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Thursday, July 30

I quit Examiner today


I quit Examiner today.  Below is my resignation letter for those who are interested as to why. If you're interested in contacting me for a writing gig please feel free to contact me on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.  
I believe all these email exchanges are cataloged, so I'm hopeful that as a six-year veteran writer of Examiner that this message makes its way to your leadership.  I'll try to be succinct in my objections to Examiner's platform: 
  • The concept of gaming as a hobby is not valued at Examiner.  This issue is clear if you look at the top five examiners in Other Games and Top Games: the Warren Gambling Examiner and the International Lottery Examiner.  Gambling, video games, and tabletop games are not the same, and it reflects poorly on my readership that the topic is grouped there. This harms my brand.
  • You advertise egregiously, including to your own Examiners. It's bad enough that my readers experience a visual assault of ads when they come to Examiner; you also advertise on the login for Examiners who work for you.  Or to put it another way, I'm actually paying YOU by simply showing up to write something.  This harms my brand.
  • You unpublished hundreds of articles without discussion or recourse.  Examiner unlisted 330 of my articles.  I have no means of fixing them without a manual process; I can't republish them or even format the articles to fix them.  I would have been happy to fix them, but I wasn't even given that courtesy.  This harms my income as an Examiner.
  • Social sharing is broken.  Google+ only picks up the appropriate picture from the article once out of every five articles.  This harms my income as an Examiner.
  • News postings are broken. A search of RPG Examiner in the news section brings up an article submitted for news with the title "Use Your Key for the Next Article."  That text wasn't in anything I wrote on the article, so it was an error in how it was submitted to Google's news. This harms my brand and my income as an Examiner.
  • You removed the $1 incentive for lists. Examiner's removal of the incentive has not gone unnoticed. Without that incentive, the more substantial writing you require is no longer worth the effort for the amount Examiner pays.
In short, Examiner is now harming my brand and what little income I made through the platform. This leaves me with no other choice: I quit.

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posted by Mike Tresca at 9:46 PM


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