Examiner.com buys NowPublic: is this just moving the deck chairs around?

Back in September, Brian Stelter reported for the New York Times, on the acquisition of NowPublic by Examiner.com.

My last startup company, Famplosion, is focused on local family audience content, so these sorts of deals are interesting to me.  The landscape of players in local digital news media is likely to continue to consolidate as some companies have raised more money than others and all are continuing to burn Capital as they wind there way down the path toward discovering what will hopefully be a sustainable business model for new media focused on News.

I believe finding a sustainable business model for the News Business is critical.  It’s not just a business thing, but it’s something that’s critical to sustaining our liberal democracy.  As the business model that has supported Journalism in our society continues to erode, so erodes our societal ability to hold the powerful accountable through true and trained Journalism.

But I’m not convinced Examiner.com has the model we need.  For sure, they are growing really rapidly, which is awesome to see.  In fact, Brian writes in his piece,

“Rick Blair, the chief executive of Examiner.com, said in an interview that his company’s expansion into more than 100 markets indicated that hyperlocal information could be a scalable and sustainable business.”

Then Brian adds the important stuff,

“Whether it can be profitable is still to be determined. ‘We’re trying many ways to determine the advertiser interest,’ he [Blair] said.”

To be sure, there is a heavy focus on scaling their local coverage to support as many local markets as possible in the shortest period of time.  The content model Examiner.com employs has been tremendous in accomplishing this goal.  But I’m waiting to see whether that same content model is sustainable over time.

It’s just that the examiner content model pays local “examiners” what amounts to pennies per page view for the content they contribute.  This model has been effective at driving the sign ups of thousands of local examiners.  However I’m not sure it pays enough for those examiners to stay engaged over the long haul.  Additionally, the examiners that do stay engaged realize rather rapidly the value of Optimizing their articles for Examiner in order to get paid more pennies than not.  And to do this, well, mention Angelina Jolie or incorporate some sort of iPhone review, (and yes, I’m tagging those both:) and you get crazy clicks!

So, the model that has driven amazing growth, I believe, will also drive low quality content over time.  And this is not going to be the way we save Journalism as an institution in our society.