At TIME.com, we’re working on a guide to the best Tumblrs out there. But we want to know what you think first.
What Tumblr can’t you live without? (Aside from ours, of course.) Whether it’s news, photography, design or just cat videos, we want to know what you follow — and why.
Reply to this post (and include the URL) with your picks. We’ll mark popular suggestions as “Readers’ Choice” in our final list, which should come out by the end of January.
We’d like to nominate Hipstamaticat, ilovecharts, rappersdoingnormalshit, cheatsheet (our sibling blawg) and shortformblog. (But that’s hardly a complete list! We love you all! Really!)
We love you Newsweek, thank you! Also, we give an emphatic cosign to shortformblog - they are my favorite news bloggy type tumblr. I’d like to add (off the top of my head) youmightfindyourself, motherjones, world-shaker, theyuniversity and casperthefriendlyshibainu (I love that dog, deal with it) to the list.
Help out TIME with their list! And if you mention us I won’t get mad, I promise.
Thanks to both of you! On top of both of these guys, our picks: Newsflick, inothernews, Buzzfeed, Pantsless Progressive, joshsternberg and imwithkanye.
Edit: More picks! Aheram, Brooklyn Mutt, kohenari, thenoobyorker, mohandasghandi, thepoliticalnotebook, kateoplis and the newly-hired producermatthew.
Think we’re cool too? Throw Time Magazine a nudge via reblog! And let us know your picks!
This week’s cover might feel a little familiar.
The latest issue of TIME (on the right) hits newsstands Friday. Its predecessor (on the left) was released last month.
Sorry, we’re not impressed because of the lack of absolute symmetry.
Here’s our mention in Time Magazine: Page 2, right next to the letter from Managing Editor Richard Stengel. Neat.
Last week’s issue also caused considerable consternation among bloggers and readers, who objected to our putting the protests in Egypt inside our domestic edition and on the cover overseas. “Why is anxiety the most pressing issue in the U.S. while the Egyptian revolution gets front-page treatment internationally?” read a typical e-mail. Observers at ShortFormBlog analyzed a year’s worth of our covers and concluded each edition gets the same amount of hard news, give or take an issue or two. We’re glad to be held to high expectations, especially when the bar is set by one of our own editions.
Good on Time for directly responding to the controversy.
johnness asks: I was around Newsweek International from 2000-2003, and I think what you see is consistent with longterm trends: Newsmagazines everywhere love soft news generally, but an editor of an international edition (usually someone in NYC) has faith that someone in Tokyo will care about big news in Kenya and vice-versa. The top editor for the American version of a newsmagazine will devote most of their limited "news" covers to domestic happenings. A folo cover on Egypt wouldn't likely be considered.
» SFB says: Thanks for the take on this piece, John. It’s worth noting that Newsweek’s covers tend to go strongly domestic as well. Much appreciated. — Ernie @ SFB
thingsmostgrey asks: In your zine, you showed a pic of the "Germany can't save the world" cover as one of the ones that the US missed out on, but I subscribe to Time and we did have that issue in the US (but I think it looked a bit different--so maybe it was technically a different cover). I definitely remember reading a lengthy article with the same title.
» SFB says: We’ll put up a clarification on the original post, but just to emphasize: It’s entirely possible that any of the topics that didn’t show up on the cover may have showed up in the U.S. edition of the magazine elsewhere. In fact, it’s more than likely. The blurbs on the post are specifically about the covers. — Ernie @ SFB
lalondes asks: Regarding your tumbl-zine on Time's covers: don't you think it's a little silly to, well, judge a book by its cover? You seem to be suggesting that the cover in and of itself is the news, that this week's edition of Time contains only information about the benefits of anxiety to the total exclusion of news about Egypt. A difference in the image on the front page doesn't necessarily constitute a difference in the magazine's content or the quality of its journalism.
» SFB says: The issue in question here specifically deals with the covers, though, because that’s where the controversy began. This whole issue began with Glenn Greenwald and a number of other analysts criticizing a cover of Time, claiming it was evidence the magazine was dumbing down the news for American audiences. What we were trying to do was to show that, no, this is not the case, and we did that by analyzing a year’s worth of covers. We agree with you — the content on the inside is key. But Time is a magazine known for iconic covers, and those covers set the tone. That, ultimately, is the point we’re trying to make. — Ernie @ SFB
Does Time water down its story coverage in the U.S.? That’s a question which has been floating around the interwebs since yesterday, when the internet hivemind figured out that Time ran a soft feature in this week’s U.S. edition, while the rest of the world got a much more important story about Egypt. (Fellow Tumblr Jessica Binsch did a Storify breakdown of the online reaction.) Most of us can agree Time probably blew this cover choice. However, we’d like to offer another argument here: That the magazine is merely playing to different markets, rather than blatantly dumbing down its U.S. coverage. Our latest Tumbl-zine (it’s been a while, we know) breaks down the past year in Time covers, by region and type of content. Here’s what we found.
Clarification: Any cover in this list that didn’t run in the U.S. does not necessarily mean the story attached to the cover didn’t get played in the U.S. edition of the magazine. Any commentary is specifically in regards to the covers themselves, not the stories.
Update: Time responds!
Telling, isn’t it?
Thought: Anxiety isn’t really good for you when it’s spread out over an entire country.
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
News is never a 9 to 5 job.
Wednesday evening, with the news that Apple visionary Steve Jobs had passed away from pancreatic cancer, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel (center) decided to stop the presses on the issue the staff had just finished earlier that afternoon. Staff members poured back into the TIME offices for an emergency edit meeting, which left us just over three hours to produce a new issue, many of us working on the very Apple devices that Jobs created.
Thursday, we’ll announce our latest issue featuring Jobs on the cover for the eighth time.
Tearing apart an entire magazine in three hours: A little grating. But the result was most assuredly worth it.
Time Magazine Special: If you haven’t got yourself one of these I recommend you do so. Time Magazine wonderfully takes you through the revolution in stunning pictures, analysis and detailed graphs. Besides it’s a good keeper for a souvenir.
Speaking of magazines, this.
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