May 2009

Technical Problems Delaying TV Ratings

In what one television executive called an unprecedented data delay, Nielsen Media Research failed to provide overnight TV ratings for four days this week. The delays caused considerable consternation within the networks that have to make important decisions this month whether to cancel or renew shows. The Nielsen daily ratings, which measure the audience sizes for hundreds of shows and are used to set advertising rates, are the pulse of the TV industry. Operating without ratings is akin to playing a baseball game without knowing who is winning, or running a movie theater without knowing how many tickets are being sold. Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC, compared Nielsen to a utility, like a gas or electric company, and said that the ratings are the sole currency that networks and cable channels have to evaluate a program's performance and do business. "It would be as though money disappeared for four days," he said.

More Cellphone Users Drop Landlines Entirely

For the first time, the number of U.S. households opting for only cellphones outnumber those that just have traditional landlines in a high-tech shift accelerated by the recession. In the freshest evidence of the growing appeal of cellphones, 20% of households had only cells during the last half of 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released Wednesday. That was an increase of nearly three percentage points over the first half of the year, the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003. The 20% of homes with only cellphones compared with 17% with landlines but no cells. That ratio has changed starkly in recent years: In the first six months of 2003, just 3% of households were wireless only, while 43% stuck to landlines. Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the CDC and an author of the report, attributed the growing number of cell-only households in part to a recession that has forced many families to scour their budgets for savings. Further underscoring the public's shrinking reliance on landline phones, 15% of households have both landlines and cells but take few or no calls on their landlines, often because they are wired into computers. Combined with wireless-only homes, that means that 35% of households -- more than one in three -- are basically reachable only on cells. The changes are important for pollsters, who for years relied on reaching people on their landline telephones. Growing numbers of surveys now include calls to people on their cells, which is more expensive partly because federal laws forbid pollsters from using computers to place calls to wireless phones.

New Firm Mines Its Polling Expertise

A bipartisan group including some former senior White House staffers today will take its polling know-how to the Web. Sara Taylor, who worked as the political director for President George W. Bush, has brought together some unlikely bedfellows to form Resonate Networks, an advertising firm that will use data on political leanings and attitudes to help companies and interest groups sell online ads. "This is the Web 2.0 of the micro-targeting world," said Taylor, who co-founded the firm with investments from people including President Bill Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes. "For public affairs advertisers, the micro-targeting possibilities are limitless when it comes to identifying, persuading or motivating high-quality online audiences for an issue-based or branding campaign." The firm will sift through demographic and other profile information it has gathered on its own or acquired from other marketing firms to help advertisers figure out the political leanings and attitudes of consumers they are trying to reach. Taylor worked with Bush aide Karl Rove to use similar micro-targeting techniques in the 2004 presidential campaign. She said Resonate will take those techniques a step further by using information from surveys and the tracking of online behavior to directly target consumers. It's part of a nascent field called attitudinal targeting.

Boost national cybersecurity without stifling freedom

[Commentary] The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would advance a plethora of shady mandates that could impinge on America's freedom and actually put it at greater risk. While the government may be wise to reinforce stricter control over its own network infrastructure, it does not need to interfere in the network security of the public or private sector. Lawmakers are hawking power-grabbing legislation on a topic that actually needs the weigh-in of independent security experts. Instead, we are flanked with justifications from the director of national intelligence, Homeland Security, former Bush administration officials, and government think tanks. Independent experts would explain that the biggest problems in computer security are not sinister IT professionals and the way they configure firewalls, but are in the software we choose to run. Software isn't perfect, but it surely evolves. It's beautiful in function but once we find that bit of flawed code, we fix it and patch it; we thus grow smarter, and our software more stable and secure. In fact, it is through this process that the ideas and innovation which make the US are formed. We cannot afford to stifle that. Before this Act goes any further, we all need to honestly ask whether the government should meddle in regulating the last frontier for free information.

A newspaper business model that's working

[Commentary] The National Newspaper Association (NNA) last month reported on a study that showed community newspapers were far less affected by the challenging economy than the industry in general. The fact is that gains among progressive community newspaper companies are offsetting a large part of the massive losses being suffered by the staid, big newspaper companies. These "strong and viable" companies recognized and adapted to the changing economy in a way that larger newspapers - for the most part - are not. They adapted to evolving reader habits and emerging business models. They abandoned the traditional, head-in-the-sand mentality of denial and exploited the opportunities presented by their often larger, but undeniably obsolete, brethren. This success is no great mystery - it's the American way. Ingenuity, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit always have been rewarded. The newspaper companies that have altered circulation methods and policies, have focused their content and developed news delivery methods to fit today's audience and advertisers are thriving. They found new streams of revenue and ways to reduce costs that didn't eviscerate their core products. In other words, they ran their businesses the way businesses ought to be run.

[Dan McDonough Jr. and Alan Bauer are founders of Elauwit Media, a community newspaper/media company based in Haddonfield (NJ)]

Bill unveiled to reverse US online gambling ban

Legislation aimed at reversing a 3-year-old ban on Americans placing online bets was introduced on Wednesday by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA). The Internet Gambling Regulation Consumer Protection & Enforcement Act would establish a federal regulatory and enforcement framework for online gaming. Chairman Frank said the bill would give the Treasury Department the authority to establish regulations and license Internet gambling operators. The Treasury would also have the authority to revoke or terminate the license of any operator that violates the law. Enforcement actions could also include fines.

Tech Implications Of Obama's Budget Cuts

President Obama will propose cutting or scaling back 121 programs in the detailed budget he will unveil Thursday, saving the federal government an estimated $17 billion in FY10. About half of the savings would come from defense programs and almost $12 billion would come from discretionary spending. Two examples of the downsizing that involve technology: 1) the government's long-range radio navigation system will be eliminated, made obsolete by the prevalence of GPS and 2) the Education Department's educational attaché in Paris. The Administration is proposing that the agency instead use e-mail and videoconferencing and does not need a full-time representative there. The savings: $632,000 per year.

Who owns the facts? The AP and the "hot news" controversy

In 1918, the Supreme Court created a "hot news" quasi-property right that still exists in some places today, and the Associated Press has been threatening to take on the blogosphere with it. Ars digs into the "hot news" historical archive to explain why the idea has always been controversial.

PBS Kids Series Helps Kids in Low-Income Families Read

PBS Kids series Super WHY? is helping kids read, particularly those in low-income families. That's according to studies conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and Florida State University's Center for Reading Research for PBS in conjunction with the Department of Education's Ready To Learn grant program (RTL). That is just the kind of result DOE is looking for, since it revamped RTL several years ago to focus more on curriculum-based education targeted to younger kids, particularly from low-income families, and whose success could be measured. Among the findings in the Annenberg study were that the show improved overall reading performance, alphabet and phoneme knowledge and comprehension, and improved pre-school, pre-reading letter and sound "naming" skills. The study broke out the gains for low-income and "working class" children, finding that 46% of those kids did better on standardized tests than a control group of the same category of kids.

FTC Testifies on Data Security, Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

On May 5, the Federal Trade Commission testified on the Commission's efforts to promote better security for sensitive consumer information and to prevent the inadvertent sharing of consumers' personal or sensitive data over Peer-to-Peer Internet file-sharing networks. As part of these efforts, the agency also announced that it had reached an agreement with one of the largest privately held lenders in the United States to resolve charges that the company violated federal law by failing to provide reasonable security for consumers' sensitive information. In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection Eileen Harrington said the agency strongly supports the goals of H.R. 2221, the Data Accountability and Trust Act, which would require companies to put reasonable data security policies and procedures in place, and to notify consumers when there has been a data security breach that affects them. The legislation also would give the Commission the authority to obtain civil penalties for violations. The Commission made two further recommendations regarding the data security legislation: It suggested that the legislation be extended to cover data stored on paper, as well as electronic data. It also recommended that certain provisions imposing obligations on information brokers - companies whose business is to collect and sell information about individuals who are not their customers - be targeted specifically to address harms consumers may face when brokers sell information about them, to the extent that such harms are not already addressed by federal law. These provisions should not displace existing legal protections.

Benton

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