“Anthony took on one of the most challenging tasks of the strategy team I ran in the WSJ newsroom: guiding section editors with actionable audience insights when the data was a taxonomic hot mess. He very quickly got buy-in from busy editor-stakeholders — working remotely, with people he’d never met — to create a manual tagging method that brought surprising and useful insights, and was used even after his departure. His work also informed the current newsroom taxonomy system.
That’s just one of many projects Anthony undertook, which included a site-wide content review, a ‘news you can use’ project for job seekers, the relaunch of a non-subscriber newsletter to bring more potential subscribers into the WSJ ecosystem, and daily use of audience data to help bureau chiefs and coverage chiefs better understand their coverage. Anthony’s success comes from a combination of strategic thinking, product knowledge, and data-informed insights combined with people skills that help others feel good about trying new things and innovating.”
Leslie Yazel Content Leader, ex-Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Cosmopolitan Managed Anthony directly at the Wall Street Journal
“Anthony DeRosa is one of the most forward-thinking, strategic, and visionary leaders in digital media — and he’s still fully capable of executing operations. He has a rare combination of skills. At the Wall Street Journal, he executed much of the digital playbook with various news desks, spearheaded a reboot of the flagship newsletter improving open rates by 15% while expanding the audience to a younger and more diverse demographic, and helped launch a newsroom group delivering utility news for career development that became one of the best-performing series. While Anthony has strong news chops, he also understands data, how to write code, and how to apply both to create better news experiences.”
Ebony Reed Chief Strategy Officer | Executive Leader Across Media, Strategy & Social Impact Senior to Anthony at the Wall Street Journal
“Very few people on earth can singlehandedly become a leading source of news on social media during a global crisis and then guide a top newsroom’s standards. That’s exactly what Anthony has done. He improved every organization that has ever brought him in, and he’s an asset to any company that has him.”
Lawrence Lewitinn, CFA Thought leader, managing editor, and former FICC trader focused on global markets and financial technology
“Anthony has one of the most accomplished and unusual resumes in journalism: The Daily Show, Reuters, WSJ, Bristol Myers Squibb, startups, and more. He’s a wonderful editor, communicator, leader, and colleague. He goes out of his way to be helpful to the people around him. Happy to sing his praises if you have questions.”
Sree Sreenivasan CEO/co-founder, Digimentors | Former Chief Digital Officer, NYC, The Met, Columbia University
“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.”
“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.”
“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
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.
From: Diana M <>
Subject: thank you
Date: March 11, 2016 at 11:07:51 AM EST
Hello Anthony
I have been meaning to do this for a very long time and the 5th anniversary of the earthquake in Japan finally prompted me to do so.
My son lives in Tokyo, I and the rest of his family in Toronto. In 2011 he was in his very early 20s and was working downtown when the quake hit. It was hours before we heard he was ok and making his way home along with millions of others.
Your tweets with Reuters were some of the first I had come across and you soon became a valued source of information for me and my son. As Fukushima unfolded, food and water sources were in question and local media and government sources were not particularly trusted.
You kept us informed and frankly, quite sane as events and updates occurred.
Thank you for that.
Kindest regards,
Diana M
“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.”
“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.“
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,”
“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
“De Rosa has an experienced eye for what’s interesting in global politics, and the media, and the web, and sports, and cultural events, and New York City – and so on. He also has sophisticated streams of information.”
ABC News segment where Soraya Darabi mentions Soup as a reliable source for news.
Soup on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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
“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
“Reuters should really give Anthony De Rosa a raise for personally covering every major domestic & intl event more thoroughly than major media.”
“Gawker‘s Richard Blakeley and Reuters‘ Anthony De Rosa officially launched Neighborhoodr in September 2009. While Neighborhoodr doesn’t aim to be the go-to place for political crises in the world, it was the go-to place for local Brooklynites to share information and read about the tornadoes that touched down in the hood this fall. And a local Williamsburg resident even used the blog to find her lost puppy.”