Tumblr to end Storyboard and dismiss 3 employees

Tumblr, the popular social blogging site, said Tuesday night that it would shut Storyboard, the multimedia news blog that it had created to report on its own community and that it had started only last May.

The company did not give much explanation for why it decided to close the site suddenly and dismiss a skeletal staff of three. When the blog opened, it garnered a lot of attention for its innovative approach to storytelling.

In a blog post, David Karp, the company's co-founder, praised the site's achievements and then said simply: "What we've accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on."

Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with the research firm Altimeter, based in San Mateo, Calif., offered one common theory. "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."

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. LinkedIn is now producing new articles on its main page.

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. 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.

Where onlookers stood on the seriousness of the loss of Storyboard depended on whether they believed that it was a legitimate outlet in the first place or merely a failed marketing experiment.

While Storyboard's staff insisted that they were doing high-quality feature journalism, they were not shy in admitting that it was in service of promoting Tumblr. In an interview last December, on the online news site Capital, which covers New York, Storyboard's editor in chief, Chris Mohney, said, "What we're doing is marketing as journalism."

But marketing as journalism was not also seen as a fit for the social media site.

"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."

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.

Her social media posts indicate that she was outside New York when Tumblr made its decision and that she was surprised by it. Bennett declined to be interviewed for this article.

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," Etlinger said.

© 2013, The New York Times News Service