The $2.50 Journalism of Examiner.com

After posting quite a few articles from the website examiner.com, I was a bit curious about why such a 'mainstream newspaper' source was posting so many articles looking positively on 'fringe' subjects. And this is what I found:

The San Francisco Examiner, Baltimore Examiner, and Washington, D.C. Examiner are all owned and operated by a company called Clarity Media Group. In the same light, the website Examiner.com is owned by this same company, so there is an obvious (intentional?) confusion on whether or not the articles which appear on Examiner.com are actually articles which ALSO appear in the 'professional journalism' newspapers around the country, making them much more newsworthy every time they crop up in Google News. In fact, Google itself may be confused, placing articles from this website in their news results instead of in their blog search results. Consider the information in this link:

The Examiner.com Wants to Become a Bastion of Citizen Journalism

But the Examiner.com has no use for professional journalists. It is instead an experiment in pure citizen journalism. Right now Examiner sites have officially launched in beta for five cities—San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, and Seattle. Although other cities like New York are coming along. The sites have been live for a couple months without any promotion, and collectively are already attracting 1.3 million visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore (which is nearly double from July). CEO Michael Sherrod says the internal numbers show 3 million monthly uniques.

And further down:

These writers are vetted and paid based on how many pageviews and advertising clicks their articles can produce. The pay is not a lot. It starts at a $2.50 for every thousand pageviews. The median amount each examiner is making right now is $25 a month, although Sherrod has written a check for as high as $1,700. Anschutz is bank-rolling the whole project. He is the only investor (the amount is not being disclosed).

Anyway, I'm not trying to bag citizen journalism (blogs), because in my mind, blogging is really the only way to get around mainstream media editors who are invited to the White House if they kiss up to politicians, and hopefully (fingers crossed? write what they tell you to write) get to see what happens at Bilderberg meetings. Regardless, I felt this information concerning articles posted from Examiner.com should be noted by all since Clarity Media Group seems to be attempting to bank on the confusion.