At AOL’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Tim Armstrong hinted that changes are afoot for Patch, the hyperlocal news venture he dreamed up and then purchased in 2009, once he ascended to AOL’s top spot. The new product, he said:
allows us to continue to do news and kind of directory listings continue at high scale, but add the ability for the community — a much higher level community involvement in a very precise way on the Patch platform. So in essence if you take the town as a campus, where people don’t move, they have specific interests, they like news and information, they like the directory listings. There is also an ability for to us mimic the way that people in towns basically live their lives, including commerce.
Nobody I reached at Patch (where I used to work) would specify what “a much higher level of community involvement” means, beyond spokeswoman Janine Iamunno’s assertion that it’s part of a continuing evolution to connect users—in this case, with one another, rather than just with local news and information. A new platform has been in the works “for some time,” she said.
But she declined to tell me what that new platform or a shift toward user interaction would look like. (We know that, at GOOD, on a much smaller scale, that shift in focus from content creation to “community” meant firing its editorial employees and then posting job listings for curators and community managers.)
The local editor position, the base-level job responsible for running a website that covers one or two towns, has changed drastically since it was explained to Patch’s original recruits. Former LE Sean Roach recounted in CJR’s March/April cover story:
The Patch idea was sold to me on the following premise: The backbone of the website’s offerings would be local news and information, with the goal being the digitization of a community—your town, online. Patch aimed to be the community newspaper and more, a hub for local businesses and a forum for community conversation: everything a local news outlet should be.
To that end, Patch advertised for and hired hundreds of reporters as it expanded throughout the country in 2010, but the job became increasingly less like reporting and more like overseeing a forum, with soft content dictates from on high, the introduction of HuffPo-style community blogs after AOL bought it, and a reported decrease in each site’s freelance budget.
Shortly after I was hired as a local editor in fall 2009, LEs started spending their first month-plus of employment creating business listings for their towns, a task previously outsourced to freelancers (all I had to do were the “prime” listings—schools, government agencies, churches, and the like, which usefully allowed me to cultivate sources). So at least the beginning of an LE’s employment already doesn’t resemble journalism by any traditional definition. And if the future of Patch is connecting users to one another, it sounds to me like the LE job will evolve even more, toward some sort of digital community moderator role and away from reporting the town’s news. That new role will be a fine job, I’m sure, but it won’t be journalism.
I can't say whether the author is correctly reading the Patchy tea leaves, but I can say that her assertion attempting to button up the article with pith and portent ("That new role will be a fine job, I’m sure, but it won’t be journalism") is wrong, at least as far as absolute statements go.
Maybe it will be journalism, maybe it won't. That'll depend a whole lot on the execution. But just because it may not fit a time-worn template, that doesn't mean it's not journalism. In fact, if Patch pulls off what they're hinting at here, it could go a long way toward redefining the meaning of community journalism.
(Disclosure: I was there, too, until May of this year.)
#1 Posted by Tim Windsor, CJR on Thu 26 Jul 2012 at 09:07 PM
Tim, that's an interesting (in a good way!) comment. Can you elaborate on what you mean re: redefining community journalism?
#2 Posted by Kira Goldenberg, CJR on Fri 27 Jul 2012 at 06:59 AM
The listing-first model has indeed been around for a while--2009 sounds about right. And that model is not bad from a reporter's perspective, since it forces one to create new and neutral relationships with the people at the head of important institutions.
But the listings--not community news--always looked to me like the core of the enterprise. B2B directory services and sales lead generators are notoriously inaccurate. A "living" listing of every business and institution in the whole country would be a gold mine; Armstrong apparently thought paying real reporters to compile one would get him there fastest and bestest.
Now, however, it's looking as though Patch/AOL is falling back on the old "New Digital Economy" formula: get (or stay) rich by using free labor.
In use for the past 14 years or so, it's lately been dubbed FoN.
#3 Posted by edward ericson, CJR on Fri 27 Jul 2012 at 08:01 AM
@Kira, I think it's best to wait and react to what Patch launches when Patch launches it. I don't want to speculate on what they may be doing.
But as for redefining local journalism, that really has been the history of Patch all along. Nobody else is attempting to build a network of local news and information sites at the scale that Patch is. And, from all reports, not only is the content plan working (audience continues to grow significantly), from Armstrong's comments, it sounds as if the revenue is following, right on schedule.
This is not to say Patch is perfect -- there are definitely areas for improvement -- but it would be a mistake to count them out.
#4 Posted by Tim Windsor, CJR on Fri 27 Jul 2012 at 04:50 PM
I recently left Patch. Patch isn't redefining anything. Patch has mandatory training that's all about getting UVs with SEO and trying to get viral election stories. Patch encourages shallow reporting and inflammatory headlines., Patch wants 7 posts a day per editor, which leaves virtually no time to get out of the house and into the communities.
Patch has gone from having an editor at every site with a $2,500 free lance budget, plus a copy editor and calendar editor (shared among several sites), to a one LE per site, with no budgets, no calendar help and very little copy editing. In fact, more and more editors are now responsible for two or more communities.
In other words, community journalism doesn't mean much to Patch anymore. And that, I suspect, will become more evident with Armstrong's announcement.
Patch had great promise. But the company never put an effort into local advertising, which was always a great mystery to me. There are sites up for almost two years that have never had a real ad manager. That kind of stuff just boggles the minds of overworked editors concerned about the health of their employer.
Unwilling to invest in the resources necessary to service local advertisers, and therefor unable to pay editors' salaries, Patch is going to make a hard turn away from community journalism and toward user-generated posts. That's my guess.
#5 Posted by Brent, CJR on Mon 30 Jul 2012 at 12:07 AM
I totally agree with Brent. Patch wants to get out of the news business.
In the coming months Patch wants its site to stop looking like a news Web site and more into a Facebook/Craigslist one where people can form groups and talk about topics.
They did cut the freelance budget and now the editors have to not only ask for money but justify why they are using it to their managers. And some managers won't even tell the editors how much money they have per month, making it harder to plan stories.
But Patch doesn't care about hyper-local news anymore. They cross post stories that are only clickable to the other Patches. 10 people can visit and comment each on one Patch but their comments appear in 15 other Patches.
Editors, users and some business owners are not happy with these changes but Patch doesn't care.
#6 Posted by News Chief, CJR on Mon 30 Jul 2012 at 09:26 AM