There are many different online publishers for the freelance writer. Many, but not all, accept news content. Some ask the writer to stay within a specific category, others hand out specific assignments, and some allow the writer a free hand to craft whatever content they wish.
Online freelance writers generally write for more than one publisher. If not, then it's likely that they've at least tried a number of others and settled on the one or ones, they like best. That means that any group of online writers represents a wealth of first hand experience about many different sites which accept and pay for content submitted by freelancers.
For what it's worth, then, here is my experience with and analysis of Examiner.com as an publisher.
I've been writing with Examiner for over two years. Examiner.com assigns each writer a specific category or topic in addition to a region. The writer can select the topic from a lengthy list on the Examiner application form, or even suggest a new topic. When I applied, I asked to write about Forests and submitted a sample article about listening to woodland bird songs. My region was the nearest listed city to my home, Manchester, New Hampshire. Examiner accepted my application, but asked me instead to write about bird watching within the recreation category.
I was initially attracted to Examiner by the page view bonus rate which, at the time, was about $9.50 per 1000 page views. (Currently, it's tracking about $6.65 per 1000 page views for me, but it varies depending upon a number of factors). Of course, higher page view rates only matter if their are enough page views to matter. Examiner has also announced a pay rate change beginning in May. The new rate will be tiered based upon quality of the articles, amount of promotion done by the author, and a handful of other criteria designed says Examiner to reward higher quality writers with higher payments. We'll see how that goes... I am cautiously optimistic.
One of the good things about Examiner, for me, is that it allows slide shows and videos to be directly appended to articles. If I am talking about a particular birdwatching location, I can include up to 20 photos of that location to add depth to the reader experience., for example. Bird watching, in particular lends itself to pictures and video.
As with Associated Content, it took a little while for my articles to start getting significant page views. Examiner does not currently track page views by article, so it is difficult to say how popular any particular article may be. New articles can be judged by the relative increase in daily page views when it is published, but it is difficult to judge the quality of specific evergreen articles.
I found that after a brief learning curve, I began getting decent page views. I'm sure much of it is built on the performance of my library of articles and photos. How much do I earn there? That's the bottom line question that everyone asks. Here's the answer:
For calendar year 2011, I am averaging $17.47 for every article that I have submitted this year in my local bird-watching topic. I also regularly receive free bird-related books for review from several publishers, and last year, I was invited by the Jamaica Tourist Board to spend a week bird-watching in Jamaica and staying at several eco-lodges on the island in order to allow me to write about the many bird-watching opportunities of Jamaica. That included free air travel, food, in country travel, and all expenses. I've also been contacted by local bird watching event organizers who have invited me to attend birding cruises and other outings in my official capacity to report on the events. While these extras don't put money in my pocket, they definitely merit entries on the plus side of the ledger when I tally the benefits of writing for Examiner. Theses extras also help provide me with a rich assortment of contacts and experiences to write about, making the job easier.
The fact that Examiner writers focus solely on a specific topic makes the writers more visible to event organizers and groups involved in that topic than sites that allow writers to be generalists, writing about a variety of topics, in my experience.
I have added two more categories to my Examiner account. I asked to write about Oceans at the national level and they invented the National Maritime Headlines Examiner title for me. national titles at Examiner focus more on news and are exposed to the national audience rather than a regional audience. Both appear on search engines with seemingly equal rankings, though. national titles seem to have a higher upside potential. I can hit more than 10,000-20,000 page views in a day with a good national topic, whereas local topics generally do not pull those kinds of quick numbers unless they happen to be of national interest on a popular news topic. However, the local articles detailing local birding venues, species profiles, and the like, have longer shelf-lives and will pull viewers over a much longer period of time than flash in the pan national news articles. The result is that for my Maritime Headlines Examiner position, I am averaging $10.71 for each article published in calendar 2011.
I also have a Manchester Green Living Examiner title that is relatively new and has little content thus far. For that title, I am only earning a non-viable $1.45 per article this year as an overall average (with only three articles submitted, year to date). That does not compare at all favorably to my Environmental Issues News beat at the Yahoo! Contributor Network which offers $15 guaranteed per article upfront, plus $1.15 per 1000 page views published at Yahoo! News. If it is a newsworthy topic, or fits within the Y!CN beat guidelines for allowable environmental issues evergreen content, I publish it there, instead of Examiner. If, however, I were to visit a wind farm and take a few dozen good photos, I might be more inclined to publish at Examiner, because of the, in my opinion, superior rich media options. I remain confident, however, that as I increase my library and following for this Examiner title, my earnings per article will grow.
Overall, page views at Examiner were lower than at Y!CN or Y! before the Google algorithm change. I haven't noticed a significant drop-off at Examiner since the change, but we all know what's happened to Y!CN and Y! page view numbers (although this differs for each individual).
Examiner requires writers to publish one new article each month in order to keep their accounts fully active and to continue earning page view royalties on existing content. Examiner also pays a generous bounty for referring new writers through a referral link. Here's my referral link if anyone is interested in signing up and giving it a try; Apply to write at Examiner.com.
Showing posts with label examiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label examiner. Show all posts
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Monday, March 28, 2011
News Titles: Capitalization
When we went to school we learned to capitalize the first word, last word and every important word in a title. Important words were any noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, or adverb. Words not capitalize din a title unless they were the first or last word of the title were prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and the word "to" (as in "Man Tries to Bite Dog").
That applied whether it was the title of a paper we were writing, the title of a book to which we were referring, or the title of a newspaper article. Somewhere between then and now, the rules have changed.
Both Examiner.com, Yahoo! News, and several other online news publishers prefer titles to be capitalized as if they were an ordinary sentence. They say it is easier and quicker to read. A title which, under the old scheme, would have read "Man Bites 52 Dogs, Kobayashi Wins Oscar Mayer Contest" would now read "Man bites 52 dogs, Kobayashi wins Oscar Mayer contest" for either Examiner.com or Yahoo! News. For news articles intended for publication directly on the Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN), however, the first version (all important words) would apply.
In the example above proper nouns, of course, still get capitalized. Oscar Mayer is the name of a company, and Kobayashi is the name of a famous hot dog eating champion, so they both get capitalized. The sentence style capitalization rules make the headline or title easier to read.
To complicate matters even more, the publishing tool on the Y!CN platform automatically converts titles to standard capitalization even if the article is for Yahoo! News. The Examiner publishing tool gives you free rein (or free reign, if you prefer - I don't) to capitalize the title however you wish, right or wrong.
The same capitalization rules apply to stand-alone sub-headings within a news article on these platforms. That is to say that if the above article included a subsection detailing eating contest opponents who have been defeated by Kobayashi, there might be a subheading called: "Eating Champion's Previous Victims" for the Yahoo! Contributor Network or "Eating champion's previous victims" for Examiner or Yahoo! News.
That applied whether it was the title of a paper we were writing, the title of a book to which we were referring, or the title of a newspaper article. Somewhere between then and now, the rules have changed.
Both Examiner.com, Yahoo! News, and several other online news publishers prefer titles to be capitalized as if they were an ordinary sentence. They say it is easier and quicker to read. A title which, under the old scheme, would have read "Man Bites 52 Dogs, Kobayashi Wins Oscar Mayer Contest" would now read "Man bites 52 dogs, Kobayashi wins Oscar Mayer contest" for either Examiner.com or Yahoo! News. For news articles intended for publication directly on the Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN), however, the first version (all important words) would apply.
In the example above proper nouns, of course, still get capitalized. Oscar Mayer is the name of a company, and Kobayashi is the name of a famous hot dog eating champion, so they both get capitalized. The sentence style capitalization rules make the headline or title easier to read.
To complicate matters even more, the publishing tool on the Y!CN platform automatically converts titles to standard capitalization even if the article is for Yahoo! News. The Examiner publishing tool gives you free rein (or free reign, if you prefer - I don't) to capitalize the title however you wish, right or wrong.
The same capitalization rules apply to stand-alone sub-headings within a news article on these platforms. That is to say that if the above article included a subsection detailing eating contest opponents who have been defeated by Kobayashi, there might be a subheading called: "Eating Champion's Previous Victims" for the Yahoo! Contributor Network or "Eating champion's previous victims" for Examiner or Yahoo! News.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
What does localization mean?
Some web news publishers, like Examiner.com and some assignments at the Yahoo! Contributor Network ask news writers to contribute localized news stories. If news happens in your home town, that's easy, but if you happen to live in a little backwater town where the biggest news is that the only gas station in town ran out of premium gasoline for three hours on Thursday, then it can be a challenge for those unfamiliar with other ways to localize news content.
Localization simply means to make the story particularly meaningful to readers in your community. Depending upon the assignment or Examiner title you have, that may be your city, county, state or even multi-state region. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this task for almost any major national or international news story.
A simple way to add a local angle to a national news story is to ask yourself a series of questions:
Could it happen here? Why or why not?
How does it affect my community? This one is terribly broad - thinking just about the tsunami in Japan, it could include such topics as: Will any radiation reach us here? Is imported Japanese food safe to eat? Has business at a local Japanese restaurant dropped? Will it take longer to get the new iPad (due to lack of Japanese made semiconductors)? Will the local Nissan dealer/factory face supply issues?
Are any individuals in my community particularly affected? People with family in the affected area, exchange students from the area, local volunteers going to help, someone just returned a day before the event and avoided near disaster, someone who had been planning a future visit
Is there a local expert who can help my readers understand the issue? Professors at a local college with particular expertise about the event or local rescue workers/firemen/ police/ doctors talking about the nature of rescue efforts in the affected area, for example
Have local officials made any statements about the event? Are we prepared? Does this affect the future of nuclear power in our state? Are steps being taken to address potential safety issues? Did the local congressman express condolences?
Do I have any relevant personal experience related to this event? Has anything from your past given you special insight into the event? For example, "Running a small family farm in Biloxi, Miss., we have experienced any number of weather-related or other events that have hurt my yield, but the thought of our spinach, cows, or the very ground itself being contaminated with radiation from a nuclear plant dozens of miles away..."
Even localized sstories about national or global news events require good research on the original event. You should include early on in the article all the relevant facts about the event (from properly cited original sources as I mentioned yesterday) since this is the foundation upon which you'll build the local part of the story. In addition, you'll likely have research at the local level, finding and interviewing someone, local news broadcasts, or newspapers. Even off-line sources need to be cited.
The plus side of writing localized content is that it is much more likely to be a unique take on an event about which many, many articles have already been written. The down side is that it may not appeal to an audience as broad as a national news item without localization. This is not always the case, however. Sometimes, particularly compelling local stories can find a national audience.
In any case, always pay attention to the guidelines, ground rules, and other guidance provided by the publisher for whom the work is intended with regard to localization.
Localization simply means to make the story particularly meaningful to readers in your community. Depending upon the assignment or Examiner title you have, that may be your city, county, state or even multi-state region. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this task for almost any major national or international news story.
A simple way to add a local angle to a national news story is to ask yourself a series of questions:
Could it happen here? Why or why not?
How does it affect my community? This one is terribly broad - thinking just about the tsunami in Japan, it could include such topics as: Will any radiation reach us here? Is imported Japanese food safe to eat? Has business at a local Japanese restaurant dropped? Will it take longer to get the new iPad (due to lack of Japanese made semiconductors)? Will the local Nissan dealer/factory face supply issues?
Are any individuals in my community particularly affected? People with family in the affected area, exchange students from the area, local volunteers going to help, someone just returned a day before the event and avoided near disaster, someone who had been planning a future visit
Is there a local expert who can help my readers understand the issue? Professors at a local college with particular expertise about the event or local rescue workers/firemen/ police/ doctors talking about the nature of rescue efforts in the affected area, for example
Have local officials made any statements about the event? Are we prepared? Does this affect the future of nuclear power in our state? Are steps being taken to address potential safety issues? Did the local congressman express condolences?
Do I have any relevant personal experience related to this event? Has anything from your past given you special insight into the event? For example, "Running a small family farm in Biloxi, Miss., we have experienced any number of weather-related or other events that have hurt my yield, but the thought of our spinach, cows, or the very ground itself being contaminated with radiation from a nuclear plant dozens of miles away..."
Even localized sstories about national or global news events require good research on the original event. You should include early on in the article all the relevant facts about the event (from properly cited original sources as I mentioned yesterday) since this is the foundation upon which you'll build the local part of the story. In addition, you'll likely have research at the local level, finding and interviewing someone, local news broadcasts, or newspapers. Even off-line sources need to be cited.
The plus side of writing localized content is that it is much more likely to be a unique take on an event about which many, many articles have already been written. The down side is that it may not appeal to an audience as broad as a national news item without localization. This is not always the case, however. Sometimes, particularly compelling local stories can find a national audience.
In any case, always pay attention to the guidelines, ground rules, and other guidance provided by the publisher for whom the work is intended with regard to localization.
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