The bigger picture, in your words

With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.

For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!

Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits or read the transcript with credits here.

“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP

"Social media has held politics and media to account"

Journalism & Backsliding Democracy was a good journalism-democracy-disinformation panel with Jay Rosen at New York University School of Journalism for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit last week.

From my live notes: “Social media has held politics and media to account,” said former director of BBC News Richard Sambrook, hitting the nail on the head!

Social media is not just part of the #disinformation problem, it’s part of the solution as I’ve been contending with my Fifth Estate-holding-power-to-account project: KIP! (Read about it here.)

The hitch: knowing which are the good actors on social media and which are the bad actors.

My live notes: Jay said we need smart practices to solve the hardest problems in news coverage, like if you had a “Category of bad actors” you could put a source in you’d be better prepared. 🤔

That sounds very much like the categorization I’ve been structuring with KIP.

Is your foot on the brake at the same time you're trying to accelerate? It’s your brain science

New read for Fogust...

I was fortunate to read an early manuscript of this new book release by ☀️ Jessica J.J. Lutz ☀️ and look forward to diving into the final version now making its way around the world!

I see Barbie gets a mention on p 110 - she was Jessica's favored doll because she wasn't a baby, she was a grown woman who knew what she wanted - Jessica and I were among the (how many, uncounted?) girls whose parents wouldn't allow us to play with the toy. Before Barbie director Greta Gerwig was even born, Barbie was a subversive force in our lives!

“A war correspondent facing burnout wonders why she suddenly feels fear when a bomb goes off at her Baghdad hotel: a clue comes when she realizes she is 4 months pregnant. To understand how her coping mechanisms no longer work, she applied her journalistic research skills to the inner conflict she experienced, and her upbringing. What comes out of it is a deep dive into the gender-based sociology, and the brain science, a review of the literature parsing it all, and a way forward, through simple exercises that anyone can do to start using our dual-sided human brain to succeed in life and work, and stay healthy and feel good about it too.”

— How I encapsulated the book on an early read.

Here’s where you can get the book in the USA: Amazon.

Selfies were Silvana's process of surviving disease

Remembering my dear friend and collaborator whose creativity found new outlet as she faced her altered states of beauty. A fierce and bountiful soul, Silvana is greatly missed.

The September Issue: Drop is "the future of delivery"

“What does it look like when a pre-Series A startup is on newsstands in three national industry magazines at the same time? ”

— Like this!

Congrats to the young diverse team at Drop Delivery which Marijuana Venture calls in its cover story "The future of delivery".

Marijuana Venture writes: “After revolutionizing delivery tech in 2020, Drop Delivery is empowering businesses with even more customizable features to improve efficiency and increase sales.”

Women & Weed calls CEO Vanessa Gabriel “the delivery diva”.

Cannabis & Tech Today says Drop’s on a mission to help retailers optimize their day-to-day operations and delivery services with cutting-edge technology for a monthly subscription fee. That’s the SaaS model.

Why am I writing about Drop?

If you missed it, I’ve been pleased to be bringing my experience to Drop as their chief operating officer since last November!

The tech + cannabis industry space is having a particular moment, as legalization spreads to more states and during the pandemic “cannabis has become an essential household item.” California, which began adult-use sales in 2018, saw consumers rise to 45% of all adults in the first half of 2021 according to BDSA’s business intelligence and market share tracking. Consumption is on the rise across the nation.

“Cannabis has become an essential household item. Consumerism has exploded. Delivery is the future.”

…and the news does not stop.

Yesterday, Drop won the Poseidon Asset Management Green Shoots Pitch Forum, a special event that connects top-performing cannabis companies across all verticals (licensed and ancillary), with accredited investors. It’s organized by Poseidon, a first mover in the cannabis investment space named Top Hedge Fund Q3 2020 by Barclay Hedge. Winning sends Vanessa to pitch to investors on stage during MJUnpacked in Las Vegas in October, an industry conference for brands, retail executives, and investors.

Amazon buys MGM, now itching for actual updates to the content vault

So many of us have envisioned this day, or at least where things are now surely headed for MGM's legendary library!

Once worked in Studio Business Affairs at MGM in the 90s, you may recall.

Then prepandemic had the pleasure of pitching 10 Block, my social and mobile streaming platform solution to MGM, Madhu and the studio's distribution leadership, and together envisioning the impact of connecting today's global audiences -- where and when and how they are watching -- with MGM's vaulted riches.

Still itching to see actual forward-looking viewing conventions applied to older content. Personally, want annotations, episodes, interactivity.

Can you imagine, for instance, viewing MGM’s library of Old Hollywood classics and Bond blockbusters broken down into short modern length episodes you can chat with your friends about, and discovering what to watch through reviews and what your network is liking? That looks like this?

A woman can dream!