Interview with Mark Coatney of Newsweek Magazine’s tumblr

Thursday, December 17 2009

Interview with Mark Coatney of Newsweek Magazine’s tumblr

In case you haven’t seen it, Newsweek magazine has a pretty kick ass tumblr blog.

The work of Newsweek Senior Articles Editor Mark Coatney, the tumblr re-frames Newsweek’s content with a fresh voice on an independent and emerging - and ultimately fun - platform.

Coatney, who posted his motivations for starting a tumblr here, answered some more questions about the site over email.

How did it come to be that Newsweek - or someone at Newsweek - started a tumblr blog?

It was me, mainly. I’d had my own personal Tumblr since spring 2007, and really liked the potential. I started one for Newsweek in late 2008, but for most of the next year it was just an rss feed from Newsweek and our YouTube channel. Tumblarity was probably -6. I didn’t do more with it, mainly because, while I liked Tumblr a lot as a platform, I wasn’t quite sure how Newsweek translated.

Tumblrs, especially then, or at least the ones I followed, tended to be mostly personality driven and, um, what’s the personality of Newsweek? (I had the same issue with Twitter, by the way). Also there was the issue of staffing; even something as easy as Tumblr requires someone to, um, Tumbl. So we just kind of sat there. At some point in September of this year, and I can’t even remember why, I decided, ah, what the hell, and started posting some. We quickly got a lot of great response (seriously, everyone was so nice; I’ve worked in online media for 15 years, and I have never experienced anything close to the positive feedback that came from starting to work on Tumblr.)

The Tumblr staff emailed and offered to redesign our theme, which previously had been something I’d hacked together (CSS is not a strong point of mine); I love their result.

Is having a Newsweek tumblr about brand-extension? Many publications don’t want to move outside their print products, much less their own sites; what’s changed for Newsweek?

Brand extension, sure, but mainly it’s about finding new ways of communicating with our readers.

I’ve long been frustrated by the inability of big media sites to have a real two-way communication with the readers. I mean, reading Newsweek (or any other old media property) online is pretty much the same experience you have in print: We put out a story, you come and look at it. Comments sort of improve on this, in that now you can at least discuss a story in that space, but they don’t work all that well as a communications channel with the publication, because a) they’re nearly always crammed into a little, lesser comment ghetto on the page, which few readers, and even fewer writers and editors, ever look at and b) our staffers don’t have an easy way to join into the conversation.

My thought with Tumblr is, mainly, that there’s a lot of really interesting, creative things being done/talked about on Tumblr, and we want to be in on that. What I’d love someday is for every bit of Newsweek’s content to be easily rebloggable, and for readers to be able to experience the site not just as some static thing we program for them, but as a conversation they have with the Newsweek staffers they choose to follow.

Do you get buy-in from the Newsweek newsroom for something like this?

Sort of. I mean, I just started this, and now it’s had some success and is getting interest from a few other people. But as you know, you don’t really ‘get’ Tumblr unless you do it, and there are only, I think, 5 staffers here besides me who have used Tumblr. So part of my challenge is to show other people here how it helps them, and Newsweek, to be participating in this space.

The tumblr features great vingettes from Newsweek that really grab my attention, but also external images and quotes and the occasional item from Nevver or the DailyWUT. How are you picking content?

This goes to my concerns about voice. Mainly, in the end, the Newsweek’s Tumblr is me, or at least a more reserved, corporate me. So the things we reblog are for the most part things that I like. I still just do this when I have the odd moment between editing stories, meetings, and all the normal things for my job (this explains the somewhat erratic posting sked). So for this to really take off, at some point we’ll probably have to have someone do this full time.

Is the Newsweek tumblarity just out of control?

Ha! It’s sad how much I pay attention to that. We’ve been all over the map, but we average around 1,200. A few weeks ago we were at 4,000, which was crazy.

Visit the Newsweek Tumblr.