CBS Local Deal Opens Doors For Pureplay
As editorial models shift and evolve in the digital age, one might say that Examiner.com has followed a variation on the big box approach: Outsource everything, but make sure it comes in bulk.
The three-year-old site, a division of the Clarity Digital Group LLC, which itself is owned by Denver-based Anschutz Co., is as much of a network as it is a destination for users. To date, over 85,000 “examiners” contribute content to the site on a wide array of topics according to its operators, who said that it has built up a content library of over 2.5 million articles and growing.
Until recently, that content lived exclusively on Examiner’s own site, arranged by topic and cross-referenced with contributors’ locations, but a deal inked with CBS Local last December opened up a whole new audience — and revenue stream — for Examiner. Now a select group of contributors to the site have been tapped to produce exclusive lifestyle content including “Best of” guides and “Top Spots” lists of restaurants, shops and nightlife for all of CBS Local’s 25 websites across the first quarter of 2012.
For Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital, the CBS Local deal is the first of many projected partnerships that will leverage Examiner’s contributor network against sites that can no longer afford to internally produce the volume of local content that they would like.
Of Examiner’s impetus, he said, “The view was as the cost constraints went up and the coverage came down, you were going to see more and more of the things that people cared about squeezed out of those traditional venues,” Brody said. “The business was really created to build a large media network surrounded by self-motivated and independent examiners and let them write about the things that they’re passionate about in their communities.”
Examiner’s contributors are compensated based on the amount of audience engagement they generate following a pro-am model, Brody said. There are no editors at the site, he added, only a small editorial staff that curates content at national and topical levels for selection on the home page. Contributors use their own dashboards to self-publish their content.
Unedited content might raise any number of red flags for Examiner visitors, not to mention potential media partners, but Brody said that contributor quality control happens at the front end of the relationship. “The real strength of the model is the vetting … at the front gate of the process,” he said, adding that writers who are selected based on their background experience and credibility on their chosen topic then go through “Examiner University” to learn the site’s protocols, expectations and publishing tools.
“They can write, they have some form of expertise and passion about the area they’re talking about and they also ideally have a local element to what they’re talking about,” Brody said.
They also tend to have some social media savvy and a strong motivation to promote their work and drive user engagement on that front, he noted. And for their part, those contributors leverage the platform on Examiner and their social following to gain credibility in their topic area.
“A pretty key component to this is a lot of our examiners are working their own social graphs and actually identifying and moving content and followers through those angles,” Brody said. “Examiner is a platform and a readership base, but they also cultivate their own.”
Paul Yanover, Examiner’s interim CEO, cited one contributor, who files exclusively on the Twilight books and films, as a particularly successful example of this dynamic. “She is well recognized by the studio that produces the movies,” Yanover said. “She has a huge following within Examiner and outside of Examiner through her own social reach.”
The contributor network’s growing bona fides resonated with CBS Local’s digital media president Ezra Kucharz, who enthused about the Examiner partnership in a written statement last month. “Taking our vision one step further by working with a stable of contributors with expertise in their field will greatly enhance the audience’s experience,” he said.
For Examiner, the CBS Local partnership validates its content streams. “It’s just a good stamp — they’re an amazing partner and it’s a great vote of confidence in the qualitative side of what we do,” Brody said.
Just as importantly, it opens up a viable new source of revenue to add to what’s being drawn from display ads and a sponsored content model. Of the latter, Brody explained, “It allows brands to work with the contributor base to actually produce content.” This doesn’t mean advertorial content, he noted, but rather an advertiser commissioning a bulk of content around a specific subject area, such as when pet food manufacturer Iams sponsored a quantity of stories around national pet adoption week last year.
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