Nieman Foundation at Harvard
To many news organizations, Reddit seems like a black box: It can deliver massive amounts of traffic to a single story, but it’s almost impossible to predict which stories will be the benefactors of that traffic.
Reddit also faces other problems of perception. It’s grappling with its goal to be seen as a legitimate news platform. Subreddits (the pages for individual topics and interest areas) are overseen by unpaid, volunteer moderators, not company employees. Following the Orlando shootings, for instance, the r/news subreddit devolved into chaos, forcing Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to address what had happened:
The platform is also often seen as a white male domain — which, in many ways, it is. In February, Pew reported that people who get news from Reddit are largely male (71 percent), white (74 percent), and young (59 percent are between the ages of 18 and 29).
Mark S. Luckie, whom Reddit hired earlier this year as its first-ever head of journalism and media, is tackling some of these problems. He’s helping news and government organizations understand better ways to use the platform. (He had a similar role as Twitter’s manager of journalism and news before leaving the company in 2015.)
Luckie has written about how difficult (and unusual) it can be to be a person of color at a tech company, and told TechCrunch in March, “I want to bring that element of diversity to Reddit, both internal and external — being a black employee who can be the voice of underrepresented communities and externally to show that diversity is possible.”
A few months in at Reddit, Luckie has begun working to address some of these issues of reliability and diversity — “starting out by increasing the diversity of the news organizations we work with.” I spoke with him last week about how the job is going a few months in (and also asked what happened to his publication Today in #BlackTwitter, which highlighted the best of discussions on Black Twitter but stopped publishing in April.)
“What I’m doing is providing lightning in a bottle,” Luckie told me, “saying, yes, this seems random, but actually, it’s not.” Our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, is below.
A lot of what I’m doing started out with education around Reddit. I want to make sure that reporters and publishers are familiar with the platform and that they know what it means beyond the front page. I want to help them with integrations like Ask Me Anything and using Reddit as sourcing for new stories.
I’m also looking at the cool things we can do together that have not been done before. There are a lot of those in the works, and I can’t say what they are just yet, but it’s really pushing the boundary of what’s possible within journalism and social media.
What I’m doing is providing lightning in a bottle — saying, yes, this seems random, but actually, it’s not. There are some ways that you can encourage your stories and conversations to be more widely circulated on the platform.
With other social networks, it’s all about pushing as much content as possible, getting as many links out there as you can, hoping that one will catch. Reddit is focused on single stories, rather than every single story or even the most recent story. Some Reddit news sources that hit the front page are a year or more old, but they have content that’s relevant and interesting.
When you look at it through that lens, it shapes how you approach the platform. It’s a much better experience on both sides if publishers understand that Reddit is a community and that they should engage in conversations, rather than just jumping into them and pushing their content onto redditors.
Entertainment reporters are going to the TV show subreddits, seeing what people are talking about and having active discussions there. Tech organizations can get a really on-the-ground understanding of what people are anticipating or what they like about a particular technology. And because Reddit is a threaded experience, with upvoting and downvoting, it’s much easier to find those conversations and follow them than it is in places where it’s basically a single post that people are responding to.
The Associated Press did an AMA on its series about evangelical Christianity. We had W. Kamau Bell from CNN do one about his story on meeting with the KKK. The LA Times did one around its investigation into Oxycontin.
Journalists from the Panama Papers have done AMAs and gotten feedback from other users. This fits with another feature inside of Reddit, Reddit Live. Reddit Live is essentially a live wiki where people aggregate information around a particular topic. Reddit users are actually digging into the Panama Papers and finding interesting tidbits as well as sharing what they found with the news organizations. It plays really well with the user-generated content that has been a huge part of journalism in the last couple years.
Recently, Reddit was at Ru Paul’s DragCon, a convention of drag queens in LA. Ru Paul’s Drag Race community is one of the largest and most active on Reddit, so we had a physical integration [at the convention] where we talked to redditors and interviewed queens and all that good stuff. You’ll start to see more of that, where we are having both online and in-person conversations with our users, and highlighting that there is diversity on the platform.
I love Twitter and 140 characters, I’m able to have really great conversations, but on Reddit, those conversations are longer, they’re deeper, they’re more insightful; they also are archived, so you can see a post from five years ago as easily as you can see one from 10 minutes ago. I think that’s a great opportunity for news organizations, because they can see these discussions, see how people are responding, and be able to follow those conversations and use them as a way to source and interact with users.
I also think one of the great advantages of Reddit over Twitter is that a journalist can send a private message to a user, so you don’t have to publicly reveal the story that you’re working on or who you’re contacting, and can go directly to the source. [On Twitter, you can’t DM someone unless they already follow you or they’ve opened their DMs up to everyone. One of Nieman Lab’s favorite Twitter searches is “I’m a reporter…”]
A lot of the things that are being built into Reddit are the product of conversations that we’ve been having with news organizations. Because we’re growing, this is a great time for news organizations to talk to us about the things they’d like to see in the platform, and what their goals are.
