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An ailing media industry may be to blame for the decline in information requests. Fifty-three percent of respondents in the same Media Law Research Center survey said their resources have declined in recent years, while 35 percent said they have eroded significantly. "Media companies have for generations taken on the lion’s share of the legal work surrounding freedom of information. But as media economics restructure, new approaches are needed," said Knight Foundation vice president for journalism programs Eric Newton.

Media companies now have a new platform that presents content in an intimate way. “Looking at it through the lens of whether or not it has new features and applications misses the point,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “It is nine times larger than an iPhone, and that is fundamentally a new application.”

This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?

But they also raise large questions about the business models that will drive that content to the screen.

But it could be a face-saving way to exit a market where Google has made surprisingly little progress. Most research companies agree Google controls at most one-quarter of China's search market. That's hard to swallow, given Google's dominant position in the U.S. and many other major markets.

Google has never been a big believer in traditional marketing anywhere, including China, while Baidu is an active advertiser in TV, out-of-home and digital media.

"Their chief problem was the idea they could come into the market without doing marketing and expect to replicate the miraculous success they had enjoyed in the U.S. They did no marketing," said Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based consultant for Youku.com and the former of head of digital strategy at Ogilvy & Mather in China.

"We have so many other voices out there, [loosening ownership limits] does not stifle the free exchange of ideas out there anymore," said Rick Peters, president of Bluewater Broadcasting, a small Montgomery, Ala.-based radio company

FCC officials are looking at what the agency can do to improve the health of the newspapers, TV and radio stations, which continue to lose customers and advertising revenue to online competitors.

"Debt and equity providers are largely disinterested in media and broadcast properties," said Brian Rich, managing partner at Catalyst Investors, a New York private-equity fund.

Google said on Tuesday that it was considering shutting down Google.cn and closing its offices in China after a cyber attack on its corporate infrastructure resulted in intellectual property loss. Google also said it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. For the first time, reports and images of the Tiananmen Square massacre and other events could be seen through Google searches in China.

Chinese American media rushing to provide their analysis in the context of U.S.-China relations. “Google, Don’t become a tool in the political fight between the U.S. and China” read the headline of an editorial published Friday in China Press. “Though Obama tried to adapt to China’s increasingly powerful role in the world with a new attitude and said the United States would not repress China’s development, the differences in ideology between the countries continue to prohibit the U.S.-China relationship from moving forward,” the editorial argued.

“If the Chinese government just let it go, Google could stop its financial losses in China, which would be beneficial to its share price. If the Chinese government is willing to compromise, Google will become the ‘hero’ that breaks China’s strict control over Internet information.” Chinese investors, Leung noted, believe the absence of Google will actually benefit the local Internet market; the stock prices of Chinese Internet companies rose right after the announcement was made.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site without extra charge.

But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.

Still, publishers fear that income from digital subscriptions would not compensate for the resulting loss of audience and advertising revenue.

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Hardest hit was feature-film production, which had been steadily falling over much of the last decade as L.A. lost jobs to Canada and, increasingly, other states such as New Mexico, Louisiana and Michigan that offer lucrative tax credits and rebates to filmmakers. California's newly adopted film tax credit program helped to blunt the downturn, with production activity increasing by double digits in the second half of the year. About 50 productions have qualified to receive about $100 million in tax credits since the state program debuted this summer

April 2 on an application by Media Derivatives, Inc. (MDEX) to create a designated contract market for film futures.

The groups said that the proposal by MDEX and a separate plan by Cantor Futures Exchange, L.P. “are based on faulty understanding of the film industry and create a risk of rampant speculation and financial irresponsibility at a time when the nation is still seeking to recover from an economic meltdown of the financial markets.”