Welcome to the Free Press blog! We post several times a week on everything from Internet access to free speech to media mergers, so check back often to see what we’re up to.
On Monday, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and CNN criticized veteran newsman Dan Rather for his recent call for a White House commission on the future of journalism and public media.
It was a misguided criticism of Mr. Rather, who has called for the commission as a way to bring attention to the crisis facing American newsrooms (20,000 newspaper jobs lost in the past 18 months alone), and to create the political will necessary to get our elected leaders to address the problem.
"U.S. carriers are some of the most backward, unscrupulous and anti-customer companies in the nation," writes Mike Elgan of IDG News Service. And he tells us why in a list of the 10 best reasons to hate your mobile network provider.
If you’ve glanced at the news these past few months, you know that the future of the Internet, the fate of quality journalism, the movement to expand local radio, and our right to communicate freely in the United States are all hanging in the balance.
Wish there were someone keeping it all straight for you? There is.
We’ve already shared with you our vision for journalism’s future. This weekend Dan Rather shared his. But what’s yours?
Today, we launched a poll designed to give you a chance to share your vision for the future of the news, and to let us know how changes in journalism are affecting your community. We want your help in shaping this campaign, and we need you to reshape public policy in Washington, D.C.
At last month’s American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, I served on a Sunday morning panel presentation on the topic of Network Neutrality. On that day, there was no Network Neutrality legislation in Congress (like there is today, thanks to Reps. Markey and Eshoo).
The business of gatekeeping has blown up in Apple and AT&T’s faces, as more and more tech bloggers, developers and iPhone users vent their rage against the blocking of access to new applications on mobile networks.
In late July, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather sent murmurs through the journalism world when he called on President Obama to form a White House commission on public media and journalism.
His plea couldn’t be more timely. As news outlets crash and burn and “investigative journalism” becomes a historical relic for the next generation to read about on Wikipedia, Rather said media reform must become a national priority because “a democracy and free people cannot thrive without a fiercely independent press.”
Earlier this year, some Stop the Cap! readers in North Carolina who attended the hearings on a pro-telecom (actually it was written by them) piece of legislation designed to stall statewide municipal broadband competition encountered strange protests from conservative groups arriving on buses.
