Portside

• Danny Schechter, The News Dissector, Dies in NYC at 72 – Don Hazen (AlterNet)
• Antebellum Data Journalism: Or, How Big Data Busted Abe Lincoln – Scott Klein (ProPublica)
• A Map of All the Underwater Cables That Connect the Internet – Phil Edwards (Vox)
• Coders Are Becoming the Industrial Workers of the 21st Century. Will They Organize? – Peter Downs (In These Times)
• Big Pay-TV Bundles Going the Way of the Dinosaurs – David Lazarus (Los Angeles Times)
• Occupation Apps – Helga Tawil-Souri (Jacobin)

Danny Schechter, The News Dissector, Dies in NYC at 72
By Don Hazen
March 19, 2015
AlterNet
Danny Schechter, one of America’s best known, most talented and effective progressive leaders renowned for his activism and ground-breaking media-making, died Thursday, March 19 in New York City, of pancreatic cancer.
Known as the “News Dissector” from his days at Boston radio station WBCN, Schechter was truly a renaissance progressive -- with a long list of achievements and creative endeavors.  He is probably best known for his passionate relationship with Nelson Mandela, fighting apartheid in South Africa, and the brilliant TV series South Africa Now produced by Globalvision, the New York City-based television and film production company he created with his longtime business partner Rory O’Connor. South Africa Now was followed by Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television shown on domestic public television and more than 60 other countries from 1992–1996. Schechter was also a producer for ABC’s news magazine 20/20, where he won two Emmys and was part of the startup team that created CNN.

Antebellum Data Journalism: Or, How Big Data Busted Abe Lincoln
By Scott Klein
March 17, 2015
ProPublica

The real history of data journalism pre-dates newspapers, and traces the history of news itself. The earliest regularly published periodicals of the 17th century, little more than letters home from correspondents hired by international merchants to report on the business details and the court gossip of faraway cities, were data-rich reports.
Early 18th century newspapers were also rich with data. If it were ever in doubt that the unavoidable facts of human existence are death and taxes, early newspapers published tables of property tax liens and of mortality and its causes. Commodity prices and the contents of arriving ships — cargo and visiting dignitaries — were a regular and prominent feature of newspapers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

A Map of All the Underwater Cables That Connect the Internet
By Phil Edwards
March 13, 2015
Vox
Cables lying on the seafloor bring the internet to the world. They transmit 99 percent of international data, make transoceanic communication possible in an instant, and serve as a loose proxy for the international trade that connects advanced economies.
Their importance and proliferation inspired Telegeography to make this vintage-inspired map of the cables that connect the internet. It depicts the 299 cables that are active, under construction, or will be funded by the end of this year.

Coders Are Becoming the Industrial Workers of the 21st Century. Will They Organize?
By Peter Downs
March 19, 2015
In These Times
Changes in the American economy will have the t-shirt-wearing coder with a computer replace the blue-collar wearing machine assembler with a wrench as the archetypal industrial worker. Industry groups predict the demand for coders will create one million new coding jobs by 2020.
The changes now spreading through the economy are similar in many ways to the shifts that swept through the American economy in the early 20th century. The economy then was becoming progressively more machine based, and the people who designed, fabricated and assembled machine parts were becoming more specialized.

Big Pay-TV Bundles Going the Way of the Dinosaurs
By David Lazarus
March 19, 2015
Los Angeles Times

Anyone who's been thinking about cutting the pay-TV cord now has more food for thought.
Apple made headlines this week with plans for an online TV service featuring 25 channels. Sony took the wraps off its PlayStation Vue video service. And HBO revealed plans to make its new online service, HBO Now, available directly to consumers on various devices.
These are some pretty major developments, showing that consumers no longer have to be held hostage by conventional pay-TV companies and their bloated bundles of hundreds of unwanted channels.
But we still have a ways to go before people can purchase only the channels they watch.

Occupation Apps
By Helga Tawil-Souri
March 19, 2015
Jacobin

Telecommunications permits Palestinians to communicate with each other and the world beyond their walls. It is an important aspect of Palestinian economic development and growth. In fact, the parent company Paltel contributes to at least 10 percent of the West Bank and Gaza’s GDP and 30 percent of the PA’s tax revenue.
But telecommunications is equally a means through which Israeli occupation continues — in dynamic and changing ways — as a form of control and surveillance. And, as Jawwal’s Q service and the Qalandia Conditions Facebook group both demonstrate, telecommunications ends up depending on the very conditions of spatial enclosure it attempts to negate.