Testimonials

“I follow the better chef Twitterers: José Andrés is particularly prolific and fun. René Redzepi. David Chang, Mario Batali, Eric Ripert — we’re all friends so we tweet each other pictures of what we’re eating. I also follow AntDeRosa on Twitter. It’s by a Reuters guy, I don’t know his real name. I’m a political junkie, and his interests seem to mirror my own. – Anthony Bourdain

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“If you’re looking for a way to unravel the mystery of finding some good people to follow on Tumblr, one thread to pull on is soupsoup.tumblr.com. Then check the sites that are reblogged. Kind of a one-stop shop for cool stuff.” – John Mayer

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“The undisputed king of Tumblr is Anthony De Rosa, who has collected nearly 11,000 followers at his SoupSoup page. Mr. De Rosa, a 34-year-old resident of Hoboken, N.J., posts a hard-to-categorize jumble of other people’s blog posts, photos and videos he finds interesting. A picture of Lady Gaga before she became famous. A news item about Internet wiretaps. A parody of bad science reporting. You could easily imagine Stephen Colbert pawing through SoupSoup for joke fodder.” – Paul Boutin, The New York Times

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De Rosa’s career track sounds like a paraphrase of Hunter Thompson’s words: When the media world gets social, the social media guys go pro. He started by running a few sites catering to Giants and Mets fans, and co-founded Neighborhoodr, a network of local news blogs. While he eventually landed a non-editorial job on the business side of Reuters, in his spare time he was becoming the biggest name on Tumblr with his blog SoupSoup. Its hook was to use Tumblr’s reblogging functionality to create a polished, full-fledged blog based on nothing more than de Rosa’s winningly idiosyncratic taste in news, photos, and video. It didn’t take Reuters all that long to figure out there was some serious unused editorial talent in the building: They hired de Rosa as the company’s social media manager earlier this month. He’s now hard at work plugging the reporting juggernaut into what’s loosely called the “ambient wire,” that is the news-spreading apparatus made up of social networks. De Rosa not only alerts Twitter and Tumblr to what Reuters is doing; he also alerts Reuters’ editors to what Twitter and Tumblr are doing. – New York Magazine

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“To look for examples of how to best use Tumblr, perhaps attention should be shifted to the effortless content creators of the Tumblrverse; news breakers (such as Anthony De Rosa)  and life casters (like Delbert Shoopman and Molly McAleer), who have created dynamic online personalities. Not to be confused with bloggers and long format journalism – these Tumblr users are original content creators. They are conscious of the importance of original photo and video content to create conversation starters; and are also aware of the who’s who of the web and understand the nuances of the Tumblr community.” – Erica Schrag

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“The crazy thing that happens on Twitter–it’s an old school journalist’s worst nightmare–is that people are just spreading rumors. So having good journalists (Anthony De Rosa comes to mind) who are filters and say either “I got someone on the phone to confirm this” or “The New York Times has confirmed ‘X’” is important. Mark Knoller and Jake Tapper are good and fast with important stuff if you’re really trying to follow a breaking story. They aren’t just shilling for their own news organizations, which I think is important.“ – Joan Walsh 

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Video of Jim Impoco, Executive Editor, Thomson Reuters Digital on the appointment of Anthony De Rosa, a product manager at Reuters who quickly became the company’s Social Media editor, is “the most amazing (journalism) story around,”

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“It was a surprise that wasn’t so surprising. When it was announced Anthony De Rosa would become social media editor for Reuters.com, it was hard to avoid thinking: Yeah, that makes sense.

De Rosa is to Reuters what Andy Carvin is to NPR, a relentless social media news machine. He’s everywhere, following everything and constantly updating it all on his Twitter feed and Tumblr, from Syria and Egypt to the vagaries of Anthony Weiner’s tweeting habits.” – Justin Ellis, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab

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ABC News segment where Soraya Darabi mentions Soup as a reliable source for news.

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Soup on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

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Though he claims to possess no special skills or magic bullets, Anthony De Rosa —codename: Soup—has over 24,000 followers on Twitter (a lot for a nonceleb) and 150,000 on Tumblr. This makes him a one-time-nobody who’s now one of social media’s poster children. It’s his outsize Web presence and emphasis on accuracy that eventually led to a gig as the social-media editor of Reuters.“ – Erica Cerulo, Details Magazine

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“The Tumblr brainchild of Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa is your suave media informant — the digital equivalent of that guy you always want to be seen standing next to. And he’s extremely popular; the New York Times called him “the undisputed king of Tumblr.” – Allie Townsend, Time Magazine

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“Reuters should really give Anthony De Rosa a raise for personally covering every major domestic & intl event more thoroughly than major media.” – Keri Hanson