March 2010

Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast

Some people placed emergency calls reporting heart attacks, others rushed in a panic to buy bread and residents of one border village staggered from their homes and dashed for safety — all after a television station in Georgia broadcast a mock newscast on Saturday night that pretended to report on a Russian invasion of the country.

The program was evidently intended as political satire, but the depiction was sufficiently realistic -- and memories of the brief war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 still sufficiently vivid — that viewers headed for the doors before they could absorb the point. Producers at the Imedi television station taped the episode in the studio normally used for the evening news broadcast, using an anchor familiar to the audience, and then broadcast the show at 8 p.m. Saturday with an initial disclaimer that many viewers apparently missed. Looking nervous and fumbling with papers as if juggling the chaos of a breaking news story, the anchor announced that sporadic fighting had begun on the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, that Russian bombers were airborne and heading for Georgia, that troops were skirmishing to the west and that a tank battalion was reported to be on the move. The broadcast showed tanks rumbling down a road, billowing exhaust, along with jerky images of a fighter jet racing out of the sky and dropping bombs.

"People went into a panic," Bidzina Baratashvili, a former director of Imedi, said in a telephone interview from Tbilisi. He compared the mock news broadcast and its effect on the population to the radio depiction of an invasion from Mars in Orson Welles's adaptation of "War of the Worlds."

Trade Papers Struggling in Hollywood

Variety's cost-cutting decision to lay off two of its most prominent critics and others last Monday sent shock waves through Hollywood. For generations, Variety's critics had a clout that far outweighed their number of readers, providing early readings on coming films and Broadway shows to an audience of powerful industry insiders. Then, on Tuesday, it faced a lawsuit that accused the paper of having lured a film producer into the Oscar race with promises of wide-ranging support through a $400,000 promotional package — only to wreck his movie's prospects with a negative review. The review, of the film "Iron Cross," was removed from the Internet when the producer complained in December. But it was restored more than two months later, after the dust-up had become a public embarrassment. The double punch became the latest in a series of blows that have people who live and die by entertainment news wondering if classic trade publishing, as practiced by Variety and its younger rival, The Hollywood Reporter, can even survive.

2010 State of the News Media

Inside news companies, the most immediate concern is how much revenue lost in recession the industry will regain as the economy improves.

Whatever the answers, the future of news ultimately rests on more long-term concerns: What are the prospects for alternative journalism organizations that are forming around the country? Will traditional media adapt and innovate amid continuing pressures to thin their ranks? And with growing evidence that conventional advertising online will never sustain the industry, what progress is being made to find new revenue for financing the gathering and reporting of news?

The numbers for 2009 reveal just how urgent these questions are becoming. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 43%. Local television ad revenue fell 22% in 2009; triple the decline the year before. Radio also was off 22%. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17%, network TV 8% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue over all fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse. Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year. The estimates for what happens after the economy rebounds vary and even then are only guesses. The market research and investment banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson projects that by 2013, after the economic recovery, three elements of old media —newspapers, radio and magazines — will take in 41% less in ad revenues than they did in 2006.

Broadband and the Future for Educational Technology

Educators got a preview of the enhanced role educational technology is expected to play in the future of K-12 education during a webcast aired March 10, 2010.

The webcast, titled The Future for Educational Technology in K-12 Education Policy and Practice, was hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). The webcast combined an overview the U.S. Department of Education's National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), released March 5, with a preview of the educational portion of the Federal Communication Commission's National Broadband Plan (NBP), scheduled to be released March 17. Similar themes ran through the two presentations, and it was clear that the two plans are well coordinated to achieve the goal of using the power of technology to transform teaching and learning to enable anywhere, anytime learning.

The NBP will recommend upgrading the E-rate program, which provides discounted telecommunications and Internet services to schools and libraries. The plan will also make recommendations to improve and expand online learning as well as help unlock the power of data to personalize learning and improve decision-making.

The recommended upgrades to E-rate will include streamlining the application process, giving school districts more flexibility in using the lowest cost option when developing infrastructure, indexing the E-rate funding cap to inflation, and allowing schools the option of permitting after-hours use of school connectivity for adult education, job training and other community uses. The plan will also recommend support for pilot programs of wireless connectivity on and off-campus, and will include a competitive funding program to encourage the development of networks that will serve as models for the future of the nation's schools.

Addressing the Digital Divide in Indian Country

Last week marked a significant chapter in Federal Communications Commission-Tribal relations, which included Chairman Genachowski's remarks to the Executive Council of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) on March 2, 2010, followed by the 7th Annual FCC-NCAI Dialogue on Improving Telecommunications Access in Indian Country at the FCC on March 4. The Dialogue included Tribal leaders, Commissioners Copps, Clyburn, Baker and McDowell, Chairman Genachowski's Chief of Staff, the Chiefs of the Consumer & Governmental Affairs and Wireless Telecommunications Bureaus, Public Safety Bureau, and other Commission staff.

The National Broadband Plan includes a number of Tribal-specific recommendations to benefit Indian Country. To enhance communications and consultation with Tribal governments, the Plan proposes three new mechanisms, including a government-wide Federal-Tribal Broadband Strategic Initiative; an FCC Office of Tribal Affairs; and an FCC-Tribal Task Force consisting of senior FCC Staff and Tribal leaders that will focus specifically on broadband deployment and adoption on Tribal lands. Other recommendations include:

A "once-in-a-generation" transformation of the $8 billion Universal Service Fund to build 21st century communications networks, including on Tribal lands;
Allowing more members of the Tribal community to share connectivity funded by the E-rate and Rural Health Care programs, helping more Tribal libraries qualify for E-rate funding, and creating a Tribal seat on both the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service and the USAC Board of Directors;
Creating a Tribal Broadband Fund to support sustainable deployment and adoption programs in Tribal lands;
Providing funding to upgrade connectivity for federal facilities on Tribal lands;
Expanding the FCC's Indian Telecommunications Initiative and allowing Tribal representatives to participate in our FCC University training programs at no cost.
Improving data collection on Tribal lands;
Exploring ways of improving Tribal access to and use of spectrum, including extending the new Tribal priority in broadcast radio services to the process for licensing fixed and mobile wireless licenses covering Tribal lands.

FCC's National Broadband Plan: What's in it?

The Federal Communications Commission plans to release a national broadband plan next week that will lay out an ambitious set of goals for broadband deployment and adoption.

The official version of the plan will be released at a commission meeting Tuesday, but FCC followers have seen the agency unveil several major thrusts of the plan in a series of speeches and briefings in recent weeks. In a mid-February speech, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski kicked off the announcements by saying it was the agency's goal to bring 100M bps (bits per second) broadband service to 100 million U.S. homes by about 2020. Many members of the US tech community have called for a national broadband policy for years, and Congress, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in early 2009, required the FCC to develop the plan. Several tech groups have expressed general support for the announcements so far, but others have questioned how the FCC will accomplish what appears to be a wide-ranging and expensive plan. FCC officials have talked about a cost of $12 billion to $25 billion to implement parts of the plan, with wireless spectrum auction proceeds offsetting the costs, but some critics have suggested the FCC's cost estimates are far too low. In a time of huge U.S. government budget deficits, there will also be pressure in Congress to use any auction proceeds in other ways.

Who Will Reap the Rewards of the Internet's Hardware Upgrade?

Although software is the most important ingredient of the next-generation Internet -- from web applications to cloud-computing platforms -- hardware vendors are not shy about marketing their wares as integral parts of the equation.

This week, Cisco claimed it will revolutionize the Internet -- the cloud included -- with its forthcoming CRS-3 router, and startups like Tilera are shilling new chips designed with large-scale web applications in mind. If we accept the premise that hardware upgrades are necessary (they certainly can't hurt), the question remains as to who will sell us this new gear. The numbers suggest we'll see hardware evolutions to match the software advances that are driving Internet traffic, and service providers and web companies could be lining up to buy these new products. Whether they'll be buying from their current vendors might depend on what they need.

Boyd Calls Out Google and Facebook for Abusing Users' Privacy

Researcher Danah Boyd brought fighting words to SXSW, where she delivered a well-received keynote Saturday on the interplay between private and public information online. She called out Google and Facebook for being cavalier with their users' personal information by repurposing that which users intended for a smaller audience, implementing opt-out services that are public by default and changing settings without adequately informing users.

Boyd, who works with Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, based much of her assessments on interviews with social media users, many of them teens. She took the stance that "Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want to be publicized." Probably the most radical accusation she levied against technology companies was to declare that "Making something more public that is public is a violation of privacy." By "making more public," she meant aggregating users' updates and making them searchable, as well as repurposing users' information in a way they didn't originally intend.

Is Privacy on the Social Web a Technical Problem?

How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year's SXSW — and not just in researcher Danah Boyd's keynote address that argued aggregating public information can be a privacy breach, and slammed Google and Facebook for their missteps with users' expectations.

Is privacy just a technical problem? That's what Google engineer Brett Slatkin, co-creator of the PubSubHubbub real-time syndication protocol, proposed on a Saturday morning panel. WebFinger, a cross-platform standard that conveys user preferences, which could include explicit privacy settings from one social network to another, could take care of understanding the relationships between users and the information they want to control, Slatkin said. He added that he felt that the reason users are confused about privacy is because of inconsistency among the social sites they use.

Apple's Spat With Google Is Getting Personal

Apple and Google are engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape.

In the last six months, Apple and Google have jousted over acquisitions, patents, directors, advisers and iPhone applications. Apple believes that devices like smartphones and tablets should have tightly controlled, proprietary standards and that customers should take advantage of services on those gadgets with applications downloaded from Apple's own App Store. Google, on the other hand, wants smartphones to have open, nonproprietary platforms so users can freely roam the Web for apps that work on many devices. Google has long feared that rivals like Microsoft or Apple or wireless carriers like Verizon could block access to its services on devices like smartphones, which could soon eclipse computers as the primary gateway to the Web. Google's promotion of Android is, essentially, an effort to control its destiny in the mobile world. While the discord between Apple and Google is in part philosophical and involves enormous financial stakes, the battle also has deeply personal overtones and echoes the ego-fueled fisticuffs that have long characterized technology industry feuds.

Benton

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