray the early Digital TV switch as a huge success? It's quite simple. In the case of newspapers with ownership connections to local TV stations, many are following orders. Their corporate parents have a vested interest in creating the perception that the switch is a success, so by God, their newspapers will toe the line or else. Don't kid yourselves, folks. Newsrooms do not make decisions based solely on journalistic reasons. And in the case of the trade publications, they have an historic closeness to the National Association of Broadcasters and other industry heavyweights who want the DTV switch to be portrayed as a success.