The FreePress’ Save the Internet initiative covered a new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) today and shared the video above. Josh Levy of the FreePress reported, “Bristol, Va., Chattanooga, Tenn., and Lafayette, La.— built next-generation broadband networks that deliver a faster, more affordable Internet than their corporate competitors.”

Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Telecommunications as Commons Initiative said that all three cities offer gigabit service throughout the community. Additionally, “these publicly owned networks have each created hundreds of jobs and saved millions of dollars,” said Mitchell. The full text of the ILSR report can be found here, as well as more information at the Community Broadband Networks initiative.

On Oahu, Kokua Wireless is smaller version of community broadband. It describes itself as “a private network that has joined forces with the City and County of Honolulu and Private Business sponsors, to create free access to the internet via Wifi across the island.” There is also a map of where the service can be accessed, and at what data rate. Statewide, the Hawaii Broadband Task Force is using their own broadband map to collect data on usage and areas in need of service.

Today, the New York Times reported that the FCC is following it’d due diligence by fining broadcasters without properly kept public inspections files, by delivering justice to the Columbia University radio station seven years late. NYT‘s Ben Sisario reported “WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University, has been fined $10,000 by the Federal Communications Commission over a lapse in its record-keeping from 1998 to 2005.”

The Times also sourced David Oxenford, a lawyer familiar with this area. “There are some big station owners who get hit with these fines,” he said, “but by and large, the bulk of these are small stations that have small staffs, and this obligation just gets overlooked.”

Last Friday, Honolulu’s Civil Beat took the public file inspection to task with this report, where the intrepid reporters visited stations and obtained the files. They’re ‘intrepid’ because getting these files isn’t always so simple, as some Cleveland-area college students recently found out. While the FCC recently mandated broadcasters in the top 50 markets to make the public files data available online, Honolulu is just outside of the top 50. CB reporters share sympathies with ProPublica‘s similar effort on the issue called ‘Free the Files.’  Daniel Victor and Justin Elliot are covering this issue, and have recently noted that formatting problems won’t allow the public file data to be easily searchable.

It seems like the FCC is headed in the right direction on this, but at the moment they’re a just a few steps behind the times.

Photo by Ryan Ozawa

Last night, shortly after their show on HPR, Ryan Ozawa and Burt Lum, lead the first Sunlight Foundation Hawaii Chapter meet-up. The Sunlight Foundation is a”non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, and provides new tools and resources for media and citizens, alike.” The meet-up came on the heels of the state’s Office of Information Management and Technology of their strategic plan release. In particular, conversation and dialogue from the chapter meet-ups will be added to the OIMT’s public forum on how to better their services.

In other government offices, the City & County of Honolulu’s recent work with Code for America and the CityCamp are examples practical, day-to-day data usage. The Honolulu 311 and Da Bus smartphone apps are indicators of this work to make public data available and put to work for citizens. Since the bar has been raised by the city, now it’s time for the state to reach up and raise it.

A goal of the Hawaii chapter is to work with with government agencies to make their public data sets more easily accessible and searchable online. While a number of government documents exist online, scanned PDF files are difficult to extract data from, or translate into a usable format for data collection and public comprehension. For example, making the Campaign Spending Commission data more easily available online, has allowed programmer Jared Kuroiwa to create an innovative campaign donor database. With infographs and clean search quires, users are able to see which organizations are funding candidate campaigns, and possibly influencing policy decisions.

The Media Council’s interest in the Sunlight Foundation Chapter stems out of our efforts to get broadcast political Ad data online and with greater availability to the public. The Sunlight Foundation is studying this area, as Pro Publica‘s Justin Elliot mentioned in last week’s episode of On the Media. Elliot cited specific problems with the FCC’s recent decision to require broadcasters to put this information online:

There was an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation looking at where the top 50 broadcast markets are compared to the swing states, and they found that in some markets in Virginia, some markets in Pennsylvania that are expected to see a lot of political advertising, they don’t fall into the top 50. Those political ad files are still gonna be stuck in paper files at the stations until 2014, when all stations around the country have to come into compliance.

Hawaii is both not in the top 50 markets, and something of a swing state during elections, allowing our broadcasters the ability to evade this rule until the next election cycle. We’re currently developing a methodology to collect this data from local broadcasters and share it. We’ll keep you posted on this project and our involvement with Sunlight Foundation Chapter. Also, if you’d like to participate in our station visits and data collection efforts, please let us know.

The two new Commissioners, Jessica Rosenworcel and Agit Pai, bring a wealth of experience, expertise and collegiality to their posts. I know Jessica best because she worked in my office as Senior Legal Advisor during part of my tenure there. She brings a depth and breadth of telecommunications knowledge perhaps unprecedented in scope for a new Commissioner. Both new Members hold great promise for distinguished service at the FCC.

Read the rest of his entry here at Benton Foundation.

UNESCO Director-General Ms Irina Bokova

In a joint message with UN Secretary-General, Mr Ban Ki-moon,  Bokova said, “Freedom of expression is one of our most precious rights. It underpins every other freedom and provides a foundation for human dignity. Free, pluralistic and independent media is essential for its exercise.”

UNESCO leads awareness of World Press Freedom Day, and has a rich trove of resources on their site. According to the Bokova’s statement, “last year, UNESCO condemned the killing of 62 journalists who died as a result of their work.” Also highlighted by UNESCO is that in our current age of digital storytelling, “more online journalists, including bloggers, are being harassed, attacked, and killed for their work.”

While the ease of collecting and sharing news has become more ubiquitous with devices like smartphones, protecting communicators has not. Harvard’s Nieman Lab has a great post on this issue today by Civil Beat contributor, Adrienne LaFrance, that helps to explain why. LaFrance wrote,

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, has given these kinds of questions a lot of thought over the years. In 2005, he founded Global Voices, a network of hundreds of bloggers around the world who work to redress “inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media.”

“It’s really hard to organize a campaign for every blogger who gets in trouble with the law,” Zuckerman told me this week. “In part because often you don’t get arrested for blogging, you get arrested for something else.”

Yet, “regardless of the regard you may or may not have for the news media,” said vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, Gene Policinski in a column recently. “Pause for a moment…to honor those who gave their lives or their liberty so that others might better know about the world around them.”

Below is the Newseum’s interactive Map of World Press Freedom.

The information about ad sales is already contained in so-called public files, which stations are required to store at their offices. Moving the files online was described by the commission’s chairman, Julius Genachowski, as a “common sense” step toward transparency.

This is considered a victory to many such as FreePress, ProPublica, and former FCC researcher Steven Waldman. Though, as Stelter reported, there is still some dissent from the National Broadcast Association. They said,

“By forcing broadcasters to be the only medium to disclose on the Internet our political advertising rates, the F.C.C. jeopardizes the competitive standing of stations that provide local news, entertainment, sports and lifesaving weather information free of charge to tens of millions of Americans daily.”

Keep an eye on the FCC.gov page for updates on when the information will go live.

Beverly Deepe Keever

Media Council Hawaii, along with 16 other community organizations are appealing to the state legislature on SB 2858.  In her OpEd at Civil Beat today, UH Manoa Professor emerita Beverly Deepe Keever explained problems with the bill. She said there are “portions of the bill that would permit a government agency to go to court to contest an official agency’s decision compelling disclosure to the public of a record to which the law entitles it.” We agree.

“Retaining FOIA in the existing bill,” said Keever. “Would unnecessarily weaken OIP’s powers, waste limited resources of OIP and other agencies, and make it even more difficult for citizens to obtain government records in a timely manner.

Read the complete OpEd here and follow the bill here.

via Savethenews.org

Earlier this month, Clear Channel announced a targeted partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters Of New York City. Five stations donated “over $1 Million in media to attract new “Bigs” to mentor city’s youth,” according to the release. “The campaign will highlight the real need for mentors,” said Clear Channel. “With a targeted focus on African American and Hispanic men in their early 20s to mid-30s, and aid the organization in matching volunteers (“Bigs”) with children in the program (“Littles”) to facilitate positive relationships that will have a direct and lasting effect on the lives of young people.”

Clear Channel Media and Entertainment owns 850 radio stations across the U.S., in 150 cities. In Hawaii,  Clear Channel owns seven stations, including KSSK. Last October, Clear Channel cut dozens of employees, “raising fresh concerns about the homogenization of radio programming,” said New York Times media columnist Brian Stelter.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) describes itself as, “a non-partisan, non-profit, media advocacy and civil rights organization created to advance American Latino employment and programming equity throughout the entertainment industry and to advocate for telecommunications policies that benefit Latinos and other people of color.”