Is Reddit journalism? The inevitable investigation.

If your interaction with Reddit is anything like mine, you’re a 9-percenter.

Remember the 90-9-1 rule of online community interaction? Well, on Reddit, I rarely say a word, and I’ve probably never started a thread, but I do so enjoy their magical little UI for upvoting posts and comments, especially on my phone, often in the middle of the night while trying to get a child back to sleep.

That places me somewhere between a lurker (90 percent) who never logs in, just reads and scans, and at best, might link to a thread from elsewhere, and an active participant (1 percent) who posts daily, optimizes their headlines to be more likely to garner enough upvotes to land on the homepage (please note the title of this blog post), and/or creates “novelty accounts” — usernames designed to be part of the joke themselves.

It’s a fascinating community, with Reddiquette that has evolved over the years, and a language of acronyms as described by David Weinberger in a blog post this weekend that acts as the beginning of a set of open questions along the lines of “Is Reddit Journalism?” But those quotation marks are my own. David’s questions are much better than that.

His questions revolve around the idea of “Reddit and community journalism(the actual title of his post, clearly not optimized for upvotes at the time of this writing.) Several key Reddit acronyms are covered, including TIL (Today I Learned) and AMA (Ask Me Anything).

Sound familiar?

Open up a daily newspaper, and find what in no uncertain terms we’d call “community journalism” in the form of interviews with and profiles of local personalities, unsung heroes, hidden gems, people in your neighborhood, etc.

That’s an AMA.

Admittedly, the request queue for print coverage in this vein could be considered a little less democratic than on Reddit, where a search for “IAMA request” strongly resembles the early days of the Help A Reporter Out mailing list.

And of course, we’ve all read columnists elaborate on some interesting tidbit of information or history of their community, sharing a discovery with their readers, who often write back in the form of letters (and now, comments, naturally) and share their own point of view, rebuttals, or even memories of the factoid in question.

That’s a TIL.

Now, go upvote this on Reddit.

If it makes it to the homepage, I’ll write a sequel titled “10 ways Reddit is like a newspaper in the 1980s.”

 

WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange

Reading the New Yorker’s piece on WikiLeaks, it’s hard to decide whether I’m reading about freedom fighters, skilled propagandists, or as is often the case, both. Without looking too deeply, I believe in what WikiLeaks is trying to do, but I’m profoundly worried to see here, for example, Tor server traffic mined for data. That’s the sort of behavior Tor is designed to protect people from, not subject them to.

WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange

Virtual Meter Lets Viewers Estimate How Much Oil Is Leaking in Gulf

Al Tompkins at Poynter talks with the NewsHour team about their awesome Oil Spill widget that measures how much of the black stuff has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. My favorite part of the widget? Includes a slider to adjust the rate of the leak based on whose estimates you believe: BP’s, USGS, or other experts.

Virtual Meter Lets Viewers Estimate How Much Oil Is Leaking in Gulf