Tumblr Storyboard

» see storyboard.tumblr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Word got out in February 2012 that Tumblr had hired journalists. Chris Mohney, who had been at Gawker, was editor-in-chief. Jessica Bennett came from Newsweek and The Daily Beast as executive editor. What they were hired to do was not obvious from the outside, because the company sold itself as a place where users made everything, and here it was paying people to write.

Storyboard launched on 7 May 2012 and the answer turned out to be reporting. The desk went into the network, found blogs worth a longer look, and produced features and video about them. If you wanted to be found you tagged a post with #storyboard. The work was good enough to win awards, which is not the usual outcome for a content-marketing arm of a startup, and it did the thing marketing rarely does: it made the platform legible to people who did not already live on it.

Eleven months later it was gone. Late on the night of Tuesday 9 April 2013, a post went up on Tumblr's official staff blog announcing that Storyboard was closing. The whole editorial team was laid off with it. Gigaom had the story the same night, Gawker went at it the next day, and David Karp spent the following weeks giving vague answers about formulas and tools.

~ the record ~

~ why a platform hired reporters ~

Tumblr in 2012 had a scale problem that money could not fix. There were tens of millions of blogs on it and almost no way for an outsider to find the good ones, since the dashboard only showed you what you already followed and the tag pages were a firehose. Storyboard was the editorial fix for that, a staffed answer to the question of what is actually on here.

The other half of it was advertising. Tumblr had started selling sponsored posts around the same time, and a newsroom that could demonstrate the platform's quality was a useful thing to have standing next to a sales deck. When Karp later said Storyboard had not found the formula, that was the formula he meant.

~ the night it closed ~

The detail that stuck was procedural. According to the Daily Dot, Mohney was asked to write the announcement of his own team's dismissal, and Karp published it under his own byline. A newsroom hired to tell stories about the platform was made to write the last one about itself.

Karp's public explanation stayed thin. He told WWD the operation was not the right tool in Tumblr's toolbox and that the company could not be happier with the journalists, which is a hard sentence to reconcile with firing all of them. A year and a bit later Tumblr was inside Yahoo, and the editorial ambitions that survived were Yahoo's rather than Tumblr's.

~ from outside new york media ~

This one lived entirely in one industry's conversation. Storyboard's audience was people who read Gawker and Gigaom and cared who a startup had hired away from Newsweek, and I was not in that conversation in 2012, working in Ankara on things that had nothing to do with New York media. Tumblr itself was a small presence in Turkey to begin with, mostly among people who had followed the fandom side of it.

What outlasted it is the pattern rather than the pages. Platforms kept hiring editorial teams to explain themselves, and kept closing them when the growth chart stopped needing the explanation.

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