June 2011

AT&T insiders may offer edge with outside groups

Some of the leading nonprofits and civil rights organizations that have urged federal regulators to approve AT&T’s mega-deal with T-Mobile have former and current employees — and lobbyists — for the wireless company serving on their boards.

Among the groups that have AT&T representatives on their boards of directors and have written to the FCC to back the AT&T/T-Mobile deal are the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the National Puerto Rican Coalition and the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators. "Over the past several weeks, we have engaged in intensive discussions with AT&T representatives, and with merger opponents. In those discussions, our focus has been on the key issues of the impact of the merger on adoption and jobs. Based on our due diligence, we have now reached the definitive view that the merger deserves to be approved," the National Urban League wrote to the FCC June 20, in a joint filing with the National Action Network. Rayford Wilkins, AT&T's CEO of diversified businesses, is a trustee on the National Urban League's board. A similar perceived conflict of interest proved toxic last week for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which came under fire from gay bloggers for weighing in on the AT&T/T-Mobile deal while a former AT&T executive and registered lobbyist, Troup Coronado, sat on the board. Amid the backlash, GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios and eight board members — including Coronado — resigned.

So far, other key minority groups haven't experienced the same type of internal turmoil for backing AT&T’s proposed T-Mobile purchase. But the groups are increasingly becoming targets of criticism over how influential corporations — especially those like AT&T that donate millions of dollars to nonprofit groups each year — should be in the work of advocates for the poor, minorities, gays and lesbians and other groups that have faced disadvantages or discrimination.

Ready, set, sue! Network Neutrality rules almost official

The Federal Communications Commission sent its network neutrality rules on their final steps to becoming reality on June 30. The agency sent the rules to the Office of Management and Budget to ensure they comply with arcane paper reduction rules -- and then the rules are on their way to printing in the Federal Register. Once that happens, anyone can file a lawsuit and get the ball rolling on testing these things in court.

The rules, based on a set of principles adopted in 2005, are an attempt to provide regulations that will keep ISPs from discriminating against traffic on their networks, so a broadband provider couldn't block content from Yahoo, for instance, or play favorites with certain web sites or services. The FCC had started this process in September 2009. Now, it could be as soon as 35 days before these rules hit the Federal Register or a bit longer, but for bureaucracy watchers (and those who care how the net neutrality fight plays out) this is a significant move.

New America Foundation and Creative Commons Hold Copyright Talk

The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative along with Creative Commons co-sponsored an event June 29 to discuss the challenges of copyright laws in a digital age.

Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons, delivered the keynote speech in which she presented the mission of Creative Commons, its growth beyond early adopters into the mainstream and the organization’s new book, The Power of Open. Creative Commons is a non-profit company that provides authors, creators and innovators with a set of tools within the boundaries of copyright law to allow for their work to be easily distributed, edited, remixed and built upon. Casserly, and other members of Creative Commons, are currently on a world tour to promote the new book. The book highlights case studies of successful uses of Creative Commons licenses in the fields of education, medicine, automobiles, journalism and art.

The licenses are intended to reduce the costs of maintaining and protecting copyrights, reduce the redundancy of intellectual property in the marketplace, allow for the creation of dynamic assets that can be easily innovated upon, said Casserly. The organization’s licenses, which are scalable, facilitate exchange across a global marketplace where copyright laws of each country are different and complex.

Interactive Marketing Exposed

According to a new report from Forrester Consulting to understand how interactive marketers use customer data to drive communications, develop promotions, and deliver consistent customer experiences, speed of response resonates loudly with interactive marketers.

Realtime customer insights and engagement across all channels are "the game." Given the velocity and frequency of customer interactions, interactive marketers are denied the luxury of timedelayed analysis and response. Forrester defines the term interactive marketing as: The use of addressable channels like email, search, display advertising, social media, mobile, or online video to sense and respond to customer need. Through indepth surveys, Forrester found that interactive marketers continue to struggle with customer data management issues. Although established channels such as email, website, display, and search are actively measured by interactive marketers, leveraging collective customer insight across channels remains a distant reality for many.

The study yielded these key findings:

The need for speed resonates loudly with interactive marketers. Marketing technology, listening across both digital and social channels, and advanced data management capabilities are foundational capabilities to address this need
Integrated campaign management is a strategic imperative, and extends into the need for greater collaboration across interactive marketing teams
ROI continues to haunt interactive marketers, as they struggle with organizational and budgetary barriers that hinder progress toward a more customer-centric and dialogue-focused approach to campaign management
Marketers continue to execute and measure campaigns in isolation from each other without a full view into customer activities across multiple channels. As a result, marketers still rely on using interactive channels to push messages versus encouraging customer dialogue
Interactive marketers struggle to execute effective crosschannel programs. Measurement and analytics capability is influenced by poor data collection, lack of data integration, and disparate data sources

Blogger's Oppose Obama's Afghanistan Plan

Bloggers, last week, responded strongly to President Obama's June 22 speech about the U.S. role in the Afghan war. Reaction to the announcement, which proposed to remove 10,000 troops this year and a total of 33,000 by next September, received 18% of the news links on blogs from June 20-24, making it the No.1 topic, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

And by a margin of almost 3-to-1, the reaction was negative. In a broader examination of more than 11,000 blog posts, utilizing computer technology from Crimson Hexagon, 36% of bloggers' assessments were negative compared to just 13% that were positive. About half (51%) of the conversation was neutral. These responses were more critical than public sentiment overall. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post following the speech found that a plurality (44%) of Americans think Obama will remove troops from Afghanistan at about the right pace.

200 million Tweets per day

[No, not @benton_fdn -- that would be some sort of record]

Halfway through 2011, users on Twitter are now sending . For context on the speed of Twitter’s growth, in January of 2009, users sent two million Tweets a day, and one year ago they posted 65 million a day. For perspective, every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world. A billion Tweets are sent every five days.

Secret Service Reveals How It Stalks Cybercriminals

A top Secret Service official ended up spilling details about federal anti-hacker strategy at a relatively obscure federal hearing in Alabama.

In testimony given to the House Committee on Financial Services, assistant director Alvin T. Smith revealed just how involved the Secret Service is in federal investigations into cybercrime. Smith detailed how the Secret Service has infiltrated underground websites (including both hacker and cyberfraud sites) and bulletin boards. A 2008 investigation into criminals who stole credit and debit card numbers from Dave & Buster's, OfficeMax, Sports Authority, and Barnes & Noble customers was largely accomplished thanks to accounts by undercover feds on illegal websites.

Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers.

The memo -- called, simply enough, "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News" -- is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes' work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.

The documents -- drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu -- reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles -- stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out -- warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about "indoctrination" when Obama did it more than 30 years later.

Over $118 Million in Broadband Stimulus Awards Have Been Returned

As more and more broadband stimulus winners begin to break ground on their projects, at least a dozen stimulus winners have opted not to join them.
Unused awards represent a small fraction of roughly $7.2 billion in awards made in the broadband stimulus program -- and the money involved, which Telecompetitor estimates at approximately $118.2 million -- will be returned to the general treasury.

Two awards made by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration will not be used by the winners. The value of those two awards is approximately $37.3 million.

Ten awards totaling $80.9 million made by the Rural Utilities Service opted not to take awards made by the RUS, including one company that returned two awards. There was no single over-riding reason why stimulus winners opted not to use their awards, but all of the reasons fit into one of five categories. The biggest single reason stimulus winners didn't use their awards—cited by four organizations–was that they found the terms of the award too daunting. Another three winners ran into problems with the project itself. Two more winners said that in the time between when they applied for funding and received it, broadband became available in parts of their project where it had not been available previously, minimizing the need for the project. And one project was scrapped because the company that proposed it was acquired by another company that didn't want to use the technology proposed in the project.

The remaining three projects involved two organizations that did not respond to attempts by Telecompetitor to contact them. Telecompetitor also was unable to uncover any published reports about why these two organizations did not accept their awards.

Errors Occur in 12% of Electronic Drug Prescriptions Matching Handwritten

As many as 12 percent of the drug prescriptions sent electronically to pharmacies contain errors, a rate that matches handwritten orders for medicine from physicians, researchers said.

An analysis of 3,850 computer-generated prescriptions written over a four-week period found 452 contained errors, including 163 that could harm the patient, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The rate was consistent with past studies reviewing the risk of errors when a doctor writes a prescription and hands it to the patient, the researchers said. The results undermine the expected safety benefits from computer-generated prescriptions, said the study authors led by Karen Nanji of Massachusetts General Hospital’s anesthesia, critical care and pain department. The U.S. paid more than $158.3 million to doctors and hospitals in the first half of 2011 to encourage adoption of electronic health records, which President Barack Obama has advocated as a way to lower health- care costs and reduce medical errors.

Benton

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