The Examiner - Spam Clickbait Catalog

Context

Presenting a compendium of crowdsourced journalism from the psuedo news site The Examiner.

This dataset contains the headlines of 3.08 million Articles written by ~21000 authors over six years.

While the Examiner was never praised for its quality, it consistently churned out 1000s of articles per day over several years.

At their height in 2011, The Examiner was ranked highly in search results and had enormous shares on social media.
At a certain point, it was the tenth largest site on mobile and was attracting twenty million unique visitors a month.

As a platform driven towards advert revenue, most of their content was rushed, unsourced and factually sparse.
It still manages to paint a colourful picture about the trending topics over a long period of time.

Content

Format: csv ; Items: 3089781

• publish_date: Date when the article was published on the site in yyyyMMdd style
• headline_text: Text of the headline in English

Start Date: 2010-01-01 ; End Date: 2015-21-31

Similar news datasets exploring other attributes, countries and topics can be accessed via my profile.

Inspiration

The Examiner had emerged as an early winner in the digital content landscape of the 2000s using catchy headlines.

It changed many roles over the years, from leftist citizen news to a multiuser blogging platform to a content farm.

With falling views its operations were absorbed by axs in 2014 and the website was finally shut down in June 2016.

The original portal and content no longer exists: www.examiner.com

This is the last surviving record of its existence.