Blog Archives
Newspaper endowments wishful thinking?
By Kenneth Corbin | March 27, 2009The news for the newspaper industry isn't getting any better. The latest in the gloomy parade of layoffs, closures and content reductions come from the New York Times, which has grudgingly terminated 100 employees from the business side of the company's operations, and is cutting newsroom salaries by 5 percent.
This comes after the [much-bemoaned loss](http://blog.internetnews.com/kcorbin/2009/03/seattle-pi-writing-its-own-obi.html) of the printed version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and almost 90 percent of its staff), the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, the Tucson Citizen and endless anxiety of the many still to come.
We all know the story by now. People today get their information from the Internet, where they have come to expect it to be free. Print products aren't nearly as relevant in the digital age. Online advertising yields just a fraction of the revenue publishers enjoyed from the print version. Craigslist and other free sites have decimated classified revenue.
The Newspaper Association of America said yesterday that newspaper ad sales dropped nearly $7.5 billion last year.
So newspapers are sick, even dying. But what if they didn't have to compete by the same rules?
Benjamin Cardin, a Democratic senator from Maryland, earlier this week introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would make some newspapers eligible for nonprofit status.
"We are losing our newspaper industry," Cardin said in a statement introducing the bill. "The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy."
Under Cardin's bill, newspapers would still be able to sell ads, provided the ad space sold does not exceed the space allotted to fulfilling the [paper's] educational purpose," which is what would entitle it to nonprofit status.
"Thanks but no thanks," Alan Mutter writes in his Newsosaur blog. The St. Petersburg Times and the Christian Science monitor, each owned by a nonprofit, are facing the same dire straits as the rest of them, he points out.
With papers like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution losing an estimated $1 million a week (or more), the problem is too deep to be solved by tinkering with the ownership model.
"Non-profit ownership will not save a newspaper -- or any other business -- if it is consistently losing heavy amounts of money," Mutter writes.
Cardin's bill is no panacea, no silver bullet, as policy types like to say. It is a nice gesture. And it could even help some papers stay afloat, if only for a little longer until their benefactors decide, as the Church of Christ, Scientist, did, that the annual loss of millions of dollars was too great to bear. Next month, the Christian Science Monitor is slated to go to an all-digital publication format, the first national newspaper to take that step.
Still, Cardin makes the point that so many who criticize newsrooms as bloated and wasteful operations miss.
"While we have lots of news sources, we rely on newspapers for in-depth reporting that follows important issues, records events and exposes misdeeds," he said. It's easy to throw mud in their eyes for plumping up their product with softball features and bogus trend stories, but what makes the good newspapers unique and strong is in jeopardy when you start making deep newsroom cuts.
Cardin may go a little overboard when he goes on to say that "most if not all sources of journalistic information -- from radio to television to the Internet -- gathers their news from newspaper reporters who cover the news on a daily basis and know their communities."
But his overall point is well taken: "It is in the interest of our nation and good governance that we ensure they survive."
A searching and fearless spectrum inventory
By Kenneth Corbin | March 19, 2009People like to talk about wireless spectrum as the precious natural resource of the digital economy. It's valuable because it's scarce, yet critics charge that it is egregiously mismanaged by the government.
Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, today introduced legislation that would direct the FCC and National Telecommunications Information Administration to conduct an inventory of the spectrum licenses and government allocations to pave the road for more effective use of the airwaves.
"Our public airwaves belong to the American people, and we need to make certain we are putting them to good use in the best interests of those citizens," Kerry said in a statement.
The Radio Spectrum Inventory Act would give the agencies six months to complete the inventory, which would encompass all spectrum between 300 MHz and 3.5 GHz.
Broadband advocates look to wireless communications as the vehicle for delivering high-speed Internet access to rural areas.
To get a sense of the value of the spectrum, consider last year's auction, when the FCC sold off a chunk of airwaves in the 700 MHz band, fetching nearly $20 billion from communications companies across the country. Verizon Wireless and AT&T accounted for the lion's share of the bidding, together spending almost $15 billion to secure spectrum for their 4G wireless rollouts.
Consider also the pointed debate over white spaces, the buffer zones between TV channels that the broadcast lobby fought tooth and nail (citing interference concerns) to keep out of the hands of wireless Internet providers. They lost that battle, and tech giants like Google are eagerly awaiting the innovative new devices and networks that promise to bring a new class of people online.
But much of the spectrum is occupied by government agencies, and that's where critics see room for efficiencies. The Kerry-Snowe bill would direct the FCC and NTIA to compile a report on how the various branches of the government are using (or not using) their spectrum allotments. Agencies that could demonstrate compelling national security concerns would be exempt from the reporting requirement.
Third time the charm for Commerce secretary
By Kenneth Corbin | March 19, 2009The Senate Commerce Committee today voted unanimously in favor of Gary Locke's nomination for Commerce Secretary, sending the matter to the full Senate, where he is expected to clear easily.
In his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Locke [spoke](/government/article.php/3811086/Locke+Clears+Questions+on+Security+Broadband.htm) in wide generalities about the importance of broadband and government transparency in response to the softballs lobbed at him by the approving senators.
The Obama administration hasn't had an easy time filling this spot. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson stepped aside amid allegations of corruption surrounding his office. Then Republican Senator Judd Gregg bowed out over irreconcilable differences with Obama in the economy. (It became apparent that Gregg's nomination was in doubt when he abstained from the vote on the president's stimulus package.)
But in Locke, it looks like they've found their man.
"Hey, he pays his taxes," one Republican staffer told InternetNews.com. What's not to like?
Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller, D-W.V., urged the full Senate to move quickly to confirm Locke.
"The American people deserve to know that the person working with Congress and this committee every day, to determine the best way to reboot this economy, is a person who -- simply put -- gets it," he said in a statement.
Seattle P-I, writing its own obit
By Kenneth Corbin | March 18, 2009It's got to be a weird thing to have to write your own obituary.
Yet there they are in Seattle, the reporters and columnists of the now-defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer eulogizing the 146-year old newspaper as it succumbs to the digital age.
The watered-down P-I now exists only online, another major daily to shut down its printing presses and embark on what columnist Joel Connelly hopefully calls an "adventure in journalism."
Elsewhere on the P-I's Web site, readers are greeted with mournful headlines like, "The pioneering P-I slips into the past" and What led to the Seattle P-I's demise?"
The P-I was the beta paper in a two-newspaper town, competing against the larger Seattle Times. Two-newspaper towns are a vanishing breed, and it seems only a matter of time before the first major American city has no paper at all. San Francisco is on the short list.
Newspapers have been closing down for years, though of course their decline has accelerated with the gathering ubiquity and spare advertising revenue of the Web. Then the bottom drops out of the economy, the pneumonia that comes to finish off the old man laid up with a broken hip.
For those of us still with a sentimental attachment to the printed product, it doesn't seem fair. But what is?
Of course, it's all-too-easy to wail about what will be lost when newspapers are relegated to a strictly digital medium.
The P-I continue to operate with a skeleton crew (about 20 of the staff of 170 remain) as its parent Hearst Corporation tries to reinvent it as a new model of online journalism.
Monica Guzman, a 26-year-old P-I reporter who's staying on, offered this hopeful assessment to the Voice of America:
"If a story's better told through video, tell it through video... If a story's better told through audio, tell it through audio... If a story's better told through text, if it's better told through a slideshow, a photo gallery."
She added that "It seems a great medium, as long as we can make the business work."
Indeed.
John McCain submits to 'Twitterview' with ABC
By Kenneth Corbin | March 17, 2009Members of the news media have been taking it on the chin of late, first for their slowness to warm up to the Web, then for an often clumsy embrace of new media.
But never let it be said that these Blogger-Come-Latelys aren't trying. We've seen news organizations team with social networks to gloss up their coverage of things like presidential debates and elections, desperate newspapers have been doing more and more with online video, and now we're Twittering.
Which brings us to today. George Stephanopoulos, ABC's chief Washington correspondent, wrangled John McCain into a jaunty 'Twitterview' today, asking the Republican standard-bearer about his thoughts on AIG, Obama's national security policies, and his daughter's recent feud with shrill conservative firebrands Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.
It was an experiment. Stephanopoulos admitted as much when he opened his blog recapping the experience, "Today, I tried something new."
The idea itself was admirable enough. Stephanopoulos has more than 177,000 followers on his Twitter feed (McCain has more than 227,000) he could poll for suggestions about what to ask.
The AIG bailout and national security ("What worries you more: Pakistan or Iran?") seem in step with a typical Stephanopoulos interview, but the line of questioning about McCain's daughter mixing it up with the Coulter and Ingraham might has the fingerprints of the Twitter community all over it.
Either way, the interview carried the limitations inherent to the medium. Both questions and answers were short, lacking nuance and context. Hard-hitting it was not, but it was conceptual.
It is also refreshingly difficult to obfuscate behind a barrage of verbiage when you're asked a direct question and confined to 140 characters.
For McCain, the presidential candidate much maligned among the Web set for seemingly hopelessly out of step compared to the dreamy, BlackBerry-clutching, social-networking powerhouse they helped elect, it also couldn't hurt from an image standpoint.
So if no news was broken in the Twitterview, we can forgive Stephanopoulos for willing to dabble with a new form. It was a novelty, to be sure, but so is Twitter. And as long as these things captivate the public imagination, experiments like ABC's today -- and McCain's willingness to give it a go -- are to be commended, I suppose.
McCain's final tweet: "Thanks a lot george, let's do it again soon. now i look forward to reading our followers comments and insults"
Still not sure what to make of this one.
Patent reform: Round 1
By Kenneth Corbin | March 10, 2009They were at it again today, the forces of innovation and entrepreneurship squaring off against the forces of greed and legal chicanery before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Try to guess which is which.
Ah, the set of funhouse mirrors we know as patent reform. What fun!
Today's hearing was the eighth the Judiciary Committee has held in four years, with the sponsoring lawmakers getting closer to passing essentially the same bill last session than the previous. Will this be the one?
Chairman Patrick Leahy certainly thinks so.
"There is much work to do, but I am optimistic that by continuing to work together, we will find the right language," he said. "We may be closer to reaching consensus on language regarding damages and venue than ever before."
In damages lies the rub.
Small-scale inventors and companies heavily invested in industries like manufacturing or pharmaceuticals charge that the bill under consideration would effectively neuter their legal mechanism for defending their patents. And with that would erode U.S. innovation, creating an intellectual-property trade deficit where the next great leaps in tech, medicine and sundry other industries would have to be imported.
"The simple fact is that weakening our patent laws would cause a massive and irreversible transfer of wealth from the United States to foreign manufacturers," said Taraneh Maghame, vice president at the electronics firm Tessera.
The argument goes that intellectual property is one of the country's greatest home-grown assets, and that the concerns (largely raised by tech companies) of frivolous lawsuits brought by patent trolls are overblown.
From Tim Crean, chief IP officer for SAP, in praise of the committee for today's hearing:
"Patent reform is a necessary step in ensuring competitiveness and creating jobs that depend on innovative technological advancements. SAP and the tech industry at large depend on the patent system, and by restoring balance to the system, we will strengthen it."
They both want to change it, but they're pulling at opposite ends of the rope. Will this be the year they meet in the middle? Concessions are scarce, but hearings are plentiful. More certain to follow ... stay tuned.
Time to step back in the ring over patent reform
By Kenneth Corbin | March 02, 2009You knew it was coming. It was never a question of *if*; it was only a matter of *when*.
Tomorrow, the always-contentious issue of patent reform will once again take center stage in the world of tech-policy, with a bipartisan gaggle of lawmakers from both chambers planning to announce companion bills to overhaul the way the nation doles out intellectual property rights.
The press conference will see a familiar cast of characters spoiling for a whale of a fight that they very nearly won last session: Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich, and Lamar Smith, R-Texas.
Each of the four was a sponsor or cosponsor of last session's attempt, which graduated from the House but ran aground in the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the chief stumbling block emerging in the mechanisms for seeking redress from infringers.
Curiously absent from tomorrow's lineup is Howard Berman, D-Calif., who introduced the bill in the House last go around.
Patent reform is one of those great policy debates that takes a drab, bone-dry issue and plumps it up with such turgid rhetoric that by the end of the day both sides are hoarse from screeching about threats to American innovation.
The two sides drawn broadly cast large and small businesses at odds, but the debate ropes in a host of other groups, ranging from the IEEE to the ACLU.
Bigger firms like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco have championed patent reform as a way to help them shoo away patent trolls.
More like crowd out the little guy, says one outspoken advocate of individual and small-time inventors, who's taken to calling it "patent deform."
Whether they'll be able to meet in the middle this time around on things like damages and application entry barriers is anyone's guess. They all agree updating the patent system is important, only so far, they've been pulling in opposite directions. Time to lace up the gloves again.
