Amazon is currently looking to hire someone with the title “Managing Editor, News.” But it’s not for the entire Amazon empire—it’s for the small slice of it that makes security-focused doorbells, Ring. (Amazon bought Ring last year.)
Here’s the job description:
The Managing Editor, News will work on an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management. Having a knack for engaging storytelling that packs a punch and a strong nose for useful content are core skills that are essential to the success of this role. The candidate should be eager to join a dynamic, new media news team that is rapidly evolving and growing week by week.
Just straight up fear-mongering to sell security doorbells.
A couple of my co-workers have Ring, and they say the feature works well. There’s a message board or something for each area, and you go on there, and people have posted videos of people who stole packages, etc. and the police is notified as well, and they usually end up catching those people.
Yeah, from a media standpoint, Ring was probably one of the highest-profile tech acquisitions of the last year or two, not for the cash changing hands, but rather for the media footprint.
It’s a tech that was initially featured on the show Shark Tank (all Sharks passed on it, I think due to crazy high valuation in the ask), but Amazon bought it, seeing it as a way to add to their delivery portfolio – since Amazon is essentially becoming (if not already) a logistics company.
But I believe Ring works off a subscription model – to get updates sent to your phone when someone rings your doorbell with streaming video, etc., you have to subscribe. This tells me that subscription revenue needs some goose-ing. Cynically done, of course.
Ring ready has an app called Neighbors that, judging by its marketing, encourages people living in bucolic suburbs with wrought iron gates to feel as if they’re in the last un-zombified neighborhood in The Walking Dead. (I assume this app is where this new managing editor’s work product will be found.)
Basically, it’s an app that makes you want to see your neighborhood the same way that this screenshot does: Suspicious Stranger Crime Crime Stranger Crime Suspicious Suspicious Crime Crime Crime Crime Suspicious Stranger Crime.
Fuck that noise. I have a ring and I’m not joking when 90% of it is stupid stuff like literal alerts about kids playing in front of someone’s house in the street, solicitors with clear logos ringing doorbells and then going away with people freaking out about how “shady they look” (most of the time they end up being black), “this 10 year old kid walked up to a tree in my front yard and stole an orange”, and other worthless alerts that cause notifications to be pushed to my phone.
The only crimes I have seen was the rare time it caught someone trying to check if a car door was unlocked, in which case sending it to the police won’t do squat because it’s too far away.
I have yet to see a redeeming value to the neighborhood watch feature, and everyone I’ve talked to in other states has had the same exact experience.
Ring’s Neighbors thing is total trash. Every emergency dispatch in the City results in someone posting about how they believe everyone has been murdered. Every person walking down the street is up to no good.
This reminds me of the social network Nextdoor. It’s a hyperlocal effort about forming networks at the neighborhood level. So what did that turn into in my neighborhood in Atlanta? Just BOLOs about black guys looking shady, complete with doorbell photos of them walking down the street.
Awww, I’ve actually had a good experience with NextDoor. I signed up because I was hoping to find people complaining about me (walks late at night) or my cat (an egregious outdoor asshole). Instead it was actually interesting stuff (turns out a ton of people in the neighborhood are looking for gaming groups) and informative stuff (why does the neighborhood smell like onions? A: they mowed a large vacant area that had a ton of wild onions growing there).
That’s not the case. The Ring hooks up to your wifi and you register your phones that you want to be linked to it by downloading a free app. The only cost (so far) is the cost of the physical device.
The local folks are generally pretty good about only posting honestly shady people or folks doing stuff that’s pretty beyond the pale. My favorite was an Amazon delivery guy that chucked a package onto the porch from like 20 feet away… breaking the bottle of perfume or whatever was in it.
But there IS an awful lot of random nonsense. For like two solid weeks we had a group of neighbors posting videos of a fox. The fox was wandering the neighborhood and checking everyone’s porches for pet-food or whatever. And every day there were two or three videos of “Fox Sighting!” … an animal that is far from uncommon in this area.
Beyond that, the Ring sends you weekly crime reports for your area: these are just geo-located police incident reports that you can drill down onto if you want. “Assault”, “vehicle damage”, theft", etc. This is the same public-record stuff you could get from any number of on-line sources.
I get occasional real crimes like burglaries. But usually you can’t see anything anyway. If I wanted to disable the ring I can rip mine off before it uploads shit to the servers anyway.
Bulk of mine is stupid crap like ups didn’t ring bell for package.
There’s one crazy that keeps posting neighbors passing by a shared entrance and reporting maintenance workers for cleaning as suspicious characters. He’s nuts.
There’s brown people ringing passing by that get reported.
One time I posted about a lost dog, that was pretty helpful. Someone else went to look for it.
Remember the old “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” thing. It’s been replaced here by one that says “It’s 10 o’clock, have you set your security alarm?”.
For me it’s: There is motion at your front door.
No it’s a car driving by in the sun. There is motion at your front door.
No it’s a car driving by in the sun. There is motion at your front door.
No it’s a car driving by in the sun. There is motion at your front door.
No it’s a car driving by in the sun.
You can truncate the motion detection area to not include the road. It helps a bit.
What’s weird for me is how often the mailman seems to evade motion detection. I know he comes every day because I see the mail. I don’t know how he doesn’t trigger the motion detection. I should ask him one day.
