By Denise Ross

I thought of the angry, pitchfork-bearing villagers demanding that Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and Tim Johnson hold town hall meetings during the August recess when I heard about the congressman who spent a summer vacation on a deserted tropical island.  

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., sought to test ought his survivor skills by living on fish he speared himself and coconuts after being dropped off by “the military” (ah-hem; taxpayer money?) to a tiny Pacific Island. Read more about it and see a photo slideshow in The Hill.

This story has quickly spread in the national press, so you might have already heard about this. I hadn’t until a relative from Arizona asked me how this amounted to news. Oh, honey, this one’s irresistable.

Commenters on the various stories I’ve read either love the guy for his independent spirit or revile him for being, well, a duty-shirking flake. I’m leaning towards the latter crowd but probably would feel fine about the congressman’s little vacation if he hadn’t turned over his photo album and diary to the media. Maybe he and ballon boy’s dad ought to share that island for awhile. A long while.

I think this would be a career-killer for any South Dakota politician. Am I wrong?

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Oft-praised bill would cost practically nothing.

By Denise Ross

Tired of the health care debate yet? If so, too bad as it’s likely to dominate Capitol Hill news throughout the end of the year. Here’s some health care news about SD’s House member that’s not been widely reported and might even become relevant in the coming weeks.

I wrote a recent newspaper column about Stephanie Herseth Sandlin’s co-sponsorship of a health care reform bill that would, among other things, end Medicaid. It also would be cheap, according to the CBO, and would cover everyone via a mandate. (Read the full column on the jump.)

The Healthy Americans Act would require everybody to buy health insurance, would provide government subsidies to help the poor and near-poor buy insurance and would mandate that insurance companies cover all comers, thereby ending practices such as capping lifetime benefits.

Americans would buy health insurance from a marketplace of plans, called pools, set up by state or region. Each plan would be required to meet minimum standards.

The HAA, also called the Wyden-Bennett bill, has not gained the support of South Dakota’s two senators. Others are apparently offering some lip service to the bill. This from Wikipedia:

According to Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, the list of HAA Republican supporters is deceptive: “The plan has a lot more fake support than it has real support. If every Republican who has co-sponsored [HAA] would commit to voting for it, the plan might pass. But they haven’t.”

To read what I wrote about HAA, click “CLICK HERE” below.

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By Denise Ross

There’s a battle brewing between the telecom giant of yore and the tech giant of now, AT&T and Google, over little old us. AT&T is demanding that the FCC require Google to stop blocking some calls to rural telephone numbers on the relatively new Google Voice application.

Last Friday, the FCC launched an inquiry into Google Voice’s blocking of calls and began an review of whether the application should be regulated as a traditional telephone service, also known as a common carrier. Google has rejected such claims, saying in a blog posting that Google Voice is a Web application and not a telecom service.

That is from the Washington Post’s tech blog. Read it all here. AT&T claims that Google has blocked calls to an ambulance service, a community center and a tribal center. (Out here in the sticks, we are more expensive to connect up to the grid. Ergo, phone companies - including AT&T - have tried but failed to find ways around the rules that say they have to connect to the more expensive numbers.)

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By Denise Ross

A sleeping baby is keeping me from Dennis Daugaard’s official campaign announcement, so let’s look at one of the plethora of events in the evolution of media and journalism.

Late last week, UC Berkeley’s J school hosted a summit on new media at Google HQ. (The venue just about says it all; it wasn’t, after all, at the San Francisco Chronicle despite its fairly great website.)

The best message came from an old media casualty:

The stakes of the digital media debate were underscored during the opening session as John Temple, former publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, discussed some of the missteps that led the nearly 150-year-old daily to close earlier this year. That closure left Denver, like most U.S. cities, a one-newspaper town.

One critical mistake was thinking of themselves as a newspaper instead of an information company, and viewing every new media initiative merely as a means to protect the core product, he said.

If the company had instead monitored and responded to what consumers were doing online, the business might have invented a service like Yelp, instead of competing with it for ad dollars it used to own.

“We had all the advantages and we let it slip away,” he said.

Those still running newspapers would be wise to listen to Temple, but I don’t expect them to. The very concept of R&D at most newspapers (and I’m told TV & radio stations) is anathema. That would be spending precious profits - which long hovered around the 30 % mark - on the “non-revenue generating department,” as my old home at the RC Journal’s newsroom was referred to by those in charge. Even if attitudes and the MSM culture were to drastically change, those profits no longer soar at such lofty heights.

Instead, I’m reading with equal parts amusement and dismay about AP’s plans to embed a “tracking beacon” into its content and that of its members (ie, almost all MSM news outlets) - see hilarious graphic on the jump. (Apologies to my friends at the AP in Sioux Falls.) Meanwhile, here’s how Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes what AP is up to:

The point, of course, is to identify uses of AP and potentially member content that isn’t licensed. So if someone copied an article’s source code onto his own site, by hand or automation, the beacon would follow along and, according to the document distributed to some AP members, “send reports back to the core database each time the item is clicked on by an end user. The beacon will identify each piece of content, the IP address of the content viewer, the referring Web server and the time of use.”

That’s right - “the IP address of the content viewer.” The Nieman blogger also notes that the graphic (see it on the jump) unintentionally depicts a “faceless news consumer will be deposited into a toxic waste recepticle.”

The same blog post notes that AP spokesfolk aren’t being terribly clear about what they plan to do with whatever information they gather, but the anger and bitterness level amongst many ensconced in the upper levels of the MSM has been growing steadily. For reasons I can’t understand, I seem to hear most of the vitriol targeted at Google for its success at monetizing search.

It also appears as though the AP is searching for methods to block its content from anyone who doesn’t pay, a thoroughly effective way to lose most of your readership. They talk a lot about protecting copyright, which is a valid pursuit and which also completely misses the vast technological opportunities at any media organization’s feet. (ie, per the Rocky Mountain News’s Temple, “Maybe if we weren’t so busy snarling at all the new technology and those using it to good effect, perhaps we would have invented search-targeted advertising.”)

There’s no shortage of discussion of this topic online, but I’ve got to stop here. Click “CLICK HERE” below to see that graphic, which includes the cryptic, detached phrase “royalty settlement,” described on the Nieman blog thusly:

The AP’s graphic explaining the beacon and a new microformat was easily mocked and labeled “magic beans” by prominent tech blogger John Gruber.

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