November 2012

As Sandy Bashes the Northeast, Emergency Communications Remain Flawed

More than 11 years after the September 11 attacks exposed the inadequacies of U.S. emergency communications networks, Hurricane Sandy strikes a nation still plagued by incompatible and incomplete emergency systems.

“If Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 happened today, the results, from a communications standpoint, would largely be the same,” says Vanu Bose, CEO of Vanu, a wireless communications company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who served on a committee that wrote a federal report on spectrum allocation this summer. “Maybe in the next five to 10 years we can actually solve the problem.” During the September 11 attacks, problems included police and fire units using different communications channels—a factor that contributed to the deaths of some firefighters who didn’t receive evacuation messages (see “Communicating in Crisis”). Similar interoperability problems, as well as poor communications between different levels of government, plagued the response to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005. Despite the explosion in commercial mobile communications in the ensuing years, a nationwide data-capable emergency network is still unbuilt, with many agencies instead using voice-only systems that aren’t always compatible with one another.

Storm Poses First Major Test for NJTV News Coverage

Hurricane Sandy was the first major test for NJTV, which WNET, the New York public broadcaster, has operated since July 2011. The change occurred after Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), despite criticism, dismantled the New Jersey Network, the state’s public broadcasting operation.

The network’s public radio stations were sold to WNYC of New York and WHYY of Pennsylvania, and the contract for the television operation went to WNET. Critics said they feared the outsiders would not devote resources to cover New Jersey. Many of those critics did not respond or declined to comment on NJTV’s storm coverage. For its newscasts, NJTV turned to its three reporters and a freelancer. They used rented $30,000 backpacks with live uplink capabilities and cellphones to file reports. The backpacks had been rented for NJTV’s election coverage. “We don’t have the money to buy them,” said John Servidio, general manager of NJTV. NJTV also relied on the New Jersey News Commons, a nascent coalition for online news — commercial, nonprofit and volunteer — based at Montclair State University, in Montclair. The school was an unsuccessful bidder for the NJN television operation, but since then has created a campus hub for statewide news coverage. NJTV and WNYC are basing operations there.

Outages Highlight Worries on Phone Networks

Local officials and first responders in storm-battered coastal New Jersey faced a daunting task last week: communicating with stricken residents whose cellphones and cable-company landline phones didn't work. The failure highlights regulators' concerns about the reliability of communications networks as more people switch entirely to cellphones or get landline service from their cable-TV providers. Those networks are governed by few federal rules or guidelines aimed at ensuring their dependability, and the telecom industry has fought off such oversight even as it has heavily promoted its wireless-service plans.

New York scrambles to reconnect

Since Oct 29’s electricity outage, the telecoms companies who keep their systems at New York’s two main technology hubs, 60 Hudson Street and 111 Eighth Avenue, two giant art deco brick buildings, have been scrambling to keep power flowing into the city’s vital telecommunications nerve centers.

“This is where all the transatlantic cables come into,” said Jock Percy, chief executive of Perseus Telecom outside of 60 Hudson Street. “This and 111 Eighth Avenue are the two most important buildings in the US. They’re probably the busiest now too.” Outside the brick and brass façade of 60 Hudson Street, a series of gas companies ferry emergency supplies to the building. For the first two days after the storm, workers carried buckets of gasoline up the stairs by hand to hungry power generators. Now that one of the building’s elevators is working, they move barrels of gas to the building’s upper floors, then take the stairs back down to conserve power.

Facing an Election Night Clamor

The media are gearing up for election night, the finale of the year’s biggest story. It’s a chance to regain some credibility — presuming, of course, that television networks and other news organizations get their state-by-state projections right. They all say they will, still mindful of the mistakes made in 2000, when the networks prematurely called Florida for Al Gore and then George W. Bush. The same precautions that were put in place after 2000 will be in place again on November 6. Different this time will be the level of noise on the Web, where armchair and professional pundits alike will react to the election results in real time.

Any Way You Describe It, 2012 Campaign Spending Is Historic

As relentlessly as the candidates have courted voters, they've also shown their love to donors. A recent report by the Center for Responsive Politics places the total cost of the 2012 elections at an estimated $6 billion, which would make it the most expensive election in U.S. history.

President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney both rejected federal public financing — another first — and each of them collected nearly as much as the entire field in 2004. That's largely due to many of the Watergate-era laws limiting campaign money that have been nullified or circumvented. The 2012 presidential election cycle marks the first since Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that swept away key restrictions on money from corporations and the wealthy. Each side had its strength. President Obama's four million small donors have contributed online or even by text message. At the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, analyst Bob Biersack says it's not just about technology — or liberals. "There's nothing partisan about it," Biersack says, "You have to have some kind of spark." Meanwhile, Romney's big-money backers also have been making contributions of a million dollars or more, often in secret, to superPACs and so-called social welfare organizations.

Local advertisers long to reclaim airwaves

Swing state voters can proudly cast their ballots knowing that their votes may actually count in the presidential election. But the price of that privilege is an onslaught of political campaign ads, sometimes so heavy that political ads fill every slot of a commercial break, particularly on local television news broadcasts. These ads have crowded out staple local advertisers, like car dealerships and furniture stores. And the high demand has sent prices soaring, meaning local businesses must pay huge premiums to advertise during peak campaign season.

Many have sat it out, both because of the high cost of ad time and out of a desire not to be mixed in with political ads that may anger viewers. Come Nov 7, those political ads evaporate, but that doesn’t mean thing are back to normal in broadcast advertising. “Still the rates are gonna be a little higher than normal,” says Karen Ashworth, a media buyer at Virginia ad firm Barber Martin. “I don’t think that they’re gonna go down until January.” Part of this is because of the holiday season, when ad rates typically rise. But mainly, there’s pent-up demand from advertisers who didn’t get on air during the race.

Media Firms Signal Sluggish Ads

Warning signs from several big advertising companies late last month about a significant slowdown in ad spending puts the spotlight on U.S. media-company earnings due this week.

CBS, Time Warner, Discovery Communications and News Corp, all of which have significant advertising exposure through their TV networks and other media outlets, will report for the September quarter. Analysts looking for clues about the state of the ad market are likely to closely scrutinize their results, along with any comments company executives make about the fourth quarter. Executives are likely to indicate the expected impact of Hurricane Sandy. Some TV stations broadcasting news coverage of the storm cut their advertising drastically or went ad-free for a couple of days last week. The superstorm's total impact on the advertising market could be a revenue loss of about $500 million, or 1% of the volume for the fourth quarter, estimates Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser. The overall ad climate this year has been lackluster, despite the strong boost provided to TV advertising by the election. During earnings reports for the second quarter, over the summer, media executives blamed the Olympic Games for soft ad-revenue growth, saying that much of the available ad spending had been shifted to NBC during the Games, hurting competing media companies. At that time, executives, in general, were cautiously positive about the third quarter. In late September, Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said at a conference that the ad market looked "a little better," but "there's not yet resurgence."

FTC gives groups time on Do Not Track

The Federal Trade Commission supports attempts by Web browsing companies, advertisers and privacy groups to develop industry standards on Do Not Track technology and wants to see ongoing talks play out before backing a legislative solution. At the same time, the FTC isn’t taking a position on a fight between stakeholders about whether to make DNT a default setting in Web browsers, even as Microsoft butted heads with Yahoo last month over its announcement that it would turn on those signals by default in the next version of Internet Explorer.

The officials said during a meeting Nov 2 that they’re trying to support consumer privacy by stepping in when they think companies have gone over the line and promoting values like transparency and choice across the online ecosystem. That includes the agency’s work with Internet stakeholders to design a system whereby consumers have a choice about where their data goes, although that has been a “two steps forward, one step back” process, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said. Discussions among World Wide Web Consortium members about Do Not Track standards seem to be moving forward, the officials said, and the FTC wants to nurture that process.

Fight Builds Over Online Royalties

The debate playing out in Washington has echoes of a presidential race. One side says businesses will suffer unless the government steps in to lower costs. The other accuses jet-set industrialists of a ploy that will cheat the middle class. These attacks, however, are not between candidates for the White House. They are being made in a battle over the obscure but increasingly vital issue of royalty rates for streaming music online.

The issue pits the survival of Pandora Media and other Internet radio services against the diminished paychecks of musicians in the digital age. This fight has raged on and off for more than a decade, and it was renewed recently with a bill in Congress that would change the way digital royalty rates are set. But with streaming music starting to account for a significant chunk of the music industry’s revenue, and Pandora now a scrutinized public company, the issue has touched a nerve as never before.

Benton

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