Amazon's Doorbell Company Is Selling Fear

Amazon Ring is building 'a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors,' reports the director Nieman Journalism Lab, in a post from The Atlantic:

That's right: A doorbell company wants to report crime news. It already is, actually. Several people on LinkedIn describe their jobs as 'news editors' at Ring... I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a really bad idea. Crime has declined enormously over the past 25 years, but people's perception of how much crime there is has not. A majority of Americans have said that crime is increasing in each of the past 16 years -- despite crime in each major category being significantly lower today than it used to be. A 2016 Pew survey found that only 15 percent of Americans believed (correctly) that crime was lower in 2016 than it had been in 2008 -- versus 57 percent who thought it had gotten worse...

These mistaken beliefs are driven largely by the editorial decisions of local media -- especially local TV newscasts, which are just as bloody today as they were when murder rates were twice as high. There's a term for it: 'mean world syndrome,' the phenomenon where media consumption makes people see the world as more violent and dangerous than it really is... But news organizations have multiple and sometimes conflicting incentives that might affect how they present the local police blotter. A company that sells security-optimized doorbells has only one incentive: emphasizing that the world is a scary place, and you need to buy our products to protect you....

So think about this managing-editor job. Ring wants to be 'covering local crime' everywhere, down to the house and neighborhood level. So one managing editor, plus however many other people are on this team, is supposed to be creating a thoughtful, nonexploitative editorial product that is sending journalistically sound 'breaking news crime alerts,' in real time, all across the country. Are they really delivering news or just regular pulses of fear in push-notification form? If that's the job, it is literally impossible to do responsibly... It's like relying on the people who make antivirus software to tell you about the latest cybersecurity issues: Even when the reporting is sound, it's still prone to exaggerating the scale of the threat and still aimed at making you so afraid that you give them money.

The article's author spent 10 years working for newspapers (most recently the Dallas Morning News), and argues that 'the reality is that 'breaking crime news alerts' are not something the majority of people needs -- especially if 'two Greenpeace volunteers stood on my porch for 30 seconds' is the bar we're talking about. It's not actionable intelligence -- it's puffing a little more air into an atmosphere of fear...'

He concludes that Amazon Ring 'says it's selling safety, but it's really selling fear. '

Read more of this story at Slashdot.