- [A]ll they care about is how many hits your page gets, and they don't care about the writing. Fine — I decided to try to do things their way.
Unexpectedly, one post I wrote about the vaccine/autism debate really brought the crazies out of the woodwork, and brought my page views to a new record high. So I went with it, decided to start baiting the vaccine deniers more and more, with exaggerations and half-truths.
I also wrote a series of preposterous articles on topics like why peanuts should be banned, why panic was a totally appropriate response to the swine flu outbreak, and why schoolchildren were likely to die if they were allowed to play dangerous games such as tag.
And no one at Examiner noticed or cared what I said or did for quite some time.
Travis Henry, Examiner.com's director of editorial, responded on LAfishbowl by saying, "It is true that we put a lot of trust in our Examiners. It is unfortunate if an Examiner uses this freedom to abuse the system."
(The SF Weekly, in reporting this story, commented on Henry's quote by observing, "You know, when the Unabomber was identified as a former UC-Berkeley lecturer, the school's chancellor did not say 'We have a great number of math professors — and very few of them sent explosives through the mail.'")
Henry's response did not indicate the Examiner was going to change its policy in any way. Instead, he turned his response into a pitch for more writers.
3 comments:
What good are these blogs or Examiners? If somebody can do this, what else on that site is made up? I know that most news on the Internet these days is suspect, but when the brand of a major newspaper appears on the same page, you'd think there would be some sort of vetting process, some way of checking what was said before it goes out.
Given the Examiner's credibility, they should have kept her and built a new business model around fake news.
The owner of the Examiner is a guy who made billions in oil. You'd think he'd spend a little bit more to have credible websites.
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