Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity is giving a Berkman lunch about the Media Tracker project. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, missing things, getting things wrong. You can always hear the entire talk at Media Berkman.]

In 1934, the Fed Communications Act was passed and the FCC was created. It got authority over radio and the Bell system. "So, for many years you had effectively two sides of the FCC: The wireless side and the wired side." The past couple of decades has made that much messier. Drew's group watches the FCC.

He shows the Media Tracker. Type in a zip code and it searches 5 million records and it shows the which media are available there, including TV radio, cable, broadband and newspapers. IT shows that for 94306, Clear Channel has 13 stations. Media Tracker provides three different views and lots and lots of detail, including type of license and parent company. And, of course, you can slice by media company as well, seeing not only how many outlets they own, but also how much they've donated to each political rep. Then you can click on a member of Congress to see all the contributions she's received from individuals and companies in the media sector. (Here's Google. Here's Comcast.)

The Media Tracker is part of the Well Connected project which also includes blogs, investigative reports, and the telecom portal at Congresspedia.

Drew also talks about FCC Watch, still in beta. But the work they've done on the 700MHz auction gives a taste of what's to come. They scrape the ex parte summaries every hour to see who's lobbying which commissioners. (Frontline is the most active lobbyist on this issue, followed by the CTIA .) You can click all the way through to see the summary of a particular lobbyist's phone calls to a commissioner. You can easily see who, say, Chairman Martin is meeting with.

Q: You're familiar with Connect Kentucky...?
A: Connect Kentucky has gained a lot of traction in the past year, for some good reasons. It's a state-led initiative, housed in a non-profit. It started out to get tech deployed in deprived communities. They connect data about broadband availability. It'd be good to also know about competitors, speeds, and prices. Drew would like to build a system for tracking all of this nationally.

Q: (ethanz) I'm dumbstruck to find out that companies are required to register every telephone call their lobbyists make. But what are the data sets that you can't get? What are the crown jewels that should be available and aren't?
A: 1. Broadband competition, speed, and price. 2. More detailed reporting about the Congressional lobbying. 3. Do that for the states as well . 4. Likewise for lobbying disclosure for international.

Q: (jpalfrey) We've been interested in a distributed app that you download onto your PC. The ONI is interested in this as a way of gathering data about which sites are being filtered, but you could do this for speed tests as well. It'd have three checkboxes: Check for malware, check for filtered sites, and check speeds.
A: eCorridors has a distributed speed test (using NDT, an open source network diagnostic tool) that does something similar.

Q: (doc) How about harnessing the power of the crowd?
A: We want to do that.

Q: (me) Has the ONI thought about having say, Google Tools include its reporting sw as an opt-in? It could also gather Dave's data.
A: ONI has so far only aimed at "gold standard" data. But we have a project for developing this distributed software, which would provide useful data but not totally trustworthy.

Q: [missed it]
A: This is both a journalism effort and a citizen data effort.

A: Newspapers will be gone in 20 years. It's time to play taps and move on. We have to think creatively and work collaboratively in some new ways. It has a bright future but a very different future.