9 Questions For Tumblr Newsie Ernie Smith Of ShortFormBlog

Lots of media organizations have started posting on Tumblr over the last few months. It kind of feels like when Twitter was just becoming mainstream. Do you see Tumblr going the same way?

Yeah, but perhaps in a different way from Twitter. The reason why Tumblr is interesting is because it encourages conversation and creativity, whereas Twitter has become much more of a broadcast mechanism over time. I think that, while Twitter continues to grow, their approach to fostering community feels less and less like it makes sense.

And the thing that really makes Tumblr stand out is that your work can reach larger sites and staff members … it’s not a one-way street. If someone posts something really cool, I’ll reblog it, no matter who the person is.

Tumblr has its own issues — particularly with downtime — but I think that the collective sense of community really makes it worth the trouble.

Recent updates, such as edited tag pages have made it easier to track news on Tumblr. Do you think Tumblr has had its coming-of-age news moment yet?

We’re starting to make inroads, but I think we’re still getting there. A couple of Tumblrs get mentioned/cited in the press semi-regularly — specifically Anthony De Rosa’s soupsoup — but we haven’t reached the point where the story is coming to Tumblr. People are aggregating what they find elsewhere on Tumblr, but people with their feet on the ground aren’t going to Tumblr first to report things, instead choosing Twitter and Facebook. In a rhetorical sense, will that change?

Either way, in terms of coverage, Tumblr hasn’t reached the level of Twitter during the Green Revolution in Iran, but I do think that things like Egypt proved that we can offer a great level of news coverage in a way people can’t get elsewhere. And with Egypt, one of the things that the Tumblr community succeeded at doing was getting Al Jazeera to create a presence on the site — an effort that has greatly improved the voices in our community.

So we’re getting there, but the “defining moment” has yet to come. It’s an exciting time of growth in the community, no matter if or when that “defining moment” comes.

Any predictions for what is around the corner for the Tumblr news community?

I think that, over time, a lot of the more independent news bloggers are going to work together on stories — and what you’ll find is that they’ll start breaking or bringing light to news before a lot of other places. You saw this to a degree during the Japan quake, the Egyptian revolution, and the current crisis in Libya. Tumblrs like Anthony De Rosa’s Soup really got ahead of the story.

But the thing is, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. I was speaking with Matthew Keys (ProducerMatthew) about this the other day. I think certain bloggers are really good at finding new things before anyone else is even aware they exist. Others (like SFB) are good at taking complex things and explaining them quickly and simply. Others have good taste — a trait that serves one well on Tumblr. And others still are great at putting sunlight on stories that perhaps fell through the cracks.

Unlike the social media journalists on sites like Twitter and other sites, we’ll collaborate more, however. If there’s a corner to the story we’re missing, We can just reblog it and give the original poster credit. Together, from a journalism perspective, it’s kinda like a newsroom without the newsroom.

The secret for big media sites is that they have to keep their ear to the ground and listen to sites like these. We’re going to talk about this stuff anyway. Whether someone in a newsroom notices and says, “HEY THIS IS IMPORTANT!” is up to them. And that’s why, if you run a big media Tumblr, it can’t be like a lot of Twitter accounts. It has to be a two-way street.

It sounds like you’re not such a big Twitter fan.

I do feel it has a lot of great uses, and I don’t want to downplay that — and lots of great conversations happen on the site. But at the same time, I’ve come to feel over the past two years that its scope can be limited at times … getting granular with people is more difficult. It has a heart that beats differently from Tumblr, and I don’t think I made that clear in what I wrote. So I think that it would be important to note that Twitter has different strengths. But Tumblr offers significant advantages that Twitter doesn’t have — or that it did have and have kind of dissipated over time.

Jaclyn Schiff is a writer, reporter and media consultant based in Washington, D.C. Her work — which often covers media, global health and women — has appeared in several publications, such as CBSNews.com, The Huffington Post, NPR, PBS MediaShift and Women’s eNews. You can probably guess that she’s on Tumblr and you can find her on Twitter too.