I’ve been fortunate to win best local columnist for a number of years running for my work three days per week in the Savannah Morning News. There’s a feed with links to those columns in the right sidebar of this blog. A few comments about the popularity of my City Talk columns in the Exchange and, to a lesser extent, my Unplugged column (formerly Man About Town) in Do:

• I’ve been writing columns for 13 years. That’s a big help in any popularity contest. . .
• The Savannah Morning News has the largest circulation of any print product in the region.
• Since the SMN and other print publications cut staff during the recession, I don’t think there are any other columnists even writing three days a week.
• Readers love basic information — what’s new, what’s open, what’s closed, who did what when, etc.
• Readers love brevity. I think the most popular columns are the ones where I include several different blurbs.
• Over time, columnists can — at least with some readers — establish credibility to talk about a wide range of issues.
• I’ve heard columnists bemoan the difficulty in coming up with new ideas, but I’ve been tracking so many different trends and stories over the years that I find it pretty easy to come up with subjects for columns.

This is my first time winning Connect’s best local blogger vote, so I’m pumped about that. I started this site for a variety of reasons that I’ve discussed before, and it has become an important outlet for me. I sincerely thank you all for reading.

Connect’s Jessica Leigh Lebos won runner-up for both best local blogger and best local columnist. It seems to me that having the same two of us at the top of both categories is a clear indication that we have a dearth of Savannah-based blogs. I have in particular been encouraging others to start music blogs for a couple of years now.

By the way, I anticipate some changes — i.e., enhancements — to Savannah Unplugged in the coming weeks and months. More on that soon.

Thanks to all of you for reading and for your passionate interest in some of the topics covered here.

Cheers,
Bill Dawers

I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about.

But since I started blogging just over two years ago and since I’m a teacher of journalism classes at Armstrong Atlantic State University, I’ve spent some time figuring out what Tumblr is all about. More of my opinion on that in a minute.

Tumblr had about $14 million in revenue in 2012. Yahoo is now apparently purchasing the business for $1.1 billion. Huh?

From Forbes’ The Intolerable Revenue Lightness Of Tumblr:

So Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for a company that made $14 million in revenue last year. It took Tumblr five years to generate as much annual revenue as a moderately well-managed New York deli. You know – the sort that offers more than six cheese varieties.

But before we jump on the bandwagon bashing Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer, consider this piece from Business Insider in January: Here’s Tumblr’s Total Revenue For 2012 — And How It Will Make A Profit In 2013. From that piece about the recent moves of Tumblr CEO David Karp:

But so far Tumblr has been very careful. It has restricted paid media to its “radar” and “spotlight” features, which take up a tiny proportion of each user’s dashboard. Most of those paid ad exposures can’t be seen unless you have an account and are logged in.

Tumblr hasn’t even begun to sell most of its real estate to advertisers.

Yet Karp has moved closer and closer to the ad biz all through 2012. Consider:

• He signed up a traffic analytics company, Union Metrics, to give marketers real performance data.
• He named 12 agencies to a hot list of companies tapped to work with Tumblr.
• He poached Groupon sales chief Lee brown to be Tumblr’s ad sales chief.
• He set a minimum buy-in price of $25,000.
• He hired Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group to build sales and marketing.

And he did all this after spending years insisting he was not interested in advertising, a position he maintained even in early 2012.

Given its traffic, if Tumblr were to install even the most basic web ad operations — by selling a native ad format on a private exchange, for instance, like Facebook does — it would instantly become fantastically profitable.

Even if it alienates some users, advertising on Tumblr will have an instant, dramatic reach since it’s a wide open field.

Still, it’s an interesting — and big — gamble, one that has brought Tumblr co-founder and CEO Karp personal wealth of $275 million.

From the BBC’s Tumblr and Yahoo: Why sex, jokes and gifs are worth $1.1bn:

Yahoo is desperate to be cool again.

And, like that kid at school who always got the newest gadgets and video games to impress his “friends”, there’s seemingly no shortage of money available to get what it wants.

Now, just two months after splashing out millions on a UK teenager’s app Summly, Yahoo is set to buy one of the hottest properties in social media: Tumblr.

It will reportedly cost $1.1bn (£723m), a smidgen more than Facebook paid for photo-sharing service Instagram last year.

Yet with users already threatening to leave Tumblr en masse, will simply owning something trendy actually boost Yahoo’s internet cred?

“It’s very hard to just buy something cool from somebody else and for it to remain cool,” says Robin Klein, a partner at technology investors Index Ventures.

I started a Tumblr a little less than a year ago as another place for showcasing some of my photography while at the same time attempting to drive a little more traffic to this blog. All these months later, I rarely update bill dawers photography and the site gets just a couple of unique visitors per day.

Still, the sheer visual ease of Tumblr and the ability to customize pages with various themes are natural draws, especially for younger people trying to assert their individuality (even if thousands of others are using the identical theme).

I routinely look at a number of different Tumblr pages, all of which are visually stimulating and satisfying in ways that ordinary blogs, websites, and Facebook pages are not. I periodically check in with performers like Triathalon, Heyrocco, and Astronautalis. But such Tumblrs aren’t very effective at guiding new listeners — they’re really for fans who already feel they’re on the inside.

I love seeing what’s on Michael Stipe’s mind these days and occasionally visiting more esoteric sites like The Paris Review, which asks a great question tonight:

If William Faulkner were with us and knocked on your door tomorrow, where in your neighbourhood would you direct him for a whiskey?

In spite of such obvious positives, I have some major reservations about Tumblr.

First and foremost: is the “reblogging” of images on sites like Tumblr and Pinterest tantamount to copyright violation?

And what about all the disturbing stuff on Tumblr that seems to be far more worrisome than what can be found on Facebook or on other social media sites? Just one example: the steady stream of posts by young women and girls advocating anorexia.

Then of course there’s all the porn, which tends toward the quick publication of viral imagery, often of “amateurs”, “selfies”, and the like. There seems to be a wide range of opinions on how much the site relies on porn for its traffic. From the HuffPo’s Tumblr’s Porn Can Stay, Suggests Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:

Tumblr pornographers, take heart: Yahoo comes in peace.

During an investor call Monday morning announcing Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of media network Tumblr, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer emphasized that Yahoo wants to “let Tumblr be Tumblr,” which she suggested would include allowing its numerous X-rated accounts to continue pumping out pornography undisturbed. […]

“I think the richness and breadth of content available on Tumblr — even though it may not be as brand safe as what’s on our site — is what’s really exciting and allows us to reach even more users,” said Mayer, who did not mention pornography as such, but referred obliquely to content that was not “brand safe.”

But it might not be that easy. From a 2011 Gawker post The Porn and Spam Behind Tumblr’s Meteoric Rise:

But the obvious prevalence of Tumblr smut, combined with the company’s public ambivalence about it, means Tumblr’s traffic is not as sustainable as, say, Wikipedia’s. It’s not hard to imagine Tumblr cracking down on adult content to appease advertisers; it would hardly be the startup’s first controversial or heavy handed content intervention.

And is any company worth $1.1 billion if Google search trends have such a short history — no matter how impressive that history might be?

So many interesting issues here that are worth watching.

I have never run a marathon, as I swore to myself I would that day, but it’s still a great memory.

Once one has sufficiently disconnected from feelings of empathy with strangers, attacking a joyous public event like the Boston Marathon seems pretty easy. Just imagine how much damage that small terrorist group, apparently responsible for several murders, could have inflicted if they had actually blown up the fountain in Savannah’s Forsyth Park, as planned.

Reflecting on the events in Boston this week, I’m not ready to jump on the bandwagon of praise for law enforcement. The jury is still out for me. The entire city of Boston came to a standstill on Friday, when 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was believed to be hiding in Watertown. Is that a practical approach for dealing with incidents involving a single suspect who is not known to have a weapon of mass destruction? As it turned out, he was hiding in Watertown, in a perfectly logical spot about two miles from his last known whereabouts. How was he missed for so long? And what exactly happened that allowed him to escape the “firefight” in which his older brother Tamerlan was killed?

And, in the biggest news that has so far not been widely reported as far as I know, why did the FBI question Tamerlan about possible terrorist ties in 2011? Hardened terrorist or loose cannon, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was obviously a troubled individual, and law enforcement might have been able to understand that well ahead of Monday’s bombing.

I’d like to see some answers to those questions before being too effusive in praise of law enforcement efforts this past week.

Others apparently knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was troubled. A cousin allegedly warned DZhokhar not to fall under his brother’s influence, and there’s wrenching video of an interview with the suspects’ estranged uncle.

The possible dynamics in the relationship between the older and younger brother have drawn comparisons to the D.C. snipers Muhammad and Malvo. I can’t help but wonder if they didn’t have separate but perversely complementary mental issues like the Columbine killers.

But that’s just speculation. Whether it’s wild speculation, I’m not sure.

And the Tsarnaev brothers were Muslim. Tamerlan’s apparent YouTube account bookmarked some videos about terrorism and at least one that suggests an extreme, apocalyptic theology.

How important was any of that? Tamerlan allegedly grew more religiously conservative in recent years, but he was also apparently married to a Christian and had a small child. What drove him to abandon them? The family has acknowledged that they “never really knew Tamerlane Tsarnaev.”

Possibly apocalyptic religious beliefs, a failure to fully assimilate, potential ties to terrorism, and other disturbing suggestions — that’s what we’ve got right now.

And there’s another element I’d like to know more about. Tamerlan’s mother reportedly subscribed to various 9-11 conspiracy theories promoted by her oldest son. Adam Lanza’s mother seems to have been a “prepper”. To what extent are our mass killings in America related to the paranoia fueled by conspiracy theories that have moved from the fringes of the internet to mainstream platforms, even to our Facebook walls?

Megan Garber at The Atlantic has a provocative piece about the complexity of crimes like this, of the mix of motives, and of the special difficulty sorting through those in the case of these brothers — Chechens, Muslims, immigrants, disaffected young men struggling to find a place in the world.

Whether his brother embraced apocalyptic theology or not, Dzhokar’s Twitter account seems to be the banal ramblings of typical 19-year old. On a tweet on the same day as the bombings, he quoted a 1974 R&B song covered by Jay-Z:

Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people — Jahar (@J_tsar) April 16, 2013

*****************

Puzzlingly, I’ve seen some media back-slapping about the coverage this week, but the gaffes stand out more than anything to me:

• Wednesday’s news that a suspect was in custody.
• Even NPR tried to do wall-to-wall talk coverage on Friday afternoon, which led them to air someone suggesting that the Tsarnaev family must have been planning the bombing for years.
• John King’s absurd citing on CNN of a source describing the suspect as “a dark-skinned male.”
• The NY Daily News use of an inflammatory cover photo that was both violent and doctored.
• The NY Post apparently deciding that they have given up trying to be a legitimate news organization.

Michael Moynihan of the Daily Beast rounded up some of the errors as of a couple days ago. Erik Wemple at the Washington Post has also been busy noting mistakes.

I’d add some more to those various lists, but that quickly becomes a dreary, mind-numbing game.

And this media maelstrom inevitably ran the risk of further damaging the minds of those who might be at risk for committing a mass atrocity in a year, or two, or even more.

*****************

I don’t know any of the victims of the Boston bombings, and I can’t imagine any of the survivors will read this blog, but my sincere condolences to all.

Of course, there’s always love in the heart of the city; it might just not be easy to find.

When I got up this morning, I listened to this great song by The Red River:

Harvey’s Kitchen: Red River (Morning Routine) from Harvey Robinson on Vimeo.

“Morning Routine” is a song about our separateness and our oneness.

I thought also about Richard Blanco’s poem “One Today” from the recent presidential inauguration. It begins:

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

And now I’m off to the Forsyth Farmers Market.

And here are the photos released; click for much larger versions:

In part I add those photos and video to this blog to highlight the irresponsibility of major media reports yesterday. Erik Wemple at the Washington Post has done an admirable job of noting media errors — major errors of fact that we could have expected to see less of after the terrible mistakes during after the Newtown massacre.

Yesterday, John King at CNN went on a riff about the “dark-skinned male” suspect. It’s very difficult in these images to determine ethnicity, but these suspects do not appear to be black. They look like dark-haired white guys to me.

So let’s add another error to the many other ridiculous ones.

Disappointing coverage, for sure.

UPDATE: Here’s John King’s rather lame explanation of his parroting of a “source” using “dark-skinned male” on Wednesday. Tweeted late this afternoon:

Source of that description was a senior government official. And I asked, are you sure? But I’m responsible. What I am not is racist.

— John King (@JohnKingCNN) April 18, 2013