markcoatney: 2105: Playing it by ear: The...

markcoatney:

2105:

Playing it by ear: The Atlantic joins the magazine-Tumbling fray in embracing experimentation

Nieman JLab:

[“Experiment. Do whatever you want. Don’t embarrass us too much. And see how it goes.” is] the attitude that has come to characterize the Tumblr accounts of even The Most Serious News Organizations. “I don’t think the Tumblr is something that one needs to or even should bring too much strategy to,” Gould says. “You should just sort of learn what it is, and learn what works well.” And that process, undertaken with a platform whose very infrastructure encourages caprice, requires a level of lightheartedness. Sure, The Atlantic can use its Tumblr to push Atlantic.com content — people who are following the magazine on Tumblr, Gould points out, are presumably also interested in the work it produces — but, ultimately, “we’re entirely interested in approaching Tumblr as its own thing.”

The broader interest is one you don’t often hear discussed in the rarefied air of our national magazines-of-ideas, but one that could stand to get a little more traction in that world: in a word, whimsy.

Here’s an angle I find missing from the coverage (ha!) of media outlets on Tumblr: it’s a social network around short-form content. Media outlets learned long ago how to engage different readers and attention spans by mixing short-form content around longer pieces. Think of the number of times you’ve found yourself compelled to read a parts of Harper’s Index aloud to others. That stuff is built to share. That shorter fare is the *definition* of ‘web-ready’ yet it hasn’t resonated on the public web before. Not until the social effect could be added, most currently and visibly via Tumblr and other link-blogging efforts.

[SNIP]

Media outlets might draw another point-of-view from Tumblr: the role their content and voice can play for social-networked audiences. Not whimsy. Relevance.

My take, when I go to media outlets and talk to them about Tumblr is just this, that Tumblr is a fundamentally a venue for sharing content. I love that Tumblr is fun (and one reason I did so much of that posting for Newsweek is that Tumblr so perfectly dovetailed with my own stupid sense of humor), but more than that I love that Tumblr is relevant—that if I follow the right people they will, every day, present me with a highly sophisticated filter on the news of the day.

The Atlantic Tumblr gets this as well as anyone: When I’m agreeing to follow the Atlantic, I’m signing up to follow the Atlantic’s sensibility, just like when I follow Soup I’m signing up to get his take on things. In both cases, I’m counting on them to share things that I didn’t even know were out there. Which is a role that media companies traditionally do well, and I’m confident that a lot of them will do great things here.