For journalists familiar with the platform, Reddit can be a rich source for story material. For the uninitiated, presented with pages and pages of equally weighted links, mostly bare of thumbnails and organized loosely into subreddits, it can be overwhelming.

To combat the problem and make it easier to use for journalists, Benji Lanyado, a freelance journalist and digital producer for The Guardian, created the website The Reddit Edit. The site simultaneously displays the top three stories at any given time from five popular subreddits: /r/worldnews, /r/politics, /r/technology, /r/science and /r/pics, plus the reddit.com homepage. The stories are displayed in colorful columns with large text.

"I adore Reddit, but think it is underappreciated as a source of truly fascinating stories from around the world, and usually thought of as a realm of cat GIFs," Lanyado wrote in an e-mail to Mashable. "I wanted to show just how powerful it is at scouring the Internet for important — and often underreported — news... I'm always noticing stories appearing in the mainstream news that I first saw on Reddit a few days earlier."

Of course, its value is not limited to journalists — it's useful to anyone who wants to know what news stories are trending at the moment without, Lanyado says, the noise of reddit.com. (Lanyado also operates top5news.net and top5news.co.uk, which displays trending stories on the websites of U.S. and UK newspapers, respectively.)

Plus, he wrote, "The design of Reddit has always annoyed me a little bit. I wanted to make it prettier."

I asked Lanyado if he planned to add more subreddits to the site. "Quite possibly," he wrote, adding that they would also be "mainstream" subreddits — film, music, gaming, etc. "However, I'm slightly more tempted to apply the design and principle to other messy news sites out there... I'd like to re-imagine The New York Times, The Guardian, etc. in a similar, quieter format, and see what people think."

Do you find The Reddit Edit useful? Or do you prefer the real thing?

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eva Blue