Reddit recently add sub domains for Slate and The New York Times. So far, Slate seems to be quite a bit more popular if the number of votes is any indication. It sounds like Reddit is trying to demonstrate to potential buyers how much they can help increase traffic. Or maybe one of the developers just thought it would be a good idea.
The question is whether the voting capability of a site like Reddit would ever have any value to a traditional media brand.
Netscape is finding out the hard way that making big changes from passive to active users does not always happen without complaints. Not everybody wants to spend time participating. A lot of people are just spending their lunch time surfing the news and expect the site they are visiting to organize it for them. There is a certain comfort that comes from repeated use of sites with strong editorial control.
A news source like Slate and The New York Times could get a nice benefit from the risk, though. In real time, and in a very direct way, they would be able to see which articles were the most popular. If analyzed properly, they could use that information to target news stories that would appeal to their readers.
That benefit comes with its own risk. Slashdot gets suggestions for articles from users and then the editors decide what belongs on the main page and what belongs on the category pages. The editors are frequently accused of supporting or being biased against certain topics. When people feel proud or slighted, it is normally the edge cases that seem to have the strongest reaction. If an article on a school board voting on discussing Intelligent Design gets a ton of response from the pro/con-ID groups, does that mean that the readers want more stories about ID, or are there a large group of readers that are bored by the story but just remain silent.
The writers would have to sort through the noise and find a way to figure out what the readers really want.
If one of the traditional media sites decides to try to give the story placement control to the readers, they would be better off offering the new Diggified version of the site AND the old editor sorted version of the site. To try and encourage voting from the old school users, they could include the vote buttons next to each story in the old layout, too.
Netscape should have gone this route with their recent change to user controlled content. There’s no reason the two kinds of filtering of data couldn’t have occurred together.
Somebody like Slate or The New York Times would be at an even greater disadvantage to switch to a voting system since they would have a much smaller story base to pull from. It’s not like The New York Times is going to want you reading editorials from other newspapers that are hosted on their competitors site. They need you focused on their own articles and ads.
Very few readers are going to get too excited about having the small number of articles a traditional print media site deals with on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis on a voting type site especially if all the articles come from one source and without allowing users to submit their own stories they find on the internet. They’ll just go to Digg or Reddit and read the best of the newspapers and magazines that make it to the top of their aggregator site.
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