MediaShift at PBS offers an eye-opening weeklong series on Web "content farms" -- sites such as Demand Media's eHow.com, Associated Content, AOL Seed and others that pay writers a pittance to generate answers on commonly searched topics.

The series kicked off with Davis Shaver's Your Guide to Next Generation 'Content Farms':

As traditional news outlets continue to lay off journalists, a new generation of companies is betting big on online content. Their approaches differ significantly, but are all built on the common premise that for online content to be profitable, it has to be produced at a truly massive scale. The proliferation of these so-called "content farms" -- a name the companies predictably dislike -- has raised the ire of journalists and pundits alike.

"If you want to know how our profession ends, look at Demand Media," wrote Jason Fry, a former Wall Street Journal columnist who edits Reinventing the Newsroom.

Earlier, Wired examined Demand Media (The Answer Factory) -- which owns eHow and other brands such as Livestrong.com and Cracked.com, and, Shaver notes, "is also the largest uploader to YouTube." Wired explained the algorithm that assigns the stories that make the money:

How to Give the People What They Want Demand Media has created a virtual factory that pumps out 4,000 videoclips and articles a day. It starts with an algorithm.

The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), The ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and The competition (what's online already and where a term ranks in search results).

(This is how we get all Britney all the time -- people click on it.)

The scariest report in the series is Writers Explain What It's Like Toiling on the Content Farm:

Although Demand pays only a meager $15 or so per piece, by choosing easy prompts (topics) and writing them up very quickly, Christopher managed to collect a tidy sum for his time and effort. Christopher forces himself to pump out a minimum of three per hour for three hours a day. "For me it's always the hourly rate," he said. "I won't [write for Demand] if I feel I can make money doing something else."

$15 a story is a pathetic wage, but there's nothing to indicate to the reader whether the information these writers deliver is even true. A journalism school grad who doesn't want to embarrass her current employer spoke anonymously to author Corbin Hiar:

The articles she wrote -- all of which were selected from an algorithmically generated list -- included How to Wear a Sweater Vest" and How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed," even though she would never willingly don a sweater vest and has never owned a dog.

"I was completely aware that I was writing ****," she said. "I was like, 'I hope to God people don't read my advice on how to make gin at home because they'll probably poison themselves.'

"Never trust anything you read on eHow.com," she said, referring to one of Demand Media's high-traffic websites, on which most of her clips appeared.

In real newsrooms, accuracy is the prime directive. Corrections are expected and volunteered if errors come to light, and real journalists are dismayed if readers have been misled. Journalism is a mental discipline that values accuracy, thoroughness, and transparency; it can't be practiced as piecework in a word mill.

If the Journal Food Editor decided to tell people how to make bathtub gin (unlikely) there'd be tastings and reports on the results. The feedback would lead to tweaking the recipe, and new comparisons, all of it painstakingly documented. There'd be "Don'ts."

But the potentially poisonous recipe for gin is still out there online, as is its author. And you, the reader, perhaps trusting that the first page of search results is the best, may not be able to tell the sage who shares all from the Google-driven rehashing hacks.

Or, as Jason Fry describes this brand of journalism, from "the kid waving his hand in class with an obvious, not particularly edifying answer to everything."

Educate yourself: Here are the PBS series' headline links again.

Related: At MinnPost, John Reinan writes, I'm still waiting to make a bushel from my 'content farm' work:

I recently became a contributor to Associated Content, which bills itself as "The People's Media Company." On its website, Associated Content explains that it "enables anyone to participate in the new content economy by publishing content on any topic."

So I thought I'd give it a try. I posted an article I'd written on accessible home design for aging baby boomers and sat back to watch the page views roll in. And did they ever!

To date, my article has been viewed 24 times. At Associated Content's going rate of $1.50 per 1,000 views, I've made 4 cents so far.