ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Reddit’s role in the transformation of news consumption in the first and second decades of the 21st century. It provides a brief summary of the history of online news, noting the ways in which blogs and news aggregators disrupted traditional news sources’ distribution and business models. The chapter describes the way in which Reddit’s design separates news headlines from news stories and sources. By cleaving headlines from sources and providing a venue in which users may discuss the headlines, Reddit serves a function played by journalism without having to compensate the journalists or news organizations that produce the news. The chapter then describes the most frequently linked to news websites on Reddit, and briefly considers how Reddit’s users engage in real-time aggregation of news during breaking news events.
