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July 2017

So this one time at a journalism conference…

[Commentary] Journalism has a class problem. We know this. The best internships are for students with the resources to work unpaid or with low pay in some of the most expensive cities in the country. Conferences are expensive and often hosted in expensive cities making it difficult for smaller newsrooms to send reporters. The bulk of the jobs are clustered in major metropolitan areas. That’s not to say people without means don’t make it into journalism. They do. But it’s a longer, rougher road with far fewer people making it to the end....

Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

[Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source software project to help manage the editorial process and facilitate collaboration between newsrooms. ]

Why I’m leaving 18F

[Commentary] On Election Night 2016, a few hours before the results were fully in, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I’m staying at 18F”. I felt it was important, to me, to make a decision based on principle before I knew the outcome. Earlier in July, I decided to leave government service.

They may seem completely unrelated to most, but I’ll try to explain why to me they were evidence of the same dangerous “denormalization” of our government. The first thing that happened was the release of the written testimony of the former FBI Director, James Comey. For anyone in public service to ask for the personal loyalty of anyone else in government is an affront to our core values. For the President to ask it of the FBI Director is beyond “not normal." The second thing that occurred that very same day is that the technology and design organization I have worked for since before its public launch, 18F (and the larger service we created for it and its sibling organizations, the Technology Transformation Service), is being reorganized via administrative order into the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service.

Illinois OKs end of landlines, but FCC approval required

An AT&T-backed bill to end traditional landline phone service in Illinois is now the law of the land. Overriding Gov Bruce Rauner's (R-IL) veto, the General Assembly approved the telecom modernization bill on July 1, enabling AT&T to disconnect its remaining 1.2 million landline customers statewide, pending approval from the Federal Communications Commission. But holdouts may have some time before AT&T pulls the plug for good on its legacy telephone service.

"It's important for our Illinois customers to know that traditional landline phone service from AT&T is not going away anytime soon," said Paul La Schiazza, AT&T Illinois president. With customers switching to internet-based and wireless phone services, AT&T has been pushing for legislation to allow it to unplug its aging landline network and focus on the modern alternatives. AT&T said it is losing about 5,000 landline customers statewide each week, with less than 10 percent of Illinois households in its territory still using the service. While AT&T ultimately needs approval from the FCC to abandon a long-standing obligation to maintain its "plain old telephone service," it has already gotten similar legislation passed in 19 of the 20 other states where it is the legacy telephone carrier, with California as the only holdout.

In Circa, Sinclair sees a way to attract “independent-minded” millennials (and Sean Hannity)

The old Circa, launched in 2012, was a mobile news app with some interesting ideas — primary among them that the traditional article should be broken up into bite-sized atomic units of news, which could be rearranged, amended, or transformed depending on the story and the reader. It featured an innovative alerts system build around individual story updates, got great App Store reviews, and was appealing to Silicon Valley. When news industry conversations of that time turned to the most interesting innovations, Circa was always on the list; their offices were a regular stop for news executives looking for new ideas.

But in the end, Circa couldn’t attract a broad enough audience and couldn’t raise enough funding; it shut down in 2015. Later that year, the company found a buyer: Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country’s largest owner of local TV stations.

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