Lauren Frayer

Earned media continues to deliver big benefits for media and entertainment brands, largely due to high-interest news viewing. Recent news concerning the presidential election and possible Russian connections with the White House are driving strong viewer and TV news content activity.

Looking at just TV networks, for the month of April so far, Fox (which would include all its brand associations) registered $224 million in media value for the month and a 97 score. CNN registered a media value of $150 million and an overall rating of 97. MSNBC, had $10.6 million in media value and an 86 rating overall. The Washington Post has produced $386.7 million in media value -- the highest amount of any news organization -- and a 96 score. The New York Times produced $216.7 million in current media value, with a 97 score. The Wall Street Journal came in at $19.6 million with a 95 rating.

[Commentary] Examples of the political divide in the US abound. But how the media conducts its business in this country should also be partly blamed for the political rift. The problem isn't that journalists have opinions, but rather that the standard media business models – daily news for traditional media and talk radio like Rush Limbaugh's and Sean Hannity's programs – drive some media to the left and others to the right, leading large segments of their respective audiences to become caught in media bubbles. What is needed are media businesses that break out of the bubbles, employ contributors, involve consumers of different mindsets and make the consumers, not drama, central to the action.

[Mark Jamison is the Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida]

Prices charged by cable operators for broadband services will double over the next several years, offsetting declines from broadband saturation and erosion of linear pay-TV services, says New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin. In a note sent out to investors, Chaplin noted that while cable operators continue to steal high-speed internet marketshare from telephone companies, cable companies' rate of Internet service provider customer growth is actually slowing. Chaplin said customer growth came in at 6.4% in the fourth quarter of 2016, down both year-over-year (from 6.9% in Q4 of 2015) and sequentially (down from 6.9% in Q3 of 2016).

With the Federal Communications Commission's forward incentive auction now complete, providers who won licenses have differing amounts of new 600 MHz spectrum to bring to market. But the amount providers paid for those licenses varied wildly, with some companies paying more than 10 times as much per license as other companies in certain cases.

Big providers like AT&T and T-Mobile generally paid the most, as these companies had no bidding credits to lighten the cost. But that doesn't tell the full story, as AT&T spend almost eight times as much as T-Mobile spent per license even as the latter took home a whopping 1,525 new licenses. AT&T, meanwhile, obtained just 23. For small providers, here defined as those pulling in under $55 million in revenue, the results were similarly uneven. Channel 51 paid far and away the most for each of its eight new licenses, while Omega Wireless, with 119 new licenses, got away paying under $1 million for each one. Of course, the playing field in this case was somewhat skewed, as small providers got a scaling credit depending on their revenue size.

For more broadband choice, encourage your elected officials to make these three things happen:

1) Allow Smaller Providers to Lease Infrastructure. Regulators seem to believe that this is too radical an idea for the US, despite the fact that until 2005, DSL internet providers had to lease their wires.
2) Improve Access to Utility Poles: Mandating one touch make-ready is perhaps the most important thing that local, state, and federal governments could do to help smaller internet providers expand their footprints.
3) Streamline the Right-of-Way: Gathering all the necessary permits to cross state lines or build on public property can also take months or years, and require talking to countless agencies. Those permitting processes are in desperate need of streamlining.

To meet the E-rate competitive bidding requirements and submit a timely FY2017 funding application, applicants were required to submit their E-rate Form 470 by April 13, 2017. The Form 470 notifies potential vendors that schools and libraries are in the market to purchase goods and service with E-rate discounts. For the third year in a row, the number of applicants posting Form 470s has declined.

The overall count was down 13% from 2016. The two groups that have seen the biggest change are individual schools and small libraries, although participation is down among all applicant types. The reduced number of applicants likely stems from (1) the phase down of support for telephone service (previously the most requested service) and (2) USAC’s difficult-to-use online portal (EPC). It remains to be seen whether the reduction in Form 470 applicants will translate to lower demand during the Form 471 filing window, but the initial indications are that the number of funding requests is likely to be lower in 2017.

The two lawmakers most responsible for rolling back landmark internet browsing privacy protections were richly rewarded by telecommunication giants. Verizon, AT&T, Cox Enterprises, the US Telecom Association, and CTIA, the trade association for the major cell phone carriers, appeared to single out the original sponsors of the repeal resolution — Sen Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and House Communications Subcommittee Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) — for particularly generous campaign contributions.

A Verizon political action committee filing shows that most lawmakers received between $500 and $1,000 from the firm during the first three months of this year. But Sen Flake received $8,000 and Chairman Blackburn received $4,500. Chairman Blackburn received $5,000 from the CTIA, the most of any House member. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) only received $2,500 from the group during the same time period.

President Donald Trump spent the Monday after Easter slamming a favorite target: the media. Every story written by “the fake media” is “badly slanted,” President Trump tweeted. “The Fake Media (not Real Media) has gotten even worse since the election. Every story is badly slanted. We have to hold them to the truth!” the president wrote on Twitter.

President Trump earlier in the morning hit the media over how it had covered a recent House special election in Kansas, where Republican Rob Estes defeated Democrat James Thompson by 7 percentage points. The previous incumbent, now-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, had won his most recent race in the conservative-leaning district by more than 30 points. But President Trump said the media had given the race too much attention when it appeared it was close and not enough after Estes pulled out the win. "The recent Kansas election (Congress) was a really big media event, until the Republicans won. Now they play the same game with Georgia-BAD!" Trump tweeted.

The Low-Power Television (LPTV) Spectrum Rights Coalition has declared legal war on the Federal Communications Commission's post broadcast incentive auction repack. "Bring on the Legal Cases," said the coalition in an e-mail April 14 rallying the troops. LPTV stations were not allowed to participate in the auction—outside of Class A stations with protections similar to full powers—nor were the translators that extend the reach of TV station signals. The coalition, whose members comprise holders of LPTV and translator licenses, was reacting to the FCC's April 13 announcement of the new channel positions for stations in the post-incentive auction repack, the official end of the auction and the official beginning of that move of 957 stations to new channels, some displacing unprotected LPTVs and translators. "For 5 years we have kept our powder dry, and have not been in the courts. We knew we could not win those cases, and did not even try," said coalition director Mike Gravino. "But the repack is different." Gravino signaled the coalition would use whatever means necessary.

[Commentary] In only 15 years, American newspaper companies slashed their workforces by more than half — from 412,000 employees in 2001 to 174,000 in 2015. But that troubling trend wasn’t on the minds of journalists at the Charleston Gazette-Mail last year as they dug deep into the prescription-drug epidemic that was inflicting mortal wounds on their community. No, what motivated them was the West Virginia paper’s unofficial motto: “Sustained outrage.” That phrase, coined by former publisher Ned Chilton, “means a lot to people here,” executive editor Robert Byers told me last week, shortly after the 37,000-circulation paper won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The family-owned paper (Chilton’s daughter is the publisher now) has a newsroom staff of about 50. “Sustained outrage” is vitally important. So is keeping it alive.