FCC, Having Spent $209,000 on Barriers-to-Entry Preliminaries, May Spend $918,000 for Research
The FCC, having contracted for $208,799 of preliminary research on barriers to entering businesses it oversees like owning radio and TV stations, may spend as much as $917,823 for studies acquiring new data including on new media. That’s according to documents the agency released to Communications Daily’s publisher under Freedom of Information Act requests. As the commission prepares to receive a new privately funded study on media ownership for which a vote on new rules was paused in February (CD Feb 27 p1), it’s embarking on what officials inside and outside the agency called the next phase of barriers-to-entry research.
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The commission Friday evening sought comment on the design of barriers-to-entry studies that it said can also be used for media ownership rule reviews. Silver Spring, Md.-based Social Solutions International came up with the research design after a two-day private meeting in Bethesda with FCC officials and academics. SSI got a contract for $130,944 for that work, some of the FOIA documents showed. They showed the University of Southern California got a contract for as much as $77,855 for a review of literature on such barriers. That review was released (http://bit.ly/17nW8z1) and the subject of a stakeholder meeting last year (CD June 27 p7) that was open to the public and is the work on which agency and other officials said the SSI design was based.
The actual studies are running behind preliminary schedules in the study design itself and other agency documents, and the design said it will take 50 weeks from that design until a final report is written. Also late is the Section 257 barriers-to-entry report to Congress, a triennial document last due in 2012, as well as the media ownership rule review that was due in 2010. “The Research Design and subsequent studies are intended to inform” the 2012 report, said a public notice Friday (http://bit.ly/154HWGO) from the Office of Communications Business Opportunities, which is involved in contracting for the SSI and USC work. “Although it was commissioned pursuant to Section 257, analysis resulting from the USC Literature Review and the Critical Information Needs [CIN] Studies will be relevant to the Commission’s future analysis of broadcast ownership issues in upcoming Quadrennial Reviews, including issues related to minority and female ownership."
The newscasts of TV stations in six markets over a “constructed week” of days occurring in different months to survey a longer period of time would be assessed in a study of media markets, the design said (http://bit.ly/19jUxsv). The same would hold true of newspaper, radio and Internet content, which would be searched for information showing what a market’s critical information needs are, the design said. “Utilizing a list of websites to be crawled for each category of CINs, we will perform a content analysis of CINs within a constructed week of Internet content.” An SSI study of “local media ecology” would cost $309,073, said an Aug. 15 contract between SSI and the FCC. The agency “needs to understand how local media ecologies operate,” said notes from last year’s stakeholder meeting obtained under the FOIA request.
The FCC also could pay $285,950 for a pilot test by SSI, said contracting documents last updated Sept. 28. Another option in last summer’s contracting documents is for a $322,798 “qualitative analysis.” The company remains ready to do the work, “depending on how the FCC is able to move, has the funding to move forward,” SSI President Jenny Namur Karp told us. “They can either choose to execute and fund the pilot study ... or the full-scale study” which itself has two separate pieces, or fund all the research, she said. “We'll stand at the ready until we get our marching orders from the FCC."
Interim Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn said the FCC “has a duty to make sure that the industries it regulates serve the needs of the American public no matter where they live or what financial resources they have.” The research design “is an important next step in understanding what those needs are, how Americans obtain the information critical to their daily lives in a dynamic technological environment, and what barriers exist in our media ecologies to providing and accessing this information,” she said in a written statement Friday night (http://bit.ly/1avIINw).
The research design disclosure is “long overdue” and something Julius Genachowski, FCC chairman from 2009 until earlier this month, “could have done a long time ago,” said public-interest communications lawyer Andrew Schwartzman, representing Free Press on media ownership. “But I'm very pleased that Chairman Clyburn has acted quickly to get it out so people can comment on it.” He’s “just glad they got it out, and I'm not being very picky about when,” Schwartzman said. Comments are due in docket 12-30 July 23. That is “just about right to produce some meaningful comments, but not longer than necessary to delay the process” by a significant amount of time, Schwartzman said.