February 2009

The Federal Communications Commission will hold an Open Meeting on Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 9:30 a.m. in Room TW-C305, at 445 12th Street, S.W., Washington, DC. The meeting will include presentations and discussion by senior agency officials as well as industry, consumer groups and others involved in the Digital Television Transition. A list of presenters will be released prior to the meeting. Congress has set June 12, 2009 as the final deadline for terminating full-power analog broadcasts. The purpose of the meeting is to educate and inform the Commission and the public about the digital television transition, including the partial transition on February 17, 2009, when some full-power broadcast television stations stopped broadcasting in analog and began broadcasting in digital only.

As Congress considers reauthorize the Satellite Home Viewer Act, House Telecommunication Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) sees two major questions: 1) should satellite providers offer local service to all 210 market areas nationwide and 2) should there be a general rule for signals where market areas straddle state lines.

Nobody know this like Headlines readers: unsexy, e-mail newsletters are all that. They're not the newest fad, but daily digests sent via e-mail can generate some much needed ad revenue when there's not much of it to go around. It may sound odd that space on a low-tech newsletter could be so desirable in an age of mass-market blogs, when young people increasingly rely on instant messaging, texts, and such sites as Twitter and Facebook instead of e-mail. But remember that signing up for and opening an e-mail newsletter is a much bigger commitment than passively clicking on a link that takes you to a blog post. Publishers can see how many people open an e-mail, how long they read it, and how many friends they forward it to. Advertisers eat up that kind of engagement, because it's different, tangible, and more likely to result in an action such as making a purchase.

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget is developing a set of recommendations to the President for a new Executive Order on Federal Regulatory Review, and invites public comments on how to improve the process and principles governing regulation. Comments must be in writing and received by March 16, 2009. For well over two decades, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at OMB has reviewed Federal regulations. The purposes of such review have been to ensure consistency with Presidential priorities, to coordinate regulatory policy, and to offer a dispassionate and analytical "second opinion" on agency actions. In a recent Memorandum, the President directed the Director of OMB to produce a set of recommendations for a new Executive Order on Federal regulatory review. Among other things, he stated that the recommendations should offer suggestions for the following: The relationship between OIRA and the agencies; Disclosure and transparency; Encouraging public participation in agency regulatory processes; The role of cost-benefit analysis; The role of distributional considerations, fairness, and concern for the interests of future generations; Methods of ensuring that regulatory review does not produce undue delay; The role of the behavioral sciences in formulating regulatory policy; and The best tools for achieving public goals through the regulatory process.