Top FCC staffers asked about how the commission should take accou...

ownership rules -- the second of three this week -- didn’t always yield many concrete answers, because some questions posed have no straightforward solutions, panelists’ responses suggested. High-quality news should be a goal of the ownership review, which Congress has required the FCC to do in 2010, speakers said. Some results of the ownership are harder to measure than others, said moderator Colin Crowell, senior counsel to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Competition can be easier to measure “because we've done it before, even though it seems like only yesterday we were doing the last media ownership review,” he said. Crowell asked, “How would you quantify, or would you, new media? Do you count the Internet as one voice? Do you count blogging sites as a voice? And if you count a major blogging site as a voice, is it a national voice, is it a local voice?” It’s hard to “determine the ’true’ impact of the Internet” because “there is almost no original reporting, and what original reporting exists is on soft news,” said Research Director Derek Turner of Free Press. “The Internet definitely has much less impact on competition with the traditional sources. That will change over time. This is one of the pitfalls in trying to construct a diversity index” that takes new media into account. The commission needs to track where content is produced, said President Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. “Identifying that which is repurposed and which doesn’t add to diversity … makes these proxies a lot more complicated.”