The Digital Beat Extra is a free online news service provided by the Benton Foundation. Much like our Digital Beat Daily , Digital Beat Extras are intended to keep you up to date on important industry developments, policy issues, and other pertinent communications-related news events.
Extras go beyond the headlines to get a deeper perspective of selected topics.
We welcome your suggestions to cover issues related to the following topics. If we do not remain local, we're going to lose our franchise to competitors. According to the study's author, Philip M. Napoli, Ph.D., Graduate School of Business Administration Fordham University, only 0.3 percent of total commercial broadcast time was devoted to local public affairs programming during the typical two week period studied. The report also found that competitive conditions, market demographics and station characteristics had no significant effect on the quantity of local public affairs programming provided by individual broadcast stations. The Federal Communications Commission is currently engaged in a process of determining public interest obligations for digital television broadcasters.