Is this Reddit’s moment for local news? | Local News Initiative

Last October, the Big 12 conference issued a rule change that only really makes sense if you watch Big 12 football: Fans at Texas Tech’s Jones AT&T Stadium were no longer allowed to throw tortillas onto the field during the opening kickoff.

In another era, it’s a story that the Dallas Morning News — located roughly 350 miles southeast of Lubbock, Texas — likely would’ve given less priority. But the paper’s coverage of Texas Tech had been shared quite a bit among fans on Reddit, so this was worth paying attention to.

“That was a statewide interest story, and that was an interesting thing to find through Reddit links and through these Reddit tools that the Texas Tech fandom was a place where we could potentially share more of our content,” said Siali Siaosi, the Dallas Morning News’ deputy audience editor who focuses on social media. “We’re trying to not just be like, ‘Here’s our content, come to our website.’ You also want to try and get into those communities and answer questions and things like that.”

The Dallas Morning News is one of a number of news organizations across the country using Reddit — and as of March 2025, a new newsroom-specific tool called Reddit Pro for publishers — to expand the publication’s reach and become a more accessible community resource.

This newer offering is intended as an opportunity to help newsrooms more effectively incorporate Reddit into their content distribution and audience engagement playbooks. The system allows newsrooms to track which of their story links are being shared across the platform, creates an RSS feed so the publication’s links are easily sharable and provides recommendations as to where the newsroom should share a link.

“It was really just about providing tools to be more successful on the platform, and when they’re more successful on Reddit, we all win,” said Gabriel Sands, the news and lifestyle partnerships lead on Reddit’s media, business development team. “Users really like engaging with news content on the platform, and newsrooms and news organizations and media of all stripes are really in need of new audience sources right now as the landscape shifts, so it feels like a nice way for us to at least attempt to meet that moment and really provide some value to them.”

Since 2021, link traffic has declined sharply on other social media platforms, particularly Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). Part of Medill’s 2025 State of Local News Report tracked the web traffic for the 100 largest newspapers and found that on average, their monthly page views have dropped about 45% over the last four years. Only 11 of the 100 saw growth over that period.

And, according to research conducted by Nieman Lab, social media users are spending less time on news organizations’ sites after clicking links on those social media channels. Throw in the rise of AI in search results, and newsrooms’ prior link traffic sources have been turned upside down.

This has created some opportunity for Reddit to become a more attractive tool for some outlets.

“It’s useful because we have lost a lot of direct channels to our audiences through algorithms,” said Jasmine Garnett, senior engagement platforms producer for KQED, a public radio and TV station in the Bay Area that’s active on Reddit. “It’s super valuable to be able to respond directly to people, and it’s kind of a media-skeptical platform.

“I think a lot of people like poking holes in our reporting and criticizing, not just us but any news organization. And so, when you can win people over on Reddit, I think it creates loyalty in a way that maybe is hard to replicate on other platforms.”

But it’s still vital to have the right approach, noted Jess Awtry, the vice president of digital strategy and communications at Pew Research Center who previously perused local subreddits as a newspaper editor.

courtesy of Pew Research Center

Jess Awtry, the VP of digital strategy and communications at Pew Research Center, argued that Reddit can be a reliable tool for local newsrooms, if used correctly.

“Reddit is increasingly becoming one of the more reliable link-traffic sources, but that’s only because everything else is drying up so much in the shift to platforms wanting to do all they can to keep people on their platforms,” Awtry said. “But if you’re just out to get subscriptions, Reddit will eat you alive if [people on Reddit] sense you’re out there flooding the zone with link traffic. That’s the fastest way to get a ban.”

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Much more so than platforms like Facebook that newsrooms have traditionally used to share every link to every story, a successful Reddit strategy involves focusing on quality over quantity, Siaosi said.

“It is for a specific audience, so you’re going into that community and seeing how they navigate things and what they’re interested in,” he added. “It’s kind of the opposite on other social media platforms where you’re like,...