San Francisco’s “second” newspaper, the Examiner, launched Examiner.com last year not as the online equivalent for the San Francisco paper, but as a national forum for recruiting citizen journalists to report on the variety of topics a typical newspaper would cover. Participants set up blogs for their topic and city that allows them to develop a unique, granular voice. For example, one of the more popular “columnists” discusses San Francisco radio.
The mission behind Examiner.com is to create massive local blog networks covering as many topics as possible. The Examiner.com management then encourage their bloggers to virally market their blogs themselves, and provides pocket change incentive of $.01 per pageview.
In conclusion, Examiner.com is a great experiment taking an obscure local publishing brand and creating a new online journalistic (albeit not a professional journalist) business model. It melds its mass media name with the social media. I’ve signed on as a Social Media Examiner and will test the concept.
In any case, at least the Examiner is creative enough to try a new business model in light of the horrid newspaper advertising collapse now happening:
(fr. Techcrunch)
