January 2012

Turn on the local news or a country music station and you cannot miss them: political ads insisting why one candidate (probably Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich) is a political charlatan.

Then there are the more flattering ones that compare candidates to lionized figures of the conservative movement like Ronald Reagan. The airwaves in South Carolina are already thick with commercials from the Republican candidates, who are engaged in an intense competition for the attention of South Carolina voters. All of them are using their ads to try to establish their conservative credentials, but with major differences.

News Corp.'s Fox unit joined the battle to buy the Dodgers, signing a nondisclosure agreement with bankers handling the sale of the storied baseball franchise, according to people with knowledge of the process.

The move formally makes News Corp. a potential bidder for the Los Angeles team, and it is the latest indication that the company, which owned the Dodgers from 1998 to 2004, plans to do whatever it can to hang onto the team's valuable media rights. People familiar with the media conglomerate's strategy say News Corp. doesn't want to reclaim full ownership of the team. Rather, Fox is looking to become a minority investor to improve its chances of keeping the team's television rights. The people say the company is interested in a 15-20% stake and is also offering to use its resources to help finance an acquisition of the team.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial online piracy bill, could force President Barack Obama to choose between two of his most important allies: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

President Obama hasn’t taken a position yet on the legislation that has divided senior lawmakers in both parties, but that will have to change if it clears Congress. If President Obama signs the bill, he will dash the hopes of Silicon Valley executives who donated heavily to his 2008 campaign and are vehemently opposed to the anti-piracy measure. But the entertainment industry would see a veto as a betrayal by the Administration on its most significant priority.

Charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds (64%) of American adults now use text messaging, and 9% have texted a charitable donation from their mobile phone. And these text donors are emerging as a new cohort of charitable givers.

The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors –which analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign after the 2010 earthquake—finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks. Three quarters of these donors (73%) contributed using their phones on the same day they heard about the campaign, and a similar number (76%) say that they typically make text message donations without conducting much in-depth research beforehand. Yet while their initial contribution often involved little deliberation, 43% of these donors encouraged their friends or family members to give to the campaign as well. In addition, a majority of those surveyed (56%) have continued to give to more recent disaster relief efforts—such as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan—using their mobile phones.