Today is the last day to submit comments to the FTC for their Public Workshops and Roundtables, “From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”. When I had written about this previously I noted that there were only two comments. As of this morning, there were eleven comments and the response that I received from the submission form indicated that my comment was the nineteenth.

The comments are text comments, with the option of adding attachments. The text is unformatted and can become unreadable for long comments. So, I wrote an abstract which I pasted as the text, and the provided the details of my comments as a PDF file.

If my comment gets processed and the system behaves as it has for previous commenters, my comment should be at 544505-00019.pdf. However, as of yet, the most recent eight comments have not appeared.

That said, I would like to highlight a couple comments that struck me is particularly noteworthy. Mark MacCarthy, whom I believe to be an adjunct professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown has a long interesting comment about increasing federal funding for public service media. I’ve only scanned it briefly, but hope to find more time to read it in detail before the workshops.

Mark Nadel, of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, has a very interesting comment on How Copyright Law Discourages Creative Output. It is seventy four pages, so I have a lot of reading on this before I can comment more on it.

Limor Peer from Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy studies, together with Pablo Boczkowski from the Department of Communications Studies at Northwestern share a thirty seven page working paper, The Choice Gap: The Divergent Online News Preferences of Journalists and Consumers. It looks like fascinating research that I hope to delve into in much more detail.

All of this dwarves my brief three page comment. Yet I hope I’ll have added something to the discussion. If you can’t read the final draft of my comment at the FTC website, it isn’t substantially different than my earlier draft.

I look forward to reading other comments and perhaps even getting a good online discussion going before the roundtables. Let me know what you think.

Update: The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has posted SPJ’s DMC FTC Statement statement on their blog. It is another long and interesting comment.