The part that is particularly noteworthy is not that "Reddit" discussed the event, rather, Reddit enabled a single user named integ3r to offer a more succinct, comprehensive, unbiased, unsensationalized story than anywhere else in the media surrounding the event.

I was about to write a long reply, but your single sentence summed up my exact thoughts in a very elegant way, thanks!

It's also not a new thing. Typically when something like this is happening in the world, someone finds their way onto reddit and keeps a flow of information going.

Here's me doing this almost two years ago: http://reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/d8b6b/noooo_a_gunman...

I don't think so. This isn't ground breaking for reddit. The "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" standard in the HN guidelines is pretty high and I don't think it's reached by the TC article. It doesn't contain any significant analysis, but a rundown of articles that are with a couple excerpts.

Yes it's newsworthy, Aurora or any other event has a limited shelf life, therefore to derive maximum page views each news outlet must differentiate their story to disseminate some new information for each cycle. News always has to have something new. A story about reddit and aurora thus qualifies as news and drives page views because it's related to a current event.

Keep in mind that for Aurora you kind of get quadruple nerd score because of the subject matter, and it's about reddit so you're going to get all the reddit traffic too.

Thinking is hard, if you tell journalists that arabs revolted because Twitter loves freedom then they will write that rather than doing their own research and finding out that people were so hungry they didn't care about the retaliation from the regime.

Same thing with Aurora tell them its about reddit and they'll write that, if IRC had a PR agency then efnet would be where people got their Aurora fix, but since EFNET doesn't and Conde Nast does...

FWIW, we're no longer under Conde Nast.

Journalists were the first to reach out to us, not the other way around. While I do agree that there is a trend in online journalism to hunt down page views rather than legitimate news, I personally feel that the story presented here is newsworthy. The information provided by integ3r on the shooting was the most succinct early coverage that I saw. Of course I'm a bit biased on that point.