Examiner.com - Official Response and Analysis Regarding the Problems with their New Platform

I seriously doubt that J Craig Canada was suspended. Maybe he hit a bug where he was unable to login but he has been posting daily, several times a day on the examiner.com writers community forums and if he were suspended he wouldn't have access to them.

J Craig Canada has not made an entry to his personal blog since the post you mentioned. Maybe he is suspended from that as well.

Have contacted Mr. Canada directly to ask him?

Also it is not clear from your article was J Craig Canada a part of the beta testing?

Your blog reads like tabloid journalism, "Last Saturday I broke the news about Something is Broken on Examiner.com - Writers in Uproar."

Are you writing about the advancement of Drupal? Or just trying to make a name for yourself off of this event?

Examiner.com staff are fond of tossing out the number 50K+ active examiners. But here's the thing - there are some serious problems with that number and those problems mean it's essentially a number designed to give a false impression. To base the percentage of writers who have submitted support tickets on that number only extends the misconception.

If Examiner.com won't be straight in public statements about the exact number of active examiners, and they want to use the 50,000+ number to make the number who have filed support tickets/complaints look smaller, I'll be happy to do some extrapolating to make the numbers look more real. After all, two can play this cook-the-books game.

First, some markets are small enough to quickly count the names of those who are listed as examiners. I discovered by looking at the sitemap for individual editions that Ex counts every **column** as a separate **examiner,** even when the column is written by the same person. If an examiner has two columns, s/he counts as two of the X number of *examiners* in the edition.

Some examiners who have been writing for the company for awhile have multiple columns - 2, 3, 5, even 10 columns. If Examiner.com counts every column in every edition as a separate *examiner,* that's a quick way to get to 50K examiners, even if some of them are the same person, counted twice. To check this out, compare the number of examiners listed in the (name of edition) Examiners box on the front page of any edition (6 of N) to the list of examiners for that edition which you can find in the Examiner.com Resources | Sitemap | (name of edition) examiners list. See the issue?

I'll use Syracuse as the example. According to the front page widget, there are 86 examiners in the edition. According to the sitemap, there are 86 columns. If I count author names, not columns, Syracuse only actually has 79 people writing those 86 columns for Examiner - a difference of 9% - but Examiner still counts their columns, not the number of people. Since Syracuse is a very new market, it's likely that fewer people have more than one column - so let's round that up to 10% (I can cook books, too...) and take 10% right off the top of that number Examiner.com uses for active examiners - 50K+. Since I can't cook an estimated book, I'll use 50K even, and when I subtract 10%, I get 45,000 examiners.

Now, let's take a look at "inactive" examiners, people who don't meet Examiner.com's own standard to earn payment - they have to write one article in the current month. Hmm. Out of the 79 people in Syracuse who are writing, only 22 have written at least one article in the month of August (which is almost over.) That's only 27.8% of the people who have ever written for Syracuse's edition who fit the definition of an "active" examiner. I'll round that up to 28% (because when cooking books, there's no need to make the calculations complicated.)

Now for the extrapolation.
If only 28% of the 45,000 human beings who have ever written for Examiner.com are active, then that's only **12,600 people.** Of course, my disclaimer is that it is only an estimate based on probabilities and using one young edition as representative. The real number could be higher - or lower. Anyone want to start doing an actual count with me?

Now - back to that sorta firm number, 5% of ~50K, which I called 2500 examiners who have needed support. By my math, 2500 real support tickets from 12,600 active examiners means that 19.8% have filed support tickets - so hey, we're book-cooking, and I vote we call it an even 20% of active, human examiners who have had to report some issue with the migration. ;)

I make no guarantees about my numbers, but I can count examiners, columns, and numbers of people in one edition who've published within the month of August. I hope that my interpretation of these numbers illustrates that there is more than one way to interpret Examiner.com's claims about the impact this migration to Drupal7 has had on their writers' community. They like to trot out the 50K+ examiners number (which is real - that is likely how many people have ever written for the company.) But the point is that only a small percentage of that number are actually active writers. And if the 2500 support tickets ballpark is even close to correct, then it should be called a percentage against the number of **active** writers, not against the number of everyone who has ever contributed to the site. Writers who are long gone or long inactive aren't likely to have even noticed that the site migrated, because they've moved on to other things.

Some shoddy reporting here. "Words against words"?? You ask for comment from a top 100 site, then still lean on the one obviously disgruntled writer? Nice work on helping Drupal too. The site obviously has a few kinks to work out, but sorry, I have a feeling they know what they are doing. After reading the posts here, not sure I can say the same about this blog.

Raymond - bloggers aren't "reporters." But please note that the 40K - 50K "examiners" number is the one that Examiner.com publishes. It's on their website, it's on their press releases, it's their go-to number. And as I point out, it's not a lie, exactly. However, it represents every column title that's ever been written for Examiner.com since it launched. It doesn't translate accurately into actual numbers of people/writers, and it has no relationship to the number of people who are actively writing today. Examiner.com won't even reveal the actual number of active writers to the active writers. All anyone, including this blogger, have to go by are those numbers Examiner publicly shares...unless they want to do a lot of math and they know where to look and have the time to open every single column in the edition to see when the person published last. No, there isn't enough time in the world to do that for every edition.

Active writers have known for awhile that not everyone listed as a columnist on their editions fits Examiner's requirement for payment - they haven't written anything within the current month (or longer.) Now, unfortunately, the readers are being exposed to this every day with a widget on each edition's front page that features the icon picture of a rotating list of (name of edition) examiners. Readers who may not have known about the careers or writing examiner are being enticed to click on a face - and then after clicking, discover that the person hasn't written anything for a month (or much, much longer.)

As for supporting Drupal7, I suspect what Examiner's early deployment on a platform that is still in alpha will do to Drupal7's reputation is far worse than the effect of someone taking a look at the results and pointing out the flaws. The "few kinks" you mention in the migration to Drupal7 and execution of the new site are affecting writers' livelihoods. These are people who know how to use words for a living and who have writing platforms and contacts in the freelance world. That's not exactly a group of people that it's in Examiner's best interests to inflame.

Thanks Gaelen for adding the point that "few kinks" is a gross understatement and that thousands of writers have been kicked in the butt, losing up to 90% of their average income since the new site launched. The tickets are slowing down because Examiner's inaction and double-speak gives writers a sense of hopelessness, that makes them stop reporting problems. The drop in page views has now trumped the still awful look of the site and the lack of functionality. As for a writer being terminated, well that might be, but there is documentation of a writer being punished for writing about exactly what Thomas is writing about here. Writers can't review Examiner even if their topic would naturally include the subject. It has happened before when the site couldn't pay people on time for months at a time. Writers were forced to submit tickets to support center as if it was a technical problem and the run=around was ridiculous. They blamed all sorts of sources for their problems when the truth was no one felt like paying attention to how it could be done right. Once the legal talk started flying around the problems suddenly disappeared, but anyone who had the temerity to report on it was slapped into submission. It's just their way.

Thomas, I've been reading your articles since the upgrade at Examiner.com. Some of it is dead on.

One point I will differ with you on is the claim that people are being silenced for complaining or criticizing Examiner. If that were the case, I'd have been suspended long ago. I've been very critical. I'm using my real name in this response, so feel free to check with any writer you may know at Examiner to verify that I am quite vocal when I disagree or am dissatisfied with their actions. I have not been asked or told to stop, nor has it been implie or hinted at by anyone from the corporate staff. To the contrary, I've been told to call it like I see it.

You are no longer welcome in the Drupal community. Seriously. Get out. Congrats on making a name for yourself by distorting the facts. You should know that all launches are hard and that as soon as the end of this month this launch will be good for Drupal and the Examiner.

I wish some of the Examiners who are making good money -- and the ones who get even more pageviews than I receive in those top 5 reported positions -- would post up their income numbers to prove that folks are still making good salaries with Examiner, even after the switch to Drupal.

They are silently still raking in the money while all this debate goes back and forth.

Good luck finding them. I used to be # 2 in my channel. Now I'm making a little over a dollar a day. Anyone who is making a lot of money now is either lying, doing something shady, or making it on the backs of those of us who are suffering the broken URLs pointing to the wrong pages.

Pageviews drop at Examiner -- http://bit.ly/FallenDown

I believe I got pushed out for my comments in the community forums. Examiner seldom uses the words "Omniture" or "Next Jump Inc" but that is exactly who they sleep with at night.

The Examiner business model has enormous similarities to a paper writen by Prof. Axel Bruns :

http://produsage.org/files/2010/Exploring%20the%20Pro-Am%20Interface%20between%20Production%20and%20Produsage.pdf
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Examiner has 16,500 "active writers" across the USA and Canada

http://bit.ly/NewsWreck

UPDATE (10/12/10): Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair responded in an email

We actually have had more than 62,000 total Examiners contribute on our site since we launched in 2008; we still actively communicate with more than 55,000, which is what that number is based on. Currently we have an average of about 60 percent that have actively contributed in the past 90 days. We use that timeframe in monitoring engagement to take into account our daily publishing frequency is always fluctuating -- as some titles like sports are seasonal, others like music are dependant upon new information or movement, for example.

"""Our 30-day average reflects this oscillation, as we range between 30 to 40 percent active in that timeframe. """"

30% of 55,000 = 16, 500 and that comes from the CEO of Examiner

I love that this guy has not posted anything else. He has nothing else to talk about! No one knows who he is in the drupal community, and he tries by posting using discontent sources and random rumors. Nice try!

It's all good now ;)
Alex @ http://thejojobaoil.com/

All good now? Only because those of us with hundreds and hundreds of broken backlinks in the pre 2.0 articles have just given up on them. Page views are about 1/4 of what they were before the Drupal switch, but current Examiners don't know that, so they're content with their pay. Most of the longtime writers are gone. The few hanging on are pretty jaded about the whole thing.