The FCC released another paperweight-class report.
Entitled The Information Needs of Communities, this 478 pager (with footnotes) is “an in-depth analysis of the current state of the media landscape along with a broad range of recommendations.”
Produced by journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, and led by Steve Waldman, a former editor and the founder of Beliefnet, the report has the obviousities you would expect, including newspaper revenue has dropped, local TV is a not source of investigative reporting, and the Internet has reduced the cost of gathering and distributing news.
Amen to that last one.
The report has many sensible recommendations—more Gov 2.0 transparency, universal broadband —and there are lots of interesting charts and tables, which many of a wonkish inclination will find worth reviewing.
Information Needs takes an unsentimental view of old media.
In their conclusions about the Internet, the authors welcome the new class of citizen reporters: “The everyone-is-a-publisher economy has allowed for the rise of a new commentariat, and a system that is arguably more meritocratic than before.”
And by the way, the Web also has something called text search, which allows the new commentariat to quickly search huge reports for minor sub-themes that may turn out to be important.
I decided to search for “Facebook” in the PDF version and tracked references scattered across 27 pages, ultimately finding myself in chapter 17, Emergency Information.
There you’ll find a reference to a Department of Homeland Security report from 2009 calling for new media (Facebook and some service known as MySpace) to be integrated into any new emergency advisory system as way to publish risk information, as well as interactively map community assessments of disasters.
Reading further, I discovered that the American Red Cross has a presence on six social networks!
The FCC’s own plans for a next-generation emergency notification system are a work in progress. In fact, they just released a Notice of Proposed Rule Making to graft an Internet-era, XML-ish notification format called CAP (Common Alert Protocol) into our old media warning technologies.
CAP will allow alert text messages to be routed across networks and devices.
Are we getting closer to the day when we receive weather, flood, earthquake or other disaster posts automatically on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +1?
Related articles
- FCC Releases Long Awaited Alert System NPRM (commlawcenter.com)
- The Information Needs of Communities (fcc.gov)
- Common Alerting Protocol (oasis-open.org)