Abstract
The current research examines two similarly situated journalism organizations, The San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Gate, to compare how they are utilizing the social network Reddit. Through the lens of post-publication gatekeeping theory, findings demonstrate that the Chronicle's approach is more effective in terms of generating higher karma scores and more comments despite posting less frequently. One of the biggest differences was that SFGate tended to post more soft news, which was less well-received. Other variables were examined to understand how the audience responded to the content regardless of which publication posted it. By highlighting the relationship between content type, audience engagement, and platform features, this study offers key takeaways for journalism organizations seeking to optimize their Reddit strategies. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
Introduction
Reddit has had a contentious history for journalism. Notably, a few high-profile concerns surrounding how anonymous individuals incorrectly crowd-sourced the identity of the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber (Suran & Brown, 2017), the anonymous nature of the platform (Brown et al., 2018), or the usage of the platform by fringe right wing groups (Gaudette et al., 2021) have historically driven publishers away from the platform. Those times have changed, however, to the point that the Columbia Journalism Review published an article suggesting that Reddit might be the “most civilized place to look at news online” (Ball, 2024). Over time, Reddit made a concerted effort to make the platform less vitriolic by banning particular communities and users that were negatively affecting the platform, thereby helping build the reputation of the site (Cima et al., 2024). Some publishers, like the Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Independent, have had a presence on the platform for years. Others have taken concerted efforts to bring their content to the platform in recent years, including Rolling Stone, Yahoo News, and CNN.
Reddit is a social news aggregation and discussion platform founded in 2005 that has grown into one of the most visited websites in the world. Often described as “the front page of the internet” (Singer et al., 2014; Tsou, 2016), Reddit is organized into tens of thousands of topic-specific communities called subreddits, each identified by the prefix “r/” followed by a description that is typically a topic name (e.g., r/worldnews, r/politics). Users, who may be anonymous or pseudonymous, submit posts, which can be links, images, videos, or text, and the community votes on them using an upvote/downvote system. The aggregate of these votes produces a “karma” score that signals a post's popularity and determines its visibility within the platform's algorithm. Each subreddit is governed by volunteer moderators who enforce community-specific rules about what content is permitted (Fiesler et al., 2018). A particularly notable feature of Reddit is the Ask Me Anything (AMA), a format in which a person (often a public figure, expert, or journalist) answers questions submitted by the community in real time, creating direct dialogue between content creators and the public (Anderson, 2015).
Despite the growing presence of journalism producers on the platform, research on its role in journalism practice remains limited. The current study examines how the platform is being utilized by two organizations that share similar geographic and institutional backgrounds but differ in editorial strategy, content style, and approach to audience engagement: the San Francisco Gate and the San Francisco Chronicle. Additionally, the study will look at the forward-facing metrics from Reddit (namely karma and comments) to better understand how the audience is responding to the supplied content. Karma scores and comments serve as meaningful proxies for audience engagement because they are publicly visible, algorithmically consequential, and directly reflect how the Reddit community evaluates and amplifies content. Prior research has similarly relied on these platform-native metrics as valid indicators of audience reception in social media environments (Saks & Hopkins, 2025; Wasike, 2011). By examining two distinct yet similarly situated publications, this study contributes to the growing understanding of how journalism organizations navigate emerging digital spaces. Although research on Reddit remains sparse, particularly for professional news organizations, this study helps fill that gap by providing a comparative look at editorial strategies, audience engagement, and content distribution practices on the platform. In doing so, it aims to offer a clearer picture of the opportunities and challenges that Reddit presents for news outlets seeking to expand their digital reach.
Literature Review
Understanding how journalism organizations use Reddit requires situating the platform within broader conversations about audience engagement, participatory media, and platform-specific gatekeeping. Scholars examining digital journalism have long documented how the shift to online environments restructures the relationship between journalists and audiences. Anderson (2013) showed how metropolitan newsrooms rebuilt their practices across digital distribution, while Lewis (2012) identified a fundamental tension between professional journalistic control and the open participation that digital platforms enable—a tension that Reddit, with its mix of professional news accounts and community moderation, exemplifies in direct form. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) further identified a persistent “news gap” between what journalists choose to cover and what audiences prefer, with audiences gravitating toward softer content even as journalists prioritize public affairs. This gap is directly relevant to the present study, which examines whether that preference holds in a community-governed environment where audiences curate visibility through voting rather than passive consumption.
The concern that metric-driven logic accelerates the prioritization of popular over important content has found empirical support in platform-specific research. Tandoc (2014) documented how web analytics are reshaping gatekeeping decisions by making audience preferences legible to journalists in real time, and Lamot (2022) found that audience metrics do encourage news softening on Facebook—though notably, hard news generated more time spent than soft news, suggesting that the metric an organization prioritizes shapes its content strategy as much as genuine audience preference does. Anter's (2024) systematic review of 156 studies cautions against overgeneralizing this pattern, finding that news is not uniformly softened across platforms and that organizations balance journalistic standards with platform-specific characteristics in ways that vary considerably by outlet type and environment. Reddit's karma system—a form of public, real-time analytics built into the platform infrastructure and visible to the entire community—offers a particularly revealing site for examining how these dynamics play out outside the algorithmically curated environments studied in most prior research.
Although Reddit was founded nearly two decades ago, its popularity and usage have only grown. To date, Reddit is the fifth most popular site in the United States and seventh most popular in the world, according to Similarweb.com. In addition to that, since 2024 Reddit has benefited from a Google search algorithm update that prioritizes “first-person perspectives,” significantly increasing traffic to the site (Herrman, 2024). With that, perhaps not surprising that many organizations that thrive on web traffic would flock to the site to participate in the platform.
There is no strong consensus from the limited, nonacademic sources available (Barber, 2024; Granger, 2024; Majid, 2023; Yan, 2022; Zaffarano, 2023) on how one should utilize the platform, but they do have a variety of suggestions. Those suggestions include cultivating good relationships with the moderators of relevant subreddits, building trust with audiences by engaging as an authentic member of the community, giving back to the community through meaningful interactions, and leveraging the platform's unique features, such as hosting AMA sessions. These broad suggestions often lack concrete guidance for news organizations seeking to integrate Reddit into their distribution and engagement strategies. They do not offer clear frameworks or best practices for translating these principles into day-to-day content decisions—such as what types of stories to post, how often to post, or how to interact with Reddit users across different subreddits. They also fail to account for how the platform's voting systems, subreddit cultures, and moderator actions shape the success or failure of individual posts. The current research moves beyond generalized advice by providing an empirical analysis of two news organizations’ actual posting strategies, their effectiveness in terms of audience response, and the factors that appear to drive engagement on Reddit.
The most relevant research to the current study is Saks and Hopkins (2025), who looked at how The Washington Post posted to Reddit over a 120-day sample. The findings from that research demonstrate a few important considerations. Notably, the overwhelming majority (86.5%) of the posts were simply links back to the Washington Post website instead of housing content on the website, like photos, videos, or text posts. Only 17 (1.9%) of the posts were AMA posts, which are a highlight of the Reddit platform (Anderson, 2015). The Post also focused on specific subreddits, ranging from local ones in the publication's geographic region to much larger ones that are relevant throughout the country and world. All of these data, and more from the manuscript, inform this study as they demonstrate a step in understanding how journalism organizations utilize the platform. However, that study only covered one account and did not contrast its approach with others. There is still much to be understood.
Academic research regarding Reddit within journalism studies has clustered into several thematic areas. One cluster focuses on the crowd-sourced nature of information on the platform during breaking news events. Suran and Brown (2017) examined how content created by anonymous gatekeepers during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was framed and what types of sources were used. Their findings suggest that, at least in this instance, Reddit functions similarly to traditional press and news distribution websites, concentrating on episodic coverage rather than contextual or thematic reporting. A second cluster examines subreddit-specific communities as sites of participatory journalism. Straub-Cook (2018) examined r/seattle and found that although sourcing was more varied than traditional media, the agenda was still shaped largely by legacy outlets. Mitchell and Lim (2018) similarly analyzed r/SyrianCivilWar and identified four structural features of the subreddit: algorithmic-driven public discourse, deliberative communication, reflexivity and transparency, and database journalism—each describing a distinct mode of community-curated information sharing. Notably, even in this citizen journalism context, legacy media retained significant agenda-setting influence.
A third cluster examines Reddit as a site for comparing content and audience preferences across platforms. Wasike (2011) analyzed the most prominent stories on both Reddit and Digg—a now-largely-defunct social bookmarking platform that once competed with Reddit for the same news-aggregation audience—comparing the news frames that were most common on each site's “front page,” the algorithmically sorted homepage that surfaces the highest-voted content across all subreddits. In general, human-interest stories were most successful on both platforms. Priya et al. (2019) compared Reddit and Twitter as news sources, concluding that each platform serves a distinct function: Twitter operates as a rapid-paced source for short bursts of breaking news, while Reddit offers more in-depth exploration of particular topics. Together, these clusters suggest a field that has documented Reddit's role as a participatory news environment but has paid less attention to how professional journalism organizations strategically deploy content on the platform.
Post-publication Gatekeeping Theory
Since its start, gatekeeping theory has evolved to reflect the increasingly complex and multidirectional nature of media systems and information flow. In 2020, Hermida modified the theory to account for the concept of post-production gatekeeping, which considers how content remains subject to gatekeeping even after its initial distribution. Hermida proposes a framework “to examine how issues and topics rise to prominence and gain attention following publication in a digital hybrid media ecosystem” (2020, p. 469). The framework works through analyzing the “Four Ps”: publics, platforms, paraphernalia, and practices. Publics refers to the various actors—journalists, audiences, moderators, and algorithmic systems—who participate in shaping content after publication. Platforms denotes the specific technical infrastructure and affordances of the media environment in which content circulates. Paraphernalia encompasses the metrics, tools, and artifacts that mediate how content is evaluated and amplified. Practices refers to the routines and behaviors that actors engage in as part of the post-publication process. By considering the actions and influences of various actors in the post-production flow of information, researchers can identify factors that determine which content is emphasized and which is not. Hermida suggests that “[t]here is potential to build on such studies by considering how all or some of the Four Ps impact flows of news and information post-publication” (p. 484). The current study seeks to understand three of the four Ps (publics, platforms, and practices) in order to see what content is published and flourishes (or flounders) on Reddit.
Research utilizing the post-publication gatekeeping framework includes Salonen et al. (2023), who examine the ways in which audiences and journalists interact with one another in Facebook comment sections. The authors find that, through conversational analysis, audiences and journalists are able to come to a mutual conclusion and understanding of norms through participation in the comment sections. The findings highlight the importance of journalists actively engaging in public discourse surrounding their work after it is published. Salonen and Laaksonen (2023) similarly analyzed the conversational style in the comments of newspapers' Instagram accounts. The study identified four different styles of comments through which the journalists and the audience interacted. Those styles were affirmative, critical, corrective, and invitational, thereby elaborating how some of the “Four Ps” interact within a singular platform environment. Another study (Salonen et al. 2023) argues that the “publics” element of the framework should also include news workers. Through interviews with nine news workers, the authors state that content producers in datafied news environments will potentially modify their practices to account for the audiences on different platforms.
Other studies utilizing the framework include Saks and Hopkins (2025) as well as Ai et al. (2022). For the former article, the authors elaborate on how the New York Times and Washington Post utilize their Instagram feeds, as well as how audiences respond to the content. In particular, the two organizations tended to publish in line with their brands (hard news and politics for the Post, and a more diversified offering including a mix of hard news, soft news, and other human interest pieces for the Times). Additionally, the audiences were more likely to like and comment on harder news articles, leading to the Post having a proportionally greater response. Ai et al. (2022) examined how users and editors evaluated content differently on the Pear Video platform in China. The results showed a disconnect between what the users and the editors found was most important, with the users showing a greater interest in public affairs information, while editors were more likely to highlight nonpublic affairs material.
The current study is attempting to better understand how Reddit fits into the post-publication gatekeeping process. However, it is first important to situate the nature of the phenomenon within the guidelines of the framework. As the authors see it, from the perspective of the “Four Ps,” there are multiple steps in the process that modify the gatekeeping function of the content. Utilizing the suggestion from Salonen et al. (2023), the authors also view the news workers’ and moderators’ roles within the publics and consider how the practices interplay. News workers select or create content within the platform's affordances and post that to a designated subreddit. The platform's algorithm then determines its initial visibility. As content emerges, moderators determine whether it meets the subreddit's criteria, while users influence its visibility through the karma system and by adding comments. That subprocess of visibility and karma/comments is a loop that continues as the platform dictates and as users interact with it.
Reddit's decentralized, community-driven structure makes it a particularly strong site for examining post-publication gatekeeping. Unlike other platforms that are dominated by algorithms or centralized moderation, Reddit relies on a mix of user voting, moderator discretion, and subreddit-specific rules—creating a multilayered gatekeeping system that shapes how news content spreads. Taken together, these dynamics may influence what journalists choose to post, where they post it, and how audiences engage. Ultimately, based on this process, news workers are able to analyze the results of the process and integrate that into future processes. The current study seeks to understand the role that Reddit plays in the post-publication gatekeeping process by analyzing how two digital news organizations, SFGate and the San Francisco Chronicle, distribute content and interact with audiences on the platform. By doing so, the research offers insight into the challenges and opportunities facing journalists on Reddit.
San Francisco Gate and the San Francisco Chronicle
As traditional media moves online, an increasing number of print publications are moving to launch digital editions. Although SFGate and the San Francisco Chronicle share a common background, they have evolved to serve distinct functions in the current media landscape.
SFGate is a news website based in San Francisco, California, covering a wide range of topics, including news, culture, travel, food, politics, and sports in the Bay Area. Launched in 1994, following an 11-day newspaper strike between employees of the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, SFGate initially served as the Chronicle's digital home (Hartlaub, 2014). In 2013, the Chronicle introduced a paywalled premium website, sfchronicle.com. Free and premium Chronicle content appeared on SFGate until 2019, when the publications split into two independent newsrooms. Although SFGate initially ran on a staff of just 21 employees, by 2025 it staffed 60 journalists across 23 cities, making it one of the largest news sites on the West Coast (Marek, 2025). The site currently attracts 25 to 30 million unique visitors monthly and has surpassed the Los Angeles Times to become the most-read news site in California (Marek, 2025).
Interestingly, both organizations are owned by the same media corporation, Hearst. According to a Hearst Media Kit (2020), in 2020 the Chronicle and SFGate had a combined global audience of 34 million readers each month, with SFGate receiving 135.9 million pageviews and 25.1 million unique visitors per month globally, and SFChronicle.com receiving 31.3 million pageviews and 11 million unique visitors per month globally. The Hearst (2025) kit reports that in 2024 SFGate attracted 49.3 million pageviews and 14.8 million unique visitors each month.
Given their large audience and regional focus, both SFGate and the Chronicle have an incentive to experiment with digital engagement strategies—including leveraging platforms like Reddit that attract niche, topic-driven communities and faster audience participation and interaction. With their shared history, similar geographic location, distinct newsrooms, same ownership, and comparable publication strategies, the two organizations make ideal focuses of study. Additionally, both accounts have been active for a long time, with the Chronicle creating its account on February 6, 2019, and the SFGate creating its account on June 13, 2017. This study will examine those similarities and differences and their implications for audience engagement and post-production gatekeeping on Reddit.
Method
To answer the research questions, the authors conducted a quantitative content analysis of u/sfgate and u/sfchronicle on Reddit. The authors used a web scraping plugin for Google Chrome called “Easy Scraper” to capture relevant information from each submitted post by the two accounts. The variables collected included the title of the post, the Reddit score for each post, the number of comments, the name of the subreddit to which the content was posted, a link to the page, and the date and time when the post was created. Using the outlined criteria, the authors captured the links on February 7, 2025. Researchers captured the entire post history for both accounts for a total of 910 posts, 664 for SFGate and 246 for the Chronicle. This collection method would therefore not include posts that were previously deleted by the accounts or removed by moderators, and due to limits from Reddit, not be usable for accounts with more than 1,000 historical posts, as that is as far back as Reddit's search function will allow you to search. However, to give the two accounts a more comparable timeframe, only the posts created after both accounts were active will be considered in the sample. Therefore, there are a total of 722 posts between the two accounts, 476 for SFGate and 245 for the Chronicle. The researchers decided to utilize the same timeframes for both organizations instead of creating a random sample to help with any temporal effects that may be relevant. Given that the two organizations share a geographic region, hypothetically they could be covering the same stories, which is meaningful for analysis. The unit of analysis for the study is an individual post.
The researchers coded for numerous variables to analyze the type of content that the account was distributing, as well as the users’ responses to that content. The variables included those previously mentioned plus the type of post, the type of news the post was focused on, if the post was removed by a moderator, and the content's topic category. The type of post identified the content characteristics of the post and was broken down into seven categories: link to external site, AMA, video, image/image gallery, text, crosspost, and other. The type of news variable attempted to identify the scope of the information shared/received. The variable values were local/regional, national, international, opinion, review, advice, and other. Lastly, the topic category variable aimed to understand the topic of the post based on the 14 categories identified by Stempel (1985). Those topic categories are: Politics and Government Acts; War and Defense; Diplomacy and Foreign Relations; Economic Activity; Agriculture; Transportation and Travel; Crime; Public Moral Problems; Accidents and Disasters; Science and Invention; Public Health and Welfare; Education and Classic Arts; Popular Amusements; and General Human Interest. In addition to those categories defined by Stempel (1985), the researchers chose to add an “other” category for any content that might not belong in the initial categories.
Intercoder reliability with Krippendorff's alpha was calculated for the aforementioned variables. Two people coded a random sample of 91 posts (a 10% sample) comprising a sample from both accounts. The alphas ranged from .814 for topic, .867 for news type, to 1 for all remaining variables. All the intercoder coefficients meet the criteria of greater than .8 as outlined by Krippendorff (2018). In addition, the researchers examined the disparities, discussed them, and then proceeded to code the study's full sample.
For the study, the level of significance was set to p < .05.
Results
In looking at the overall descriptive statistics for the sample, there were a total of 476 posts by SFGate and 246 posts by the Chronicle, bringing the total number of posts to 722. The mean score for all posts was 330.51 (SD = 1,638.598) and the mean number of comments was 50.30 (SD = 142.676). There is also a strong correlation between a post's score and the number of comments it received (r = .732, p < .001), suggesting that posts that earn greater algorithmic visibility through upvotes also tend to generate more audience discussion. The overwhelming majority of the posts were links back to website content (N = 645). The second-most common type combined multiple formats (N = 22), often featuring an image gallery alongside a link to an article. AMA posts were the third most common (N = 17). In terms of the scope of the news, most posts were related to local/regional news (N = 612), followed by national news (N = 62), and reviews (N = 21). For topic, the majority of the posts were on the softer side of the news spectrum, with the top value being general human interest (N = 226), followed by popular amusements (N = 165) and politics (N = 82). Lastly, of the 722 posts, 70 were removed by moderators for a variety of reasons (such as the post being off-topic or a duplicate post).
Based on these descriptive statistics, a few considerations arise for later analyses, particularly regarding outliers and posts removed by moderators. In examining the scores, seven outliers—all posted by SFGate—were removed from subsequent analyses as they were more than four z-scores above the mean and they were skewing the means significantly. Additionally, all posts that were removed by moderators are removed from subsequent analyses as well. Forty-six posts from SFGate and 24 from the Chronicle were removed. Combining these considerations, 430 posts by SFGate and 222 by the Chronicle remain. For the purposes of this article, the remaining analyses will utilize those data.
When comparing the types of posts created by the two accounts, SFGate was very consistent in its approach, with 418 link posts, zero AMA posts, zero image/image galleries, four text posts, and one other. Although the Chronicle still heavily relied on link posts (158), the account showed more diversity, with 17 AMA posts, five videos, 12 images/image galleries, seven text posts, one other, and 22 multiple. That approach was significantly different according to a Pearson chi-square test, χ2(6, N = 645) = 123.539, p < .001. This indicates that the two organizations have developed meaningfully distinct strategies for presenting content to Reddit audiences. For the type of news, there was a significant difference between what types of news the two organizations were focusing on with their posts, χ2(6, N = 645) = 22.127, p = .001. Both publications focused mostly on local/regional news, but SFGate had a larger share of the other categories. The full breakdown of the analysis can be found in Table 1. Additionally, when considering topic by publication, both publications posted a substantial amount of soft news content, as shown in the General Human Interest and Popular Amusements categories. However, the Chronicle posted more hard news content in proportion to the number of total posts, and that difference was significant with a Pearson chi-square test, χ2(12, N = 645) = 92.617, p < .001. The full results from the analysis can be found in Table 2.
Publication by News Type.
Publication by Topic.
In terms of subreddits, the majority of posts across both accounts were posted in either r/bayarea (N = 198) or r/sanfrancisco (N = 212). The next-most frequent subreddit was r/politics (N = 39), one of the largest subreddits on the platform. Those three subreddits combined made up 69.6% of the overall posts by both organizations. The remaining posts were divided among 102 other subreddits. Those subreddits covered a variety of locations (such as the subreddits for Oakland, Lake Tahoe, or other nearby locations) and topics (such as local sports teams, television shows, or marijuana). Most of those subreddits (N = 80), however, received two or fewer posts.
Comparing the two accounts in terms of the users’ responses to the posts yields interesting results as well. In particular, when looking at the mean scores by account, the Chronicle yielded a higher score (M = 286.51, SD = 739.115) than SFGate (M = 167.30, SD = 547.102) and that difference is statistically significant, t(643) = −2.321, p = .008. Similarly, the Chronicle's posts received more comments (M = 76.11, SD = 138.767) than SFGate's posts (M = 27.18, SD = 69.316), which was also statistically significant, t(643) = −5.972, p < .001. These results directly challenge the intuitive assumption that posting more frequently leads to greater overall engagement: the Chronicle's strategy of posting roughly half as often as SFGate produced significantly higher average engagement per post, suggesting that quality and content diversity outweigh sheer volume on this platform.
In terms of content, regardless of publication, there were significant differences in how the audiences responded to the content across the variables. Notably, for the content type, Kruskal–Wallis tests were utilized as both demonstrated significant non-normality. The Kruskal–Wallis tests then showed significant differences for karma [χ2(6) = 30.188, p < .001] and comments [χ2(6) = 39.337, p < .001]. For pairwise comparisons, there were many significant differences for both karma and comments across the values. However, the karma for AMA posts, images, and multiple types was significantly higher than that for links, despite links being more ubiquitous. The comments were significantly higher for AMA posts as compared to most of the other values. This pattern indicates that Reddit audiences actively reward content that takes advantage of the platform's native features (particularly the AMA format) over passive link sharing that redirects users away from the platform.
When examining karma and comments across different news types, only the distribution of karma scores was non-normal, while comment counts were normally distributed. Karma scores differed significantly across news types [χ2(6) = 20.450, p < .01], but comment counts did not [F(6, 638) = 1.244, p = .282]. However, there were no significant pairwise comparisons for karma when adjusted with a Bonferroni correction.
Lastly, comparing topics to karma and comments yielded significant results for both. Both karma and comment distributions for topics were non-normal, so the analysis utilized nonparametric Kruskal–Wallis tests. The tests for karma [χ2(12) = 47.946, p < .001] and comments [χ2(12) = 102.931, p < .001] demonstrated that topics yielded differing results from audiences. For karma, the only pairwise comparisons that remained significant after applying a Bonferroni correction involved the popular amusements category, contrasting with economic activity, travel and transportation, crime, and public health issues. This pattern suggests greater interest in hard news compared to soft news. The comments yielded similar pairwise comparisons with significant differences between human interest and five other values, as well as popular amusements and five other values. Taken together, these findings push back on the prevailing assumption that soft news and entertainment content reliably outperforms hard news in terms of engagement. For these two accounts on Reddit, the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Discussion
The current study examined how two similarly located and similarly situated journalism organizations use Reddit. Additionally, the study examines audience engagement with these posts through the platform's forward-facing metrics. The findings show that posts appear in similar subreddits but differ in terms of content and sharing approach. The Chronicle's approach was generally more successful in terms of karma and comments, despite posting about half as often as SFGate. One of the key distinctions that separated the two organizations was that SFGate tended to focus on more soft news than the Chronicle. The audience, it appears, also responded more positively to the hard news content, and therefore gravitated to upvoting and commenting more on the Chronicle's posts. The Chronicle also diversified its content more than SFGate in terms of content types, with more AMA posts (to which SFGate had none), more videos, more images, more text posts, and more multiple-type posts. Both organizations tended to focus on local news, but SFGate included more opinion and review pieces.
It should be noted that all outliers that were removed from the analyses for high karma all came from SFGate. As such, the organization's approach does seem to have more potential for extraordinarily positive feedback. All seven posts were link posts: six came from politics, one from popular amusements. Three posts were opinion-based, with two covering local news and two covering national news. Also, all of the posts were submitted to very large subreddits (six posted to r/politics and one posted to r/music). With this in mind, more research is needed to understand how high-scoring posts drive traffic to the organizations’ websites and whether these outliers are “worth more” than standard posts.
The findings from this study are somewhat similar to those of Saks and Hopkins (2025). Both accounts focused on select subreddits; they mostly published links that went back to their own sites, and they did not have many AMA posts. Notably, though, the distinctions between the types of stories that they were highlighting were an important characteristic that was not covered in the previous research. The increased positive responses to the harder news demonstrate a greater interest in that type of content, at least in terms of popularity and visibility in how the algorithm presents that content.
More broadly, these findings challenge assumptions that have shaped how news organizations approach social media strategy. The prevailing logic (that volume drives reach, and that soft news drives engagement) is contradicted by the data here on both counts. The Chronicle posted roughly half as often as SFGate yet generated significantly higher karma and more comments per post, suggesting that content quality and diversity outweigh sheer output. And where Lamot (2022) found soft news generating more interactions on Facebook, Reddit's community-governed environment produces the opposite pattern, with hard news consistently outperforming softer content. Anter's (2024) systematic review cautions against treating any single platform's engagement patterns as universal, and the present findings reinforce that caution forcefully: what works on Facebook does not simply transfer to Reddit. News organizations that apply a one-platform logic across all their social media presences risk systematically misreading the signals their audiences are sending.
In considering the post-publication gatekeeping framework, Reddit creates an interesting feedback loop through its platform and selection algorithm. The algorithm constantly evaluates the content's visibility to determine how it is ranked and displayed. As such, the interplay between the various publics, practices, and the platform yields fruitful considerations for how each element in the framework interacts with the whole. For the current study, the results demonstrate a connection between the content (or practices) and the audience (one of the publics). There are significant differences in how the audience responds to content that news workers should consider. In particular, it may be useful to diversify content offerings to meet the interests of the public and take advantage of the affordances of the platform. This suggests that a more strategic approach—one that blends platform norms with editorial values—may help news organizations better balance audience engagement goals with their journalistic mission. For example, AMA posts, which utilize the platform's affordances of subreddits, the karma system, and the nested comment system, performed better than links for both karma and comments. There are definitely questions, however, about whether the news workers are actively engaged in understanding what types of content were successful or not. By having a more singularly focused approach toward sharing links and a disproportionately soft news bent, SFGate, from the authors’ perspective, is not displaying much consideration for modifying its approach to suit the needs of the audience and platform as much as the Chronicle may be. This raises important questions about the long-term viability of a soft-news focused strategy on Reddit, where audiences appear to reward harder news and participatory content like AMA posts over passive links to lifestyle and entertainment stories.
Another consideration is the purpose of posting from an institutional perspective, based on the content supplied by the news workers. There is currently no publicly available data showing the amount of traffic that posts on Reddit yield for publishers. There may or may not be a correlation between visibility through the karma system and improved click outcomes. However, that does not mean that there are no potential benefits, like brand building, community support, or participation in a more deliberative democracy. Alternative engagement metrics—such as time-on-page and link click-through rates—may also help researchers and news organizations better understand how Reddit participation translates to tangible outcomes. As of yet, it isn’t clear what the end goal is for the publishers. More research is needed to understand how Reddit can best meet the wants and needs of the organizations.
An element that we have only briefly discussed to this point is the role of moderators in the framework. Unlike most other social media sites, which tend to utilize professional content moderators who only see content when it is flagged by an algorithm or a user, Reddit has volunteer moderators who see essentially all of the content that passes through their subreddits. They also have the power to, with other moderators on an individual subreddit, decide what content fits the subreddit and what doesn’t. Every subreddit has a different set of rules and expectations on what constitutes acceptable content. The news workers have to understand this process on multiple levels across the site to know where their content is welcome. As such, news workers need to consider the content that will appease the audience as well as the moderators, which may further modify the requisite practices utilized. Engaging on Reddit requires more than understanding audience interests—it also involves building relationships with moderators, whose personal discretion and interpretation of rules and community norms can make or break a post's visibility. Overall, this study highlights the need for journalism organizations to move beyond a “one-size-fits-all” approach to platform engagement, adapting their strategies to fit the complex and evolving dynamics of Reddit's post-publication gatekeeping landscape.
In summary, although this study focuses on Reddit specifically, its core questions—how news organizations read and respond to platform-specific engagement signals, and how community governance shapes what journalism succeeds—extend well beyond any single platform. The lessons here about content diversity, platform fit, and the mismatch between cross-platform assumptions and platform-specific audience behavior are likely to recur as journalism continues adapting to emerging and evolving digital spaces.
Conclusion
This study showed how two San Francisco-based publications utilized different posting strategies on Reddit over an almost 5-year period of time. The results demonstrated that certain approaches may yield better outcomes in terms of karma and comments. Given the lack of research on Reddit for professional journalists, we hope these data are a starting point for future research on the subject. Additionally, the findings provide further insight into the post-publication gatekeeping theory by outlining the publics, platforms, and practices of the phenomenon.
Limitations include that the focus was only on two publications owned by the same media conglomerate. Other factors may be in play that are not demonstrated through the results, such as institutional influence on the social media news workers. Both accounts are relatively old, being created back as far as 2017, so newer accounts may utilize different approaches.
More research is needed on the subject in a multitude of ways. One element that is left out of these analyses is how the organizations utilize their own posting strategies in the comment sections. The current study and Saks and Hopkins (2025) both focus on top-level content without analyzing the deeper discussions and interactions that might be going on in the comment sections for the articles. Those may allow the publications to have more discussion and dialogue with the audience that isn’t at the level of an original post. The role of the moderators needs to be better understood as well. As the gatekeepers of each individual subreddit, they hold a significant amount of power and influence over what could potentially be posted and what could not. Different media with differing posting schedules, such as accounts for television channels, magazines, or websites, may approach the platform differently as opposed to similarly situated daily publications. Similarly, publications that are more topically focused as opposed to locality-focused may also utilize different strategies. Qualitative studies and interviews with social media managers on their specific approaches to the platform would also yield highly valuable insights into the framework.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.