Merry
Well-Known Member
An article, "Graduating College Despite Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The Neuroimmune Disease and Why You Should Care," by new college graduate and ME/CFS patient Karina Wagenpfeil appears today in the Huffington Post.
Nothing wrong with the article, and I appreciate Karina putting the time and effort into writing it, but when I saw that it was published under the HuffPost Contributor platform, I decided to find out, at last, what this means. I've long wondered if anyone can post an article on this platform, and if the writers are paid.
To a question on Quora about publishing via the HuffPost Contributor platform, Campus News owner Darren Johnson says:
Anna Callahan adds:
I tried googling Karina Wagenpfeil's article, and the only hits I got were the article's appearance in what is I think Karina's own personal blog and a Facebook ME/CFS group page. Someone outside the ME/CFS patients community is unlikely to see this article.
Now I'm thinking that the reason it turned up in my Yahoo newsfeed is because I've previously clicked on ME/CFS articles.
News about ME/CFS is not getting out to the general public as much as I had assumed. Disappointing.
Nothing wrong with the article, and I appreciate Karina putting the time and effort into writing it, but when I saw that it was published under the HuffPost Contributor platform, I decided to find out, at last, what this means. I've long wondered if anyone can post an article on this platform, and if the writers are paid.
To a question on Quora about publishing via the HuffPost Contributor platform, Campus News owner Darren Johnson says:
HuffPost is pretty much a vanity publication credit. No offense. I'm sure you were excited. I've been fooled like that before, too, by Yahoo!, LinkedIn and others. The fact of the matter is, even if there is some kind of pay-per-view model, you'd have to get, say, 100,000 views to make $10; nearly impossible, considering these sites find thousands of chumps to contribute. Too much competition. I refuse to provide my best work for free.
I think on a writer's resume, HuffPost would be seen as a negative today, similar to if you self-published on Kindle or the like. I wouldn't highlight that publication credit, unless you can add a qualifier to it, such as your article being placed on their homepage, getting 1 million views, etc.
Anna Callahan adds:
More disturbingly, it has a “noindex nofollow” header, which tells search engines not to bother indexing it. No google search will ever find my article, making a post on Huffington Post Contributors considerably worse for the author (and the post) than posting onMedium.com or Criticle.me.
I tried googling Karina Wagenpfeil's article, and the only hits I got were the article's appearance in what is I think Karina's own personal blog and a Facebook ME/CFS group page. Someone outside the ME/CFS patients community is unlikely to see this article.
Now I'm thinking that the reason it turned up in my Yahoo newsfeed is because I've previously clicked on ME/CFS articles.
News about ME/CFS is not getting out to the general public as much as I had assumed. Disappointing.
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