Media Bits & Bytes - All the News That Fits Edition
July 31, 2012

Published by Portside

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New News in New Orleans
by Cameron Mcwhirter and Keach Hagey

Wall Street Journal
July 27, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577551262563081728.html

National Public Radio, the University of New Orleans, and a
group of business and community leaders are creating a
nonprofit newsroom to compete against the city's for-profit
newspaper, the Times-Picayune. The planned operation, funded
by memberships, donations and sponsorships, will have a staff
of 10 to 20 and produce news for the Web, mobile devices and
radio. The announcement comes two months after the Times-
Picayune's owners, Advance Publications Inc., said it would
cut staff and reduce print publication to three days a week
this fall.

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Ford Foundation gives Washington Post $500,000 grant for
government-accountability reporting
by Andrew Beaujon

Poynter Institute
July 30, 2012

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/183327/ford-foundation-gives-washington-post-500000-grant-for-government-accountability-reporting/

On the heels of a $1 million grant to the Los Angeles Times to
"focus on the Vietnamese, Korean and other immigrant
communities, the California prison system, the border region
and Brazil," The Ford Foundation has awarded $500,000 to The
Washington Post to expand its government-accountability
reporting. The grant will be used to work on special projects
related to money, politics and government. It is part of a
Ford initiative to experiment with "new approaches to preserve
and advance high-quality journalism."

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So, who really did invent the Internet?
by Michael Hiltzik

Los Angeles Times
July 23, 2012,

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-mo-who-invented-internet-20120723,0,5052169.story

Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page
reopens the ancient debate over who invented the Internet, by
calling its government origins an "urban legend." But he's
wrong. My book, "Dealers of Lightning" bolsters, not
contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in
ARPANet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency based at the
Pentagon. ARPANet was very much the precursor of the Internet as we know it today. Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities...

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Bain Capital Owns Clear Channel (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,
Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Etc.)

The American Dream
January 13, 2012

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/bain-capital-owns-clear-channel-rush-limbaugh-sean-hannity-glenn-beck-michael-savage-etc

Clear Channel owns more radio stations (850) than anyone else
in the U. S. and they also own Premiere Radio Networks, the
company that syndicates Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn
Beck, among others. So they basically own conservative talk
radio. Who owns Clear Channel? Well, it turns out that Bain
Capital is one of the primary owners of Clear Channel. So if
you have been wondering why so many conservative talk show
hosts are being so incredibly kind to Mitt Romney, this just
might be the answer.

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WikiLeaks Reopens Channel For Credit Card Donations, Dares
Visa And MasterCard To Block Them Again
by Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff

Forbes.com
July 18, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/07/18/wikileaks-reopens-channel-for-credit-card-donations-dares-visa-and-mastercard-to-block-it-again/

After 18 months of having its funding nearly completely cut
off by a payment industry blockade, WikiLeaks says it's
finally found a new workaround that allows it to receive
credit card donations again. The Fund for the Defense of Net
Neutrality (FDNN) has agreed to accept donations on behalf of
WikiLeaks, through the French payment card system Carte Bleue.
WikiLeaks claims that Visa and MasterCard are contractually
obligated to allow payments through Carte Bleue, and thus are
prevented from blocking the donations as they've done in the
past. After a legal victory against Visa in Iceland, the group
is literally daring the card companies to shut down payments
again.

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ALEC Wants to Disconnect You
by Alec Dubro

Working America - Main Street Blog
July 7, 2012

http://blog.workingamerica.org/2012/07/17/the-real-alec-alec-wants-to-disconnect-you/

AT&T and Verizon have been waging a stealthy, but amazingly
successful, lobbying campaign in statehouses across the
country to end public regulation of landline phones. In at
least four states you no longer have the right to have a phone
installed in your house, 20 states have ended or limited
conditions on carriers, and 14 more states are considering it.
This hits rural America particularly hard, especially in areas
where wireless is spotty and broadband speeds are already low.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the tool of
the right wing and the Koch Brothers, is helping AT&T and
Verizon bulldoze their way through state legislatures. But a
coalition, including the Communications Workers of America
(CWA), the Working Families party, and the AARP managed to
stop the bills aimed at lost jobs and service cut-offs for
"less profitable" customers-disproportionately senior, rural,
or low-income customers who use basic phone service."

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Washington State will enable voter registration via Facebook
by Cyrus Farivar

Ars Technica
July 17, 2012

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/07/washington-residents-to-be-able-to-register-to-vote-via-facebook/

The State of Washington will become the first state in the
nation to offer voter registration via Facebook. In 2008, the
Pacific Northwest state became just the second in the union to
offer online registration. Today, Washington and 12 other
states offer online voter registration. This week, a new
Facebook app created by Microsoft (a Washington company,
naturally) will provide a new interface to let voters access
the on-line MyVote system that they already use, to pull their
name and date of birth from their Facebook profile. After
that, it operates exactly as it does if they're not in
Facebook. Washington hopes to make it as easy as possible for
voters to register, and online registration is not only more
efficient for voters, but it's cheaper, too.

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Big data and the changing economics of privacy
by Jeff John Roberts

Paid Content
July, 11, 2012,

http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/11/big-data-and-the-changing-economics-of-privacy/

There was a time when only people with money could hire a
detective to dig into someone's life. Now, dozens of companies
have sprung up that will prowl into a person's past for as
little as $2. This shift illustrates a fundamental change in
the economics of privacy --- it has become cheap and easy to
pry into the lives of others, at the same time protecting our
own lives has become time-consuming and expensive.

This article looks at two companies - one that sells your data
and another that protects it - to show the business and policy
lessons of this new reality.

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The Most Important Tech Company You've Never Heard Of
by Reyhan Harmanci,
BuzzFeed Staff

BuzzFeed.com
July 2012

http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/the-most-important-tech-company-youve-never-heard

A Delaware-based company that didn't exist 20 years ago has
quietly become one of the major players in surveillance
infrastructure - but totally under the radar. Meet Neustar,
one of the most important companies you've never heard of.
Information about every cell phone in the country is in a
Neustar database, and over 400 telecommunications companies go
to Neustar when they want to outsource law enforcement data
requests.

Neustar isn't a wireless carrier, it is one of a number of
companies in plain sight that work in the background. The
company was originally a department inside aerospace giant
Lockheed Martin, but now they have their hands in many
different pots, outsourced surveillance being only one of
them.

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Free access to British scientific research within two years
by Ian Sample, science correspondent

Guardian (UK)
July 15, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research

In the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the
invention of the internet, the U.K. government is ready to
unveil controversial plans to make publicly-funded scientific
research immediately available to anyone for free by 2014.
Under the scheme, research papers paid for by the British
taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and
individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the
world. The move reflects a groundswell of support for "open
access" publishing among academics who have long protested
that journal publishers make large profits by locking research
behind online paywalls.

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