Droning On, or Not

So we got our first drone/videocamera system a while back (at UTK's School of Journalism & Electronic Media), just before the FAA came out with its restrictions on drone use.  And checking with the University's legal office, they initially said we should limit use to over University property; then said better not use it until FAA figures out rules.  And so it's been on a shelf in our equipment room for the last year.

It's not that we, and other journalism programs, don't see the potential of drones to gather information and images.  One early application of drone journalism was its use to cover the aftermath of Alabama tornadoes in 2011. [The FAA started an investigation of that "unauthorized" drone usage, arguing that it violated its regulations (as yet, no public announcement of actions)].

On the international front, the Bangkok Post used drones to cover the political protests last year, Meanwhile, drones are finding widespread applications in filmmaking - especially documentaries (where drones offer significant cost savings over renting helicopters) - and other uses related to imaging (real estate) and monitoring (disaster relief, agriculture, etc.).   Drones are proving to be potentially very useful tools, albeit with real concerns about potential loss of privacy, or damages from drones hitting things (power lines, other aerial vehicles, even people). There's certainly enough to keep a few academic drone journalism centers occupied.

In the meantime, the FAA has banned most commercial drone use, while it works out its concerns and develops drone-specific rules.
In the meantime, this summer's seen an emergence of interest in drone journalism - based on some really good examples internationally, and a spate of horrified reactions when a (thankfully false) report surfaced that celebrity-news outfit TMZ had applied for a license to operate drones (to peek into celebrity homes and back yards).  The report was false, but the renewed interest in the ability to use drones in news gathering isn't.
 A number of "drone journalism" programs and centers have developed at University journalism programs. The initial problem they all face is getting permission to actually use drones for news gathering and news reporting.  Initially, many thought they could get waivers in the form of FAA "Certificate of Authorization" (COA) program designed for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).  That program allowed UAS use for research purposes, by "public operators (i.e. government agencies) of a specific drone within a specified geographic location for a limited period of time."  Even if the program was appropriate, the regulations require advance notice and approvals for each use, and severely limits the area and times of use - conditions that curtail the utility of drones for spot or breaking news coverage.
We profs would probably try sneaking drones into our journalism curriculum anyway, as we could identify specific times and places for class demonstrations.  However, the FAA indicated quite early on that "drones" were not the kind of "unmanned aircraft system" their current regulations covered, and until they could come up with new rules specifically for drones, most commercial drone usage (including for news coverage) was banned. So for now, the ability of most programs to use drones in journalism coverage and education is effectively curtailed.
That hasn't stopped some "drone journalism" centers and programs from partnering with news organizations to "research" drone journalism.  One, a joint project by Georgia Tech and CNN, to “investigate technologies, operating procedures, and crew skill requirements that will enable the safe and effective use of UASs for news coverage”, seems willing to continue despite FAA limits (part of that project is looking at aeronautical control systems, which the FAA considers UAS research).  Many others (Nebraska, Missouri, South Florida) have tried applying for COAs, despite the limitations.  But those approvals have not been coming.
Just as the FAA quickly decided that drones weren't UAS and thus able to operate within those guidelines, the FAA seem to have decided that drone journalism and other drone applications aren't what they meant by UAS research and were unlikely to get COAs.  Last month, the FAA said so explicitly, releasing a Memorandum that indicated that the only allowed use covered by a COA was for aeronautical research, which was restricted to research on airplane and aeronautical control systems.  The memorandum also indicated that the use of off-the-shelf drones for other research purposes (including journalism) would not be eligible for COAs.  The FAA suggested that public universities looking at drone applications wouldn't qualify as "public operators," either.

“The public aircraft statute exists to free governments from regulation, not to confer a benefit on government entities that is unavailable to civil operators. ... The public aircraft statute and UAS COAs do not exist to create a loophole of exclusive operation, or to allow state universities to become exclusive providers of certain aircraft operations by any entity willing to fund them as ‘research.’ ”

This certainly has slowed development of drone journalism here in the US; at least until 2015, when the FAA hopes to have new rules in place for drone operation.  Still, that delay hasn't slowed discussion of potential ethical issues, and consideration of whether the news industry should develop  normative guidelines for the use of drones in news reporting. Among the top ethical issues is the question of privacy (the TMZ/paparazzi issue), public concern that news organizations could be contributing to the growth of surveillance in public life, and the likelihood that drone coverage of criminal activities is likely to be subpoenaed by police (conflicts of interest).  Then there's the strong possibility of unanticipated effects, like drones hitting people or remote operators losing control. 

It's going to be an interesting new world with drone journalism, if and when the FAA allows it.

Sources: The Debate on Drones: Navigation for Journalists, PBS Mediashift, EducationShift
Ethics Aloft: The Pros and Cons of Journalists Using Drones,  PBS Mediashift, EducationShift.
University Hopes To Lend Drones To Students, May Face FAA Challenge, Forbes.com
Unmanned Aircraft Systems Alert: FAA memorandum may jeopardize certain state university research projects involving unmanned aircraft, Legal Alert from Kramer Leving Naftalis & Frankel laaw firm.

New Mobility Study & Infographic

From Mobility Fueling the Digital Surge, research report from Accenture.

 

Full research report

Pew: The State of Statehouse Reporting

Just out is a new research report from Pew Research Center that looks into local state legislative reporting and staffing.  It follows the general trend of newsroom staffing, with large declines in full-time newspaper newsroom staffing.  Major findings include:

• Most news organizations don't have anyone assigned to the statehouse beat. Only 30% of daily papers and 14% of local TV news have anyone regularly covering the statehouse (either full- or part-time)
• 16% of reporters covering the statehouse work for nonprofits or digital-only sites. Interestingly, that's about the same percentage for full-time reporters, suggesting that nontraditional outlets are just as likely as traditional news outlets to assign the statehouse as a full-time beat
• Some 14% of statehouse reporters are actually students.  (While not specifically addressed, it's likely that most of these are interns).

Some bemoan the shift in focus from local and state coverage to an increasing emphasis on national (and non-news) coverage.

“I do think there’s been a loss in general across the country, and that’s very concerning to me,” said Patrick Marley, who covers the Wisconsin statehouse for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We have scads of reporters in Washington covering every bit of news that Congress makes. State legislators have more effect on people’s daily lives. We need to have eyes on them, lots of eyes.”

Another concern is that many news organization are combining statehouse staffing and coordinating their coverage, which shrinks (if not eliminates) diversity and investigative reporting.  The study also notes that most states are producing their own news feeds of statehouse activities, providing a cheap source for raw coverage and the potential for state actors to frame coverage to their advantage.

Sources:  America's Shifting Statehouse Press: Can New Players Compensate for Lost Legacy Reporters, Pew Research Center
Full Research  Report, Pew Research Center
Legislative Broadcasts and Webcasts, National Conference of State Legislatures

Resource: "College of Journalism" blog at BBC Academy

Ran across the "College of Journalism" blog hosted by the BBC Academy.  They're doing a good job "discussing current technical, ethical, production and craft issues in journalism."  I'll add a link to the resources list and encourage readers to explore, and try to monitor and share its efforts.

College of Journalism blog, BBC Academy

New Report on Hyperlocal News in UK

Collaboration between AHRC-funded projects in the UK has led to a report on the status and viability of hyperlocal community news.  Some key findings:

• UK community news sector is well-established, with nearly three-quarters of players producing news for 3 years or longer (one-third doing so for more than 5 years)
• 70% see what they do as a form of active community participation; half identify their activities as local journalism, half as an expression of active citizenship
• More than half have formal journalistic training or mainstream media experience
• Most hyperlocal news sites have modest reach, even in their local communities

• Most community news producers classify their activities as part-time (only 11% report spending 40 hrs/wk or more on producing community news).  Also, most producers fund their projects themselves - only a quarter raise enough money to cover their costs.

Source :  UK Hyperlocal Community News: Findings from a survey of practitioners. Research report

Milepost: 2 in 5 US Households are "cellphone-only"

The proportion of US households who only have wireless phones passed 40% in 2013, according to a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.  Furthermore, it would seem that the cell phone has replaced the land line as the "lifeline" for the poor and for families with children.  The report also shows that younger folks are also high adopters of the wireless-only lifestyle.

  The report found that 56% of "poor" households and 46% of the "nearly poor" are cell-only; furthermore, almost half (47.1%)of all children live in wireless-only households.
  Demographically, it's no surprise that older age groups are most likely to maintain their land lines even after acquiring cell phones - only 14% of those 65 or older are wireless-only, while roughly a third (31%) of those 45-64 have abandoned landlines to go wireless.  In contrast, two-thirds of those 25-29 reported being wireless-only. Hispanics reported the highest level of wireless-only households, at 53.1%.  Those households living in the Northeast were the least likely to be wireless-only, with just under a quarter (24.9%) without land lines.

These results fit several of the current memes on the diffusion and adoption of telephone service:

• mobile households are more likely to rely on mobile services, particularly those who change physical addresses.
• lower income households are less likely to maintain multiple services (the interesting note here is that cell services are becoming cheaper than land lines)
• households with multiple wireless users are more likely to go with individual mobile lines than a "family" land line

There are also policy implications of the switch.  If cell phones are increasingly becoming the telephonic lifeline for people, there should be a shift in Universal Service policy and promotion from traditional land lines to mobile services.  Or from the CDC's perspective, making sure that health campaigns embrace mobile.

Sources:   Two of every five U.S. households have only wireless phones, Pew FactTank
Wireless Substitution: Early Release of Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey, July-December 2013, CDC National Center for Health Statistics report

Copyright Decision on Aereo

Aereo is a recent technology service that offered online access to local TV broadcasts in selected markets in the U.S.  For a fee, they grabbed programs that a subscriber requested, from "free" over-the-air local broadcasters, digitally converted the broadcast into a IP stream that was sent directly to the subscriber's connected device.

And when TV networks and cable systems  heard about it, they sought to pre-emptively ban it.  Cable because it was a much cheaper alternative to a service they sought to provide.  The networks' objection was pithily stated by one network CEO: "If anyone makes money from local broadcasts, we demand a share of it."  A consortium of networks and MSOs filed suit claiming that Aereo violated copyright law and seeking an immediate injunction against deploying the system; however, the judge in that case ruled against an injunction as Aereo offered a reasonable argument that its service was not a violation of copyright - but did not initially rule on the viability of that argument.  Both parties wanted to expedite matters, so they sought to bring the case to the Supreme Court to get a final ruling on the basic copyright issues.

Copyright law is fairly simple, yet complex.  The law gives the owner of the copyright the legal authority to determine the conditions under which the copyrighted material is made available to others.  It also, however, permits a "fair use" exemption under certain general conditions - allowing others to access and use the content under restricted conditions.  The rise of broadcasting created an issue, however - what counts as a "copy"?  This came to a head with the rise of cable systems, and their retransmission of over-the-air broadcast signals from local (and eventually distant) stations.  As a result, Congress amended copyright law to include "public performance" of audiovisual signals, and specifically applied that term to carriage ("retransmission") of over-the-air television broadcasts. 

Around the same time, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on what behaviors were considered "fair use" of audio and video content.  Specifically, they ruled that - for legally acquired content - individuals could record content for their later use (time-shifting), transfer and translate content for use in different locals or on different devices (place-shifting), and make a back-up (archive) copy, but only for their own use.

Aereo's service was designed to fit those "fair use" guidelines and the "free" nature of over-the-air broadcasting (stations are prohibited from charging viewers for access to public broadcasts).  Each Aereo subscriber was assigned their own antenna for receiving the free broadcasts, and unlike cable, content was not retransmitted unless specifically requested by that subscriber, and was made available only to the device the subscriber sent the request from.  Aereo argued that they were not engaging in a public performance, but a private one that essentially amounted to the time-shifting and place-shifting aspects of fair use.

The big media consortium (ABC et al.) argued that the Aereo service was simply a retransmission service, and was engaged in "public performance" because it offered its service to the public at large.  Therefore, Aereo was in violation of U.S. copyright law.

The recent Supreme Court ruling (6-3) was that Aereo's service was "substantially similar" to cable, because it offers a service that allows subscribers to watch TV programs, and that it is a "public performance" because several subscribers may be watching the same program, thus constituting a "public."

It's not terribly surprising, although it is disappointing, that the majority decision is technologically ignorant and focuses on outcomes rather than processes and behaviors.  To the majority, any technology that delivers TV programs to members of the public is essentially no different than a cable system and thus any retransmission right for that content must be granted by the copyright owner (presumably, but not necessarily, for a fee).  In addition, the majority nonsensically assumes that since the copyright act does not explicitly define "public", it is any group of individuals beyond what may be watching on a single device. The majority also finds that it makes no difference who is initiating and controlling the retransmission - an individual subscriber or a cable system; rather, they shift the focus to Aereo because it offers a "service."

There is a weird yet nonsensical example given, where the majority suggests that Aereo's problem is that it doesn't provide a service to the copyright owners, but to the public.  The majority repeatedly focuses on copyright owner's right to set the terms of "performance" or consumption.  This ignores the fact that, under law and the terms of their licenses, local broadcasters must provide their copyrighted content freely and without restriction to the public.  Not only to those watching live at home on a TV set, or through a cable system paying retransmission fees; the viewer, or Aereo subscriber, already has the legal right to view or listen to broadcast content.  The copyright owners have already been paid for that performance by the broadcaster - the majority seems to think that viewers need to pay a second time to engage in time-, place- or device-shifting.

The majority decision argues that this ruling does not prejudge future technologies, saying that it is not their intent.  It's hard, though, to see how this is possible, when the decision sets down three extremely broad definitions - 1) that any system for delivering TV content to consumers is "substantially similar" to cable and thus subject to cable's rules; 2) that any group of individuals is considered to be "the public"; and 3) that the driving purpose is not protection of a copyright owner's rights, but the networks "right" to offer a "public performance" of copyrighted material.  Combine that with the majority decision's total disregard for the specific elements of technology and service offered by Aereo - and thus not providing any hook for a narrow argument - and you set a precedence for overreach.

Further, this case offered the opportunity to re-examine which activities are covered by "fair use."  In light of the wretched quality of the decision, I'm relieved that this Court didn't take up that opportunity.

The dissent shreds the majority decision, arguing that the service provided by Aereo was not even a "performance" as defined by copyright law, much less a "public performance."  Rather than looking at the end stage of the service (providing TV programs to viewers) and making an indefensible leap to equate it with cable, the dissent treats Aereo as an Internet content delivery system.  And supports their argument by actually looking at what the service does, then examining the actual case law relevant to those actions (rather than relying on problematic anecdotes).  The dissent eviscerates the majority's "looks like" argument, noting how it conflicts with other recent decisions (including some authored by the same Justice who wrote the majority decision), and ignores both the question of the type of copyright violation being considered (primary, secondary violation, and whether Aereo is acting as an ISP and thus exempt), as well as the issue of "fair use" and the role of the subscriber (not the system) in selecting content for viewing.

The majority decision has turned a copyright case into a "performance" result, achieved only with mystical inference of Congressional intent, over-broad definitions of "public" & "performance", and a "looks like a duck" equivalence of two video delivery systems that could hardly be more polar opposites in technology and operation.  And by doing so, making the application of copyright to new technologies and content delivery systems even more problematic for the future.

And of course, the TV & cable industry hailed the decision, seeing a potential source of revenues (or a protection of current retransmission rights fees).  However, that's likely to be a short-term and low-value source for broadcasters and networks for two reasons - first, that while they think they're soaking the service operator for these revenues, eventually viewers will figure out that stations and broadcast networks are asking them to pay for "free TV"; second, that it's the content that generates the value for viewers, not their "public performance" of that content.  In fact, to the extent that the broadcast "performance" has any value for the station or network, it comes from the broadcast's ability to reach an audience; as such, any mechanism that will extend or expand their reach should be welcomed, rather than challenged.

Sources -  Supremes Rule Against Aereo, Broadcasting & Cable
ABC et al. v. Aereo, Supreme Court decision No. 13-461

MSNBC remains as least trusted

Tacked onto a recent poll about immigration were some simple questions on which TV news sources were the most, and least trusted.

Overall, Fox News was viewed as most trustworthy by a quarter of the June 2014 sample, just beating off the combined total for the 3 broadcast networks (23%).  CNN came in at 17%, PBS at 12 %.  MSNBC fell below the satirical "faux-news" Daily Show, at just 5%.  There were significant differences in trust among those with different political ideologies and party identifications, particularly when it came to Fox News.  But MSNBC still couldn't garner support from more than 10% of Democrats or liberals.

That people's trust in news outlets is generally low is nothing new.  Pew and Gallup both regularly ask about the public's trust in news media in their polling, and find trust declining, and also becoming more partisan - suggesting a perceived bias (check earlier posts here and here).  

And the American left must be shocked and appalled that "rabid, extremist, right-wing Fox News" (their terms) remains the most trusted news outlet among news consumers - and remains the most-watched of the cable news outlets by huge margins.  And that reliably leftist MSNBC remains among the least trusted sources for "accurate information about politics and current events," although it has managed to capture second place in viewership from CNN.

Source: Brookings Survey: The Most Trusted Name in Television News Is . . .  Fox News, National Review Online

Media Sports Consumption - Infographic

From PERFORM and Kantar Media: Global Sports Consumption 2014

Globally, Press Freedom down in 2014 reports

The latest Freedom of the Press report was released this morning by Freedom House. The report suggests several factors contributing to the lowest overall level of press freedom in a decade.

“We see declines in media freedom on a global level, driven by governments’ efforts to control the message and punish the messenger,” said Karin Karlekar, project director of the report. “In every region of the world last year, we found both governments and private actors attacking reporters, blocking their physical access to newsworthy events, censoring content, and ordering politically motivated firings of journalists.”

Overall, the report concurs with the Reporters Without Borders recently released World Press Freedom Index 2014 report.  Levels of press freedom are declining in many cases, due to spreading conflict and "a tendency to interpret national security needs in an overly broad and abusive manner to the detriment of the right to inform and be informed."

The U.S. comes in tied for 30th in the Freedom of the Press report, a significant drop from the 17-18 positions in previous reports, and a similar drop of 13 positions in the World Press Index 2014 report to 46th place.  Recent revelations of spying on reporters and attempts to criminalize those reporting leaked information were a major contribution of the decline for the U.S., which President Obama continues to assert is "the most transparent, ever."

It's been a tough few years for the press.

Sources -  "Freedom House report cites lowest global press freedom in a decade,"  Poynter.org
Freedom of the Press 2014 report,  Freedom House
World Press Freedom Index 2014 report, Reporters Without Borders

edited to add Freedom House 2014 map, and reposition other graphic (2 May, 11:30 a.m. EDT)