Future of Media Project Eyes More Outsider Studies

Additional workshops or a field hearing on the initiative are possible, after two workshops this year, commission officials including Waldman said. Some at the FCC, including Commissioner Michael Copps, hope there will be additional events to gather public input, an agency official said. Waldman said the speakers at the last workshop, on public media (CD May 3 p3), indicated there may be a consensus within public broadcasting that its programming should include local news and information. “There is a lot of hot, interesting discussion going on there about how to reinvent themselves and what role local news and information plays in that is a hot topic,” he said in an interview. Many online local news start-ups, some of which are non-profits, share “the same goals as public media players,” he added.

The FCC staffers spending part of their time on Future of Media work, those like Waldman devoting all of their time to it, and outside “freelancers” helping to prepare memos on certain areas are entering the next phase of work on the initiative in that parts of the report are starting to be drafted, he said. “Literally in the last week we started to do very early stages of writing in the background section,” which may form the first part of the final document, Waldman said. “It’s fair to say we are still researching, but we are starting the beginning stages of writing some of the background and thinking about writing some of the recommendations” and reading through initial public comments -- which were due early this month in docket 10-25. “It’s still mostly a research mode” with more of that being done by staffers and contract employees, including interviews with those in media, Waldman said.

What Waldman called a descriptive section may follow the background portion of the final report, describing trends in online and traditional media and policies and regulation affecting it. The report likely will end with recommendations to be executed by the FCC and “elsewhere,” since some of the report will cover areas outside the commission’s jurisdiction, Waldman said. The report may lay out “how should we be thinking about this now, what should we do,” with “a mix of things for the FCC and recommendations that will be for other policy makers,” he continued. “We're definitely very focused on coming up with concrete recommendations” and perhaps saying what can be done by regulators -- akin in a way to how the National Broadband Report detailed how its recommendations could be followed up on, Waldman said.

Waldman foresees a “fairly rigorous effort to get further input and vetting from throughout the agency, including from staff and commissioners’ offices” before the Future of Media project is done. “We've kind of been doing it along the way,” since “a decent chunk of the work is being done by various bureaus,” he added. “People have been sort of donating labor from various bureaus” and this project isn’t like the broadband plan in that it didn’t hire many outsiders to work full-time on the project, he said. “There are a whole lot of people working on it in bits and pieces,” with freelancers writing memos that may be completed in the next two months, Waldman said. “In certain pockets of areas where we thought we needed more research or a little more in-depth expertise or on the-ground-reporting, we're going to do some contract work.” Professors including Ellen Goodman of Rutgers University, Peter Shane of Ohio State University and James Hamilton of Duke University lent expertise, Waldman said.

With many studies on media done in the past 12 months by “all sorts of entities” outside the commission, Waldman said he will have a lot of research to work with. A Pew Research Center study on media consumption in Baltimore, mentioned in the notice for the FCC media ownership review (CD May 26 p6), is one such report, Waldman said. An ongoing study by the Michigan State University and one that the New America Foundation hopes to expand to cover additional cities are other research efforts that Waldman expects to mention in the Future of Media report, he said.

The MSU study of media coverage of city council meetings in about 100 markets is being finalized, so underlying data could be available in a month, said Prof. Steve Wildman. The research, which will cover August 2008-August 2010, includes radio and TV stations, local newspapers and websites, he said. “We're developing a very large data set that can be used for other studies,” he said of the multiyear research on coverage of local politics. “The focus is to look at the nature of coverage of local government and public affairs by all local media.” The New America Foundation submitted studies of Scranton, Pa., and Seattle in its initial comments on the Future of Media proceeding and may do as many as 10 more similar studies of other markets, said Tom Glaisyer, a fellow there. “We want to get a cross-section” of the U.S.” with “both cities and rural” areas, he said. “This is not a D.C. view.”