everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Carl Bernstein at ONA 17

    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 us to seek out, “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

    Mr. Bernstein reminded us that it is not the job of the press to undo a candidate or knock a one out of office. The mission of the press is to uncover the truth, in context and developed through great investigative reporting so that the people may make the important decisions that drive our democracy.

    But lately the press has been,

    disfigured by celebrity, celebrity worship, gossip, sensationalism, manufactured controversy (particularly in the press), denial of our society’s real conditions (good and bad), and by a political and social discourse that we (the press) the politicians, and the people have allowed to devolve into a cacophony of name-calling, idealogical warfare and, especially, easy answers to tough questions

    He pleaded for all journalists to keep their focus on the larger story. Even with the new tools available today, it is the unique perspective and context that comes from knocking on doors and “shoe leather” reporting that will unearth the truth required by our democracy. To gather that truth we all needed to be better listeners.

    His remarks concluded with a quote from his editor at the Washington Post, the late Ben Bradlee.

    The more aggressive our search for the truth, the more some people are offended by the press. So be it. I take great strength knowing that in my experience the truth does emerge. It takes forever sometimes but it does emerge. Any relaxation by the press will be extremely costly to democracy.

    Amen to that.

  • SmartNews CM with Riho Yoshioka

    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, 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.

    Screencaps on this site.

  • Work for SmartNews!

    Work for SmartNews!

    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:

    • Coding experience in Java, Kotlin, or Scala
    • Experience operating and maintaining a JVM-based application
    • Experience developing on top of a web framework (e.g. Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails, etc.)
    • Working knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
    • Experience with AWS
    • Experience developing and operating a high-traffic web service
    • Good understanding of JVM internals

    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.

    SmartNews SF office (the earth guy is our mascot Chikyu, he has a blog)

    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.

    People like to visit our office to learn about startups

    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.

    Our Harajuku Headquarters (it’s very swank)

    For more, about SmartNews check out:

  • SmartNews TV commercials featuring Tamori

    SmartNews TV commercials featuring Tamori

    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.

    The news app so addicting you look for time to be alone.

    News Junkie are you? Check out the US Edition.

  • SmartNews shoutout on Google Play

    The crew running @googleplay account gave SmartNews a nice shoutout this morning. Thanks Google!

    The cool animated GIF and tagline was all them. Love it! Posting here for posterity.

  • Stay Informed with SmartNews

    Facebook

    We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about.

    SmartNews

    Our mission is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world.

    It helps to be aligned with your partners.

  • AI is only human

    AI is only human

    I’m so glad that The New York Times ran this op-ed (Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem) about the inherent biases in Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Popular culture and much media coverage of AI tends to mysticize how it works, neglecting to point out that any machine learning algorithm is only going to be as good as the training set that goes into its creation.

    Delip Rao, a machine learning consultant, thinks long and hard about the bias problem. He recently gave a fascinating talk at a machine learning meetup where he implored a room of machine learning engineers to be vigilant in making sure their algorithms were not encoding any hidden bias.

    The slides from his talk are posted online but Delip’s final takeaway lessons have stuck with me and are good to keep in mind whenever you read stories of algorithms taking on a mind of their own.

    Delip Rao takeaways

    It is still very early days and many embarrassing mistakes have been made and more will be made in the future. Our assumption should be that every automated system is fallible and that each mistake is an opportunity to make things better (both ourselves and the algorithm) and should not be an indictment of the technology.

  • Rich Jaroslovsky on the Future of News

    Rich Jaroslovsky on the Future of News

    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

  • Heineken Champions League

    Heineken has long-running relationship with the UEFA Champions League tournament in Europe. Each year they run a series of advertisements running up to the contest that feature the fans and get everyone excited about the game.

    This year’s installment is brilliant. The Dilemma pits an Italian fan’s love of the game against his faithfulness to his mates who get together to watch every game together on the couch.

    Last year’s The Match illustrates what a ship of football freak sailors will do to get a TV signal of their favorite game.

    Heineken Spain gets in on the game in 2014. Will you run out on your girlfriend?

    2013 featured The Negotiation where the guys have to convince their wife or girlfriends to spend almost $2000 for a pair of stadium seats, “you don’t even have to worry about the dogs chewing on them.”

    There’s more where these came from. Follow Heineken on YouTube for more.