The MSM is all over Tumblr. Now what?

It’s hard to wander around on Tumblr lately without tripping over at least one or two brand-new tumblelogs created by old-school, “mainstream media”-types.

Newsweek was the first success of its type and since editor Mark Coatney jumped ship to work for Tumblr itself, its popularity has exploded in traditional media. To be fair, some sites were up and running on Tumblr before that — the L.A. Times’ “Go Mobile”, Life, Public Radio International (just barely). Though some fizzled out almost as quickly as they were put up (I’m looking at you, HuffPost New York) or only started posting regularly then (Village Voice).

But since then, The Economist, The Atlantic, Washington Post Style Section, Politico, The American Prospect, the Times Union of Albany, N.Y., have all set up Tumblrs. Even the most mainstream of mainstream media, the New York Times, has put a placeholder on Tumblr (though since posting “Coming soon!” on June 24, there’s been no sign of life).

So now what ? A bit of context – I spent 20 years in newsrooms of varying sizes in five different states in three different time zones (four, if you count Arizona, which doesn’t participate in Daylight Savings Time).

That is to say, I know a little bit about how old-school media organizations work, and the rush to Tumblr didn’t surprise me one little bit. Nor did it surprise me that no one quite seemed to know what to do with the tumblelogs once they had them.

Newsweek’s Tumblr succeeded in building community by being a part of the community. Then-editor Mark Coatney, who is now Tumblr’s chief media evangelist, built the tumblelog as a side project and made Newsweek a solid member of the tumbling public. He reblogged cool posts, posted cool stuff and interacted.

And though Newsweek’s Tumblr wasn’t a huge SEO or traffic boost, it brought quality readers to Newsweek’s main site. I recently set up a meeting between Coatney and editors for WalletPop and Urlesque for them to meet and figure out how they could best leverage the platform, and he dropped some interesting tidbits:

Visitors to Newsweek from Tumblr stuck around – they viewed, on average, six pages each time they came. And, even better, they’d come back – not always via Tumblr.

Publications can go chasing page views and there are plenty of ways they can achieve that. Front pages on Digg or Reddit, viral hits on StumbleUpon – those can bring nice spikes to traffic and boost the month’s traffic report. That’s important, of course, but so is building a community of readers who will come back time and again and share your content.

But not everything can help create community. Twitter and Facebook can help, but they’re more like city streets. They’re so busy and everything’s rushing by at breakneck speed. It’s very easy to miss something.

Tumblr’s like a small town main street where you can wander around and see familiar faces and sometimes someone you’ve never seen before. You can stop to chat — ask a question, comment on a post or reblog. Or you can just wave hello — ”like” a post and then go about your business.

The problem I’m seeing with these blogs is that they’re mostly talking and not doing a lot of listening, which is the typical problem for mainstream press in this new media world.

On Life’s Tumblr, for example, the only reblogs are other people’s posts (worth noting that some of those other posts are folks who work for Life) of photos from or old covers of … Life magazine.

The Atlantic’s is similar, though a gallery across the bottom shows posts from other Tumblrs that the magazine has “liked.” (Newsweek has a similar gallery, but it’s prominently displayed at the top of the blog.)

To be fair, in both cases it’s content that’s easy for readers to share and has great images. And they’re getting comments on their posts, so someone’s reading.

And using Tumblr without reblogging also isn’t unusual — this is the platform that spawned “This is Why You’re Fat,” “Look at this Fucking Hipster,” and “Garfield Minus Garfield” three of the 14 Tumblrs that have gotten book deals. All those sites were reblogged plenty without reblogging others. However, most of those single-serving sites accepted reader-submitted content through the community.

There’s a chance Tumblr could be come a great new outlet for all these media types. But if they take the chance and squander it by just doing more of the same and not taking chances, that’ll be a shame.