Why I have parted ways with Examiner
February 28, 2016
Readers of my Examiner columns will notice that no new articles have appeared in my columns since late January 2016. There are many reasons for this, and a detailed explanation is necessary both for the edification of my readers and the staff at Examiner.
When I first learned about Examiner in December 2011, I had been without any kind of employment for 18 months. My plans to become a doctor of physics had fallen through, and the dismal economy had no opportunities for me. At the time, I thought that Examiner was a way for me to make my own opportunity and become a better writer. It is good for any profession to have a developmental league, and it was my hope that Examiner would be this for writers. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Over the past four years, the conditions at Examiner have progressively gotten worse and my writing skills have grown in spite of Examiner rather than because of it. Let us explore the details of these events in rough chronological order.
The great promise of Internet media is that it can serve as an alternative to the establishment lapdog media, providing a place where formerly censored viewpoints can be expressed and articles which the rich and powerful would see suppressed can be shared. It is unfortunate and regrettable that Examiner has failed to fulfill this great promise, being instead willing to guide its writers in a pro-establishment direction and censor articles toward this end. For example, an editorial initiative released on May 1, 2012 directed writers to treat the presidential election as Obama-Romney only, even though Ron Paul had not been eliminated in the delegate race and there were third party candidates with enough ballot access to have a mathematical chance. An effort on my part to point out this bias resulted in my first censored article at Examiner.
As the 2012 election neared, my traffic at Examiner reached its peak, getting me new subscribers and more pay than I received before or since. After the election, I began writing more philosophical pieces and felt the need to separate these from my news articles. When I split my Libertarian Examiner title into Libertarian News Examiner and Libertarian Philosophy Examiner, my subscribers were not moved over, costing me a significant amount of traffic and revenue. I filed support tickets to solve this problem, and these were denied.
After this, there was a change to the criteria for news articles. Whereas the original standard required that the article contain information that had become available in the past 72 hours, this was tightened to 48 hours. A limit was also added to how many articles could be published on an event. These standards can limit an author’s ability to write about events that develop slowly, and can cause thoughtful and intelligent articles to be censored just because a faster author who wrote a shorter and less informative piece took one of the slots for newsworthy articles on a particular topic. These standards led to several of my articles being unpublished from Examiner without recourse, some of which did not actually violate the standards. Again, I filed support tickets to solve this problem. These received generic, seemingly automated responses which did not even address my specific objections. This would become the new normal at Examiner, following a period when people would actually answer and resolve support tickets.
In 2015, an article review process was established for all articles which is much more extensive than any previous review process. Notably, writers are discouraged in the new site guidelines from writing more than 1,500 words, and reviewers tell authors to stay under 1,100 words. This provides no room for an author to engage in deep discussion of a topic and steers the direction of the entire Examiner site in the direction of click-bait. My articles were held up on several occasions because of this, but that was not as bad as outright refusal to publish two controversial pieces of mine. As a private company, they have the right to decide what will or will not appear on their website, but their rationale in the first case (and lack of rationale in the second) is a legitimate target for criticism. The review feedback said,
“It appears as though your article contains content that we feel readers may find offensive, objectionable or outright libelous.”
First, it is legally impossible to libel the dead, and a reputable news organization should know this. Second, even if a deceased plaintiff were not a defense against libel, truth is. Third, objectionability is in the eye of the beholder, namely the reader. Rather than let their readers decide and inform them if it is objectionable, they decided to believe themselves to be smarter than the audience. Finally, being offended is for people who cannot control their emotions in the face of uncomfortable truths and expect others to do it for them.
(Ultimately, this article may be censored by Examiner as well, but doing so would only strengthen my arguments herein. As it will appear on my other publishing sites, it will not even hide the article from the public.)
Finally, there is the issue of payment. While Examiner claims to pay a competitive rate, Examiners rarely earn more than a pittance, with only the top few being able to make anything resembling a living there. This has gotten worse over time; incentives have disappeared, overall site views have declined to such an extent that I am still in the top five Examiners from my region without publishing in almost a month, and actions taken to attempt to remedy this have only served to drive away writers, as described above. The Examiner staff also does not seem to understand that advising authors to spam social media with their links can get sites to ban posts that contain links to Examiner content, as Reddit has done.
With all of that being said, it is not too late for Examiner to be turned around, saved from failure, and turned into the development site for new writers that it could have been for all of this time. But it is time for me to move up and move on. Toward that end, I began posting content from my Libertarian Philosophy Examiner title at Liberty.me in December 2014. This gained me a wider audience, an article picked up at ZeroHedge, and better constructive criticism than I ever received at Examiner. In January 2016, I created my own site in order to go independent. I invite my readers from Examiner to join me as I begin this new adventure.
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