February 2010

Don't Touch That Dial!

A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload.

In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both "confusing and harmful" to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an "always on" digital environment. It's worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once used e-mail and was completely ignorant about computers. That's not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press. Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label. These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself.

The Story the New York Times Won't Touch

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company, I wrote "I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn't out of favor with the paper's new sugar daddy." Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it's not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

For the last several days, bloggers and many business news outlets have been revealing truly astounding details from a court case involving J.P. Morgan Chase and two large Mexican telecom companies, one of which is Slim's. Blogger Felix Salmon at Reuters was one of the earliest to cover this at length; his summary of the case gets right to the heart of it: "JP Morgan took one of its longest-standing clients in Mexico — Grupo Televisa — and tried to hand all of its secrets over to its biggest rival, Carlos Slim. And the way it tried to do that was by selling Slim a loan larded up with covenants which would essentially force Televisa to reveal any and all information to the holder of the debt." This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world's largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected to cover it, as the Journal and Bloomberg have. Yet as of Saturday midday, I cannot find a single mention of any aspect of this case, anywhere in the physical New York Times, or on its Web site--not even a blog post or a wire story.

'Anonymity is over' on Web; what you shop for will be known

Former National Economic Council member Susan Crawford believes "anonymity is over" in the blossoming world of Internet commerce.

When asked as part of the Pew Center's latest Web survey how online businesses and services might treat users' identities 10 years from now, she predicted: "We'll be known to others as a condition of doing all we want to do." "That may not be all bad news -- we'll get loyalty points, after all -- but we'll have to ensure that traditionally anonymous political speech and criticism is somehow protected," added Crawford, who assisted the White House when it drafted its team to lead the Federal Communications Commission.

Palo Alto drops stimulus bid, pinning fiber hopes on Google

Palo Alto's city council has decide to drop the city's bid for broadband stimulus funds and instead apply to partner on a Google infrastructure project.

City Manager James Keene said Palo Alto's chances for stimulus cash looked dim, since the federal projects are aimed at communities where Internet access is scarce. By contrast, Keene and several other officials speculated that a plugged-in city such as Palo Alto might be just what Google is looking for.

Online doctor visits prove valuable at some Europe bases

The US Army is testing telemedicine as a way to give patients at remote posts in Europe better access to American specialists.

In recent years, as the military footprint in Europe has shrunk and US hospitals in places such as Würzburg have closed, servicemembers and family members increasingly have been sent to foreign medical facilities for treatment. Telemedicine — which enables doctors to do remote consultations over the Internet — is a way to bring those patients back into the U.S. medical system, according to Col. Steven Brewster, commander of U.S. Army Medical Activity Bavaria. A telemedicine system is being tested at two on-post clinics in Vilseck, allowing doctors at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to perform examinations and determine if more extensive care, such as surgery, might be needed. Telemedicine will help the Army tighten oversight of soldiers' medical treatment and provide the best long-term results, he said.

Regional Extension Centers: Enabling Meaningful Use for All

[Commentary] A common concern about health information technology (health IT) adoption is that it may not be feasible for small practices and those serving safety-net populations.

Due to economies of scale, implementation and meaningful use of health IT is far less daunting for larger, commercial health care organizations. Even so, some small practices and community health centers around the country are actively defying that statement. It is precisely this reason that, in developing the HITECH legislation, Congress made sure to incentivize providers and deliver support to those who most need it. Last Friday, Feb. 12, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced the first cycle of grant awards for 32 Regional Extension Centers (RECs), totaling $375 million. Additional REC cooperative agreements will be announced in the near future. The combined REC program will provide support to priority primary care providers in virtually every nook and cranny of the country. When we at ONC talk about "priority primary care providers," we're focusing on solo and small group practices, community and rural health centers, public and critical-access hospitals, and other settings that predominately serve uninsured, underinsured, or medically underserved patients. Through cooperative agreements, we will work closely with RECs to ensure that primary care providers who need help are provided with an array of on-the-ground support to meaningfully use electronic health records (EHRs).

On Healthcare: No Mercy on Meaningful Use

[Commentary] It sounded promising. The HIT Policy Committee's Workgroup on Meaningful Use was taking about flexibility, about no longer forcing providers to meet all its requirements in order to get one penny of HITECH stimulus cash. Dr. Paul Tang, chairman of the workgroup and CMIO at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, said he heard the provider community's complaints about the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking's high bar and 100 percent compliance requirement, so his team was recommending a more flexible approach, one that would allow hospitals and physicians to defer a few measures to later years, while still reaping the benefits of a good-faith effort. But just when you started thinking the HITECH ship was finally on a sensible course, the old bait and switch revealed it was still heading straight towards the rocks. That's because just as it paid lip service to the concept of flexibility, the same workgroup piled on requirements HHS and ONC had left out of the NPRM, leaving providers (and journalists) who thought it was already prohibitive with their mouths agape.

Sprint says it will accept devices from other carriers under broadened phone trade-in program

Sprint Nextel has broadened a program under which it recycles old cell phones, saying it is now taking devices no matter which handset maker or wireless carrier they come from. Sprint now gives an instant credit to Sprint customers who hand over as many as three eligible phones at a Sprint bricks-and-mortar store when they start service with the company or upgrade their current phone. Credits can be as low as $5 to more than $300, depending on phone. The company accepts more than 900 different handsets.

Charging for Content Elicits Strong Objections among Bloggers

Social media last week dove into the debate of free versus pay online content. Sparked by Warner Music's plan to favor Web sites that charge users, bloggers answered in force: It's free or we flee.

Twitter users also joined voices last week-in this case to criticize the privacy settings on Google's new social networking tool, Google Buzz. And Google, for its part, quickly responded. In the blogosphere, the top subject was the news that Warner Music was no longer going to support free online music streaming services such as Spotify, We7 and Last.fm. From February 8-12, this topic received 19% of the week's links according to the New Media Index produced by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Stimulus Debate Drives the News

Fueled by the one-year anniversary of the $787 billion stimulus package, which offered yet another occasion for polarized debate, the U.S. economy topped the news agenda last week.

In all, however, the anniversary was not an overwhelming story. At 12% of the newshole from February 15-21, coverage of the economy was up only modestly from the previous week (10%), according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. But that was enough to make it the No. 1 story in a week when five stories filled between 7% and 12% of the newshole and four different stories were No. 1 in different media sectors studied in PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index.

The No. 2 story, accounting for 8% of the newshole, was the Winter Olympic competition in Vancouver. The games accounted for close to a third (29%) of the news airtime on the three commercial broadcast networks. Host network NBC -- with Brian Williams anchoring his evening newscast from Vancouver -- devoted nearly 60% of its morning and evening news programming studied by PEJ last week to the competition.

Benton

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