Neal's Notes

Five years ago I could pick up the classified section of my local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and actually feel some substance to it. Today, even the Sunday classifieds are silicon wafer thin.

It’s nothing new to report – the Internet has wreaked havoc with media budgets nationwide. Community newspapers, for instance, used to derive about 10 percent of their annual revenue from public notices. Today, cash-starved state and local governments simply go online and publish themselves, effectively cutting out the community newspaper as ‘middleman.’

And the media continues to be directly/indirectly impacted from other government funding sources – the Nieman Journalism Lab reported that postal subsidies were worth $1.97 billion in the mid-1960s (in 2009 dollars). Today they have shrunk by more than 75 percent to $288 million. A postal fee hike last year, for example, cost The Nation more than $500,000 in mailing costs last year – not exactly good news when the magazine reportedly bled more than $300,000 in red ink.

Is there a solution? Most would agree that free speech and free press are sacrosanct and also essential to a healthy U.S. economy. Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, recently postulated one interesting scenario – enhanced public funding for journalism.

It’s not a new concept – public broadcasting, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, is, in the aggregate, funded 40 percent by various government entities. In fact, Bollinger reported that both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have initiated studies of ways to ensure that the economic pickle facing newspapers and broadcast news doesn’t deprive Americans of important information they need as citizens.

Bollinger said Americans already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for a lot of international news – “especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes to us courtesy of British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC and taxes to support the World Service.”

He added that this type of state support hasn’t resulted in official control – “the reliable public funding structure, as well as a set of professional norms that protect editorial freedom, has yielded a highly respected and globally powerful journalistic institution.”

Bollinger believes top priority should be given to strengthening America’s public broadcasting role globally. The federal government’s two international broadcasters, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, for instance, can’t even broadcast within the U.S. – an anachronistic Cold War policy.

The solution? Bollinger recommends creating an American World Service that can compete with outfits like the BBC, China’s CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, even Qatar’s Al Jazeera.

“The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need,” Bollinger said.

Sounds good to me.

A few months ago, the renowned Pew Research Center launched the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Telephone interviews of 2,252 adults ages 18 and older (including 744 reached via mobile) were conducted between April 29-May 30.

Overall, the results produced nothing earth shattering or game changing, but many of the findings further illustrated a number of handset trends.

Here a few:

Minority Americans are setting the pace when it comes to mobile access, especially via handset devices. African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to own a cell phone than their white counterparts (87% for both; compared to 80% for whites). Both minority groups also take advantage of a much wider array of their phones’ data functions compared to white cell phone owners.

Not surprisingly, 90% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone and are more likely than those in other age groups to utilize mobile data applications discussed as part of the survey.

Some significant stats for this age group: 
• 95% send/receive text messages
• 93% use their phone to take pictures
• 81% send photos or videos to others
• 65% access the Internet on their mobile device
• 60% use their phones to play games or record a video

And some interesting percentages on the low-end:
• 21% have used a status update service such as Twitter from their phone
• 20% have purchased something using their mobile phone
• 19% have made a charitable donation by text message

The findings also indicated that while overall cell phone ownership has remained steady (82% of all American adults own a cell phone), the use of mobile data applications has jumped markedly as you can see in the above visual:

Figures gleaned for seven additional cell phone data applications also revealed some interesting numbers:
• 54% have used their mobile device to send someone a photo or video
• 23% have accessed a social networking site using their phone
• 20% have used their phone to watch a video
• 15% have posted a photo or video online
• 11% have purchased a product using their phone
• 11% have made a charitable donation by text message
• 10% have used their mobile phone to access a status update service such as Twitter

More than half of mobile web users go online from their phones on a daily basis.

A direct quote from the study:

“In addition to being a growing proportion of the overall cell phone population, users of the mobile web now go online more frequently using their handheld devices than they did as recently as last year. More than half of all mobile Internet users go online from their handheld devices on a daily basis – 43% do so several times a day, and 12% do so about once a day. At a similar point in 2009, just 24% of mobile Internet users went online several times a day.”

The survey added that among mobile Internet users, frequency of use was highest among the affluent and well-educated.