The Nontraditional Forms of Journalism

As a journalist, I would say that I am accustomed to creating content and sharing stories through video, written text for blogs, audio such as, podcast, and even social media, like Instagram and Facebook. But more recently, some more alternative journalistic and storytelling forms have surfaced in the news world. Platforms like Reddit have become a common tool for journalist to tell their stories.

To me Reddit is a foreign language. Personally, I have never used the site — mostly because it looks so old fashion and outdated. But besides me thinking its a website from the early 2000s, people actually use the site, especially for news. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, four percent of adults in the United States were Reddit users and of those, 78 percent used the site for news consumption.

It makes sense to me that journalist have turned to Reddit as a platform because most of its users use it for news. One good thing about Reddit is that people can vote any published post up or down, which inevitably allows users to see what are the hot topics everyone is talking about. This makes it easy for people to find your story and also actively engage in the topic at hand.

The major downside I find about Reddit is that only a total of two percent of American adults on the Internet use the platform to obtain news. Compared to other news platforms, Reddit does not get much traffic from people looking for the news, which is why I believe Reddit isn’t the most practical platform for journalists to share their stories. Yes, we can find a very niche audience, but when we want to share our stories in a more broader aspect, Reddit won’t be the answer.