Article is a bit misleading, and fairly light on facts. Strikes me as Time trying to "out" a competitor.
They're basically saying examiner.com is the Demand Media of online newspapers. This sounds like a fair assessment, but there's no scandal here. Just two divergent business models.
Side note: one thing in this article I find completely false is the statement that examiner.com's articles are "neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight."
Examiner.com has a flavor, to be sure. I don't like it, and I generally avoid their articles, but calling them vanilla is incorrect.
Interestingly enough, they (and helium.com, who have a vaguely similar business model) were soft-banned from Wikipedia back in August [1] --- IPs and new named accounts can't add links to them.
I'd never heard this before but I can see why naming the subject helps over using "I" or "we." Writing "Jason likes cake" on my website would tie me to the "cake" keyword moreso than "I like cake", right?
I took it to indicate a bias against personal blogs, fiction, and other forms more likely to be in first person. That's in contrast to sources like Wikipedia, or virtually all news, which are in third person. Where it gets weird would be informally written blogs that are still using the first and second person.... or interviews perhaps?
I do the same thing with http://osdir.com/ -- it should really be delisted from google. It's nothing but redundant messages available elsewhere plastered with 30 ads that will severely lag or crash your browser.
I feel like Rupert Murdoch should be campaigning against sites like Examiner and ContactMusic rather than Google News - they more closely fit the description he paints of the parasitic organization that makes advertising money off other people's content.
I think Murdoch wants publicity more than anything, and you don't get publicity by attacking small things. The only reason Murdoch's google-attack made the news is because google is so popular.
They're basically saying examiner.com is the Demand Media of online newspapers. This sounds like a fair assessment, but there's no scandal here. Just two divergent business models.
Side note: one thing in this article I find completely false is the statement that examiner.com's articles are "neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight."
Examiner.com has a flavor, to be sure. I don't like it, and I generally avoid their articles, but calling them vanilla is incorrect.