A colleague asked for my thoughts on the latest round of Patch layoffs and the decline and possible demise of the company.
My first thought is sincere best wishes and empathy for the hundreds of Patch employees losing their jobs (and those who earlier lost their jobs), including some friends.
Patch hired a lot of good journalists and did an excellent job covering a lot of communities (including the area where I live and many communities covered by my Digital First Media colleagues). We just hired Don Wyatt, a Patch editor, as our vice president for news in Michigan. Whenever journalists lose jobs, I hope for better opportunities around the next corner.
I won’t pretend that I ever studied Patch closely. When it launched, I was focused intensely on the launch of another much-hyped local news product, TBD. When a member of our TBD Community Network expressed concern about competition from Patch, I blogged about the possibility of collaborating with competitors, but otherwise I haven’t had much to say about it.
From TBD I moved to DFM (then the Journal Register Co.), where I had a similar intense focus on my duties on this job. So Patch has always been on the edge of my consciousness, but never a topic of concentration.
Granting that I didn’t study it closely, it always appeared to me that Patch was more innovative and experimental in trying to develop a new approach to local news coverage than it was to developing a new approach to local commerce.
I thought Patch had the potential to develop and succeed at moving beyond advertising into more meaningful revenue sources. I thought its national scale and digital roots gave it potential to develop some of the revenue sources I have encouraged news organizations to explore, such as databases, local search, direct sales and commissioned obituaries and other life stories.
If Patch tried any such innovative approaches at generating revenue, I never became aware of them. And they certainly never succeeded in building a sustainable business.
I welcome a guest post from anyone who has watched Patch closely or who worked for Patch. Maybe you can answer better than me: Why didn’t Patch succeed?
I had a chance to watch several local Patch reporters and editors cover Northern Virginia. I saw some really good work being done in some of the neighborhood coverage, but it was inconsistent across the board.
I can tell you as the former editor of community newspapers that covered the same areas of Patch, I was impressed with their use of social media and the quickness with which they covered some events. They weren’t at all the meetings, but when the reporter made the effort to get to know what made a particular community click, the work was solid.
Patch, sadly, was doomed from the start because of its business model. It needed to be built from the bottom up, establish itself with local businesses to build a solid base to grow from.
I applaud any journalism venture that tries to blaze new ground. I also hope those former Patch journalists are able to bring the skills they honed covering local communities into other newsrooms.
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[…] Steve Buttry, I never closely studied Patch but am intimately familiar with the kind of traffic a local news […]
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I can’t answer the larger question you ask. I can only speak for my own community, Reston, Va. where the former Patch editor is taking another stab at a much-needed hyperlocal news site called RestonNow.com. People just don’t have the time to add another website to their already too-busy Facebook, Twitter lives, especially in areas of the country with traffic congestion, two-earner households, etc. I would often talk up Patch with my friends and neighbors when they asked me how I knew so much local news, yet they rarely followed up by asking me how to find Patch on the web.
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FYI, Michelle Ferrier of Journalism That Matters (among other things) has apparently been studying this very closely and is writing about it: http://michelleferrier.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/aol-patch-insiders-know-how-to-build-it-better/
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Thanks, Anna!
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No matter how deep, how broad, how profound or even just interesting local journalism may be or become, there is no substitute for innovating local commerce.
What high-minded journalism has lost is the support of high-profit commerce.
Your observation, Steve, is all any of us still aspiring to journalistic success need to know.
I think nearly every one of your readers will be looking for your reporting of discoveries you make as you engaged with those innovating local commerce.
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