Bloomberg

In the past three years, Tribune’s 42 stations have added 170 hours a week of local news programming, for a total of more than 80,000 hours annually. Tribune executives said in a May earnings call that they expect to increase political ad business by 20 percent this year from 2012 Local newscasts across the nation have already reaped an estimated $279 million in revenue from political ads since Jan. 1, or about 40 percent of the money spent on ads across broadcast and national cable television, according to Kantar Media, which tracks ad spending through its Campaign Media Analysis Group. “People who watch local news are more likely to vote in the same way that if I watch sports on TV I’m more likely to buy a ticket,” says Will Feltus, senior vice president at National Media, a Republican ad-buying firm. Saturation coverage has another benefit, he says: “Campaigns are never going to complain about having too many spots on the local news because they want to see themselves. All of the donors to the campaign, the candidate’s family and friends, and the people around the campaign all watch the local news.”

The increase comes as local news viewership is falling. Since 2007 the average audience for late-night local news fell 22 percent, according to a June report from the Pew Research Center. Viewership in the morning and early evening decreased by 2 percent from 2014 to 2015, while viewership of early-morning newscasts has increased by the same amount. Adding news programming is attractive to station managers because it’s usually cheaper than buying syndicated shows to run in the daytime hours. That’s a concern for stations that aren’t affiliated with ABC, CBS, or NBC. “If you’re a Big Three, you’re getting 12 to 14 hours a day from the network,” says Larry Wert, president for broadcast media at Tribune, where only about a quarter of stations are affiliated with one of those three networks. “If you’re a Fox station, you’re really getting two hours plus sports.”

The Democratic National Committee was warned in the fall of 2015 that its computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the security advice it was given, apparently. The missed opportunity is another blow to party officials already embarrassed by the theft and public disclosure of e-mails that have disrupted their presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia (PA) and led their chairwoman to resign.

Computer security consultants hired by the DNC made dozens of recommendations after a two-month review, apparently. Following the advice, which would typically include having specialists hunt for intruders on the network, might have alerted party officials that hackers had been lurking in their network for weeks -- hackers who would stay for nearly a year. Instead, officials didn’t discover the breach until April. The theft ultimately led to the release of almost 20,000 internal e-mails through WikiLeaks on the eve of the convention.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler intends to stay in his job until the middle of 2017 if presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wins the White House, apparently. Chairman Wheeler has avoided any public pronouncements about when he might leave the agency. Apparently, Chairman Wheeler has told telecommunications industry insiders privately about his plans for 2017.

Staying until mid-2017 gives Chairman Wheeler a better shot at wrapping up several big-ticket agency initiatives, sealing his legacy as an activist chairman. Chairman Wheeler is hoping to finish several controversial agency proposals before he leaves the chairmanship, including rules impacting the business broadband market, broadband privacy related to his network neutrality rules and a complex auction to shift spectrum licenses from television broadcasters into the hands of mobile carriers hungry for more airwaves. A mid-2017 time frame could also be just what a Clinton administration would prefer, apparently. Chairman Wheeler technically could serve out his full five-year commission term, which doesn't end until Nov. 3, 2018. That is not likely; according to conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, a Clinton loyalist is expected to take the helm of an agency that has grown from relative obscurity to playing a prominent policy role in the Obama Administration.

Google just paid for part of its acquisition of DeepMind in a surprising way. The Internet giant is using technology from the DeepMind artificial intelligence subsidiary for big savings on the power consumed by its data centers, according to DeepMind Co-Founder Demis Hassabis.

In recent months, the Alphabet unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said. The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, "which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment," he said. The savings translate into a 15 percent improvement in power usage efficiency.

[Commentary] Schools, healthcare providers, libraries and other anchor institutions are the gateway to the community. These non-profit and governmental organizations increasingly provide essential Internet services to students, patients, patrons and underprivileged people. But their ability to meet these community needs depends on being able to obtain affordable, high-capacity broadband connections that often do not exist, especially in rural and non-competitive markets.

The 2010 National Broadband Plan Goal #4 called for every community to have affordable gigabit level broadband to anchor institutions by the year 2020. While we have made significant progress in the last six years, there is much more work to be done to meet that goal. The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB Coalition) will be releasing an important Broadband Action Plan for Community Anchor Institutions on Wednesday, July 13. One of the most important recommendations of this Action Plan is the need to rein in the prices for special access services, also called “business data services.” Communities are clamoring for better, faster, more affordable broadband to support their public institutions. As we’ll outline in our Grow2Gig+ Action Plan, we believe addressing a lack of competition in business data services is an important step forward. We have the opportunity to dramatically improve teaching and learning, to offer equal and ubiquitous access to broadband for our communities and begin to reach goals we have set for ourselves.

[John Windhausen is Executive Director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition]

According to published reports, ESPN pays roughly double what the three broadcast networks do for the rights to air National Football League games, $1.9 billion per year.

ESPN aired the fewest games, with only 17. But unlike the other networks, which have to share the fans’ attention on Sundays, ESPN owns Monday -- a weeknight in prime time.

Not surprisingly, Monday Night Football is the highest-rated show on cable television and the highest-rated show for young men. ESPN has been able to pass along its additional costs to the cable operators -- which, in turn, pass them to the customer to the tune of $6/month/subscriber.

The bad news for the privacy-conscious is that big Web companies and dozens of startups have begun testing or using cookie alternatives that are often more difficult to spot or disable.

These programs “don’t have consumer controls already there,” says Lou Montulli, who invented the cookie 20 years ago and is now a co-founder of Zetta, a cloud storage startup. “Once they go into effect, consumers have no ability to turn them off.”

Some programs track users by their IP addresses; others look at users’ operating systems and other factors. Startups are promising advertisers that they can deliver, without cookies, data comparable to what the big Web companies collect.

Millennials are chucking their checkbooks and cash. EBay’s mobile-payment tool called Venmo handled $314 million in mobile payments in the first quarter of 2014, up 62 percent from the prior quarter.

The broader mobile-wallet market was slow to catch on with a wide audience. Yet, the rising use of peer-to-peer applications among 20-somethings is improving the prospects for adoption of all kinds of smartphone-based payments.

China Mobile rose to the highest in six years after saying it will cut $2 billion from the subsidies that help consumers in the world’s largest market pay for smartphones from Apple and Samsung Electronics.

“With fewer subsidies, consumers may opt for cheaper devices made by local producers in favor of those sold by Apple and Samsung,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts John Butler and Matthew Kanterman said.

Carl Icahn, who disclosed a new activist stake in Gannett, had planned to mount a campaign to separate the company’s print and broadcasting businesses before Gannett beat him to it.

He still wants to talk with management. Icahn Associates acquired about 6.6 percent of Gannett’s shares and options during the second quarter, with the belief that “value could be created by splitting the issuer into separate print and broadcast companies,” the fund said.