Hi Mark — another college newspaper-Tumblr question. I’m really motivated to start a Tumblr for my D.C. college newspaper, particularly to promote multimedia and layout content. I’ve done plenty of research on the topic, outlined a well-reasoned plan for the blog, but the editor in chief isn’t giving me the go-ahead. She thinks it’ll be too much maintenance time and work for little payoff since there aren’t nearly as many students on Tumblr as there are on Twitter or Facebook. This is true, but — to me — it’s beside the point. How can I sway her? I know Tumblr is easy to maintain, but how can I sell her on the benefits despite smaller readership?

Tuesday, June 28 2011

Hi Mark -- another college newspaper-Tumblr question. I'm really motivated to start a Tumblr for my D.C. college newspaper, particularly to promote multimedia and layout content. I've done plenty of research on the topic, outlined a well-reasoned plan for the blog, but the editor in chief isn't giving me the go-ahead. She thinks it'll be too much maintenance time and work for little payoff since there aren't nearly as many students on Tumblr as there are on Twitter or Facebook. This is true, but -- to me -- it's beside the point. How can I sway her? I know Tumblr is easy to maintain, but how can I sell her on the benefits despite smaller readership?

Asked by lunchm3at

Hmm. I can give you my experience at Newsweek, which should be somewhat parallel; my job was as an editor there, and I experimented with a lot of different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. While I think they all have their uses, for me Tumblr was the most rewarding one, and also the most effective at performing a core mission of any news organization: creating a real dialogue between publisher and audience. By that I mean that people on Tumblr were much more engaged with Newsweek because we spoke to them as equals; we responded to them by following and reblogging where appropriate

Our Tumblr followers at Newsweek were fewer than the ones we had at Twitter or Facebook, to be sure (though that gap is narrowing; when I was doing Tumblr for Newsweek there were less than 5 million Tumblr blogs; today there are more than 21 million), but they were much more engaged. The average Tumblr user coming to Newsweek looked at 6 pages per visit; for FB and Twitter the number was less than 4 pages/visit. Also remember that you can treat your Tumblr blog as in effect part of your site. It can look exactly the same as your site, carry the same advertising, analytics, etc.

In the end I think Tumblr is an especially useful tool for journalists/publications because because of its full interactive feature set, like the ‘ask’ box and the ‘submit’ function (EatSleepDraw, for one, gets hundreds of submissions a day through this; see also Neighborhoodr for a great example of community-sourced local stories via the Submit feature); for its ease of mobile publishing; as a method to quickly and efficiently circulate your stories to a large network of people; and as a way to foster tight connections with your readers.

Also, I’d be glad to talk to your EIC. I’m mark@tumblr.com; send her my way.