Reddit is a wire service now

Google pays Reddit about $60 million a year. OpenAI pays about $70 million. That’s not a partnership. That’s a supply contract.

I covered Ferguson for months in 2014, the grand jury night and everything after. Our coverage won a Murrow. And I’ll tell you something it took me a while to admit: on any given night, the most accurate account of what was happening on a specific block did not come off the wire. It came from a dozen people standing on that block, contradicting and correcting each other in something close to real time. Messy, and closer to true than any single filed report.

That’s the shape a model rewards. Reddit and Wikipedia together account for more than 25% of all US ChatGPT citations. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg and the Financial Times don’t appear in the top 20 at all. Forbes is the only American business publication that does.

The lesson is not “go astroturf Reddit.” That gets detected, and it torches the exact credibility that made the platform worth anything. The lesson is that your earned plan needs a map of where models actually look, not where trophies live.

Reading that map is judgment, and judgment is the thing we sell. We spent our careers knowing which outlet actually moved a story and which one only looked good in a boilerplate. Same instinct, new map. Most PR plans are still aimed at the wrong building. I know, because for twenty years they were aimed at mine.

We build earned strategies pointed at the places the models are actually reading. Then we go get the coverage.