“Journalists everywhere are using it to get ideas for features,” Benji Lanyado, a freelance writer based in London, told me recently. “Stories appear on Reddit, then half a day later they’re on Buzzfeed and Gawker, then they’re on the Washington Post, The Guardian and the New York Times. It’s a pretty established pattern.”
Much of the “inspiration” is simple: journalists trawling Reddit and simply lifting ideas, photos or quotes: sometimes with credit, oftentimes without. But it’s more than just a source of material for aggregators, copycats and rip-off artists. Look a little deeper and Reddit’s news filter is also influential in other, less visible ways.
The site’s huge traffic (now more than three billion page views a month) means that it pushes through a lot of attention. Stories that rise to the top of the site can suddenly get propelled into the stratosphere — meaning that other media outlets, including TV news, have a greater chance of spotting them. The voracious, skeptical approach of many redditors also acts as a sort of built-in fact checking service for journalists too lazy or time-poor to do the legwork themselves:
And then there’s the site’s original content — things like the AMA sub-section, which has turned into an interview slot and confessional all in one. These real-life stories have helped turn Reddit from a simple link machine into something that creates its own stories, with the result that it’s constantly driving headlines.
The utility of Reddit for journalists is such that Lanyado has decided to build The Reddit Edit, a skinned version of the site. It’s aimed, at least in part, at that diminishing cadre of media workers who still shy away from the site. It looks more presentable than its parent, and puts forward only the hottest stories across a variety of topics: if Reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”, then The Reddit Edit would be the 60 second news bulletin.
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