'Newsweek' Takes Bold Stance Against Tumblr's Struggle for Profit

The Tumblr of Newsweek, which still exists, unlike Newsweek, and which is run by the DailyBeast “senior editor for social media,” announced a new policy yesterday. “You pin, we unfollow” was the communiqué — by “pinning” they mean the Tumblr commerce initiative wherein, for a small fee, one can make a Tumblr post “adhere” to the top of each follower’s dashboard until each follower “clicks” upon the post to make it disappear. (By “unfollow,” they meant that they would no longer choose to receive said pinners’ posts in their dashboard.) “The pins are like dashboard cockroaches. Turn on the lights every morning and unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin,” the Tumblr explained.

Newsweek — do I still need to be typing italics tags by hand around Newsweek now that it is no longer a magazine? — rowed back this policy shortly after some fun and gif-games. And after a lot of people called them names. (“Hey, idiots, I think you guys are the ones who need all the followers you can get,” wrote the Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins.) All in all, it was a brave brief stand against unusual user-side monetization techniques. But that’s all over now.

Newsweek’s Tumblr also employs a javascript that transforms the reader’s cursor into a mustache.