Find Your Old Examiner.com Articles on the Wayback Machine

Did you once write for examiner.com? Are you seeking a way to link to and recover your examiner.com articles? Well, it’s possible courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

After seeing a surge in traffic here over the last month or so, many new visitors to the site may have been seeing my anything but subtle plugs to follow various links to my work on examiner.com in order to, as the text plainly says, help me pay my bills. Well, for anyone curious enough to follow the links, they landed on a website that was clearly not the expected destination. So, what gives?

For many people looking to break into writing professionally 10-15 years ago, examiner.com and other similar websites built on user-generated content offered a promising gateway. While not able to speak for the other websites that I didn’t write for, I can say that Examiner was very up front with prospective writers about what they were getting into. Pay was per click, a penny per click, which wasn’t much. Examiner was open about the fact that its writers probably wouldn’t even be able to entertain the idea of quitting their regular jobs for writing, but that writing for Examiner was more of a way to supplement one’s income.

As for me, I was looking for a way to cover my health insurance costs, or at least part of it. This was in 2009, long before Obamacare drove premiums through the roof. As for the application process, it was quite simple: look for the largest market city nearest to you, look for open titles, click on one you were interested in writing about, write a sample article for that title, and send it in along with some of the usual job application stuff.

I heard back pretty quickly from the editorial staff and, after I filled out a few forms and opened a Paypal account, I became the Cleveland Photography Examiner.

After plugging away around a month or so, I realized that this was, at least to me, pretty decent money, enough to cover my health insurance and then some (back when a healthy young adult could get a policy with a monthly premium under $100!).

The real eureka moment came when I logged on one morning to see my previous day’s click/earnings total and was shocked to see that I had over 8,000 hits the previous day and was going to be getting over $80 for that one article. The topic, you ask? Remember the viral photo of then-president Obama looking at a girl’s butt? Yep. Since it was a hot topic at the time and was related to photography, I did an article on it, posted it, and got picked up by Google News. It was at this point that I read up on search engine optimization (SEO) and how to achieve it. Since my pay was per click, learning about SEO was something worthwhile to do and would quickly come to be very profitable.

Over the next year or so, I would add three more columns, Cleveland Astronomy, National Photography, and National Space News to my plate, often cranking out at least one article per column per day. Using my newly earned SEO knowledge, I became pretty good at wording my headlines and opening paragraphs all while looking for topics that either were already or looking to become hot in my chosen areas. Astronomy and Space News? Major celestial events like eclipses, meteor showers and new scientific discoveries made good fodder. On the photography side, new cameras, camera side by side (camera A vs. camera B) comparisons, hot photo industry rumors, and how-to articles on photographing big celestial events (think cross-marketing) often led to big hits, and money. A couple of times, I made over $200 on just a single article that got picked up by and placed at the top of search results in Google.

Did I ever make enough to live on? Absolutely not, but who wouldn’t mind having, on average, an extra $500 a month or so from writing about topics they were already interested in? I sure didn’t!

Unfortunately, after a few years, the examiner.com gravy train came to a screeching halt. Search engines (most notably Google) decided that examiner.com was a ‘content farm’ and that the articles offered on such websites were low quality ‘click bait’ and that such websites’ search results should get pushed to the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Come 2020, people who are urging Big Tech and, even worse, government, to regulate the spread of ‘fake news’ and ‘misinfornation’ need to think about this: who are Big Tech and government to determine what online content is of quality and what is not? Do you really want other people deciding this for you? Do you think people are too stupid to think for themselves? Well, it already happened when sites like examiner.com were blacklisted by search engines. As a writer, I will say that SEO was a big part of being successful on examiner.com but, on the other hand, using attention-grabbing openings doesn’t equate to junk articles and besides, what established media outlet doesn’t use such tactics?

Long story short, the hits really dried up. In fact, they all but evaporated. Many writers left. Me? I kept plugging away at it for awhile, especially when a big astronomical event was coming or when a hot new camera was first announced. Eventually, on the Cleveland edition at least, I would often occupy multiple slots on the most popular article list but have only a few bucks to show for it when, in the past, I could have been earning tenfold. Eventually, the effort wasn’t worth the reward and I gave up on it, too. Come 2016, so did examiner.com itself. The site went offline and all content, at least in published form, was lost.

Or was it? Enter the Wayback Machine.

Started in 2001, the Wayback Machine is a web archive of cached web sites/pages that looks to serve as a digital repository for as much of the Internet as is possible. Getting curious upon learning of it, I started plugging in websites that I knew were long gone and, as if by magic, there they were again, often complete with working links. This is when I decided to search myself and my long thought lost 4 columns on examiner.com.

Guess what? There they were, albeit in pieces.
Astronomy in Cleveland
Space News in National
Photography in National
Photography in Cleveland

Did you write for Examiner and want to find your old stuff in its published context? Well, to do that, simply go to the Wayback Machine and plug in your old Examiner URL into the search bar at the top. Don’t remember your URL? No problem. The start of all the Examiner URLs will be http://www.examiner.com/. After the slash, simply plug in your title in all lowercase letters with hyphens between the words, then another slash followed by your name with a hyphen between first and last. Example: “photography-in-cleveland/dennis-bodzash” for my Cleveland Photography column. That done, hit the “Browse History” button.

This is where things will get different for everyone as the amount of saved links will vary. If your column was popular, expect a lot of links. If you weren’t popular or came in late by which point Examiner’s traffic was next to nothing, don’t expect a lot.

Your site archived, start clicking on things. If you were like me and listed recent articles at the bottom of every article you wrote and/or linked to previous articles or ones in your other columns if you wrote under multiple titles, there could be a lot of clicking involved. Not all links will lead to an old article but, hopefully, many will take you to an archived web page where you can see your work in its original context rather than as a Word file.

Like What You Read?

Why not check out other great stuff about photography, present astronomy, historical astronomy, reviews of associated gear, and how to use it.

Think someone else would find this informative (or at least entertaining)? Use the buttons below to share!