Heck, I not only read Patch, I was a paid reporter for it, and for one week I filled in for a local editor.
Obviously I don’t know what’s going on with the entire organization, but I do know Patch has tried various approaches to being “hyperlocal” and none of them have been entirely successful.
I can say the hierarchy at Patch seems to be entirely too wrapped up in the idea that local readers are going to spontaneously contribute reports on what’s happening in their neighborhoods (without payment), that those reports are going to be worth reading, that readers will continue to check the sites every day and that advertisers will flock to support it. So far none of that seems to be happening.
(bolding mine)
Yep! As a matter of fact, this post is brought to you courtesy of AOL.
I started out on AOL, back in the ancient past, when you had to pay them! :eek:
Then along came Yahoo, which was FREE!
So I opened a Yahoo account, (and by a weird stroke of luck, I even got the exact same username that I had been using on AOL for years) at that point though, AOL quit charging and since I had already gotten used to AOL, I just kind of quit signing on to Yahoo and have been an AOL user, ever since.
I know some people absolutely abhor using AOL, but it was extremely ‘user friendly’, and it was the way in which I acquired the majority of my ‘computer skills’ (such as they are :dubious:).
When I lived in northern New Jersey, I followed the local patch. The town has an extremely corrupt past that is still hanging on to this day. When local reports on something dealing with the reformers that are trying to stamp out the old corrupt ways, the messages section would fill up with exchanges between supporters of the old guard and supporters of the reformers. It would get really nasty. Eventually, patch started to try to deal with the message issues. First they just randomly deleted posts. Then they started to filter posts, so posts might show up 18 to 36 hours later. That made the message system pretty much useless, which they probably want. It was fairly entertaining when a message war would break out, which happened frequently.
I follow my local Patch. For a while it had really good reporting on local issues - often better than the more established news outlets. Then it changed editors, and the reporting went in the tank. I haven’t given up on it yet - maybe someday they’ll bring back the original editor.
Patch? What should I Patch? What the heck is Patch? Who the heck is Patch?
My neighbor’s Burro is named Patch. I do NOT follow Patch around, doing so will most likely lead to either getting kicked, and/or stepping in burro shit.
It is a news outlet of some kind? Hmmm, I will google it. It is not in my town quite yet.
Much like ours; we had a local reporter/editor who seemed to be everywhere, all the time. It made the site - made it essential in a town with no alternative news source. She got promoted (or just 'moted) to some kind of regional position, and the site’s coverage is now just meh.
And with the format change, user comments have dropped to near zero; if a decent exchange begins, it’s a sure bet someone will come along and weed out all but the blandest “ain’t that nice” comments.
I read ours pretty regularly. We’ve got a bunch of small town politics going on about building a new high school and the small group of whackos determined to prevent it. They’ve had really good (and funny) coverage on that.
Again, same here. The funny thing is that I looked up my former hometown edition once, and it seemed like the same uber-right, no-on-everything folks were posting there, too. I’m not sure if the suppressing of comments is a good thing or bad; the correct thing would have been more alert and sensitive moderation, but of course that costs money and doesn’t bring in ad clicks.
From what I gather, Patches are hit or miss, depending upon who the local editor is. Some suck, some are really good. The thing is, the quality really is dependent upon the editor even moreso than traditional media. They’re responsible for so much more than an editor at a newspaper.
The Patch where I’m at was launched a few years ago and the editor was really, really good. She showed up at more stuff around town than I thought was humanly possible, she was a great writer, photographer, had great angles to her stories, great social media contributor, etc. She was so good, the city PR department recently snatched her up. Now the new editor has made me realize how good the previous editor really was at her job. In less than three months, it’s gone from really, really good, to pretty embarrassing most of the time.
I still follow it since it’s still better than the local newspaper (that I once worked for), which doesn’t even have offices in the city it covers anymore, and is run by a company in New Jersey that just filed for bankruptcy and fired most of its long-time employees.
Big corporations need to move away from local media. This is one business model that will not work.
