Examiner.com, a grab-bag of hyperlocal community coverage and wire copy, has kicked up major dust since Nielsen Online named it the fastest-growing Top 30 news site this fall. With 7.5 million unique users in August 2009 — up 342 percent from a year earlier — Examiner.com seems to demonstrate the folly of paying pros. Instead, the site relies on community “examiners” who cover subjects ranging from politics to pets.

The pros, of course, are in various stages of dither, especially because a big chunk of Examiner’s growth is based on reblogging original content to score high on search engines. Time magazine, for example, lamented Examiner.com as “neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight.”

However, Knoxville News Sentinel news director of innovation John Lail noted last month that “the Examiner is honing a formula of [search-engine] friendly headlines and body copy, Social Media links, sheer article volume and technology approaches that ought to make news sites envious and more than a little embarrassed they haven't done the job as well with their original journalism.”

As of late December, Examiner.com was in 240 markets, says Suzie Austin, the Denver-based company’s senior vice president of content and marketing. Even if Examiner.com’s journalism isn’t inspired, its approach to grabbing local ad dollars might be.

So how powerful is the fast-growing site’s sway in the Twin Cities infosphere?

Not very — at least not yet. Examiner public relations specialist Elisabeth Monaghan says the Minneapolis edition ranks 18^th among the 240, but drew a mere 2,525 unique visitors in November. (The site recently debuted editions in Austin, Duluth, Mankato and St. Paul, and didn’t provide numbers for those locals). Given that there are 357 Minneapolis examiners, that works out to a mere seven visitors per writer per month.

More local readers check out Examiner’s general offerings, which include wire copy and content from 1,600 national examiners. According to ComScore, 84,000 unique visitors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market visited Examiner.com in October 2009. That’s up from 15,000 a year earlier, though the 2009 number remains less than half MinnPost’s total.

Still, with 24,231 contributors (the amount on a headquarters tally board the morning Austin and I talked) publishing a total of 3,000 articles a day, Examiner.com’s unified site theory produces big-time Google juice. Austin says the site wants 85,000 examiners by this time next year. The site advertises for topic-specific contributors on several job boards, and according to Time, pays a $50 finder’s fee for new writers. At some point, the quantity-first approach may produce synergies local organizations will envy.

Examiners are not technically amateurs, though many come close. Christopher Lower, the “Minneapolis Food Examiner,” says his monthly pay topped out at about $60 for the 13,482 page views he generated in his best month.

Lower admits the minuscule pay keeps him from writing more than once a week; Austin says about 50 percent of examiners have published in the last 30 days, and 91 percent within 90 days. Pay, she notes, is based on a “black box” of session links, return visits and page views, and Lower’s infrequency would suppress his rates.

Still, the Minneapolis Food Examiner has other considerations; Lower is a principal at the Sterling Cross Group, which handles restaurant clients such as Baja Sol. Though he doesn’t write exclusively about clients, he’s not shy about doing so. There are Baja Sol items here and here, and Lower also blogged about a charity event at a client eatery after earlier noting its charms here.

Some of the items are benign, others beneficial, and a couple nakedly promotional. In all cases, the direct relationship was never disclosed, but if someone’s willing to pay you, even a little bit, to advance your client’s brand, why not take it? As for readers, well, Googler beware.

Examiners have editors who specialize in their topic area, and Lower says his told him “as long as I write about other restaurants, it’s OK. They’re just driving ad revenue, clicks or views. There isn’t a disclosure thing.”

Austin says the site has no prohibitions against consultant-authors: “They can certainly reference their business, but they cannot shill for themselves or other advertisers.” She points out a “report article” button at the end of each piece for poor quality or misinformation, though how would readers know to use it, assuming they even care about journalistic standards? “Our best tool is other examiners letting us know” something isn’t up to snuff, Austin contends.

Of course, this isn’t the New York Times or the Star Tribune, and readers probably don't expect it to be. As Lower himself notes, “Do I think this puts me on par with [Minnesota Monthly food critic] Dara [Moskowitz Grumdahl] or [the Star Tribune’s] Rick Nelson? No.”

The company, staffed in large part by AOL veterans, does offer a “centralized training resource” known as Examiner University, Austin notes. Writers — who must first pass an obligatory background check — learn search-engine friendliness and some (though apparently not all) traditional journalistic rudiments. There’s also a live help desk and editor calls with new examiners beyond email interactions.

Austin contrasts Examiner with other crowd-written competitors, noting her site is growing faster than Huffington Post, more in the current-events mix than About.com and more dynamic than Demand Media, another high-story-count, high-search-rank operation relies on assignments.

Though the site is owned by conservative media baron Phillip Anschutz, who just bought the Weekly Standard from Rupert Murdoch, has correspondents from across the ideological spectrum — though Minnesota’s “independent examiners” seem to have a distinctly “global warming hoax,” “tea party” bent.

Of course, none of this speaks to quality, but on some level, this is the free market at its purest, at least within Google’s algorithm and a pennies-into-pounds ad strategy.