The Knight Foundation announced the winners of its annual $4.7-million News Challenge on Wednesday. There’s s a theme running through most of the winners: namely, data as journalism. Just as tech companies of all kinds are focusing on “Big Data” as a tool for new services, the media industry is (hopefully) starting to understand that data can be useful for its purposes as well.
The Associated Press will be among 16 news organizations and Internet entrepreneurs sharing $4.7 million in funding to design innovative ways to find and deliver news in the digital age.
The funding came through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge. The AP's grant will fund a project to help journalists mine large documents for stories. The system, called Overview, will create an interactive, visual display that maps out frequently occurring keywords and shows the relationship between topics, people, places and dates. In a proof of concept, Overview scanned 400,000 documents from the Iraq war logs and plotted each incident as a colored dot. The dots were clustered based on shared keywords, such as "blindfolded" and "handcuffed." The resulting image quickly highlighted certain themes that guided further exploration. Knight said the project will get $475,000 over two years. The AP plans to share its tool with other news organizations, groups and individuals.
Despite the obvious demand, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has adamantly refused to offer electronic versions of her phenomenally popular series for young adults — until now.
As part of the launch of an interactive website called Pottermore, the billionaire writer also announced that e-book versions of the novels will be available directly through the site for all major platforms. In one fell swoop, Rowling has cut both her publishers and booksellers such as Amazon out of the picture. Not everyone has that kind of power, of course, but Rowling’s move shows how the playing field in publishing continues to be disrupted. The author said the Pottermore site will offer extra content that she has written about the characters in the books, which have sold an estimated 450 million copies and made her one of the most successful authors of all time. There will also be a social network of sorts built into the site that allows readers to connect with each other, play games and share their thoughts about the novels and their characters. Rowling said the site will launch in beta at the end of July for a small group of users, and their feedback will be used to develop the full version that will launch in October.
A bill that would limit the ability of law enforcement agencies to track the location of personal mobile devices was introduced last week and is moving along the legislative process on Capitol Hill.
The proposed Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act (GPS Act H.R. 2168), sponsored by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), is currently being reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The bill provides some clarity for police and other law enforcement officials about when geolocation data can be used and accessed. In addition, the legislation would also give telecommunications companies guidance on whether they can share customer geolocation data.
[Commentary] Were I to attempt to influence Texas Gov. Rick Perry's decision on joining the 2012 presidential race by writing him a check for a million dollars, I'd probably get a lot of critical media attention and risk prosecution for violating campaign finance laws. Were I to write him a check for the same amount in return for being my personal advisor or a television host on my network -- conditional on his staying out of the race -- I'd simply be quietly influencing the race in much the same way that Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, has.
There's a widespread belief that a major reason Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin have stayed out of the race is to retain their generous stipends from Fox -- reputed to be $500,000 and $1 million respectively, well beyond what either made as governor -- which refuses to retain a network personality formally in the presidential race. The question here isn't whether Fox is doing anything improper or whether this is part of a scheme by Roger Ailes to become GOP kingmaker, a role he's long allegedly aspired to, or perhaps GOP kingkiller. It is merely musing about whether we see the development of a new political tactic -- history suggests that such ideas spread far more quickly than the rules can be changed -- and whether we'll next see others -- Hollywood liberals offering production deals, Wall Street consulting contracts, corporate America speaking fees -- that will divert credible candidates who aren't rich enough to spurn such offers or egocentric enough to be single-minded about their candidacy. Such a development probably wouldn't improve the candidate pool in the years ahead.
US mobile ad spend is expected to balloon to $4 billion in 2015, up from just $790 million last year, according to the latest projections by forecaster BIA/Kelsey. One of the key drivers of the growth will be targeted local ads, which will account for $2.8 billion, or 70 percent of total spend, compared to $404 million, or 51 percent, this year.
The big question here is how large agencies and major publishers will respond. Companies like Gannett have been moving feverishly to reorient their newspaper and business operations to a more mobile world. But continuous cuts to the news operations are viewed as having potentially detrimental impact on local brands, whose established names are seen as a way to staying ahead of startups. If those brand names are degraded, the advantages are therefore naturally reduced, paving the way for new services to capture those local markets.
NetAmerica Alliance, LLC announced Peoples Telephone Cooperative (Quitman, Texas) and Etex Telephone Cooperative (Gilmer, Texas) as two new alliance participants.
Both have signed charters, are committed to rolling out 4G LTE services, and are building a mobile broadband network in their license areas. These two new participants bring an additional population coverage of over 650,000 subscribers and a land mass of over 7,500 square miles. NetAmerica has joined forces with rural independent license holders, that are deploying converged 4G wireless/wireline networks, to provide business and network services including combined buying power, nationwide branding, 24/7 network monitoring, 4G core network elements, applications development and other key services needed to build the converged network of the future.
[Commentary] The 'digital divide' seems wider than ever.
No, not the differences in Internet access caused by income inequality. Great strides have been made bridging that gap ever since the issue was dramatized by a photo-op of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore wiring a California high school to make sure its lower-income students had equal Web access. No, today's yawning digital divide is between left and right, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. That ideological gap -- a gulf, really -- separates the Netroots Nation and RightOnline confabs taking place in Minneapolis this weekend, almost within earshot of each other. This divide's impact is profound -- for digital media, sure, but just as much for politics, and thus for citizens, at a time when the state and the nation face enormous problems that polarization aggravates. Even media scholars and experts wonder whether digital media mirrors, or causes, these divisions.
The Maine Public Utility Commission (MPUC) in May gave Central Maine Power customers who think smart meters are a health risk two opt-out choices, but the commission has since taken considerable flak for charging customers for the privilege.
Some opponents of the fees have argued that the incremental costs of providing the opt-out choices should not be charged directly to those customers but shared by all Central Maine Power ratepayers. In disagreeing with that decision, the MPUC stated "The AMI meters are now CMP's standard meter. It has been the practice in Maine that customers who desire alternatives to the utility's standard meters pay the incremental costs of the alternative metering... We see no reason to change this practice in the context of CMP's smart meter program. As a general utility ratemaking principle, customers that request non-standard devices should pay the incremental costs of those services."
Voters still think most reporters are politically biased and tend to view them as more liberal than they are.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of Likely US Voters believe that most reporters, when covering a politician campaign, try to help the candidate they want to win. Only 21% think most reporters put the emphasis instead on trying to offer unbiased coverage. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure. Forty-eight percent (48%) also believe that most reporters would hide any damaging information they learned to help the candidate they wanted to win. Twenty-nine percent (29%) disagree and 23% are not sure. A plurality (46%) of voters continues to feel that the average reporter is more liberal than they are. Eighteen percent (18%) say the average reporter is more conservative than they are, while 22% think their views are about the same. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided.
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