August 2011

FCC's Emergency Access Advisory Committee

Federal Communications Commission
Friday, September 9, 2011
10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. (EST)
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2011/db0830/DA-1...

The September meeting will continue deliberations to develop recommendations to the FCC as required in the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA).



August 30, 2011 (Coverage of Irene; BART)

BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2011

Find us online at http://www.benton.org/headlines


EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
   FCC says 6,500 cell sites down in four states in wake of Irene
   Sens. Rockefeller and Hutchison push for public safety network [links to web]
   Hurricane News, Mostly Uninterrupted by Ads
   Did nonstop coverage of hurricane Irene save lives?
   Did Media Go Overboard Hyping Irene?
   Hurricane Irene highlights need for smarter grid

ENERGY
   USDA Smart Grid Funding for 14 States - press release

GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
   Public Interest Groups Ask FCC to Declare BART Actions Unlawful - press release
   From a Few Iraqis, a Word to Libyans on Liberation

WIRELESS
   How Carriers Hamstring Your Smart Phone
   Wireless Data Caps: Will They Really Cost You More? - analysis
   Deutsche Telekom: US staffing not linked to AT&T deal
   Google takeover pays off for Motorola employees, too
   ITIF sides with LightSquared on GPS spectrum issues [links to web]
   The Internet May Soon Include All of the Things Around You - analysis [links to web]
   Nokia Siemens projects a five-fold increase in spectral efficiency beyond 4G

INTERNET/BROADBAND
   Broadband, the poor relation among utilities - op-ed

PRIVACY
   The Leaky Nature of Online Privacy - analysis
   Internet advertisers begin offering new Do Not Track icon [links to web]
   It’s official: Google wants to own your online identity - analysis [links to web]

KIDS AND MEDIA/EDUCATION
   Google Shuts Kids Out of Email Accounts [links to web]
   Project Classroom: Transforming Our Schools for the Future [links to web]
   FCC ruling brings e-Rate funding to more applicants
   Hacking scandal costs News Corp a contract [links to web]

ADVERTISING
   Four key things Google admitted to the Feds

CONTENT
   Motorola Deal Means Google Controls Digital Pipeline - analysis
   How Google plans to change the way you watch TV [links to web]
   A Cloud over Ownership - analysis
   At Last, a Label Goes Digital [links to web]

BROADCASTING
   Fairness Doctrine Demise Gives Rise to the Public Interest - op-ed

RESEARCH
   Hispanic Media: Faring Better than the Mainstream Media - research
   Libya, Irene, Quake Led News - research [links to web]

COMPUTERS
   PC market: a price battleground - analysis

MORE ONLINE
   Twitter hires Hill, FCC veteran Crowell to head global policy [links to web]
   Workforce one of three keys to Army's cyber future [links to web]
   For Google CEO Larry Page, a Difficult Premiere Role [links to web]

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EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS

IRENE KNOCKS DOWN CELL SITES
[SOURCE: nextgov, AUTHOR: Bob Brewin]
Hurricane Irene knocked out 6,500 cellular communications sites in four states from Virginia to Vermont, where 44 percent of the sites remained down August 29, the Federal Communications Commission reported. Neil Grace, an FCC spokesman, said 35 percent of the cell sites in Connecticut, 31 percent in Rhode Island and 25 percent in Virginia were down in the wake of the storm. Wired phone lines serving 210,700 customers were out, along with cable TV service for 1 million subscribers, Grace added. Army coordination officers continued to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Northeast, as Vermont faced the worst floods in 75 years due to rains spawned by Hurricane Irene and outages in the power grid that could take weeks to fix.
benton.org/node/88248 | nextgov
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COVERAGE INTERRUPTS ADS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Stuart Elliott]
The effects of Irene — as hurricane, tropical storm or wet and wild troublemaker — had marketers, agencies, media companies and retailers scrambling all weekend and into the new workweek. By some estimates, Irene became the most disruptive news event for advertising plans since Sept. 11, 2001. Tens of millions of dollars of commercials and print advertisements were canceled or postponed to accommodate the decisions by television, radio and newspaper executives to devote sustained coverage to the storm. For instance, in New York City, television news programming was continuous on stations owned by the national networks. They pre-empted regular network and local programming for more than 36 hours. “We weren't paying attention to the revenue stream during the height of the storm,” said Peter Dunn, president and general manager of WCBS-TV, Channel 2. “We did run a couple of breaks, but it was very, very little compared with what we normally run.” “When you’re in the heat of it, you want to make sure to get the best coverage to viewers,” said Mr. Dunn, who is also president of the CBS Television Stations division of the CBS Corporation. “Then you think about making advertisers whole.”
benton.org/node/88261 | New York Times
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IRENE COVERAGE
[SOURCE: The Christian Science Monitor, AUTHOR: Gloria Goodale]
Hurricane Irene never reached above a Category 3 hurricane as it moved up the eastern seaboard. But media coverage of the storm easily reached Category 5 proportions. The situation is complicated, say disaster experts, meteorologists, and media pundits. For every excess, there are examples of lives saved and property protected. To media critic Tom Cooper, weather emergencies are one topic where media excesses are acceptable, even welcome. But former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh says the coverage went too far, and this has its own consequences. "This far outstrips any coverage of a much more devastating hurricane, namely Katrina," he says. "The official response to that hurricane may have been bad, but the media coverage was not.”
benton.org/node/88259 | Christian Science Monitor, The
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OVERBOARD ON IRENE?
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: ]
Once Irene was gone, the media was hit by a storm of criticism over the build-up to the hurricane. Media organizations defended their coverage, in some cases angrily. Networks took cues from public officials, like when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered unprecedented evacuations and a full-scale public transportation shutdown in the nation's largest city.
benton.org/node/88258 | Associated Press
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NEED FOR SMARTER GRID
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Katie Fehrenbacher]
Hurricane Irene wasn't exactly the raging monster that some forecasters expected, but it has left millions of people across a whole bunch of communities in the dark, and potentially without power for days, and even weeks, at a time. The outages due to major storms like Irene could likely be far shorter, and could be easier and cheaper to fix after the next-generation of smart grid technology is installed. ComEd has said publicly that if smart grid technology had been in place for previous storms this summer, the impact of those storms would have been minimized. Smart grid tech can allow utilities to know when specific customers are without power without the customer having to call the utility, and digital automation tech can also reroute power to customers in need.
benton.org/node/88249 | GigaOm
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ENERGY

USDA SMART GRID, TRANSMISSION SYSTEM IMPROVEMENTS TO CREATE JOBS, BENEFIT CONSUMERS IN 14 STATES
[SOURCE: Department of Agriculture, AUTHOR: Press release]
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that rural electric cooperative utilities will receive funding for smart grid technologies and improvements to generation and transmission facilities. These loans will benefit more than 19,000 rural consumers in 14 states. The $900 million in loans are provided by USDA Rural Development's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to help electric utilities upgrade, expand, maintain and replace rural America's electric infrastructure. RUS funding will help build nearly 1,500 miles of line and improve more than 1,700 miles of existing line in rural areas. More than $19 million will finance smart grid technologies. USDA Rural Development also funds energy conservation and renewable energy projects.
benton.org/node/88244 | Department of Agriculture | White House blog
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GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS

FCC PETITION ON BART
[SOURCE: Public Knowledge, AUTHOR: Press release]
On August 11, 2011, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), anticipating protests and demonstrations in its stations, shut down access to cellular communications, disrupted mobile phone and data service to a massive number of consumers for up to four hours. On August 29, Public Knowledge, along with a coalition of other public interest organizations, urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to immediately find that BART violated federal law and to clarify that local government agencies may not interfere with access to mobile phone networks.
In the petition, the groups said, “The Commission must act immediately to clarify that local governments do not have blanket authority to interrupt access to [mobile phone] networks. Allowing local governments to interrupt access to wireless communications networks threatens the stability of the network, endangers public safety, and infringes the right of members of the public to access the phone system.
The groups also noted that it has been settled law for decades that local government agencies have no authority to shut down mobile phone service on mere suspicion of illegal activity without due process.
In addition to Public Knowledge, the following groups signed on to the petition: the Broadband Institute of California, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Media Justice, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Media Access Project, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.
benton.org/node/88230 | Public Knowledge | read the petition | PK blog | WashPost | The Hill
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ON FREEDOM
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Michael Schmidt]
Democracy is not just the absence of oppression, but that it also involves challenging concepts of tolerance, compromise and civic responsibility yet to take root in Iraq, or in Libya. What emerged in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government was a society of everyone for themselves, individually and in small groups, grabbing for what they could get — literally, through looting, and eventually through the political process. This has made many Iraqis weary of the chaos of Iraqi-style democracy. Increasingly, they want a strong hand — elected by the people — to wield power. Some advice: Do not trust expatriates who rush back to stake a claim in the new government. Avoid a parliamentary system. And do not ostracize members of the former regime, as happened in Iraq under the so-called de-Baathification policy. Libyans should be wary of freedom of speech. In Iraq, they are now free to express themselves, which they could not do under Saddam Hussein. But this right is almost useless because the government is not responsive to the public.
benton.org/node/88267 | New York Times
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WIRELESS

CARRIERS HAMSTRING PHONES
[SOURCE: Technology Review, AUTHOR: Christopher Mims]
A team at the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research has uncovered, for the first time, the frequently suboptimal network practices of more than 100 cellular carriers. By recruiting almost 400 volunteers to run an app on their phones that probes a carrier's networks, the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent. They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers.
benton.org/node/88218 | Technology Review
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WIRELESS DATA CAPS
[SOURCE: PCWorld, AUTHOR: Megan Geuss]
Unlimited data plans are going extinct, and users are wondering how they can avoid paying higher fees for their Web-surfing and Facebook-checking habits. In July, Verizon Wireless became the most recent carrier to switch from $30-per-month "all you can eat" data pricing to tiered data pricing. To see what effect the move to tiered pricing is likely to have on everyday users, we asked ten subscribers with smartphones to look at how much data they've been using per month for the past few months. Most of the respondents found that they hadn't been exceeding the 2GB data cap; but the larger their phone's screen was, the more data they tended to use, simply because those phones do a better job of streaming video and audio, and are easier to use for recreation and for checking email. For now, if you're already a Verizon customer with a data plan, you can keep the unlimited-data provision of your contract until you upgrade to a smartphone from a feature phone. Even then, you can keep your $30-per-month plan, but you'll pay extra if you use more than 2GB per month. At the moment, it appears that most smartphone users don't consume more than 2 GB, meaning that most Verizon customers won't see a change in their fees under the new plans. But as phones get bigger screens, 4G networking capabilities, 3D gaming systems, and other features in the near future, many people will be tempted over the 2GB line by the improved experience.
benton.org/node/88216 | PCWorld
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T-MOBILE CUTTING STAFF?
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Peter Maushagen]
Deutsche Telekom said it had not been cutting jobs at its US arm T-Mobile USA in anticipation of the unit's sale to AT&T, as reported by a German online magazine. "In the past 12 months the workforce has been reduced by 2,000 but that is in line with normal fluctuations." The U.S. unit employs 36,000 people at present.
benton.org/node/88207 | Reuters
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GOOGLE-MOTOROLA GOOD FOR EMPLOYEES
[SOURCE: Crain's Chicago Business, AUTHOR: ]
CEO Sanjay Jha isn't the only one who's going to make out on his $12.5-billion sale of Motorola Mobility Holdings to Google. The all-cash deal also will provide a long-awaited reward for Motorola employees who survived the double whammy of recession and restructuring. Motorola Mobility accepted a $40-a-share offer last week from Google. That should put employees whose stock options have been worthless into the black. In June 2009, Motorola allowed employees to exchange options at a rate of roughly 2.25 old ones for one new one. After Motorola Mobility separated from the public-safety business known as Motorola Solutions Inc. in January, those options were priced at $24.24 each, for a potential 39% gain. Some unvested options and restricted stock awards will be exchanged for Google stock, according to securities filings. Becoming a Google employee also will have its perks. Google, whose shares have traded between $450 and $639 over the past year, likely will hand out options and restricted stock as incentives to keep Motorolans in key positions in the fold.
benton.org/node/88199 | Crain's Chicago Business
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SPECTRUM EFFICIENCY
[SOURCE: Connected Planet, AUTHOR: Kevin Fitchard]
When wireless industry experts point to huge capacity increases in the future, they’re usually talking about adding carrier bandwidth, not increasing the overall efficiency of the network. Future technologies like LTE-Advanced achieve much of their enormous speeds by layering on more spectrum, aggregating carriers into monster 100 MHz-wide configurations that can support 1 Gb/s connections--they build more lanes in the spectral highway rather than make the cars go faster. The reason for this is because wireless engineers have started bumping against a limit—called Shannon’s Limit after Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon—that prevents them from packing any more useful data into a hertz of spectrum before any capacity gains are lost to noise. With long-term evolution and high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) technologies, the industry almost reached that limit. Most of the future capacity gains we read about come not from building more efficient pipes, but from building fatter pipes through carrier or from laying many more pipes. Small cells, for instance, mean that the same spectrum can be re-used in more places, while multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technologies send parallel but separate transmissions over the same airwaves. In a new white paper, however, Nokia Siemens Networks explores technologies and techniques that would boost network spectral efficiency between four and five times than that achievable in the LTE networks being deployed today, not by overcoming the Shannon’s Limit, but by sidestepping it. According to NSN’s engineers, no individual wireless link can exceed Shannon’s barrier, but the spectral efficiency of the overall system can. By building a network in which multiple cells interact with one another and turn the individual cells’ weaknesses into a system-wide strength, vendors will be able to design networks with an overall spectral efficiency greater than the individual links within it.
benton.org/node/88257 | Connected Planet
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

BROADBAND AS UTILITY
[SOURCE: ZDNet, AUTHOR: Phil Wainewright]
[Commentary] Broadband Internet is supposed to be a utility — many people even say it’s a human right. But the providers don't see it that way when you move house. I arrived in my new home a week ago. There was energy and power. The water was flowing. None of these presented any problem whatsoever. It was just a matter of changing the customer names on the accounts and reading the meters. But it was a different matter when it came to communications. The phone was disconnected and there was no prospect of broadband Internet until almost two weeks away. That length of wait to get service delivered does not in my view merit the title of a utility, with its connotations of reliable, always-on provision. What irks me most of all is that I, like a growing number of other people, work from home and the broadband connection is critical for that work. Everyone is up-in-arms when there is so much as a two-hour outage of an online service such as Amazon or Microsoft BPOS. Routinely inflicting two-week outages on economically significant workers like this ought to be a national scandal.
benton.org/node/88206 | ZDNet
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PRIVACY

ONLINE PRIVACY
[SOURCE: Slate, AUTHOR: Kevin Gold]
The day when we all sport stress monitors is probably not looming. But we may already be unintentionally volunteering that information. Recent research by Ming-Zher Poh, Daniel J. McDuff, and Rosalind Picard of that same Affective Computing Group has found that pulse information can be gleaned from a basic webcam. It turns out that blood changes the skin's color slightly with each pulse, in a way that can be recovered from a video signal using a technique called independent component analysis. Though the technology has not yet proven itself outside the lab, where controlled lighting conditions can make such analysis easier, it is not hard to imagine that pulse could be recoverable from video recordings of normal teleconferences. Pulse therefore joins the long list of information that we are leaking all the time over the Internet without really knowing it. It's clear at this point that anybody can take a photo of you and post it on the Internet; once it's there, it is nearly impossible to remove all copies. But increasingly, pattern recognition software has made it possible to learn about someone not based on what he has shared about himself but by examining what his friends have made public.
benton.org/node/88255 | Slate
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KIDS AND MEDIA/EDUCATION

MORE E-RATE APPS FUNDED
[SOURCE: eSchool News, AUTHOR: ]
Several hundred more e-Rate applicants will get funding for the wiring, routers, switches, servers, and other equipment needed to bring high-speed Internet access into classrooms, thanks to a decision from the Federal Communications Commission. Granting a petition from e-Rate consulting firm Funds For Learning (FFL), the FCC on Aug. 22 directed the Universal Service Administrative Co. (USAC), the agency that administers the e-Rate, to issue funding commitments for these so-called Priority Two services at the 80-percent discount level for funding year 2010. On its own motion, the FCC also reversed its previous decision to deny Priority Two funding below the 80-percent discount level and directed USAC to make available funds for Priority Two requests at all discount levels. That means all 2010 e-Rate applicants whose requests are eligible for e-Rate discounts will receive funding—marking only the second time in the program’s 14-year history that USAC will be able to fund internal connections for all eligible applicants.
benton.org/node/88204 | eSchool News
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ADVERTISING

GOOGLE AD DECISION
[SOURCE: PCWorld, AUTHOR: John Mello Jr]
In one of the largest settlements of its kind in U.S. history, Google agreed last week to pay the U.S. government half a billion dollars for allowing its advertising system to be abused by Canadian Internet prescription drug peddlers illegally importing their wares into the country. The size of the settlement wasn't the only eye-opener in the case. The settlement agreement contained some surprises, too, especially in some admissions made by the company whose motto is "Do no evil." Here are four of them.
Google knew Canadian pharmacies using its AdSense advertising platform were illegally selling prescription drugs to U.S. consumers and improperly assisted the drug peddlers in doing it.
Although Google knew the Canadian pharmacies were illegally selling drugs to Americans, the settlement revealed that Google "provided customer support to some of these Canadian online pharmacy advertisers to assist them in placing and optimizing their AdWords advertisements and in improving the effectiveness of their websites."
When Google did take action against online pharmacies selling prescription drugs to U.S. buyers, it ignored the fact that the system was being beaten by some pharmacies.
Google was aware that online pharmacies were exploiting the company's keyword system to end-run its pharmacy certification program but dragged its feet in cracking down on those exploiters.
benton.org/node/88236 | PCWorld
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CONTENT

MOTOROLA-GOOGLE
[SOURCE: MediaPost, AUTHOR: Jim Courtright]
[Commentary] On the surface, one might think Google/Motorola wants to emulate Apple's success in the SmartPhone area. Not only do you create the great software, but you design the product too, like the iPhone. That went from nothing to become Apple's cash cow. It's a very lucrative business that will do nothing but grow. Now Google can make the phones and the software, too. Smart strategy. There's a lot of money there. But that's not where the really BIG money is. The real money is in controlling the digital pipeline to smartphones and home TVs. These are the current "dumb pipes" that the CellCos and ISPs deliver. With the acquisition of Motorola, Google has access to the set-top hardware technology to make those dumb pipes a lot smarter. And make Google a lot richer.
benton.org/node/88202 | MediaPost
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A CLOUD OVER OWNERSHIP
[SOURCE: Technology Review, AUTHOR: Simson Garfinkel]
Our possessions define us. Yet today the definition of possession itself is shifting, thanks to cloud services that store some things we hold dear on distant Internet servers. When those belongings reside in Netflix's video service, Amazon's Kindle bookstore, or Apple's coming iCloud service, they become impossible to misplace, and easier to organize and access than before. They also gain new powers over us, and slip free of powers we once held over them—powers that have shaped our thinking and behavior for centuries. One consequence is to give the companies that provide cloud services tremendous amounts of unchecked control over these possessions. In some cases, that control has already been abused.Despite the supposed revolution wrought by digitization, mass computing has until now left the fundamental nature of our possessions untouched. Collections of content have adorned the shelves and walls of our homes, schools, and courts since the Enlightenment.
benton.org/node/88196 | Technology Review
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BROADCASTING

FAIRNESS DOCTRINE
[SOURCE: The Huffington Post, AUTHOR: Sue Wilson]
[Commentary] On Wednesday, August 24, 2011, the Federal Communications Commission made it official: the Fairness Doctrine is dead and buried. It's not like there's been any serious talk about restoring it, (although Newt Gingrich supported the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine back in the Reagan years.) These days, the only people really talking about restoring the Fairness Doctrine were former right wing radio talk host Mike Pence (R-IN), who sponsored the Broadcaster Freedom Act , and right wing radio talkers like Sean Hannity, who have spent years on radio microphones trying to make the Fairness Doctrine a boogey man to the American people.
There is much energy around restoring the Public into the Public Interest. A grassroots movement started earlier this year in Florida, when the UU Legislative Ministry supported an 11 city media reform tour featuring Broadcast Blues. But it is really finding its legs next month with the 2011 Wisconsin Media Reform Tour featuring Broadcast Blues. (Broadcast Blues is the 2009 documentary film I made which delves into issues of public interest obligations of broadcasters.) Thanks to the organizing efforts of local folks, I'll be traveling to eight cities in Wisconsin, showing the film, then surveying citizens as to their specific public interest needs. Next, we'll work on how to approach their local broadcasters, not just by email, but with personal visits, and convey to the broadcasters what they need. In some cases, friendly visits will get great results: heck, the manager of the station could be somebody you went to high school with. But other times, protests, boycotts, maybe even legal petitions to deny the stations' licenses may need to be filed. We'll do whatever it takes to restore the public -- all the public -- into the public interest obligations of broadcasters. But unlike the Fairness Doctrine, this is a bottom up approach. This is "We the People" holding both broadcasters -- and the FCC accountable to us. We are taking back that which we already own: our public airwaves.
benton.org/node/88232 | Huffington Post, The
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RESEARCH

HISPANIC MEDIA
[SOURCE: Project for Excellence in Journalism, AUTHOR: Emily Guskin, Amy Mitchell]
Spanish-language media remain important to a changing, more acculturated, and more U.S.-born Hispanic population in the United States. And in the last year, Spanish-language media tended to fare better overall than their mainstream English-language counterparts.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the nation’s Latino population grew to more than 50 million, more than double its size in 1990, and up 46.3% since 2000.1 It is also the nation’s youngest ethnic group. The median age of Latinos is 27, while for non-Hispanic whites it is 42 and for non-Hispanic blacks it is 32. Among Latinos, a majority are bilingual. However, as births have become more important for Hispanic population growth than the arrival of new immigrants, the nation’s Latino population is also becoming more U.S.-born. All of these factors could pose a threat to Spanish-language media operations. So far though, the contrary has occurred.2
Hispanic newspapers overall lost circulation in 2010, but not nearly to the extent of the English-language press. The total number of Spanish-language newspapers remained stable.
The story in television was even more positive. Univision, the largest Spanish-language network by far, continued to grow, reaching audience sizes that compete with the three major English-language broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). In 2011, it also announced the launch of a 24-hour Spanish-language news station.
Radio is growing as well. The number of Spanish-language radio stations increased in 2010, and more Spanish-language radio companies began measuring for Arbitron, the standard method of rating radio stations.
Magazines showed improvement too, with year-over-year growth in ad spending.
On the digital front, while Hispanic Americans do not access the Internet at the same rates as other Americans, there is growth, and bilingual Latinos are already heavily online.
benton.org/node/88192 | Project for Excellence in Journalism
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COMPUTERS

PC MARKETPLACE
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR:]
Hewlett-Packard is getting out of the PC business. Exit has to be easier than competing with companies such as Acer and China’s Lenovo, the third-largest player, which are built to get by on operating margins of 1-2 per cent (in good times). Are PCs a large ($250bn in global sales) and sluggish market doomed to become a battleground for companies willing to compete primarily on cost? In a word, yes. Annual revenue growth, in dollars, has averaged under 3 per cent in the past decade, according to IDC, with price declines offsetting unit growth. So far, this year is about average; earlier optimistic shipment estimates are being slashed. Tablets are much stronger, but Apple has an iron grip on this market for now and is taking share in high-end PCs. So why stay in the business? Tech conglomerates, including HP and Dell, used to argue that selling PCs provides supply-chain muscle (the same components that go into PCs are found in higher-margin products such as servers) and add clout to the sales effort, since customers can get a full package of hardware, software and services. Now HP, with all its PC strengths, is giving up. That suggests these reasons are no long compelling enough to justify hanging around in a market entering the final stages of commoditisation.
benton.org/node/88263 | Financial Times
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From a Few Iraqis, a Word to Libyans on Liberation

Democracy is not just the absence of oppression, but that it also involves challenging concepts of tolerance, compromise and civic responsibility yet to take root in Iraq, or in Libya. What emerged in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government was a society of everyone for themselves, individually and in small groups, grabbing for what they could get — literally, through looting, and eventually through the political process. This has made many Iraqis weary of the chaos of Iraqi-style democracy. Increasingly, they want a strong hand — elected by the people — to wield power. Some advice: Do not trust expatriates who rush back to stake a claim in the new government. Avoid a parliamentary system. And do not ostracize members of the former regime, as happened in Iraq under the so-called de-Baathification policy. Libyans should be wary of freedom of speech. In Iraq, they are now free to express themselves, which they could not do under Saddam Hussein. But this right is almost useless because the government is not responsive to the public.

For Google CEO Larry Page, a Difficult Premiere Role

When Google co-founder Larry Page announced that he would take over as chief executive earlier this year, he promised that he would shake up the Internet search giant to speed up decision making. Instead, much of the shaking up has happened to the new CEO.

Challenges have piled up for Page since he assumed his post in April. They include a broad U.S. antitrust probe of the company's practices; the settlement of a long-running criminal investigation into Google's advertising business; and shifting industry forces that led him to make a deal to buy mobile-device maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. Since he took on his new role, the company's stock price has declined 9.1%, compared with a drop of 8.42% for Nasdaq stocks as a whole.

PC market: a price battleground

Hewlett-Packard is getting out of the PC business. Exit has to be easier than competing with companies such as Acer and China’s Lenovo, the third-largest player, which are built to get by on operating margins of 1-2 per cent (in good times). Are PCs a large ($250bn in global sales) and sluggish market doomed to become a battleground for companies willing to compete primarily on cost? In a word, yes. Annual revenue growth, in dollars, has averaged under 3 per cent in the past decade, according to IDC, with price declines offsetting unit growth. So far, this year is about average; earlier optimistic shipment estimates are being slashed. Tablets are much stronger, but Apple has an iron grip on this market for now and is taking share in high-end PCs. So why stay in the business? Tech conglomerates, including HP and Dell, used to argue that selling PCs provides supply-chain muscle (the same components that go into PCs are found in higher-margin products such as servers) and add clout to the sales effort, since customers can get a full package of hardware, software and services. Now HP, with all its PC strengths, is giving up. That suggests these reasons are no long compelling enough to justify hanging around in a market entering the final stages of commoditisation.

Hacking scandal costs News Corp a contract

The scandal stemming from phone hacking by the News of the World in London has cost News Corp’s newly acquired US education business a valuable contract, demonstrating the risk to Rupert Murdoch’s media group of wider political and commercial fall-out from the affair.

Thomas DiNapoli, New York State comptroller, has rejected a $27m contract the state had planned to award to Wireless Generation, a News Corp-owned education technology company, “in light of the significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with respect to News Corporation”. News Corp paid $360m for a 90 per cent stake in Wireless Generation last November, and the contract would have been a sizeable one for a company with reported revenues last year of about $60m. The rejection is a blow for Joel Klein, recruited by Mr Murdoch in November to set up News Corp’s education division. Mr Klein, a close counsellor to Mr Murdoch, is now leading News Corp’s response to the hacking scandal.

Hurricane News, Mostly Uninterrupted by Ads

The effects of Irene — as hurricane, tropical storm or wet and wild troublemaker — had marketers, agencies, media companies and retailers scrambling all weekend and into the new workweek. By some estimates, Irene became the most disruptive news event for advertising plans since Sept. 11, 2001.

Tens of millions of dollars of commercials and print advertisements were canceled or postponed to accommodate the decisions by television, radio and newspaper executives to devote sustained coverage to the storm. For instance, in New York City, television news programming was continuous on stations owned by the national networks. They pre-empted regular network and local programming for more than 36 hours. “We weren't paying attention to the revenue stream during the height of the storm,” said Peter Dunn, president and general manager of WCBS-TV, Channel 2. “We did run a couple of breaks, but it was very, very little compared with what we normally run.” “When you’re in the heat of it, you want to make sure to get the best coverage to viewers,” said Mr. Dunn, who is also president of the CBS Television Stations division of the CBS Corporation. “Then you think about making advertisers whole.”

Did nonstop coverage of hurricane Irene save lives?

Hurricane Irene never reached above a Category 3 hurricane as it moved up the eastern seaboard. But media coverage of the storm easily reached Category 5 proportions.

The situation is complicated, say disaster experts, meteorologists, and media pundits. For every excess, there are examples of lives saved and property protected. To media critic Tom Cooper, weather emergencies are one topic where media excesses are acceptable, even welcome. But former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh says the coverage went too far, and this has its own consequences. "This far outstrips any coverage of a much more devastating hurricane, namely Katrina," he says. "The official response to that hurricane may have been bad, but the media coverage was not.”

Did Media Go Overboard Hyping Irene?

Once Irene was gone, the media was hit by a storm of criticism over the build-up to the hurricane. Media organizations defended their coverage, in some cases angrily. Networks took cues from public officials, like when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered unprecedented evacuations and a full-scale public transportation shutdown in the nation's largest city.

Nokia Siemens projects a five-fold increase in spectral efficiency beyond 4G

When wireless industry experts point to huge capacity increases in the future, they’re usually talking about adding carrier bandwidth, not increasing the overall efficiency of the network. Future technologies like LTE-Advanced achieve much of their enormous speeds by layering on more spectrum, aggregating carriers into monster 100 MHz-wide configurations that can support 1 Gb/s connections--they build more lanes in the spectral highway rather than make the cars go faster. The reason for this is because wireless engineers have started bumping against a limit—called Shannon’s Limit after Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon—that prevents them from packing any more useful data into a hertz of spectrum before any capacity gains are lost to noise. With long-term evolution and high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) technologies, the industry almost reached that limit. Most of the future capacity gains we read about come not from building more efficient pipes, but from building fatter pipes through carrier or from laying many more pipes. Small cells, for instance, mean that the same spectrum can be re-used in more places, while multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technologies send parallel but separate transmissions over the same airwaves.

In a new white paper, however, Nokia Siemens Networks explores technologies and techniques that would boost network spectral efficiency between four and five times than that achievable in the LTE networks being deployed today, not by overcoming the Shannon’s Limit, but by sidestepping it. According to NSN’s engineers, no individual wireless link can exceed Shannon’s barrier, but the spectral efficiency of the overall system can. By building a network in which multiple cells interact with one another and turn the individual cells’ weaknesses into a system-wide strength, vendors will be able to design networks with an overall spectral efficiency greater than the individual links within it.