Author: Paul
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Links from the Dec. 21 Radioshow
On this evening’s radioshow John referenced a blog post by Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge’s Policy Blog: Let’s See If the FCC Is Serious About Stopping the Next Media Consolidation. And don’t miss John’s Enforcement Action Database for 2007 at DIYMedia.net.
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Mark Cooper on the FCC’s Cross-Ownership Decision
The Consumer Federation of America‘s Mark Cooper is arguably one of the smartest guys looking out for the public interest in media law and regulation. He has a very broad and deep understanding of the law and economics and how it applies to the spheres of policy and regulation. The Columbia Journalism Review interviewed him…
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The Gospel of Kevin Martin
Media Access Project’s Harold Feld has written an interesting analysis of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s history of positions and decisions. Feld claims that Martin’s approach is very consistent, marked by a brand of free-market pragmatism he calls “First Church of the Market — Reformed”: Like most Republicans, Kevin Martin is all about the deregulated free…
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Congress Says, Let’s Screw Up Broadcast Radio, too
Never doubt the power of the lobby. Despite all the public uproar over the rising royalties levied on online radio broadcasters, paid to the recording industry, Congress is now considering putting similar royalties onto traditional broadcast radio. The fact that no royalties are paid by radio stations to the owners of the “performance” on a…
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Newspaper-TV Combos & Lawsuit On the Way
As expected, the FCC today voted down party lines to all but eliminate the cross-ownership rule [see PDF of the press release]. It was a last-ditch rush job by Chairman Martin since his lame duckness is about to set in with the end of the Bush administration. In his statement [PDF] Martin strenuously tries to…
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Easier Listening
I just installed a simple little Flash-based mp3 player over at the radioshow site so that you can listen to each week’s show without having to download it or mess with an external player. Let me know if you like or dislike it. If you like, you can listen to this week’s show right here:…
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FCC Ready to Rumble on Tuesday
The FCC’s having a big meeting this Tuesday, Dec. 18. The biggest item on the agenda is Chairman Martin’s attempt to rush through the near-total dissolution of the newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban. It’s a plan he only revealed to the public and his fellow commissioners last month. As a result the public interest community, many Congresscritters…
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Free DivX Pro for the Holidays
I’m not the biggest fan of DivX because it’s not terribly useful for web distribution of video — especially if your audience isn’t particularly computer savvy. Nevertheless, DivX Pro is not a bad tool for compressing videos into the DivX codec, which is good for getting pretty high near-DVD quality video onto CD-Rs and such.…
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Fresh Air Double-Ender Correction
Last week I noted in a post about my interview with Michael W Dean that the NPR program Fresh Air uses the same kind of recording method that we used. What we did was talk over Skype but record our own voice locally. Then Michael sent me a file of his audio and I edited…
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Conference Video: Making Effective Online Video for Education
I moderated a panel on educational video at the Streaming Media West conference this past November, and video of that session is now up for viewing online at ScribeMedia.org. I was very impressed by the panelists, each of them bringing a unique perspective on the question of what makes effective online video for education. I…