What Does Tumblr Have to do With Journalism?

Mindy McAdams said:

Tumblr is not a replacement for a traditional blog, and it’s not a substitute for Twitter. Tumblr is something else — part bookmarking tool, part FriendFeed, part scrapbook, part serendipitous newsfeed.

Mindy adds:

For an excellent, lavishly illustrated guide to getting started, see Smashing Magazine’s Complete Guide to Tumblr (July 2010). Just this month, Tumblr made a few changes to its dashboard (your central base for using Tumblr) — for me, these changes were welcome improvements (but not all Tumblr users were happy).

If you haven’t yet given Tumblr a try — or if you looked once and then left — take a few minutes now to check it out.

• Explore tags on Tumblr. Try, for example, the tag Libya.
• Construct a search term with plus signs. For example, search for posts containing the phrase Committee to Protect Journalists like this: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/committee+to+protect+journalists (it does not search only for tags — it searches full text).
• Sign up for Tumblr (read this first — IMPORTANT)* and choose a few carefully selected sources to follow. Then browse the posts on your dashboard once a day for three days in a row. You might find it addicting! (See the link list at the bottom of this post for news organizations on Tumblr.)
• Read the transcript of a recent Poynter chat with with Matthew Keys, an online producer at a TV station in the San Francisco Bay area. Keys offers some great tips for how journalists can use Tumblr effectively.
• Read this list of five reasons why Tumblr won over someone who initially disliked it.