Call it my inability to abandon my breaking news background as a former TV journalist. But I’m enamored with the notion of a “news peg” to galvanize attention around a particular issue.

Our MCDM program did it with Wikileaks in December with “Open Secrets” and the news gods have smiled upon us again, ahead of our conversation tonight “Who Owns the Pipes?” as it relates to content creation and net neutrality. That’s because the federal government just gave its blessing to the Comcast/NBC merger. We delved deeply into what this ruling means for content creators as lines are drawn around control and regulation of the Internet. Indeed, framing the issue this way struck to the heart of net neutrality, as ISP’s might content that it’s online video that strains their infrastructure the most. And if we’re talking about “transmedia” storytelling, access to the internet via cellphones to access this bandwidth-heavy content begs a whole other set of questions. That’s why the FCC created a mobile broadband exception in its December 2010 net neutrality rules.

News pegs make even more sense today as we all battle for each other’s attention. We’re caught in an interesting paradox that as the explosion in digital communication technology facilitates the promulgation of new voices, we’re also losing our ability to listen — because there are so many voices. So what’s going to grab people??

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I was a little exorcised last night when I read about Google and Verizon possibly two-timing the FCC on net neutrality. In the middle of industry/FCC discussion (at least nine meetings in seven weeks), Google and Verizon reportedly reached a deal to privilege YouTube bits.

My gut response was along the lines of “so this is what ‘do no evil’ means?”

I wrote about this at TheModerateVoice and syndicated the essay on Newsvine. The TMV post was featured in TheHill’s morning reads. (Blatant self-promotion.) Woot! Read more…

Last week, we cancelled our cable TV service.  In one fell swoop, we went from 60 to 0.  No more DVR, HBO in HD, nor movies-on-demand.  Also gone: the extraneous 700 other channels that I never looked at.  For the first time since I was a college student, I wasn’t tethered to a coaxial connection.

I told Comcast, no hard feelings.  We kept their broadband and voice services.  I said, we needed more “breathing room” so I could work on my book (presently entitled Trust Me: How to Tell Stories in a Credibility-Starved World).

I was being truthful.  That said, that I’m also saving $1000 a year.  I’m ingesting content specific to my interests (streaming Hulu and Netflix through my Playstation 3).  And I’m putting the savings to media that matters most to me: public radio (KUOW, KEXP), the Seattle Times Sunday paper, and a dead-tree subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

Image from zeropaid.com

Thanks to three recent articles in that same Wall Street Journal, I now also believe there’s a higher purpose to this decentralization of my media choices.  Because once again, large institutions with a vested interest in maintaining their power aren’t too pleased that people like me are making such choices.

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