Today, we’re excited to introduce a partnership with Reddit that will enable our users to explore what’s happening across Reddit’s network of more than 130,000 active communities — and for the first time ever, provide them a way to search Reddit comments.
Reddit is one of the best places online to stay ahead of emerging trends and issues, and to discover stories and original content before they go viral. Each month, 430 million users contribute to 130,000 active communities focused on niche topics encompassing cozy places, alternative histories, retro computer games, and the beauty of data.
Reddit’s communities are informed — often composed of experts and knowledgeable users. They’re passionate — about causes, products, lifestyles, and ideas. They’re inventive — great memes and ideas start on Reddit. And they are home to some of the realest discussion on the internet. Reddit is where people go to learn from each other, seek communities they can trust, and maybe even “change their view.”
For journalists and publishers, Reddit’s communities are a goldmine of stories, quotes, reactions, and expertise. To help journalists and media uncover the gold, we’ve partnered with Reddit to create a comprehensive monitoring function that aims to improve searching and filtering, helping our users add context around posts and comments.
“Starting today, publishers using NewsWhip will be able to access and distribute publicly posted Reddit content to their many readers. This content is featured and searchable within NewsWhip Spike for further insights and content sourcing,” said Youyoung Lee, Senior Manager of Media Partnerships at Reddit. “Journalists are able to search for relevant topics and save these searches for future use.”
Here are some of the key features of our Reddit Partnership:
Find stories fast and first
Stories and events can emerge on Reddit days or weeks before they break into mainstream awareness. As Yara Silva, Group Head of Social at Reach told us:
“We use the Reddit integration with NewsWhip every day to find great stories. It’s a really useful tool to see what’s generating conversation and find posts that are on the cusp of going viral so that we can turn them into compelling articles for our audiences.”
Find early signals by tracking subreddits that touch your beat or search for discussion around a breaking news item.
Connect with experts
Reddit’s unique subreddit structure provides knowledgeable communities in almost any niche. People gather in these self-selected, user-moderated groups based on common interests and experiences – giving unique depth of subject matter expertise for journalists to engage with.
For example, MIT’s Technology Review tapped the r/ChangeMyView subreddit for expert advice on how to challenge beliefs in conspiracy theories. For hyper-local reporting, a local LA story about road closures featured a Reddit post from an LAFD official explaining what had happened.
Understand public opinion
Reddit is unique in its largely anonymous user-base and conversational structure, which encourages honest contributions and discussion among its users. This has led journalists to follow communities for relevant topics and sourcing. For example, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post used r/unemployment as a source for his reporting on emergency coronavirus relief.
“The additional context from Reddit will help journalists discover new insights and angles to developing stories as NewsWhip tracks their trajectory through the social ecosystem” according to Jim Kennedy, Senior Vice President for Strategy at The Associated Press. For NewsWhip users it will “continue to sharpen the platform’s ability to surface important news events and themes.”
Get Redditing
The NewsWhip team is excited to start including Reddit content within NewsWhip Spike, and thus more easily into the hands of our customers.
If you’re new to Reddit, we hope you’ll enjoy exploring it for news and stories.
For existing Reddit users, our integration will save hours of scrolling with:
- The easiest and fastest way to search all of Reddit.
- A path for filtering into the comments relevant to your search, highlighting the percentage of comments on each post that relate to your search term.
- Saved searches for monitoring specific subreddits and search terms, cutting down your browsing time.
- Full “firehose” coverage with posts, comments, and vote scoring.
- Exports for offline analysis, summarization, and sharing.
- A full view of any news event, putting Reddit discussion in context along with news stories and discussion on other major networks in our cross-platform view.
You can read more about the integration on our Reddit Monitoring Feature page, or log into Spike and start exploring.
Finally: massive thanks to our friends at Reddit, and to NewsWhip’s product, engineering, and design team who have made this integration sing.
If you’re not a customer and you’d like to explore Reddit monitoring – or any of our other predictive media intelligence capabilities – please get in touch today.