The Citizen app is available in NYC and the SF Bay Area. The app is designed to alert you when crime happens nearby with location-based push notifications. But, because the platform is crowdsourced, it exposes all the idiosyncratic definitions of “crime” that you would expect from its voyeuristic users.
Here are some of my favorites. If you have a good one, send it my way and I’ll add it.
We used to have Florida Man stories. Now we have Citizen.
Don’t believe everything you see online. Good on Jordan Peele for making this PSA which uses some readily available software literally put words in Obama’s mouth. You can read more about it on Buzzfeed.
We’re about to enter into an intense period of “he said/she said” with the Cohen trial and Comey’s book tour that is going to put a premium on verified evidence and face-to-face interactions.
Who do you trust when everything can be fake? News brands built up their reputation on continually telling the truth, as best as they could. Photography, television, and the internet helped chip away at that dependency as people were able to view the raw materials on their own and make their own judgement. As the sophistication of counterfeiting technology improves such as in the example above, the value of a trusted source that can verify and corroborate videos such as the one above will increase.
I’m calling it here. We’ll be hearing more about technically-savvy forensic journalists in the very near-future.
Related: How To Spot A Deepfake Like The Barack Obama–Jordan Peele Video
The @wendys twitter account is having all sorts of fun making fun of McDonalds frozen beef.
Tomorrow is International Womens Day and they may have had the last laugh.
Your turn Wendy’s.
When I worked at Yahoo it was at the height of a cultural trend called Web 2.0. The fashion was to put stickers of various startups all over the front of your laptop so people could see how hip you were. I was running into many interesting people so I took a different approach and asked them to sign my laptop with a sharpie instead.
When the laptop started to give out, before handing it back Yahoo IT and took a snapshot for posterity.
Here are some of the names. Click on the photo above to go to the Flickr page that has them tagged.
Rafat Ali
Stowe Boyd
Nick Denton
Caterina Fake
David Filo
David Jacobs
Bradley Horowitz
Guy Kawasaki
Ross Mayfield
Richard MacManus
Dave McClure
Matt Mullenweg
Ray Ozzie
Greg Reinacker
Doc Searls
Deborah Schultz
Kathy Sierra
Bruce Sterling
Chris Tolles
David Weinberger
Dave Winer
Niklas Zennström
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, and up-and-coming actress in Japan.
1 minute of news in the morning can change your life is a rough translation of the “catch phrase” of the campaign and each clip follows Riho’s character through her day.
– getting up in the morning and checking the “newspapers” before going to work
– making productive use of her morning commute
– reading our new curated International section to practice her English
– reading the news while putting on her makeup to make her evening conversations more interesting
– checking the news in the afternoon because it’s always morning somewhere in the world – right?
Hope you like it! I’m not sure how often it’s running but would love to hear if you see them on TV in Japan.
We’re looking for a few engineers for our downtown San Francisco office. Primarily back-end with a strong background in backend development technologies. The bullet points on the job posting say:
That’s the baseline. There’s a coding test to suss out the knowledge and skills you’ll need to be an engineer at SmartNews. You will have a burning desire to change how we keep up with what’s going on in our world and how news is distributed from those who publish it. That means you are original and creative – we don’t want to be just another socially-powered aggregator of feeds.
We do things differently. See that photo of our modern-looking lobby above? The wooden slats are bed frames from Ikea. The beautiful slab of redwood is repurposed from a fallen log harvested by my neighbor. We look for inspiration everywhere. We use familiar tools and materials in different ways to make something new, orthogonal.
Because SmartNews is not writing or producing news, we rely on our publishing partners to send us the most important stories every day. To do this, we built a product and business that brings new readers and revenue for our partners. We want those that publish great journalism to get exposure and succeed. Our goals are aligned with our partners.
If you have a passion for the future of news, live to scale and optimize infrastructures, and wouldn’t mind working with a international (Japan, Iceland, Iran, Argentina, and China) team of engineers (and occasionally visit the SmartNews HQ in Tokyo), drop me a line and send me your CV.
For more, about SmartNews check out:
SmartNews (where I work) is running a series of TV commercials in Japan featuring Japanese celebrity, Tamori. The tagline for the campaign is “禁断のニュースアプリ” which roughly translates as “The forbidden news application” as in it’s so addicting that you binge use it when you’ve got time alone.
News Junkie are you? Check out the US Edition.
The crew running @googleplay account gave SmartNews a nice shoutout this morning. Thanks Google!
.@Smartnews: Because some mornings you just don’t have time to read 13 million articles. https://t.co/7DvfY5MNHp pic.twitter.com/406m2s4qwy
— Google Play (@GooglePlay) July 18, 2016
The cool animated GIF and tagline was all them. Love it! Posting here for posterity.
There’s an on-going series of video interviews with journalists on the futureof.news site. Two recent interviews were with Rich Jaroslovsky, my boss at SmartNews. Rich and I crossed paths years ago. He not only has a good instinct for what works for media online but also a history in both the print and online journalistic worlds and the deep memory for how things are put together and came to be the way they are today.
It is a huge vote of confidence that he’s working for SmartNews and, as you can see from the clips below, he’s here for all the right reasons. Some key quotes to call out:
excessive personalization is a rabbit hole. It at some point becomes an active negative, because what ends up happening is that you never discover anything new, you never discover anything that didn’t know ahead of time you would be interested in, and instead your worldview gets narrower and narrower.
. . .
When we launched WSJ.com, one of my conclusions was, serendipity is very hard to do in a digital environment. One of the great charms of SmartNews is that it has reintroduced that concept of serendipity, of finding things that you didn’t know you’d be interested in, and they turn out to be very interesting.
. . .
I’ve had many epiphanies over the years about digital journalism and how it’s different than print journalism, and one of them is that there is a craving in the audience for authenticity, for hearing things as close to the original source as possible. There are people who want to be able to access content that is from international sources, even when they are reading about stories that are being heavily covered by US media because it provides a different viewpoint.
. . .
In some ways news has been disintermediated the same way that music was. When I was in my record buying heyday and CD buying heyday, if there was a song I really liked, I had to buy the record. I had to buy the CD. And the fundamental unit was that CD, that package. I had to buy the whole package to get that one song. Now if there’s a song I like, I can buy that one song. That’s a very different model, as the music industry has learned somewhat to its despair but is adapting to. In news the same thing has happened.
The brand is no longer a destination, a place that people go to to get news. The brand is a mark of quality on that story. This is a USA Today story, I know what USA Today standards are, therefore the fact that it says USA Today, which is one of our valued partners, on top of that story—that’s a brand of quality. I know what I’m getting here. Or an NBC story, or a Huffington Post story, or a Fox News story. So it’s a very different environment, and the brand is still extremely important, but the meaning has changed quite fundamentally.
finally
My greatest hope is the the flip side of that coin—that as journalism evolves, as new forms of journalism evolve, as new delivery mechanisms evolve, that the end product is a more informed person and a more informed populace. Because I think that an informed populace is the critical element to a successful, thriving democracy. So my great hope is that as journalism works through this period of turmoil and uncertainty, that we come out the other end with models that keep citizens informed, where people can always get the information they need to make informed decisions.
You can see the entire text of the interview on the futureof.news site. I’ve also embedded both video clips below.
Part One
Part Two