While Reddit has been one of the web’s busiest and most exciting destinations for some time, many journalists — with that legendary ingrained fustiness — have been quite slow on the uptake.
Just like social media before it, Reddit has been a bit of a secret weapon for the few(ish) journalists who consider themselves a bit more web-savvy than the majority of the newsroom.
But that’s all set to change. The site has released its Pressiquette, a guide for journalists using the website to source stories.
It’s a sign that Reddit itself knows the press are coming, and in a big way.
And for good reason. For journalists, Reddit is a goldmine of stories, opinions, tip-offs and fun.
It’s also a tremendous way to share and debate your own work in a manner that’s far more worth your while than Twitter (more on that later).
For newcomers, Reddit may seem a waste of time. The top item on the frontpage, while I write this, is a picture of a husky wearing a hoody. Woodward and Bernstein eat your heart out.
But when you dig deeper into Reddit and how it functions, what you find is quite extraordinary — a wealth of ways for journalists to find stories, drum up ideas, be inspired and generally be more effective at their jobs.
And here’s how to do it — without winding everyone up.
Learn how subreddits work: Locate and follow the ones that relate to your beat
So, a quick explainer: users on Reddit — Redditors — can post items, usually links to other sites, for other users to see. If someone likes a link, they’ll “upvote” it by clicking a little up arrow next to the link. If they don’t like it, it can be given a “downvote”.
It means (in theory) the most popular content floats to the top, while the least popular drifts to the bottom. Or if something receives a lot of downvotes relatively quickly, it is pretty much hidden altogether.
For each posted item, people can post comments. These too work with the upvote/downvote system, meaning that quite often the top comment on a story will be the most insightful, or wittiest, or whatever.
There! That’s how it works.
Now, Reddit has frontpage — reddit.com — but that’s simply a magnet for all the most viral stuff on a given day.
Far more useful for hacks is following a selection of subreddits … smaller bits of the site dedicated to a particular topic. So, I check /r/technology daily. (/r/ is the subdomain all the subreddits are on — so, reddit.com/r/technology).
But there’s also /r/apple, or /r/google or /r/robotics… hundreds, if not thousands, relating to tech. If you’re a sports reporter, there’s /r/premierleague, or /r/liverpoolfc or /r/messi … you get the picture.
Subreddits aren’t just about topic, but anything, really — there’s /r/London, /r/earthporn, or, my favourite of all: /r/dave.
That’s a lot to follow, you may think — and you’re right. But handily enough, Reddit introduced a nifty little feature called multireddits. This allows you to bundle a load of subreddits into index you can glance at at once (or take an RSS feed from).
Here’s mine — a tech multireddit that combines 36 different subreddits into one place. You’ll find that many major subreddits, like /r/technology, will have a list of related subreddits in the right hand column — useful if you’re not sure where to start.
Create (or steal) a good multireddit and check it daily. The stories will come.
For big, breaking news events, new subreddits will emerge — as will live coverage. These are normally highlighted on the frontpage. Harness the Reddit community, they can be your eyes and ears. But, er, double-check everything.
Get story ideas and inspiration from AMA and TIL
Two of the best subreddits out there are AMA — which means Ask Me Anything — and TIL, which is Today I Learned.
AMA is increasingly becoming a must-do spot on the circuit for any celebrity promoting a book/movie/cause or, in Barack Obama’s case, election campaign.
But the value of the AMA subreddit is not just in the famous names — although if you’re interested in that, you can see a calendar of what’s coming up here. You just missed Denzel Washington.
Much more useful, from an ideas-generating point of you, are the “normals” that get on there to answer questions. From the past week: “I spent a year clearing IEDs from the side of the road… AMA”, “I’m an ex-California cop turned private investigator… AMA” and “I’m a sales assistant at an adult store in the US bible belt… AMA”.
The AMA subreddit is inventive, fascinating and remarkably civilised, given that it’s the internet we’re talking about here. A good way of keeping up to speed with good, active AMAs is to follow @Reddit_AMA on Twitter.
Today I Learned is not a place to find breaking news or scoops. But rather, particularly if you’re in the feature-writing business, a place to get little bursts of inspiration.
TIL is a subreddit that just pulls out little bits of information that for some reason may have passed a lot of us by. It’s the digital equivalent of talking to a friend and saying something like “Do you know what I found out the other day…”.
A fun recent example: “TIL that 17 people dancing to ‘I’ve Got the Power’ caused a Korean skyscraper to shake so violently that it was evacuated for 2 days”.
Find sources and content, but for crying out loud, ask permission first
We’ve all seen the credit: “YouTube” — the calling sign of an overworked producer or web writer who hasn’t been able (or hasn’t bothered) to get the permission to use a clip.
Well Reddit won’t stand for it. Redditors will call you out. Trust me.
Moderators can (and have) prevented entire news organisations from appearing on Reddit for bad behaviour, so it’s important you do things right, etiquette wise.
It all boils down to one thing: Ask permission.
Redditors are, generally, nice people who want to share things. That’s the whole point — and they quite literally do it for the “karma” … karma being the score Reddit gives users for sharing things that get a lot of upvotes.
What Redditors don’t take kindly to is people stealing things they’ve posted — particularly when it’s so easy to ask, and because the vast majority aren’t seeking any monetary gain.
Click on a username, and select ‘send message’ on the right hand side.
I often put my work email address as a point of content — both as a way of showing you’re real, and also because the big downside of Reddit messaging is that it’s easy not to notice you’ve been sent something — the inbox notification (top right) is just a small envelope that changes colour when a new message has arrived.
To make sure you don’t miss any replies yourself, you can sign up to an RSS feed.
You can post your work, but just try to be a good Redditor
Knowing Reddit’s reputation for taking no prisoners, a little while ago I took to another great subreddit — /r/AskReddit — to gauge opinion on whether it was ok for me to post my own links.
“Should I be posting my own work?” I asked. Pleasingly enough, the answer was yes. But not it’s not black and white.
Firstly, the fact I was demonstrably part of the Reddit community, and not just logging on to post my work, worked very much in my favour. So — like you’d go to church for a few weeks so you can eventually get married there, I’d advise dipping your toe into Reddit before you start posting your own work.
My advice is also to post it as yourself, not your organisation (unless you have a separate subreddit dedicated to your org, like this).
Stand behind your work as a person, a reporter, someone who takes the privilege of having a byline seriously. If you don’t feel like you’re in a position to debate some of the finer points of an article, those points shouldn’t be there in the first place.
But before you post, I’d suggest you look to see if people are talking about your story already.
This is a best bit.
On Reddit.com, enter the URL of your story in the ‘search Reddit’ box. If no-one’s posted it, it’ll invite you to. But if someone, or multiple people, have already started a discussion, you’ll see that too. The link may have been posted in various subreddits, but under each entry it will say which posts are getting the most comments.
Dip in, see what people are saying. Respond, interact, follow-up. It’s the single best thing your news organsation can do on Reddit to increase your reputation, gain respect and, as a by product, build traffic and attract tip-offs.
People respect you when you come to them as an individual in any scenario — but particularly on Reddit. For the journalist, it’s actually an enlightening and rewarding experience — even on stories where you’d think the community wouldn’t react favourably.
tl;dr: Use Reddit for your journalism, just don’t be a nob about it.
@davelee / reddit.com/u/davelee_bbc
Wonderful header image by Blake Patterson, via Flickr.
