Say what you will about Newsweek…but don’t forget about their Tumblr. The Awl put it best: “For sale: Perennial runner-up weekly publication in dying media segment. $0 or best offer. Includes funny Tumblr.” The Tumblr in question? Newsweek’s. Yes, Newsweek‘s. Like the best Tumblrs, the site is random and trenchant and funny and unapologetically idiosyncratic. Indeed. When traditional media latch on to new forms The Tumblr’s fate is, at the moment, as precarious as that of its parent magazine. “The nice thing about management is that they’ve been very much like, ‘Experiment. Which is a small thing, but a rather profound one, as well. Another way to put it: the Tumblr, as part of an overall approach to institutional media, suggests the power of the personal — the idiosyncratic, the unique — in journalism.
The problem of scale Which isn’t to say there aren’t tensions between the personal and institutional in even something as unassuming as a Tumblr. Another challenge is the perennial one: commercial appeal. Links on Twitter: Newsweek with an impressive Tumblr, New York Times coming to Tumblr, other news organizations on Tumblr.
Newsweek. Micheline Bérnard always loved Lionel Desormeaux. Their parents were friends though that bonhomie had not quite carried on to the children. Micheline and Lionel went to primary and secondary school together, had known each other all their lives—when Lionel looked upon Micheline he was always overcome with the vague feeling he had seen her somewhere before while she was overcome with the precise knowledge that he was the man of her dreams. In truth, everyone loved Lionel Desormeaux. He was tall and brown with high cheekbones and full lips. His body was perfectly muscled and after a long day of swimming in the ocean, he would emerge from the salty water, glistening.
Micheline would sit in a cabana, invisible. She would lick her lips and she would stare. When Lionel walked, there was an air about him. He believed her. Lionel was always surrounded by a mob of adoring women. On her birthday, Micheline decided she would be the woman Lionel took home.