by Kurt E. DeSoto

On January 1, 2002, Berry Best Services Ltd. celebrated a quarter century of service to the communications industry. I offer a toast to business and married partners Tom and Randy Berry, who indeed have done a remarkable job helping make research at the FCC much easier for practitioners.

Berry Best is one of the companies that pioneered computerized access to the FCC's Daily Digest and associated releases. And though other information service providers have folded or been acquired over the years, Berry Best has been a survivor. And for good reason, too; it has continually adapted to the changes in the day-to-day operations at the FCC to ensure that its offerings provide added value.

For example, well before there was an Internet, Berry Best began offering electronic access to FCC's releases via 2400 kbps dial-up, bulletin board-like connections. More importantly, unlike other information providers, Berry Best made available almost every document issued by the agency, including public notices, texts, news releases and speeches. This effort required it to employ numerous typists and expensive character-recognition equipment to convert the FCC's paper releases into electronic format. Berry Best has now moved to an Internet-based platform (located at www.berrybest.com), but still offers the most comprehensive set of FCC documents available online.

And when the FCC decided to host its own website providing free access to its Daily Digest and releases (at http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Digest), Berry Best modified its offerings to include additional features not available on the FCC's site. It understood that subscribers would need a reason to pay for something that is now available for free. Thus, Berry Best offers three electronic services that should be standard tools for all practitioners.

E-Distribution Service: Under this offering, Berry Best posts the FCC's daily releases on its website and notifies users of their availability by email. Included with the releases is Berry Best's own "annotated" daily digest, which includes documents that have been released by the agency but are not listed on the FCC's Daily Digest for that day. To provide just one of many examples, the agency's Daily Digest of January 3 contained nine items not appearing on previous digests, but that were released as far back as December 14, over two weeks earlier. On some occasions, the FCC's Daily Digests have not listed items at all, or until several months after their release. Released items appear on the correct date on Berry Best's annotated digests, however. Thus, using Berry Best's service can help practitioners avoid problems created by delays or omissions in the FCC's postings. Indeed, this service can be critical to practitioners who need to monitor and take timely action concerning particular FCC proceedings.

To be more specific, the email notification system works as follows: Berry Best's staff picks up paper copies of the FCC's releases as soon as they are made available to the public. These copies are converted into electronic files (Adobe PDF and TIFF) and then posted on its website. Typically before 1:30 pm, Berry Best broadcasts an email advising its subscribers that the releases are available. The email contains hyperlinks which direct users to the Berry Best website. After logging on with a password, users are presented with Berry Best's annotated daily digest. Links are provided to download the entire day's releases or selected releases into any folder of the user's choosing or as an attachment to an email to be forwarded to clients. Practitioners can also open the releases to display them on their monitors.

Later in the afternoon, Berry Best sends a second (and sometimes third) email to notify subscribers of the availability of "late releases," which usually do not appear on the FCC's Daily Digest until the next day. Again, users can click on the links provided in the email to download or display these documents. I consider these later notifications the "silver lining" in the storm of informational emails I receive daily over the Internet cloud, because I am able to learn about certain FCC actions one day earlier than I otherwise would if I had relied only on the FCC's Daily Digest.

FCC Library: Berry Best's library service offers Internet access to the only online database that is updated daily and contains every FCC release dating back to June 1988. In addition, the FCC Library contains the longest running set of Daily Digests, available from 1982. Unlike the E-Distribution Service, the FCC Library is fully searchable (without the need to use to keywords). For example, subscribers can search the database using a word, phrase, location, file number, callsign, frequency or any other relevant term.

In sum, one of the biggest advantages of Berry Best's database is its completeness. While the FCC itself now makes many of its documents available for free on its website, the postings are not as timely and often incomplete. If there is a critical proceeding that a practitioner must monitor, the FCC's website is just not sufficiently reliable at this time.

Moreover, Berry Best makes it a point to obtain the "official" paper copies of the FCC's releases to convert and post on its website. Other companies distribute the electronic files made available on the agency's website, which are not considered official and often differ from the paper copies. In the case of a discrepancy with legal consequences, practitioners will be thankful they relied on electronic copies of the FCC's "official" releases.

Non-Docketed Filings Service: Through this service, Berry Best emails the subscriber all of the non-docketed paper-filed pleadings and correspondence submitted to the FCC shortly after they are made available by the agency. Because these items are typically unavailable on the FCC's website, the only other way to obtain them would be to send someone down to the agency to pick them up in person.

The fees for Berry Best's services are very reasonable. The E-Distribution Service is $250.00 per month for the first five users and $10.00 per month for each additional user. The charges for the FCC Library service are $17.00 per search query and $1.00 per document opened, but flat fees are also available. There are two options for subscribing to the Non-Docketed Filings Service. Under the first option, Berry Best will allow access to unlimited users at a rate of $150.00 per month. Under the second, Berry Best will charge $85.00 per month plus $10.00 per each document opened. For more information, contact Doug Yale at (202) 293-4964 or at doug@berrybest.com.

There are other services that offer access to FCC releases, such as Pike & Fischer, Inc. (http://www.pf.com), West (http://west.thomson.com/store/default.asp) and LexisNexis (http://www.lexis-nexis.com), but those offerings are sufficiently different (albeit overlapping in part with Berry Best's) so as to warrant separate treatment. For example, Pike & Fischer provides communications-related decisions, statutes, and regulations through compact discs delivered to its subscribers and that are supplemented through an online service. I plan on covering those other services in greater detail in upcoming articles.

And those services do not offer one feature that I like in particular on Berry Best's website: "Randy's Reviews" In fact, this feature (located at http://www.berrybest.com/movies/index.html) appropriately complements Berry Best's "silver" anniversary. For the benefit of movie buffs, Randy critiques not the latest releases of the FCC, but those appearing on the silver screen.