Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, walks with her attorney Therese Lawless in February.
Continuing the trend of tech companies seeking to become destinations for news, Reddit on Monday announced that it’s developing its own news site called Upvoted that will have a team of about 10 staffers who “find stories on Reddit, verify the details, interview the original posters, and then write articles.”
Per WIRED’s Julia Greenberg, Upvoted is a way for Reddit to capitalize on highly shareable stories that news organizations have been mining from the so-called “front page of the Internet” for years.
Upvoted is a way for Reddit to recapture some of the attention (and, ahem, traffic) that the site loses when other news organizations take stories from the site; it serves as a kind of introduction to the world of Reddit for non-users; and it acts as a testing ground for advertisers who may be hesitant to dive straight into advertising in a world moderated by unaffiliated, unpaid volunteers. Upvoted may be our first look at what the future of Reddit might hold. If it works.
News of Upvoted’s approaching launch solves a mystery that was raised last month when a position for a staff writer at Reddit surfaced on JournalismJobs.com, provoking many raised eyebrows among media watchers on Twitter.
Reddit, which has had problems with lawless and lewd trolls in the past, will not allow comments on Upvoted, according to WIRED.
