Year: 2017
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The week that was
Trying something new. A weekly wrap-up of sorts. The Austin headquarters for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission was overrun by “several hundred” rats. A Russian rocket launch went awry when the wrong directions were loaded into it’s flight plan and sent it to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, the Voyager team dusted […]
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ProAm Used Car Listing
This is what happens when your boyfriend is a professional director, and you want to sell your used ’96 Honda Accord.
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The World We Live In
Things have gotten so crazy and divisive lately that it’s now increasingly obvious that people are living in alternate realities. Our filter bubbles have become so completely isolating that they are impervious to commonly understood baseline facts such as science and reason. Some examples: Facebook is using your phone to listen to your conversations. The […]
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Story behind iconic Steve Jobs portrait
How do you get a portrait subject to relax so you can get their true essence? What if your subject is Steve Jobs? You know the photo – here’s the story behind how it was captured. the pair got to work and Watson began to approach the process like he was conducting a passport photoshoot; […]
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Carl Bernstein at ONA 17
Recently, SmartNews (my employer) hosted Carl Bernstein, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, at the Watergate Hotel during the annual Online News Association conference in Washington, DC. Under a full moon on a warm DC evening, Mr. Bernstein inspired us all to strive harder to make use of the powerful “reportorial platform” the digital era provides […]
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Perspective
When your job brings you in regular contact with tragedy on a mass scale (as it does when you work in a newsroom) the rush & tumble of getting the news out gets in the way of stopping to feel the personal impact of these events. As I’m certain will happen with the Napa/Sonoma fire […]
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Preventing Harry Tuttle
My last post, Democracy’s Soft Underbelly warned how algorithms for content distribution and advertising have been weaponized to alter public opinion. The most disturbing aspect of the affair is there is no public evidence of the ad campaigns so there is literally nothing to talk about. When there is no public record of what ad […]
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Democracy’s Soft Underbelly
journalists digging into ad buying platforms discover the soft underbelly of a democratic free market that was exploited during the election — ian kennedy (@iankennedy) September 15, 2017 Let me explain. It’s now well-documented that outside forces took advantage of social media platforms to spread rumors in order to swing the 2016 presidential election. Journalists […]
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SmartNews CM with Riho Yoshioka
Television markets in Japan are much more centralized than in the United States. Therefore it’s pretty efficient to allocate marketing dollars to old school TV ads (in Japan they are called “CM” as in “commercials”) to give brand lift to online marketing. This month SmartNews dropped a set of short TV spots featuring Riho Yoshioka, […]
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IKEA’s augmented reality app
It’s no coincidence that the Swedish home furnishing superstore IKEA timed the announcement of their AR app IKEA Place to drop shortly after Apple’s much anticipated announcement of their AR-optimized phones the iPhone 8 & iPhone X. First announced back in June, the final release of IKEA Place will take advantage of Apple’s ARKit to […]