Reddit's Newsgathering Comes of Age After Growing Pains

In the hours and days after the Boston Marathon bombing, the hive mind of Reddit sprang into action. Redditors studied pictures from the scene, listened to police scanners and pieced together information in attempts to identify the suspects. It was the culmination of what had become a popular pastime on the link-sharing site — compiling breaking news reports from disparate sources to provide what its users considered to be a richer and more timely picture than mainstream news reports.

The series of Reddit posts about the explosions and the aftermath is primarily remembered for culminating in the accusation of an innocent college student, who had been missing for about a month before the bombing. (He was later found dead, but police said foul play was not suspected.) Read more...