We seek to interview any person or company doing innovative things in new media or traditional media. We prize innovation here at metaprinter and encourage media organizations to come on here and trumpet their achievements. The goal of the interview is to find out a little bit more information than what can be found already online or in print.

To follow up the piece we wrote about the Reddit / Independent partnership I conducted a short email Q&A with The Independent to learn more about the partnership.  Below is the interview.

October 27, 2008

Meta: Introduce yourself
Independent: Jimmy Leach, editorial director for digital at The Independent

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Meta: Why Reddit? Why not an in-house application?
Independent: The point is to take the Independent to audiences that might not already be habitual users. In the social media space there’s arguments for building your own communities and for attaching yourself to existing communities and feeding them content that might be of interest. In this case, I’m keen on the latter. Reddit’s an excellent concept with a highly active audience and it seemed like a great fit.

Meta: What problem did you encounter with the Reddit partnership?
Independent: Remarkably few, just the technical aspects of buttons and domains and the like.

Meta: The Reddit code is open-source, did your in-house team develop it at The Independent or did you work with an outside agency?
Independent: In-house, with the cooperation of the Reddit guys, who were great.

Meta: The Reddit partnership at http://www.reddit.com/r/independent/ has created new entry points to your news stories.  How are you better monetizing these landing pages?
Independent: We’re not making specific arrangements for landing pages from Reddit since we can’t choose what Reddit users will want to recommend to each other. The pages are monetized, but no more or less than the pages that the Reddit community are less keen on.

Meta: How will you measure success with this partnership?
Independent: We haven’t set any KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – it’s more of an experiment which feels intuitively right. We’re not going to cut it lose if it doesn’t deliver an audience of 5 million. It’ll develop and perhaps turn into something rather different than we expected, but it’s sure to be interesting.

Meta: Thank you for your time.  If you would like to add anything else for our readers please feel free to do so here.
Independent: Only that they should go to http://www.reddit.com/r/independent and see what we’re talking about.

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About Reddit: “Reddit (also reddit) is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the web. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to appear more or less prominently on the Reddit home page.”

About The Independent: “The Independent is a British compact newspaper published by Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily newspapers, with a circulation of 240,503 in May 2008 according to the UK Audited Bureau of Circulations.”