Examiner.com Fails To Pay Bloggers, Takes Money; Come To Zennie62.com

If you’re thinking about blogging at Examiner.com, the local-news-focused series of websites that calls writers in various subject areas “Examiners,” think twice. You may not get paid for your work.

UPDATE: EXAMINER.COM RESPONDS, WILL PAY ZENNIE62

This blogger’s normal place of content creation is here at Zennie62.com. But I have posted at The Examiner strictly because of its’ access to Google News, and my knowledge of how to design a blog post that reaches high rank in that system. Google News should have Zennie62 in it, and there’s no excuse for my great blog not being a part of it, but that will change.

But I digress.

I made a flurry of posts on Examiner.com, and most notably took aim at Dragon-Con after being asked to submit a press credential application, then being rejected because the media person didn’t like my harmless SFGate.com blog posting, then discovering that Dragon-Con has a huge problem where one of its owners is an accused pedophile who has gained money from ticket sales.

In other words, part of your Dragon-Con money goes to an accused pedophile.

So it was just after that series of posts that I gained $93 in revenue according to The Examiner’s own dashboard. A woman by the name of Lisa Wiles sent this email to me:

Hello,

It appears that your PayPal email address doesn’t match our records and we’ve been unable to pay the earnings we owe you. Can you (i) confirm which email address you’re using for your PayPal account and (ii) click the “edit profile” link after logging into Examiner.com and update the field where it asks for your PayPal email address?

Please reply to this message when this is completed so I can be sure you’re a part of our October payment (around the 20th). Let me know if any of this is unclear.

If you have already submitted a ticket in regard to this payment, please disregard this message.

Thanks,

Lisa Wiles
Editorial Support Manager
Examiner.com

I was traveling when I got the email, but did respond to it, and updated the information.

But still no payment from The Examiner.com.

Now $93 is not a lot of money (it may be to someone else) but it’s the principle of the matter: you get paid what you’re owed for what you did. Period.

In an effort to get to a resolution of this problem, I filled out a trouble ticket, but the person on the other end of it kept kicking back a statement on how the Examiner compensation system works. That’s wrong.

Then I checked my dashboard and noticed that the unclaimed money was not listed, and my total dollars generated was about 3 bucks – something’s wrong. It looks like someone there took the money I was due to get.

So I contacted Examiner Chief Operating Officer / Chief Executive Officer Ashish Kapur, but no answer from him. So, I sent a mass email designed to get the attention of a number of people at The Examiner – no response.

In the process of my online search, I noticed a complaint that was filed with a firm called Writers Weekly.com which represents freelance writers and it was against The Examiner because the person was owed just $13 – yet it took The Examiner six months to pay them. The Examiner finally took action after the issue reached the attention of the PR department and a person named Justin Jimenez.

This is what he wrote:

Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 11:05:21 -0600
From: Jimenez, Justin
To: Angela Hoy

Angela:

Thanks again for reaching out, as I mentioned we take concerns like this
very seriously.

According to our records [TB] was owed a sum for writing provided
to Examiner.com. These funds have been distributed into [TB]’s
Paypal account as of March 2.

As for the delay, at the time of his resignation [TB] had not met
our standard $25.00 threshold needed to have funds automatically
distributed to his PayPal account; thus his earnings had to be manually
reconciled by our team. Unfortunately this took longer than expected,
although we did remain in contact. We have reached out to [TB] to
explain this and also personally apologize for any inconvenience the
delay may have caused him.

[Promotional verbiage removed by WritersWeekly.com.]

Regards,

JUSTIN JIMENEZ
Examiner.com
Director of Marketing & Public Relations
555 17th Street, Suite 400 | Denver, CO 80202

So the issue was resolved, but it is sad that it took a good six months. In my case, the money they owe me is far greater than a “$25 threshold.”

Examiner Has A Lot Of Reports Like That

Curious, I conducted another search under “Examiner complaints” and learned that there’s a large listing of them at Ripoff Report. There are a number of entries like “Examiner.com I was not paid for over $200 worth of work at Examiner,com Internet,” and “Examiner.com Examiner Avoiding actual pay. Chicago, L.A., New York, Internet,” and with horror stories of work done and people feeling like unpaid hampsters lured in with the promise of compensation.

Not good.

This is a good reason why you should contribute to Zennie62.com. At present, we don’t pay for every blog post, but the ones we do pay for, we not only make sure you get the money soon – usually within a week or two, but the compensation for a single post is generally around $20 to $30, and $50 for videos, plus a revenue share.

Bloggers should be treated with the utmost respect, and that is reflected in how one is paid and how they are communicated with.

Join Zennie62.com. Just send an email to me at [email protected]

We will not leave you hanging.