ME/CFS stories on HuffPost Contributor platform

[Merry]

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:

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.

 

[Cort]

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.

Thanks for checking that out ....That is so weird! I wonder why it isn't search indexed.

I tried to get something published on the Huffington Post one time and they didn't even reply to me!

 

[Cort]

Thanks for checking that out ....That is so weird! I wonder why it isn't search indexed.

I tried to get something published on the Huffington Post one time and they didn't even reply to me!

It sure brings back memories. I got sick at College...I went from very fit to wiped out over one semester...I was actually dating someone named Karina (lol)....My cognitive skills were better than hers but by the end I was battling to put one foot in front of the other..I never graduated from that school.

I wouldn't wish it on anyone!

. I went from loving backpacking and sailing to struggling to make it to a 50-minute lecture, from being able to recall nearly any dialogue I had heard to having the short-term memory of a goldfish. Simple tasks like grocery shopping or cooking dinner can lay me flat for over a week. Every day I get out of bed, I am fighting with every fiber of my being. I can’t remember what it feels like to not be exhausted, foggy, and in pain. I struggle to identify with a self I do not recognize. If you see me out and about, you can be sure that I am pushing myself and will be paying for it later. I am a prisoner to the whims of my health, always resisting arrest but inevitably crashing into a bed-ridden flu-like state. I shift clumsily between the able-bodied and disabled community, feeling like an imposter in both.

 

[Cort]

It sure brings back memories. I got sick at College...I went from very fit to wiped out over one semester....My cognitive skills were better than hers but by the end I was battling to put one foot in front of the other....

I wouldn't wish it on anyone!

This is a great quote... I had no idea there was an AIDS and ME/CFS clinic at Oregon... or anywhere else.

A prominent CFS and HIV/AIDS physician (Prof. Mark Loveless, head of the AIDS and M.E./C.F.S. Clinic at Oregon Health Sciences University) has likened the everyday condition of a C.F.S./M.E. patient to that of an AIDS patient two months before death, the primary difference being that C.F.S./M.E. drags on for decades.

 

[Snow Leopard]

This is disappointing. Especially the “noindex nofollow” BS. We deserve better.

 

[Karina]

Hello all! I've been a lurker on these forums for far too long and finally made an account. I am the author of the aforementioned piece.

We deserve better.

You're very right, Snow Leopard. Thankfully, HuffPost contacted me the day after the piece went up to ask if they could feature it on their Healthy Living page. That process just went through yesterday, and the piece is now indexed and SEO optimized. Yay! It seems like the placement of the piece on their website is determined by the level of social media engagement (shares). In other words, the more people within the ME/CFS community who share the piece, the more prominently it will be featured on the HuffPost site and the more likely it is that people outside of the community will read it.

Here's the piece if you want to share it.

 

[Merry]

@Karina, thanks so much for the update. This is good news that more people will see your informative article. Congratulations!