Still Not Going To Do This Every Day

See that you guys? The print media! They’re on Tumblr! I mean you heard, right? You didn’t miss the last two weeks of relentless self-congratulatory announcements, did you? About how We The Established Print Media Are Coming To Tumblr To Engage Our Audiences?

Except that maybe you did, seeing as so far “Coming To Tumblr To Engage Our Audiences” seems pretty indistinguishable from “Bringing Our Insidery Circle Jerk To Yet Another Social Media Echo Chamber.” Just look at this exchange: high-fives from Politico, an alley oop from The New Yorker, all rounded out with a celebratory ass-pat from The Atlantic. And what’s really sad is just how symbolic it is to see Mark Coatney right in the middle of all this—the guy whose job it is to help these Established Brands™ reach out to the Tumblr community—and here he is giving them the formal intro and all they can think to do with it is cheerlead amongst themselves.

Matt Langer makes some good points with this “The Print Media People Are Doing It Wrong!” post, but I think he discounts how new and foreign this is for big media companies—and ignores the fact that most of them will get better, and quickly. Remember that the majority of these publications have only been doing this for a few weeks; I know that, as they learn the space and fined their place in it, the good ones will become full, valuable members of the Tumblr community.

It’s understandable, though, why media companies would gravitate toward other media companies on Tumblr. We’ve all had this experience, where we go to a big party, and there are a million (or in Tumblr’s case, seven million) people in room; in such a situation, you first look for the familiar. So if you’re the New Yorker, and you’re the new kid in this space, and you see the Atlantic walk in, you’re psyched—you have an immediate point of contact. Also, you’ll follow those mainstream pubs first because you want to see how they’re doing it. Finding those great individuals on Tumblr to follow is, though ultimately the point, a harder and longer process, and not one that happens in a few days.

Though I believe that though Tumblr is a valuable tool publishers can use to fundamentally alter, and strengthen, the relationship to their readers (and that doing so will be key for successful publishers going forward), I understand that this isn’t something most places will be brilliant at overnight. This really is alien to the traditional ways all media organizations have related to their audiences. Most media companies think of their work as a fundamentally one-way communication (This, by they way, is not because they’re standoffish so much as that until recently the technology has never really allowed this). Even the way publishers think of reader interaction (comments, user-generated content) is usually one-way—commenters say their thing, in their little space on the site, but the author of the piece rarely responds; users upload photos—but there’s no acknowledgement of this from the publication, and no effort to integrate the photos into the editorial stream, etc.

It’s also a risk—what if the community rejects you? When I first started the Newsweek Tumblr, people were immediately nice and supportive, so it was very easy to interact with them, and I was comfortable outing myself as the author of the Tumblr (believe me, if everyone thought the Newsweek Tumblr sucked, I would have said it was totally written by Jon Meacham)¹.

In my experience the mainstream media people want to do this the right way, and I think they will. They’re still learning to crawl, but they’ll be doing amazing things soon. 

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^{1: This is funny because Jon’s the boss! And everyone knows he wouldn’t have done such a crappy Tumblr, so it’s a good joke.}