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I started to notice some thing weird while using Reddit, every link post from Condé Nast owned news outlet was getting a high amount of upvotes and awards while other publications had a very normal rate of awards( usually zero, with the exception of the sponsored ones) and upvotes.
That when I started to investigate this matter till I found out about this.
They are boosting their publications on Reddit on the major subreddits. They are trying to give their publications a advantage over all the other news outlets.
They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.
Having poured more idiom into three short grafs than at any time in my history of writing, I felt the need to come back and revisit other things.
Before I get to the issues with the title,
... oh, no! Gannett and Sinclair will be marginally affected. News outlets have already been dying for decades. The solution to this is certainly not killing more of them.
But as an editor, that title really grinds my gears.
If you want to go upstyle, that's fine. But commit to it. As it stands, this is a bunch of Random Caps, making it look more like a Trump tweet. Why is "their" lowercased?
"YSK" -- already something that should never be used when making a breathless pronouncement -- is serving zero function here. Then we have the ... interesting style choice of a comma set solid with a trailing ellipsis, followed by no period on "etc."
I mention all of this not to be mean, but rather to show what decades in news editing turns one into. And decreased traffic to those sites would endanger editors before reporters. Readers have been lamenting the decline in editing since the buyouts began in earnest back in the aughts, but it's a vicious cycle.
Less revenue, fewer editors.
I'd hazard a guess that, on Beehaw at least, users are aware of Advance's holdings. Anyone who's been following, for example, Ars' coverage of Reddit has seen the disclaimer at the bottom of every story.
So, this is not news but rather, "Look what I ran into on Wikipedia!" Cool. If I posted every Wikipedia story I ran into, I'd likely get a vacation.
It's important to remember that people can do excellent work for shitty corporate overlords. Pointing at Ars (literally my only paid subscription) and other properties still committing quality journalism under increasingly fraught circumstances is tone deaf.
But more to the point, who the fuck is still getting "news" off Reddit? The goal here should be getting people to stop using Reddit (admittedly, I'm still on there for niche topics), not to punish the journalists toiling to create the stories that get linked there by marketing.