December 2009

Most people in the media business are excited to put 2009 behind them, but a stabilizing or even recovering ad market won't help everyone equally, according to a new forecast by Fitch Ratings. First national broadcast TV, and then cable networks and large-market broadcast TV are likely to participate in any recovery, but some media -- print mediums, namely newspapers, yellow pages and consumer magazines -- will fall short of even their depressed 2009 levels, Fitch said. The company predicts media companies with print products will erect and then dismantle online pay walls next year. Audience fragmentation will continue but the pace of "legitimate" new media entrants will slow. Consumers aren't likely to cancel cable subscriptions to watch shows entirely online. The four major broadcast networks, including the NBC network that General Electric is selling to Comcast, will remain in 2010. But at least one could explore becoming a cable network as early as 2011, according to Fitch, which called NBC and ABC the most logical candidates.

[Commentary] Dr. David Blumenthal, director of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, recently urged the healthcare industry to break down barriers to electronic exchange of healthcare information in order to improve the quality of care and better serve patients. To reach that goal, we must develop a greater degree of interoperability among healthcare IT applications than we have today. To discard the existing data interchange standards and to replace them with something new and "simpler," as some are proposing, would be counterproductive. Instead, we need updated and simplified tools and processes that leverage the existing standards and produce the needed interoperability. Specifically, the HITECH legislation requires the reuse of data for decision support and for quality evaluation.

Open government advocates have criticized the Obama administration for removing some public comments it collected on a site developed for the presidential transition and fear the practice means the White House might stop making some citizen input accessible on its site. The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires the Executive Office of the President to archive most online public dialogues for historical purposes. But the administration is under no obligation to host the data on a Web site during President Obama's four-year term. It shut down parts of Change.gov, a Web site the presidential transition team created before Obama took office, which gathered public input on policies as well as provide other information. But the public expects ongoing access to the original comments from online brainstorming sessions that the administration conducts with citizens, including those collected during the transition, said government transparency advocates and critics of the administration.

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank today. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007. The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago. The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows. Surprisingly, this off-site link sharing has also extended the lifespan of content.