Tag Archives: Georgetown Voice

Weekly output: YouTube meets COPPA, LTE and 5G hotspots

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I was supposed to be spending today bouncing from one MWC press event to another, but the cancelation of that conference left me at home with an empty schedule. That also meant I could see firsthand the worst thing you can spot in the paper: a death notice for an old friend. My Georgetown classmate and Georgetown Voice colleague Claudine Weber-Hof died last month in Germany, but the sad news somehow took longer to make its way to Washington.

The Munich-based magazine where she worked put together a lovely remembrance, and I want you to read that. That story doesn’t explain what happened, but a public Facebook post by one of Claudine’s friends that I found later this afternoon mourns her “lost battle against anxiety and depression.” Which would mean that for the second time in less than three years, depression has taken somebody I know. It’s too much.

2/19/2020: Will YouTube’s New Privacy Rules Actually Protect Children?, Glimmer

I helped inaugurate this new online publication from Glitch, the Web-app-development firm formerly known as Fog Creek Software. As the date stamp on this suggests, the site was supposed to launch earlier but ran into some late snafus that I’d just as soon not know about. So everybody had to wait another week and change to read my look at the controversy YouTube has made for itself by subjecting creators of content that kids might like to an unusually harsh regime.

2/19/2020: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter

Speaking of long-awaited updates, this revision to Wirecutter’s guide to WiFi hotspots brings two new recommendations and my emphatic advice to ignore 5G for now. Especially Verizon’s millimeter-wave 5G, which offers amazingly fast speeds almost nowhere–speeds that the company’s first 5G hotspot can’t share over WiFi with nearby devices.

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Weekly output: watching baseball online, ATSC 3.0, 5G media, CDA 230, alternative DNS, Lyft vs. Uber

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My college newspaper celebrated its 50th anniversary this weekend, which both let me catch up with not enough of my long-ago colleagues and contemplate anew how important the Georgetown Voice was to this business I’ve chosen. Without all those insane (and unpaid) hours, I might have still made my way into journalism–but I wouldn’t have had four years of learning to report, write creatively but quickly, deal with frequently-brutal edits by peers, and get back to it for the next issue.

4/1/2019: Why these 6 baseball teams still won’t let you watch their games online, Yahoo Finance

For the third year in a row, I ranted about regional sports networks–yes, I very much have the Nats’ Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in mind–that still limit their distribution to traditional cable and satellite bundles instead of following cord-cutting viewers to streaming TV services.

4/2/2019: ATSC 3.0 hits the road at NAB 2019, FierceVideo

I wrote a short post for this trade publication about likely storylines at the National Association of Broadcasters’ trade show involving this next-generation broadcast-TV standard.

4/2/2019: 5G brings optimism and concern to NAB Show 2019, FierceVideo

My second NAB-show preview outlined what this conference, happening this week in Las Vegas, might have to say about media ventures built on 5G wireless.

4/3/2019: Why killing a law that shields tech companies would actually cement the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Yahoo Finance

When I wrote this post unpacking a recent bout of criticism of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act–the statute that says online forums aren’t publishers and can’t be held liable for everything their users post–it came in at well over a thousand words. It took multiple rounds of editing to get my precious prose down to a manageable size (sound familiar, my former Voice editors?).

4/4/2019: Primer: When (and how) to dump your Internet provider’s DNS service, The Parallax

I wrote a how-to post about using such alternative domain name services as Google and Cloudflare to work around reliability and privacy issues you can run into if you stick to your Internet provider’s DNS.

4/4/2019: Lyft exec says ‘we’re a company of values’ when asked about Uber, Yahoo Finance

I wasn’t sure the lunchtime talk by Lyft public-policy chief Anthony Foxx at the Washington Auto Show Thursday would yield a story until he answered an audience question about how his employer differentiates itself from Uber with that company-of-values line. I’m not sure how many of my readers bought that self-assessment; at UberPeople.net, a forum for ride-hailing-service drivers, the reaction was distinctly cynical.

Weekly output: customer satisfaction, net neutrality, Facebook interest-based ads

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Having a holiday shorten this work week was much appreciated. So was the chance to catch up with some of my college-newspaper friends Saturday; my unpaid, no-course-credits-granted time at the Georgetown Voice remains the most career-relevant thing I did in college.

Yahoo Finance ACSI post6/1/2016: New customer service survey says Comcast is no longer the worst, Yahoo Finance

This was the first story I’ve written in an actual newsroom in quite some time, thanks to me visiting Yahoo Finance’s NYC offices for the day.

6/5/2016: The FCC’s ‘power grab’ on net neutrality still hasn’t burned your broadband provider, Yahoo Finance

I was working on another story when I saw that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had yet again failed to cough up a ruling on the suit challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality regulations. I decided that I was tired of waiting on that court to write my next post about the net-neutrality argument and cranked out this over a couple of hours.

6/5/2016: Status with Facebook ‘interest-based’ ads is complicated, USA Today

This was yet another piece that I didn’t have on my list of story ideas at the start of the week. My summary to my editor after spending two hours bouncing e-mails back and forth with Facebook PR to discern the privacy models behind two of the social network’s ad systems: “This was one of the bigger reporting hairballs I’ve had to eat.”