Tumblr, the popular social blogging site, shut Storyboard, the multimedia news blog that it created last May report on its own community, Leslie Kaufman reports in Thursday’s New York Times.
The company did not give much explanation for why it decided to close the site suddenly and dismiss its skeletal staff of three. When the blog opened, it garnered a lot of attention for its innovative approach to storytelling.
Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with the research firm Altimeter, based in San Mateo, Calif., offered one common theory why Storyboard was closed. “Tumblr has taken in a lot of money and is trying to get to profitability this year,†she said. “They are looking to cut anything that does not contribute to the bottom line. I think it may be as simple as that.â€
The significance of the decision was being debated online Wednesday because Tumblr was not alone among social media sites in producing its own newslike content, often with experienced journalists.
In 2011, Flipboard hired the former Time executive Josh Quittner as editorial director. The same year the professional networking site LinkedIn hired Daniel Roth, the head of Fortune.com, to run its editorial operations.
But not all of the experiments have been successful. For example, in January 2012, Facebook hired a recent journalism school graduate, Dan Fletcher, to be its managing editor. Mr. Fletcher’s rather amorphous job seemed to be to write stories about trends on Facebook. Last month, he announced he was leaving. He said that Facebook did not need reporters and that articles detracted from activity on Facebook, which he said was inherently more interesting.
“Tumblr’s Storyboard and editorial operation never made any sense to me. Guess I am not the only one,†Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed.com, an online news site that has its own reporters but also has content sponsored by advertisers, wrote in a Twitter post.
In a phone interview, he added, “It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically.â€
The demise of Storyboard seemed to be taken hardest by other online journalists. Tumblr had not hired marketing people but journalists from more traditional outlets to run Storyboard. Jessica Bennett, Storyboard’s executive editor, had previously been at Newsweek/ The Daily Beast.
Ms. Etlinger said she appreciated that journalists were disappointed but said that online news was still in a very experimental stage. “I think we are going to see a lot of failed experiments before we see a form of journalism that makes money online,†Ms. Etlinger said.
