Can Somebody Please Throw Reddit Back into S.I. Newhouse’s Yard?
The press and the public have abetted this ownership without responsibility ruse long enough.
Four years after Adrian Chen’s exposé of notorious troll Violentacrez, the inmates are running the asylum once again over at Reddit. Now a haven for abusive nationalists with whom the management seem to have futile behind-the-scenes relationships — as they did with Violentacrez — the meltdown has been documented in a series of posts by Gizmodo, all notable, as Reddit coverage has been for years, for what they do not mention, which is that the Newhouse family, owners of some of the most upscale and tasteful magazines in America — including The New Yorker and Vogue — own the damn thing, have been its majority owner since 2006, and have somehow gotten people (particularly tech journalists) to believe that they do not own it by repeatedly saying that they don’t.
As media professor Robert Quigley told the Seattle Times last year, “Their strategy appears to be to pretend they don’t own it.”
It is a weird strategy, but a seemingly convincing one to a generation of journalists raised in the thrall of official PR and Silicon Valley.
After Chen’s Violentacrez story, Peter Kafka, at least, had the sense to kick the can to Condé Nast.
In a typically surreal response, Advance.net chairman Steven Newhouse answered, truthfully if misleadingly, that “Reddit was spun off a year ago , and it operates as an independent company. Condé Nast has no involvement in the management of Reddit,” while confirming that Advance — Condé’s parent company — was still Reddit’s majority shareholder, as it is to this day.
Kafka seemed to understand there was something … Kafkaesque about this response, slugging it with the hed “Reddit’s Owner Says It Doesn’t Manage Reddit.”
Newhouse is playing word games here, although they are important word games — from a PR and perhaps legal perspective — aimed at keeping Reddit’s toxicity away from Anna Wintour and David Remnick. (These are the sort of word games about which we need to recover a new clarity as the President-elect prepares to unveil his “divestment” plan later this month.)
This “spin-off” that Newhouse referenced in 2012 was announced a year earlier in a much-celebrated — and seemingly misunderstood — declaration of independence on the site. “Today reddit, a division of Condé Nast, becomes reddit Inc,” it begins.
So Condé sold Reddit? Not exactly. As it goes onto explain, “reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast), so even though the organizational shift is important, reddit is not really going anywhere.” Also, four of the five board members then named were either from Advance or Condé Nast. Full ownership, plus 80% of board seats? This is not independence, and it certainly does not let Advance Publications off the hook for corporate responsibility.
To be clear, the Newhouse family — owners of privately-held Advance Publications — moved Reddit from under Condé Nast into its own division, which they still fully owned, with the result they could truthfully state that Condé Nast and Reddit have nothing to do with each other, as in this official myth buster posted on Reddit in 2013.
myth: Condé Nast owns reddit.
reality: reddit is not owned by Condé Nast. reddit used to be owned by Condé Nast, but in 2011 it was moved out from under Condé Nast to Advance Publications, which is Condé Nast’s parent company. Then in 2012, reddit was spun out into a re-incorporated independent entity with its own board and control of its own finances, hiring a new CEO and bringing back co-founder Alexis Ohanian to serve on the board. The best characterization might be to say that reddit is a “part-sibling-once-removed” of Condé Nast.
Again, technically true, but misleading, since — lower on the page — we see that, “The largest shareholder is still Advance Publications.”
In 2015, Wired — bored with our unsophistication —painstakingly explained to us that Reddit had been re-organized yet again in 2012 to become truly independent. Ah, so Advance is out, right? Wrong. Wired says, “To this day, Advance Publications remains a majority shareholder of Reddit, but Reddit says it is fully independent.”
The latter clause, I contend, can only be false, given the former. No independence without financial independence.
Don’t get me wrong. The Newhouse family has been loosening its reins on Reddit practically since they bought it. They would perhaps like to sell it. Maybe they are readying it for a sale. But right now, today, they own a majority stake and the responsibility that comes with it. To deny this is to deny a fundamental axiom of journalism — and activism: Follow the money.
As boycotts and campaigns breakout against Breitbart advertisers and other accomplices of the far right, there is no reason Advance Publications should be excluded. And the question any concerned citizen might honestly ask them is simple:
You are the majority stakeholder in Reddit, a platform that has become a haven for right-wing extremists. What are you going to do about it? My subscription to The New Yorker depends on your answer.
