The BuzzFeed Tumblr (The Buzzblr)

This is not our regularly scheduled rant!

langer:

Really more of a backup rant seeing as the rant we’d originally lined up for this time slot was pre-empted at the last minute at pain of both Doree¹ and Katiebakes² auto-close-tabbing³ our asses—but hey, we got rants to spare around here!

So! Let’s begin.

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.

You can lead a horse to water, I guess.

So then I got curious as to just how well these guys were engaging their newfound audiences and went looking around. Check out who Politico is following:

Or how about The American Prospect:

And while none of the other Big Media Tumblrs that I could find display a list of other Tumblrs they keep up with, still, you can paint a pretty good picture based on their reblogging habits: The Huffington Post Tumblr seems to exist for the express purpose of reblogging other Huffington Post subsidiary Tumblrs; The New Yorker reblogs the shit out of its own staff writers; and The Atlantic once courageously parted ways with the hallowed club of elite media to reblog… the founding editor of Gawker.

Meanwhile, outlets like The Paris Review and The Economist are making no attempt whatsoever to engage an audience, using their Tumblrs instead as just another channel for inbound links to their existing websites. Which is fine! Until, of course, that sort of good old fashioned link-whoring gets billed as the second coming of journalism.

You know, Mark Coatney brought Newsweek to Tumblr with astounding success because Mark knows how to be a part of a community, because he’s smart enough to see that his audience works just as hard as he does at producing the sort of content that makes this community worthwhile, and that we all did it without expecting a ticker tape parade to celebrate our esteemed arrival.

Meanwhile, established media came to Tumblr to engage their audiences, and in so doing revealed that the only audience that really matters is themselves.

—

¹cf. http://twitter.com/doreeshafrir/status/21342913678
²cf. http://twitter.com/katiebakes/status/21348285683
³I was going to rant about how royally fucked up it is that this whole outrage over the 9/11 GROUND ZERO TERROR MOSQUE™ has been initiated by two specific demagogues—Sarah and Newt—and how obviously calculated and utterly meaningless any sort of “populist outrage” is when it’s been manufactured by two people who, collectively, represent a combined constituency whose grand total is FUCKING ZERO—but then I held off on ranting about it out of respect for the wishes of Doree and Bakes, but then I snuck it in here as a footnote because hahahaaa you guys you can’t auto-close-tab a footnote!! lol!1!

Nailed it.

Come down from your ivory towers, reblog and interact with us, your unwashed masses.

Here’s an idea: Hire some tumblr natives who are also very familiar with your publications.