You would think that graduate students are all studying, networking and no fun (the last part was kind of exaggerated, but you know what I mean). However, we do have those days where we would gather and goof around. A couple of weeks ago, after our midterms, our SMF class along with our professors, decided to … Continue reading "It’s not just studying and networking!"

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Conference Proceedings on the Web 23: Economic and Social Sustainability at Airports is a compilation of the presentations and a summary of the ensuing discussions at May 7-8, 2018, forum in Washington, D.C. The meeting brought together individuals from airports, airlines, academia, consulting, local and regional government, general sustainability professionals, and others. The forum included sessions on social sustainability, economic sustainability, key...

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Conference Proceedings on the Web 23: Economic and Social Sustainability at Airports is a compilation of the presentations and a summary of the ensuing discussions at May 7-8, 2018, forum in Washington, D.C. The meeting brought together individuals from airports, airlines, academia, consulting, local and regional government, general sustainability professionals, and others. The forum included sessions on social sustainability, economic sustainability, key...

Adult On-Road Cyclist Injury in Victoria, 2008/09 to 2017/18: A Report on Ambulance Attendances, Emergency Department Presentations, Hospital Admissions and Deaths , released by Monash University

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on May 6, 2020.

In 2017, when leadership at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) decided to build a new International Arrivals Facility (IAF), they knew they had to leverage airport resources in a cost-effective manner to enhance customer experience. At nearly 50 years old, the existing facility could no longer accommodate Sea-Tac’s demand for international travel, which grew 107 percent from 2007 to 2017. The latest issue of the  TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's (ACRP) Impacts on Practice serie...

TRB has been closely monitoring the evolving situation related to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. The health and safety of our volunteers, sponsors, meeting guests, staff, and the greater community are of utmost importance to us. In light of the current situation, we have decided that the event cannot be held as scheduled. Convened by Transportation Research Board, the Sustainability and Emerging Transportation Technology (SETT) Conference was to be held on August 31 – September 2, 2020, at ...

A report from the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Transportation

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Report 80: Guidebook for Incorporating Sustainability into Traditional Airport Projects describes sustainability and its potential benefits, and identifies different applications of sustainable initiatives in traditional airport construction and everyday maintenance projects. The printed version of the report includes a CD-ROM that includes an airport sustainability assessment tool (ASAT) that complements the guidebook and may be used to assist in identif...

Airports continually balance demands to improve infrastructure within the realities of available budgets. Green revolving funds (GRFs) offer an alternative approach for investing in projects that generate operational savings. These funds work by tracking verified cost reductions from implemented actions, and then transferring those savings to a reserve that provides capital for future qualified projects such as energy system upgrades. A number of universities have managed GRFs for over a decade. Municipa...

With the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic hitting the transportation industry hard, TRB’s catalog of research on infectious disease and other biological threats to people and transportation systems is crucial in helping to advise transportation professionals. Transportation officials must be prepared to know how to minimize the consequences to their communities. In regards to biothreats, a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report suggests that there are advantages to...

Environmental regulations have long required airports to undertake review of many actions associated with planning and development. More recently, airports have embraced sustainability as a means for ensuring the long-term viability and community benefits of their facilities. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Research Report 209: Integrating Sustainability Planning and the Environmental Review Process is designed for airport industry practitioners who are interested in gaining a better ...

Rozvolňování opatření proti šíření koronaviru v Česku zdárně pokračuje podle plánu. Otevírají se obchody a instituce, firmy obnovují svoji činnost a zanedlouho otevřou zahrádky u hospod. Lidé už začali plánovat dovolenou a nervózně sledují vývoj zpráv, jestli budou moct letos k moři či nikoliv. Vše by mohlo nasvědčovat tomu, že se všechno brzy vrátí do starých kolejí. Ale to je omyl, česká společnost se vrátí do poněkud odlišnějšího světa. Protože u toho už nebude řada firem a desítky či možná stovky tisíc lidí budou pracně zajišťovat svoji existenci.

Po nějaké době opět exhumovali prezidenta Miloše Zemana z jeho krypty v Lánech, nabalzamovali ho a poslali mezi lidi, aby ukázal, že ještě žije, a hlavně aby promluvil k národu. Tentokrát se prezident Miloš Zeman vyjadřoval k aféře, kdy měl do České republiky přicestovat ruský občan s kufříkem plným ricinu se záměrem otrávit tři regionální politiky.

Have you heard of Heath Freeman? He's a thirty-something hedge fund boss, who runs "Alden Global Capital," which owns a company misleadingly called "Digital First Media." His business has been to buy up local newspapers around the country and basically cut everything down to the bone, and just milk the assets for whatever cash they still produce, minus all the important journalism stuff. He's been called "the hedge fund asshole", "the hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry", "a small worthless footnote", the "Gordon Gecko" of newspapers and a variety of other fun things.

Reading through some of those links above, you find a standard playbook for Freeman's managing of newspapers:

These are the assholes who a few years ago bought the Denver Post, once one of the best regional newspapers in the country, and hollowed it out into a shell of its former self, then laid off some more people. Things got so bad that the Post’s own editorial board rebelled, demanding that if “Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

And here's one of the other links from above telling a similar story:

The Denver newsroom was hardly alone in its misery. In Northern California, a combined editorial staff of 16 regional newspapers had reportedly been slashed from 1,000 to a mere 150. Farther down the coast in Orange County, there were according to industry analyst Ken Doctor, complained of rats, mildew, fallen ceilings, and filthy bathrooms. In her Washington Post column, media critic Margaret Sullivan called Alden “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.”

And, yes, I think it's fair to say that many newspapers did get a bit fat and happy with their old school monopolistic hold on the news market pre-internet. And many of them failed to adapt. And so, restructuring and re-prioritizing is not a bad idea. But that's not really what's happening here. Alden appears to be taking profitable (not just struggling) newspapers, and squeezing as much money out of them directly into Freeman's pockets, rather than plowing it back into actual journalism. And Alden/DFM appears to be ridiculously profitable for Freeman, even as the journalism it produces becomes weaker and weaker. Jim Brady called it "combover journalism." Basically using skeleton staff to pretend to really be covering the news, when it's clear to everyone that it's not really doing the job.

All of that is prelude to the latest news that Freeman, who basically refuses to ever talk to the media, has sent a letter to other newspaper bosses suggesting they collude to force Google and Facebook to make him even richer.

You can see the full letter here:

Let's go through this nonsense bit by bit, because it is almost 100% nonsense.

These are immensely challenging times for all of us in the newspaper industry as we balance the two equally important goals of keeping the communities we serve fully informed, while also striving to safeguard the viability of our news organizations today and well into the future.

Let's be clear: the "viability" of your newsrooms was decimated when you fired a huge percentage of the local reporters and stuffed the profits into your pockets, rather than investing in the actual product.

Since Facebook was founded in 2004, nearly 2,000 (one in five) newspapers have closed and with them many thousands of newspaper jobs have been lost. In that same time period, Google has become the world's primary news aggregation service, Apple launched a news app with a subsription-based tier and Twitter has become a household name by serving as a distribution service for the content our staffs create.

Correlation is not causation, of course. But even if that were the case, the focus of a well-managed business would be to adapt to the changing market place to take advantage of, say, new distribution channels, new advertising and subscription products, and new ways of building a loyal community around your product. You know, the things that Google, Facebook and Twitter did... which your newspaper didn't do, perhaps because you fired a huge percentage of their staff and re-directed the money flow away from product and into your pocket.

Recent developments internationally, which will finally require online platforms to compensate the news industry are encouraging. I hope we can collaborate to move this issue forward in the United States in a fair and productive way. Just this month, April 2020, French antitrust regulators ordered Google to pay news publishers for displaying snippets of articles after years of helping itself to excerpts for its news service. As regulators in France said, "Google's practices caused a serious and immediate harm to the press sector, while the economic situation of publishers and news agencies is otherwise fragile." The Australian government also recently said that Facebook and Google would have to pay media outlets in the country for news content. The country's Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg noted "We can't deny the importance of creating a level playing field, ensuring a fair go for companies and the appropriate compensation for content."

We have, of course, written about both the plans in France as well as those in Australia (not to mention a similar push in Canada that Freeman apparently missed). Of course, what he's missing is... well, nearly everything. First, the idea that it's Google that's causing problems for the news industry is laughable on multiple fronts.

If newspapers feel that Google is causing them harm by linking to them and sending them traffic, then they can easily block Google, which respects robots.txt restrictions. I don't see Freeman's newspaper doing that. Second, in most of the world, Google does not monetize its Google News aggregation service, so the idea that it's someone making money off of "their" news, is not supported by reality. Third, the idea that "the news" is "owned" by the news organizations is not just laughable, but silly. After all, the news orgs are not making the news. If Freeman is going to claim that news orgs should be compensated for "their" news, then, uh, shouldn't his news orgs be paying the actual people who make the news that they're reporting on? Or is he saying that journalism is somehow special?

Finally, and most importantly, he says all of this as if we haven't seen how these efforts play out in practice. When Germany passed a similar law, Google ended up removing snippets only to be told they had to pay anyway. Google, correctly, said that if it had to license snippets, it would offer a price of $0, or it would stop linking to the sites -- and the news orgs agreed. In Spain, where Google was told it couldn't do this, the company shut down Google News and tons of smaller publications were harmed, not helped, but this policy.

This surely sounds familiar to all of us. It's been more than a decade since Rupert Murdoch instinctively observerd: "There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production... Their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it's theft."

First off, it's not theft. As we pointed out at the time, Rupert Murdoch, himself, at the very time he was making these claims, owned a whole bunch of news aggregators himself. The problem was never news aggregators. The problem has always been that other companies are successful on the internet and Rupert Murdoch was not. And, again, the whole "misappropriation" thing is nonsense: any news site is free to block Google's scrapers and if it's "misappropriation" to send you traffic, why do all of these news organizations employ "search engine optimizers" who work to get their sites higher in the rankings? And, yet again, are they paying the people who make the actual news? If not, then it seems like they're full of shit.

With Facebook and Google recently showing some contrition by launching token programs that provide a modest amount of funding, it's heartening to see that the tech giants are beginning to understand their moral and social responsibility to support and safeguard local journalism.

Spare me the "moral and social responsibility to support and safeguard local journalism," Heath. You're the one who cut 1,000 journalism jobs down to 150. Not Google. You're the one who took profitable newspapers that were investing in local journalism, fired a huge number of their reporters and staff, and redirected the even larger profits into your pockets instead of local journalism.

Even if someone wants to argue this fallacy, it should not be you, Heath.

Facebook created the Facebook Journalism Project in 2017 "to forge stronger ties with the news industry and work with journalists and publishers." If Facebook and the other tech behemoths are serious about wanting to "forge stronger ties with the news industry," that will start with properly remunerating the original producers of content.

Remunerating the "original producers"? So that means that Heath is now agreeing to compensate the people who create the news that his remaining reporters write up? Oh, no? He just means himself -- the middleman -- being remunerated directly into his pocket while he continues to cut jobs from his newsroom while raking in record profits? That seems... less compelling.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple News and other online aggregators make billions of dollars annually from original, compelling content that our reporters, photographers and editors create day after day, hour after hour. We all know the numbers, and this one underscores the value of our intellectual property: The New York Times reported that in 2018, Google alone conservatively made $4.7 billion from the work of news publishers. Clearly, content-usage fees are an appropriate and reasonable way to help ensure newspapers exist to provide communities across the country with robust high-quality local journalism.

First of all, the $4.7 billion is likely nonsense, but even if it were accurate, Google is making that money by sending all those news sites a shit ton of traffic. Why aren't they doing anything reasonable to monetize it? And, of course, Digital First Media has bragged about its profitability, and leaked documents suggest its news business brought in close to a billion dollars in 2017 with a 17% operating margin, significantly higher than all other large newspaper chains.

This is nothing more than "Google has money, we want more money, Google needs to give us the money." There is no "clearly" here and "usage fees" are nonsense. If you don't want Google's traffic, put up robots.txt. Google will survive, but your papers might not.

One model to consider is how broadcast television stations, which provide valuable local news, successfully secured sizable retransmission fees for their programming from cable companies, satellite providers and telcos.

There are certain problems with retransmission fees in the first place (given that broadcast television was, by law, freely transmitted over the air in exchange for control over large swaths of spectrum), and the value they got was in having a large audience to advertise too. But, more importantly, retransmission involved taking an entire broadcast channel and piping it through cable and satellite to make things easier for TV watchers who didn't want to switch between an antenna and a cable (or satellite receiver). An aggregator is not -- contrary to what one might think reading Freeman's nonsense -- retransmitting anything. It's linking to your content and sending you traffic on your own site. The only things it shows are a headline and (sometimes) a snippet to attract more traffic.

There are certainly other potential options worth of our consideration -- among them whether to ask Congress about revisiting thoughtful limitations on "Fair Use" of copyrighted material, or seeking judicial review of how our trusted content is misused by others for their profit. By beginning a collective dialogue on these topics we can bring clarity around the best ways to proceed as an industry.

Ah, yes, let's throw fair use -- the very thing that news orgs regularly rely on to not get sued into the ground -- out the window in an effort to get Google to funnel extra money into Heath Freeman's pockets. That sounds smart. Or the other thing. Not smart.

And "a collective dialogue" in this sense appears to be collusion. As in an antitrust violation. Someone should have maybe mentioned that to Freeman.

Our newspaper brands and operations are the engines that power trust local news in communities across the United States.

Note that it's the brands and operations -- not journalists -- that he mentions here. That's a tell.

Fees from those who use and profit from our content can help continually optimize our product as well as ensure our newsrooms have the resources they need.

Again, Digital First Media, is perhaps the most profitable newspaper chain around. And it just keeps laying off reporters.

My hope is that we are able to work together towards the shared goal of protecting and enhancing local journalism.

You first, Heath, you first.

So, basically, Heath Freeman, who has spent decade or so buying up profitable newspapers, laying off a huge percentage of their newsrooms, leaving a shell of a husk in their place, then redirecting the continued profits (often that exist solely because of the legacy brand) into his own pockets rather than in journalism... wants the other newspapers to collude with him to force successful internet companies who send their newspapers a ton of free traffic to pay him money for the privilege of sending them traffic.

Sounds credible.

Doesn't play well on iPhones, but bureaucrats rushed it out rather than wait months for perfection. Meanwhile serious bug reports have emerged

Australia’s “COVIDSafe” contact-tracing app was rushed to market in the knowledge it would perform poorly on some devices and without agreements in place to let actual contact-tracers use the data it collects. As a result, no collected data has been used in at least 10 days since its launch.…

Switchzilla issues a whopping 30+ patches in time for the long UK weekend

Cisco has emitted a fresh round of software updates to address nearly three dozen security holes in its products.…

Despite you know what, little evidence of a rush to new racks

Equinix has posted its Q1 FY2020 results for the period ending March 31st, along with some interesting insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted data centre consumption.…

If you listen closely, you can hear how the creatures' full-throated call increases in volume when you are on holiday

On Call Friday is here! How is your weekend looking? Same as the last one, and the one before that? Never mind – before breaking into the lockdown lagers, join us for another entry in The Register's tales of those brave souls who are On Call.…

Schneider Electric patches vulns after Trustwave raises alarm

Two Schneider Electric SCADA products had vulnerabilities similar to the ones exploited in the Iran-bothering Stuxnet worm, an infosec outfit has claimed.…

Problems aside, no one is sure how useful phone-based tracking will be

The NHSX, a technology group within the UK government's National Health Service, has released the source code for its Android and iOS COVID-19 coronavirus contact-tracing apps in an effort to allay privacy concerns and improve the code.…

Apple has launched a new web page that brings together links and information about its online services for customers shopping from home during the global health crisis.


Titled "Everything you love about our stores is online," the new catch-all page links from the Apple.com home page and includes details about no-contact delivery options, Apple Specialist help, financing and credit options, Apple Trade In, Apple Card, order status checking, service and support.

The page also links out to "Today at Apple - At home," a series of fun how-to videos to help users get creative during the ongoing stay-at-home measures, and there's a series of category links for customers to explore products on Apple's online store.

Apple has been gradually re-opening its retail stores in countries where lockdowns have eased, although some are operating on limited hours.

Apple CEO Tim Cook last week said that Apple was going to reopen stores in Austria and Australia this week, and Apple's sole Apple Store in Vienna will be reopening on Tuesday, May 5.

We're still waiting to hear exactly when stores in North America will reopen, but Cook also said that Apple is planning to reopen a few stores in the U.S. starting in May. Store openings will be staggered, with Apple evaluating data that includes local guidelines and recommendations before reopening.
This article, "New Apple Web Page Directs Customers to Its Online Shopping Services" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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