Examiner.com

Examiner.com is a multiuser blogging site owned by conservative mega-donor that presents itself as a news site. Don't be fooled.

Examiner.com pays its writers based (among other things) on pageviews. As a result, a lot of Examiner material tends to be sensationalistic to attract attention &mdash; positive or negative doesn't matter, it's all clicks. Headlines such as "U.S. to bomb moon on UFO witness John Lennon's birthday" and "Official disclosure of extraterrestrial life is imminent" are par for the course. You will see enthusiastic Examiner bloggers linkspamming furiously on other sites (to the point of being in Wikipedia's spam blacklist since 2009 ), often touting their work as "media coverage" (and themselves as "journalists" or "the press" ) rather than just a blog post they themselves wrote. Not that it pays very well &mdash; Writers Weekly considers it "just another pay-per-click meat market," exploiting writers to attract people to their site by paying them pennies.

Cranks and those with really bad critical thinking skills will link Examiner articles as if they're edited journalism rather than just some guy blogging. If you use an Examiner page as a reference for anything whatsoever, treat it with great caution. Not all Examiners are rubbish, but it's the way to bet.

The domain name used to be owned by the San Francisco Examiner, a proper (if free and local) newspaper, which now uses sfexaminer.com. It's not clear what they were thinking when giving it up.

The Examiner runs print tabloid editions in several major cities, including Washington, D.C. Virtually all are freely distributed at mass transit stops and tend to run a local news or sports story as the main headline in an attempt to lure readers. The unlucky readers are bombarded with wingnut news articles and an editorial section which runs the full spectrum from moderate-right to far-right.