Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Obama Starts a Tumblr

While Republicans say they’re now armed and ready to use Twitter in the 2012 election, President Barack Obama has jumped to the next social platform: Tumblr.

Obama’s Tumblr launched today with a couple of casual posts that are clearly not written by the president himself. An anonymous staffer writes that the Obama reelection campaign plans to use Tumblr as “a huge collaborative storytelling effort.” That will be done using Tumblr’s popular reblogging feature to pull in content from other Tumblrs, as well as direct user submissions.

The best part is a meek plea for decency, so rarely found in political discussions online.

There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people — fairly nice ones — and that your mother would want you to be polite.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald