Research

The US is putting up relatively meager competition in a potent new global tech race that, combined with the wave of go-it-alone nationalism led by President Donald Trump, is reshaping global politics and may lead to war, according to a major new report.  In the late 1950s, the US, facing a similar momentous challenge in Sputnik, threw all its resources into a single-minded effort to dominate the future.

This toolkit provides background context for the Homework Gap, addresses broader implications of household connectivity, suggests resources for scoping the problem, and details five strategies districts are currently using to address these challenges: 1) Partner with Community Organizations to Create “Homework Hotspots”, 2) Promote Low-Cost Broadband Offerings, 3) Deploy Mobile Hotspot Programs, 4) Install Wifi on School Buses and 5) Build Private LTE Networks. In addition, it outlines four steps school leaders can take to collaborate with local governments and their community to take a bro

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters’ decisions was “science fiction.”

In today’s fast-paced and complex information environment, news consumers must make rapid-fire judgments about how to internalize news-related statements – statements that often come in snippets and through pathways that provide little context. A new Pew Research Center survey examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.

The relationship between technology platforms and news publishers has endured a fraught 18 months. Even so, the external forces of civic and regulatory pressure are hastening a convergence between the two at an accelerated rate beyond what we saw when we published our first report from this study in March 2017. Journalism has played a critical part in pushing for accountability into the practices of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, yet newsrooms are increasingly oriented toward understanding and leveraging platforms as part of finding a sustainable future.

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference-induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences.

Since 2004, Pew Research Center has issued an annual report on key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors within the US news media industry. On June 13, 2018, Pew released the Newspapers Fact Sheet. 

The economic upside of internet access is being pushed by rural broadband advocates across the country who say that there isn’t enough being done to connect rural communities.

It’s finally happening: In 2019, people around the world will spend more time online than they do watching TV, according to new data from measurement company Zenith. In 2019, people are expected to spend an average of 170.6 minutes each day on online activities like watching videos on YouTube, sharing photos on Facebook and shopping on Amazon. They’ll spend slightly less time — 170.3 minutes —watching TV. The global transition from TV to internet as the main entertainment medium was a long time coming, but it also happened faster than expected.

There is, of course, a digital divide among low-income Americans, but there is also what we at TechSoup call an organizational digital divide. Many nonprofits themselves are low-income and benefit greatly from low-cost, uncapped broadband. This is a groundbreaking study on how charities use this resource for both their staff and their clients. Nearly a third of nonprofit respondents report relying on Mobile Beacon service as their main Internet connection. A majority of respondents reported that unlimited data has allowed them to expand their program services.