Politico

The early contenders to run the Federal Communications Commission in a Hillary Clinton administration include longtime Clinton allies and donors, say sources close to the campaign.

Among the names are Susan Ness, a top Clinton fundraiser who previously served as an FCC commissioner under President Bill Clinton; Karen Kornbluh, an executive at audience measurement firm Nielsen who has deep Democratic Party ties; and Phil Verveer, an FCC official and longtime friend of the Clintons. Of course, it’s still early for a formal list, but that hasn’t stopped telecom types from coalescing around those perceived to be front-runners for a commission spot. Nearly everyone on the list is part of the Clinton campaign's network of tech advisers, which helped draft the Democratic nominee's tech policy platform.

What if the entire newspaper industry got it wrong? What if, in the mad dash two decades ago to repurpose and extend editorial content onto the Web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars? What if the industry should have stuck with its strengths—the print editions where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from—instead of chasing the online chimera?

That’s the contrarian conclusion I drew from a new paper written by H. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas and published this summer in Journalism Practice. Buttressed by copious mounds of data and a rigorous, sustained argument, the paper cracks open the watchworks of the newspaper industry to make a convincing case that the tech-heavy Web strategy pursued by most papers has been a bust. The key to the newspaper future might reside in its past and not in smartphones, iPads and VR. “Digital first,” the authors claim, has been a losing proposition for most newspapers. These findings matter because conventional newspapers, for all their shortcomings, remain the best source of information about the workings of our government, of industry, and of the major institutions that dominate our lives. They still publish a disproportionate amount of the accountability journalism available, a function that’s not being fully replaced by online newcomers or the nonprofit entities that have popped up. If we give up the print newspaper for dead, accepting its demise without a fight, we stand to lose one of the vital bulwarks that protect and sustain our culture.

Chatbots, one of the hottest trends in consumer technology, are invading the 2016 election, with Democrats and progressives deploying the artificial intelligence-powered software to do things like register voters and keep supporters engaged with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Type a question or statement to an online chatbot, and it will attempt to respond like a human would. They can be pulled up with a few key strokes on popular services like Facebook Messenger or via SMS text. Though chatbot technology has existed for years, it's entering the mainstream thanks in part to products like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo, which have quickly taught people that having a conversation with a machine isn't all that strange. Now, some in politics are trying to harness the power of bots to influence the presidential election.

Donald Trump's presidential transition team is turning to a crusader against regulation as it seeks to craft a strategy on issues like network neutrality and the future of the Federal Communications Commission, according to three sources familiar with the effort. The newly tapped aide, Jeffrey Eisenach, is a known commodity in Washington tech and telecom circles.

Dating back to his time as leader of the now-defunct Progress and Freedom Foundation, he's argued vigorously in favor of the FCC taking a hands-off approach to digital issues. While there in the 1990s, he also called for robust penalties against Microsoft during the US government's antitrust investigation of the software giant. In 2012 Eisenach arrived as a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and, in that role, he’s been an outspoken antagonist of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his policies. In his research and advocacy, often backed by tech and telecom interests, he's slammed the Obama administration's efforts on net neutrality, broadband investment and more. It also marks a shift for Eisenach, who earlier this election cycle had criticized Trump. In March, he tweeted that he wouldn’t “apologize for pulling out all stops to defeat Trump,” citing the stakes in the election. But that tweet, and others critical of the GOP candidate, have since been deleted from his timeline. He's also been the source of controversy: The New York Times in August needled Eisenach for his research and writing on issues like net neutrality, some of which has been funded by companies like Verizon and other telecom interests that oppose the FCC's rules.

Hillary Clinton comes across in the FBI interviews as a disengaged tech user who sees the communication tools as little more than a means to an end. She has, according to multiple aides, never even learned how to use a desktop computer. Clinton regularly pumped those around her for help with her devices—even those, as her long-time aide Philippe Reines joked to the FBI, whose job had “zero percent” of their responsibilities focused on IT. Reines, whose name is redacted in the FBI files but whose identity is easily discernible, “likened it to your parents asking for technical help with their phone or computer.” Except that what Clinton turned to others for help with wasn’t an Amazon purchase or reading CNN.com: She needed help managing a massive trove of communications about the inner workings of the nation’s diplomacy and national security.

Over the course of five years, those emails lived first in her Chappaqua, New York, basement, then later in a data center in New Jersey, then they were FedExed across the country and possibly copied onto a thumb drive before being printed out, sorted and handed back to the State Department in 12 bankers’ boxes. The boxes soon found themselves at the center of an FBI investigation and led ultimately to the biggest controversy to shadow Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. But it all started with the strange home server.

This is its story.

Fox News’s vice president of public-opinion research sent a memo to staff reminding employees that unscientific online polls, which were cited in several segments to suggest that Donald Trump won Sept 26’s presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, do not meet the network’s editorial standards.

"As most of the publications themselves clearly state, the sample obviously can’t be representative of the electorate because they only reflect the views of those Internet users who have chosen to participate," Dana Blanton, Fox News’s vice president of public-opinion research, wrote in the memo to the channel's politics team. "Another problem — we know some campaigns/groups of supporters encourage people to vote in online polls and flood the results," she wrote. "These quickie click items do not meet our editorial standards." "News networks and other organizations go to great effort and rigor to conduct scientific polls — for good reason," Blanton added in the memo. "They know quick vote items posted on the web are nonsense, not true measures of public opinion."

Get ready to hear a lot about the “uberfication” of user-generated content. Yes, it’s a mouthful. But it’s also the next big thing. Fresco News, a two-year-old New York start-up, sees itself becoming a hot property as it cracks the code on local amateur content generation. I first wrote about Fresco [“The Uberfication of news”] as Tronc impresario (and chairman) Michael Ferro sought to buy the company in July, amid a frenzy of efforts to find lots of cheap-to-produce content to Tronc, the websites of the newspapers owned by the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing. Tronc’s effort to buy Fresco seems unlikely to succeed, as this hot company – several sources tell me – finds itself well-courted by more stable buyers. Both 21st Century Fox and AOL have shown buying interest as well as Tronc, confidential sources say.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see even greater interest given the priority many news companies, both legacy and start-up, have been lately giving to ad-friendly, video-delivered news. Still, it appears more likely that Fresco will remain an independent company, at least for now. Simply, Fresco News now enables local TV stations to assign, receive and quickly get on air and online lots of amateur-shot newsy videos in their metro area. Its secret sauce: Uberizing the supply chain process from station assignment to Fresco “qualified” shooter to shooting smartphone video to uploading and optimizing its quality for quick delivery to consumers, online or on the air.

It took Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) four months and three weeks of “careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience” to declare publicly that he would vote for Donald Trump. He made the decision to profit by selling his supporter list to Trump far faster than that. Just six weeks after he dropped out – and more than a month before Sen Cruz would dramatically snub the nominee at the Republican National Convention – the senator quietly began renting his vast donor e-mail file to his former rival, pocketing at least tens of thousands of dollars, and more likely hundreds of thousands, that can be used to bankroll the Texan’s own political future.

An array of civil rights and tech organizations including the NAACP, New America's Open Technology Institute, the Benton Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology are urging NBC anchor and debate moderator Lester Holt (and the other debate moderators) to add a question about affordable broadband. “In the same ways that trains, highways, and telephones have long powered the way we do business and share ideas, internet infrastructure is our country’s economic driver for the 21st century,” they write, “With this in mind, voters must understand the presidential candidates’ plans for broadband access.” Clinton has set a goal of broadband for every household by 2020, while Trump hasn’t addressed the issue.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has paid his family's businesses more than $8.2 million, according to an analysis of campaign finance filings, which reveals an integrated business and political operation without precedent in national politics.

The GOP presidential nominee’s campaign has paid his various businesses for services including rent for his campaign offices ($1.3 million), food and facilities for events and meetings ($544,000) and payroll for Trump corporate staffers ($333,000) who helped with everything from his traveling security to his wife’s convention speech. In all, the Trump campaign’s payments to Trump-owned businesses account for about 7 percent of its $119 million spending total, the analysis found. That’s an unprecedented amount of self-dealing in federal politics. Even the wealthiest of candidates have refrained from tapping their businesses’ resources to such an extensive degree, either because their businesses are structured in a manner that doesn’t legally allow them to do it with flexibility, or because they’re leery of the allegations of pocket-padding that inevitably arise when politicians use their campaigns or committees to pay their businesses or families. Trump, on the other hand, appears to have structured his businesses in a way that lets the campaign use them without legal restriction. And he certainly doesn’t appear to feel any embarrassment about flouting political norms that typically compel candidates to distance themselves from their businesses during campaigns.