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Can you build a local news site entirely with freelancers, wire copy and RSS feeds?
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Probably not, but...
...when Whalehead King is one of your freelancers, that's a good start.
Larry Davidson
Better than a blog?
The Examiner pays its contributors $2 per CPM. That's it. Bloggers are flocking to the site because they boast "competitive" wages. I'm sorry, but $2-$8 per post isn't competitive. While I have friends who are Boston-based "Examiners," I remain wary of the site and some of the garbage they post as content.
The only benefit I see joining their blog (yes, they slam blogs in their Craigslist posting but they are, in essence, a blog network) is that it's being picked up in Google News. But so did Associated Content when it first launched a few years back, and now they've been kicked to the curb after several bogus "articles" were posted and picked up by mainstream news organizations.
My thoughts? Until they start paying their writers fair wages and focus on quality over quantity, this Colorado-based site will fail just like a majority of the out-of-state hyper-local experiments before them.
what's a CPM?
CPM
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cpm
CPM?
is 1,000 page views
Yes...
Yes you can. And if you know anything about SEO, you can get more traffic than the sources you get the news from do.
Ayup!
And I see they've revived the old trick for getting two page views out of somebody else's content: Create a link for somebody else's headline to a "summary" page on your own site.
Kinda hypocritical of me to criticize another site that relies on work done elsewhere, but that two-step linky thing has always seemed just a bit too much.
However, give them credit for actually paying bloggers even if, as Sam notes, it's not much.
Dirty little not-so secret:
Dirty little not-so secret: radio has been taking their news from the early edition newspapers since forever.
Sources
And you NEVER hear "According to the Boston Globe" on local TV news.
No sharing
Well, here's an interesting twist: I just visited their site, read a column by their workplace "examiner," and submitted a comment that closed with, along with my name, a link to my own blog about work and workplaces.
However, the comment didn't go through: At this juncture, their comment function will not accept links or urls. I had to resubmit without my blog url -- it went through. But I won't be spending much time there.
ALSO, while it's possible to build a local news site this way, the content I read from several of their "examiners" did not show a lot of depth of understanding of their topics of supposed expertise.
SanFran Examiner
Others might be able to speak about this more accurately, but I think this web site has been around for a few years. Herald owner Pat Purcell has been aware of the owners of the San Francisco Examiner wanting to start up free dailies a-la Metro in cities all over the country. This seems like a web version of the same idea.
I wonder if it will work.