Condé Nast Buys Reddit: One Small Step for Social News
Techrunch is reporting that magazine publisher Condé Nast has purchased the social news site Reddit. Condé Nast is the owner of a number of popular magazines suchs as Wired, Vogue, GQ, Glamour, Bon Appétit and the New Yorker.
I think this is a fascinating and smart acquisition by Condé Nast. We’ve already seen Reddit partner with media companies like Slate to create “Reddit” views of their data. The Slate experiment just sort of scratched at the surface of what might be possible if traditional publishers embrace social technologies.
For a publisher like Condé Nast the potential uses of Reddit technology are staggering. The publisher could create a single destination site where all the articles from its various publications are aggregated and voted on using Reddit technologies. Alternatively, Condé Nast could add Reddit views to the websites of all the magazines they own in order to provide a “social” view of the magazine’s content in addition to an “editor” controlled view.
I think this is a great move by Condé Nast. Look for Wired.com to serve as the testing ground for how the publishing giant incorporates Reddit into their other offerings.
Update: Check out the links below for more on this:
- Wired Acquires Reddit (instead of just white labeling it) – Read/Write Web
- Reddit Acquired: Interiew with Founders – Talkcrunch
- Wired Digital Acquires Reddit – Wired
The Bivings Report Nominated for Best of the Blogs Award
The Best of the Blogs (the BOBs) awards program has narrowed its 5,500 nominees down to 150 finalists in fifteen categories. As the result of some sort of oversight, our blog, The Bivings Report, is a finalist in the Best Corporate Blog category.
The BOBs gives out two different kinds of awards:
(1) The User Prize for each category is determined by user voting. You can vote here. Voting is open until November 11th and by voting you’ll be entered in a drawing to win an iPod.
(2) The Jury Prizes will be voted on by a panel of respected journalists and bloggers, including Lisa Stone of Blogher and Mark Glaser of Mediashift.
Anyway, I’d encourage you to check out the nominees and vote for your favorites (by favorites, I mean The Bivings Report). And while you’re at it, vote for Ze Frank in the Best Podcast category too.
There is Money to be Made in Niche Content
Those interested in the newspaper/media business will do well to read a story published in the New York Times yesterday about the Rivals sports network.
Rivals maintains a website for every large college in the country and has 1-4 reporters dedicated to covering each school’s athletic department in depth (many of the reporters are part timers who have other jobs). There is no print product. These team sites provide insider news as well as in deptch football, baseball and basketball recruiting news. This kind of reporting isn’t really done by the mainstream media. In addition to the news, as a subscriber you also get access to a private, team-specific bulletin board where the reporters interact with the subscribers.
Rivals charges $9.95 per month for access to the website for a single team (such as the University of Texas). According to the Times article, Rivals has 160,000 paying subscribers. Assuming each user is paying an average of $9.95 per month, that would mean Rivals is clearing a little over $19 million a year just on subscriptions. Continue reading “There is Money to be Made in Niche Content” »
Pentagon: Milblogs a security risk
Xeni Jardin filed a report with Wired magazine to describe the new pressure placed on military bloggers, or "milbloggers" by the Department of Defense. Milblogs are written by active duty military personnel, with some 
directly reporting from the frontlines. Jardin notes that with the number of reporters in Iraq decreasing, milblogs are possibly the only way to get a firsthand account of ground operations in Iraq.
The controversy over blogging is thought to be representative of a culture clash between Internet generation recruits and seasoned military personnel who are used to controlling information released to the public.
Currently, all milblogs are being reviewed by the Virginia National Guard for information thought to put military operations at greater risk.
Currently, there are more than 1,500 active milbloggers. An annual convention (not affiliated with the DoD) is held in Washington, DC, to bring together military bloggers and explore blogging and compliance issues.
Check out Xeni's article here.
RNC Gets Into the Text Messaging Business
Just got an email from the Republican National Committe (I'm on every political mailing list known to man) inviting me to join GOP Mobile, their brand spanking new text messaging network. According to the email, the RNC intends to use the service over the next week to send out election-related breaking news and action alerts to people who sign up.
Good stuff. Anyone know if the Democratic National Committe has a similar program? Or of any similar programs abroad?