Few could doubt the impact of nationally televised presidential debates after Republican Mitt Romney set President Obama back on his heels in their first encounter in October 2012.

Romney was articulate and aggressive while Obama appeared frazzled and very much off his game. Romney’s commanding performance helped the former Massachusetts governor briefly energize his floundering campaign and regain its momentum.

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Moreover, with home viewership topping 67 million, the debate -- moderated by Jim Lehrer, the former news anchor for the PBS News Hour – broke a 32-year gross viewership record dating back to the first debate between Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Yet amid dramatic changes in political campaign tactics and fundraising and the way Americans consume the news, these televised general election presidential debates actually are suffering from diminished reach.

A new study issued on Wednesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania seemed to compare presidential debates to TV entertainment. Their assessment: the more than two-decade old debate format is to blame for the low viewership among millennials, although baby boomer viewers have increased.

Related: Why Marco Rubio Might Just Beat Hillary Clinton

So what to do?  In an era when large audiences pay far more attention to “Game of Thrones,” “House of Cards,” “Master Chef” and “So You Think You Can Dance” than to increasingly lengthy presidential campaign seasons,  how can the political parties and the National Presidential Debate Commission jazz up the debates to attract and keep a wider audience?

The Annenberg panel, of course, stops well short of recommending the equivalent of no-holds barred political mudwrestling to heighten audience engagement and sustained interest. The goal, the group says, is to expand and enrich debate content and produce a better informed group of voters.

To that end, the advisory group appears anxious to get rid of the moderator or middle man as much as possible and allow the two candidates to set the agenda and duke it out. They want to get rid of the one or more prominent journalists who set the ground rules and determine the pace and course of the evening’s discussion.

Related: GOP Prunes the 2016 Primary Debates Down to Nine

If, for example, Hillary Clinton were to slam, say, Marco Rubio in a debate, Rubio shouldn’t have to wait patiently for his opportunity to reply but should be allowed to jump in with a rejoinder. Think of it as the resurrection of CNN’s Crossfire.

To add a smidgeon of Jeopardy to the proceedings, each candidate would have a total of 45 minutes to spend to make their case or defend it.

While the candidates would have plenty of opportunity to get their political messages across, they would also have to respond quickly to attacks. A well-scripted candidate wouldn’t necessarily do well in that setting, and the possibility of “oops” moments would be increased. Welcome to reality TV, Beltway style.

Related: The GOP Hunger Games: Who Will Make the Debate Cut?  

Ah….but dead air is not an option, so a filibuster is off the table. No answer, rebuttal or question could exceed three minutes, according to the panel. When a candidate runs out of total time, he or she has exhausted the right to speak. Remaining time at the end of the moderator-posed topics can be used for a closing statement.

The recommendations are advisory only and it will be up to the presidential debate commission and the national parties to iron out the final ground rules next year.

If you haven’t yet heard about DuckDuckGo, you probably will soon.

On its face, the search engine looks much the same as any other. A little more sparse, maybe, but nothing much separating it from, say, Google. There’s a logo and a box for your search.

Where it differs from its peers, though, is what happens when you hit enter.

Though silly in name, DuckDuckGo has a serious ethos: protection of user privacy at all costs. The engine, launched in 2009, shies away from the personalized filter bubbles so adored by search giants like Google and Bing, refusing to track searches or store user data. Users have the option to completely anonymize their search by routing it through the anonymizing TOR network, rendering it even more invisible to prying eyes. DuckDuckGo earns money through simple keyword-targeted advertising, steering clear of the tracking cookies used by more sophisticated ad campaigns.

Though the slavish dedication to privacy has its drawbacks — for example, results are less tailored to the user searching for them, and thus more likely to be irrelevant — the search engine has seen 3 billion searches a year and has a firm community of fans who are attracted to the site’s long-standing defense of user privacy.

Related: News Companies Have Good Reason to Fear Facebook

That ethos seems to be paying off. Gabe Weinberg, CEO of the Pennsylvania-based company, told CNBC last week that the search engine’s traffic has grown 600 percent since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the large-scale spying conducted by the government. DuckDuckGo’s search traffic was further assisted last year when Apple integrated it into the Safari mobile browser.

DuckDuckGo’s traffic is still tiny compared to the big players — the 3 billion searches a year that Weinberg claimed to have on CNBC is pretty much the same amount of searches that Google traffics in a single day. But DuckDuckGo expects steady growth as average users become increasingly educated about their privacy.

Here’s another sign that the housing market keeps getting healthier: More than 250,000 formerly underwater homes regained equity in the first quarter of 2015, according to CoreLogic, meaning that the value of the homes rose above the value of the mortgages on them.

Borrower equity grew more by $694 billion in the quarter, and more than 90 percent of mortgaged American homes now have equity. Such a surge in homeowner wealth has historically led to increased consumer spending and investment.

“Many homeowners are emerging from the negative equity trap, which bodes well for a continued recovery in the housing market,” Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic said in a statement. “With the economy improving and homeowners building equity, albeit slowly, the potential exists for an increase in housing stock available for sale, which would ease the current imbalance in supply and demand.”

Related: 9 Real Estate Trends to Watch in 2015

Still, 5.1 million mortgaged homes remain underwater, representing 10.2 percent of all mortgaged properties. Five states  — Nevada, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and Rhode Island — account for nearly a third of all properties with negative equity. As of the end of the fourth quarter, 10.8 percent of homes — or about 5.4 million properties — were underwater.

The number of underwater homes has decreased year-over-year by 1.2 million and the aggregate value of negative equity has fallen 13 percent to $337.4 billion.

Texas was the state with the fewest underwater properties; 98 percent of homeowners there with a mortgage have equity in their homes.

Just under 20 percent of homes with a mortgage are considered “under-equitied,” meaning that they have less than 20 percent equity and would likely have trouble refinancing their property or obtaining new financing to sell their home and buy another.

A 5 percent increase in home values nationwide would bring another million homeowners into positive equity territory, CoreLogic economists predict.

The embattled Veterans Affairs Department is once again under scrutiny for potentially violating agency guidelines when treating patients—this time, failing to ensure that veterans with depression are receiving sufficient follow-up care after being prescribed anti-depressant medication.

That’s the conclusion of an investigation by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO reviewed patients being treated for depression at six separate VA medical centers and found that after the veterans received anti-depressants, their doctors did not conduct follow-up appointments within four to six weeks, as the VA requires

Related: VA Wastes Millions, But Still Wants More as Vets Wait for Care

In its review, the GAO said that among all patients whose records were reviewed—almost none of them received check ups with doctors in the required time after they were given anti-depressant medication.

"Given the debilitating effect that depression can have on veterans' quality of life, VA's monitoring of veterans with [depression] is critical to ensuring they receive care that is associated with positive health care outcomes," GAO director of health care Randall Williamson said in congressional testimony this week. He went on to criticize the VA for not following its own guidelines to assure veterans receive sufficient treatment.

“This work illustrates, once again, a continuing pattern of VHA's [Veterans Health Administration] noncompliance with its own policies and established procedures,” Randall Williamson, the GAO's director of health care said in congressional testimony last week.

Separately, the GAP flagged the VA’s Behavioral Health Autopsy Program which is used to collect data on veterans that have committed suicide in order to inform policy decisions, saying it is plagued with inaccuracies.

Auditors said that the system had incorrect dates of death—sometimes off by one day, sometimes off by a whole year. The GAO said this made it nearly impossible to assess what kind of treatment they were provided.

Cell phones often get blamed for the always-on work culture that keeps us tethered to our jobs around the clock.

Turns out they might be the reason we’re not getting our work done during office hours in the first place. More than half of employers say that cell phones and texting are the biggest productivity killers at work, making them the number one distraction, according to a new survey from CareerBuilder.com.

Other top productivity killers included the Internet, named by 44 percent of employers, gossip (37 percent), and social media (37 percent).

Related: 10 Ways to Boost Happiness at Work

“There are so many stimulants in today’s workplace, it’s easy to see how employees get sidetracked,” Rosemary Haefner, Career Builder’s Chief Human Resources Officer said in a statement “The good news is, taking breaks from work throughout the day can actually be good for productivity, enabling the mind to take a break from the job at hand and re-energize you.”

Nearly half of employers said that such distractions compromised the quality of work, and 30 percent said they caused lower morale since other workers had to pick up slack for their preoccupied peers. A quarter of employers said that distractions hurt the boss/employee relationship.

Nearly 3 in 4 employers have been proactive about battling productivity killers, with a third blocking certain Internet sites and 23 percent banning personal cell phone calls and usage on the job.

Haefner recommends that workers stay focused by scheduling breaks, surrounding themselves with productive people and taking walks to rejuvenate the brain.