Tumblr and the New York Times:
Yes
Tumblr, as a tool for annotation, is limited. Tumblr users are given the option to post on their feed either by using the text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video tool. All of these tools have great purposes for other people but none were created in mind for a first year english student who wants to present their annotations on a New York Times article.
The tools that get closest to being useful in this specific issue are the text and photo tool. Both, however, are very limited. With the text tool you can't even highlight or insert comments on a article you post, you can only strike through sentences you don't care for or bold things you liked. With photo you can post pictures taken of your annotated New York Times newspaper and include captions on those pictures. This tool happens to be, in my opinion the most effective and stimulating when I needed to show my annotations. Instead of just only being able to include the words of the article, you could now post pictures from the article along with pictures of your annotations and comments. This way of doing things, unfortunately, can be just as tedious as the text tool. For example, the photos have to be readable on Tumblr and to do that close-ups on the article are necessary. But multiple close-ups are needed to show followers the complete article so you often end up with a ridiculous amount of pictures to post which can be very overwhelming and visually disturbing.
Tumblr, however overwhelming and visually disturbing it may be when you want to post annotations, is not without its uses. As I tried to solve the annotation issue for Professor Moore, I discovered a promising feature that could prove to serve, not any notative purposes, but as an intellectual stimulant.
For Professor Moore's English class students have to read at least the front page of the New York 
Times and the Sunday Review of the New York Times. Reading from other sections is encouraged but not required. I was the student, horror of horrors, that only did the required work. Only if I had time and wasn't afflicted with laziness would I flip through the other sections. Then this Tumblr project came along. For the project, I had to post images and annotated articles but to find those images and those articles I had to search.
I found myself searching and reading through so many of those previously ignored sections in the New York Times just because I wanted to find subjects that interested me. The Tumblr project soon became more about posting things that I thought should be shared with others of my generation rather than displaying my underlinings on an article (which they probably wouldn't pay attention to anyways).
For example, Instead of simply presenting my annotated articles on the artist Iona Rozeal Brown I posted up some of her work that had been mentioned in the article. Another example is that on a story about a back country snowboarder, I presented my notes as was required but then provided a link to a trailer of one of the snowboarders snowboarding movies. These two examples are not the only ones I have.
The point is is that Tumblr could be more useful in an English classroom reading the New York Times than previously anticipated. While having no value as an annotative tool, Tumblr proves to have 
greater value when applied in a looser way. If you allow your students to post on Tumblr, with their purpose being the want to spread knowledge on subjects that are important or interesting to them, then you will have a highly motivated and intellectually stimulated classroom.