9 Questions For Tumblr Newsie Ernie Smith Of ShortFormBlog
How many people currently help maintain the blog?
Three at the moment. I handle a lot of the social media aspects and general tinkering right now along with posting, and Seth Millstein and Chris Tognotti write a good chunk of the posts. (They’re really good!) During the peak of the situation in Japan, we also got a lot of help from Matthew Keys (better known as ProducerMatthew), who was breaking a lot of news at the time. He was a key source for that recent Gawker story on Anonymous.
If you follow news on Tumblr, it’s hard to miss SFB. Your stuff is popular and you also edit several tag pages. What makes for effective news delivery on Tumblr?
Timeliness, brevity, finding a new angle on the topic du jour, and — most importantly — listening to your readers. They usually have good ideas and perspectives you aren’t covering. And you know what? What I’ve found most helpful is strong relationships and friendships with other news-oriented and political-oriented Tumblrs. Sites like Kateoplis, Newsflick and Pantsless Progressive have their pulse on news angles that others are missing. Their best posts encourage me to work harder on my own stuff. And when you combine all these things together — base content, reader input and interaction with other bloggers — you get something really interesting.
Let’s talk about content. What’s your formula for choosing great stuff?
Our main guiding principle is to tell people something they don’t know or to offer a twist on a story — where ever we can find it. Number-based posts and breakdowns (clearly) get precedent, but it’s most important to find something near the in your average news story that you might’ve missed when reading the first time, or offers an angle worth a closer look. Otherwise, wit, personality and voice are key for us, so stories that allow us to show our true colors are important.
What do your traffic and follower numbers look like?
We’ve traditionally gotten about 1,200-1,500 unique visitors a day, though we’ve been doing a little better than that lately. This month has been one of our best months ever traffic-wise, due in part to the large amount of news happening at the moment — from Wisconsin to Libya to Japan to Egypt … we were in front of a lot of these stories, and some of the things we broke to the Tumblr audience got some attention from larger sites.
The site has been kinda slow-growing on Twitter of late, but on Tumblr we’ve exploded. In six months we went from zero followers to over 5,000. The site hit the 5,000 mark about a week ago and has already scored a few hundred more followers since then.
What have been some of your most popular items?
We have a lot of them, but just a sampling of the ones that have been pretty popular on the Tumblr:
A graphic on nuclear plants vs. fault lines in the U.S.; Fukushima/Chernobyl math, which was easily the site’s most popular post in ages; our roundup feature, the ShortFormBlog Summary Sandwich, which got a preview during the Japan quake; and this photo was probably our most-reblogged post from that period.
Overall, though, we post a lot of stuff — our news cycle tends to blaze by. :D
Your post featuring a video of Jennifer Rexford, who discussed health issues she experienced following the Gulf oil spill received a lot of reblogs recently (669 last we checked). Despite the Tumblr visibility, why do you think this story hasn’t gotten more coverage?
On top of a bad hand, Ms. Rexford was dealt a bad news cycle. Too much is going on right now, and the Gulf Oil Spill — which so dominated the news six months ago — doesn’t get a lot of play these days. And that’s a real shame; her story, and that of wheelchair-bound Paul Doom (who wanted to be a Marine before he got very sick after swimming in the ocean), reflect an angle of the oil crisis people missed the first time.
I think that’s where sites like Tumblr can get a real advantage on news stories. We can find opportunities like this to tell others about things that are getting underplayed in the press, and by telling people about them, can make people in our circle care. And even if they don’t go mainstream, we can say that we’ve made our best effort in bringing it to light. We can say to our audience that we’re giving them something they’re not getting anywhere else — be it news from the Gulf Oil Spill, Haiti or the Ivory Coast.
Another example of this was the coverage me and a few other bloggers did of the MLK Day attempted bombing in Spokane, Wash. SFB and the blog Pantsless Progressive did a lot of work covering this, and I threw together a post detailing the level of play it was getting at the time, which was very low. When a friend of mine contacted me to say, “I live in Spokane and had no idea this was going on,” I knew we had touched a nerve with our audience.
