Hits Versus Content At Examiner.com
To follow up on my previous post, here’s an e-mail from a former Examiner blogger:
Is this really the future of journalism? There is no fact checking, no editing, no nothing except a regular series of emails from your “channel manager” imploring you to employ SEO and “viral marketing” to increase the number of hits your page gets, and writers are paid next to nothing. An example from one of their emails: “Examiners should avoid obscure references, no matter how ‘clever.’ Search engines don’t recognize cleverness.”
I was being tongue-in-cheek about Examiner.com based on the ludicrousness of the article I referenced…TMZ said Natalie Portman was alive, which is how I really knew it was true. The Rick Astley report was the best - complete with a “© 2009 Associated Press” at the bottom. A simple Google search showed that was total bullshit; that post has since been removed from iReport.com (“Unedited. Unfiltered. News” where “only stories marked “On CNN” have been vetted for use in CNN news coverage.” Right now that’s 699 of 320,858).O
