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Mark & Mary Devlin

Mark & Mary Devlin42 posts

Mark and Mary Devlin are media entrepreneurs. After studying engineering in Scotland, they moved to Japan in 1989. In 1993 they started handing out a four-page classified ads sheet on Tokyo streets. Over 14 years that sheet grew into Metropolis, Japan’s No 1 English Magazine. In 2000 they founded japantoday.com, the No. 1 news and discussion site about Japan in English. In 2007 Mark & Mary sold their businesses and moved to the United States where they opened Kroaky’s, a private karaoke room business. In 2014 they launched Newslines, an innovative news timeline site, which was followed by NewsBlocks, a blockchain-based marketplace for news data. In June 2020 they launched The Majority to fight back against Nationalism in Scotland. They have two children and live in Glasgow.

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24 Apr, 2001

A tour round the Metropolis office

TV Appearance0 Comments

MX TV’s World in Tokyo program gives viewers a tour of the Tokyo Classified office. Mark:

All these ads came from the readers, so the readers made the magazine bigger and bigger.

About Japan Today:

We want to really promote the idea that foreigners and Japanese people can come together and start to talk about things and make better communication.

Tokyo Classified - Metropolis 2001

6 Mar, 2019

News Rewired talk

Gives Talk0 Comments

Mark presents NewsBlocks at News Rewired, a conference at Thomson Reuters HQ in London, that promotes trends in journalism technology. Mark discusses the use of blockchain technology to create a verified, permanent and priced “store of news value” for all the world’s news.

19 Jun, 2019

World News Media Congress panel

Gives Talk0 Comments

Mark participates in a panel on news innovation at the World News Media Congress in Glasgow. The other participants included Frédéric Sitterlé, Director of Development at Groupe Challenges, which is creating news products for use in Renault cars, Kourtney Bitterly, R&D Lead at the New York Times, who talked about the company’s research into Smart Speakers, and Robyn Spector, Director of Corporate Strategy and Development at the Associated Press (AP), who talked about giving AI tools to journalists.

Mark talks about using blockchain to price news data:

At the moment, there’s so much discussion about subscription models, and how much can we get people to pay for news. But nobody really knows the real cost of a piece of news.

And the challenges facing startups:

It seems companies really want to pick the winner. News organisations would rather wait and see if something succeeds. But how can something succeed if they haven’t been funded from beginning?