THE CONSTANT GARDENER

[Admin]

See original article at: www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_constant_gardener.php?page=all


06:00 AM - March 12, 2012
The Constant Gardener
My two years tending AOL’s hyperlocal experiment

By Sean RoachFacebookTwitterEmailMore sharing PrintOne Page

My employment with Patch started with a handshake and a promise that I would be called with a job offer in the next few days. I had met with Patch’s editor in chief, Brian Farnham, at the company’s New York headquarters. This was in late October 2009, just a few months after AOL acquired the nascent hyperlocal platform for $7 million. In less than a week, I was hired to build and manage the Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow Patch, covering a pair of Hudson River towns north of New York City.

I was one of about two dozen journalists Patch hired in the fourth quarter of that year, entrusted to replicate an online local news model that had been launched in New Jersey communities like Maplewood, Millburn, and Short Hills, suburbs on the outskirts of Newark. An end-of-year push would establish Patch in New York’s Long Island and Westchester communities, too, and further expand its coverage in New Jersey and Connecticut. At the time, AOL itself was in the process of spinning off from Time Warner, and was investing significantly in Patch as part of its strategy of repositioning the company to focus more on content creation.

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. We were given immense trust and responsibility to build a site to that standard.

Patch is relentlessly driven to refine and tweak its strategy to reach its goals, and it is entirely different now than it was in 2009. When I started, the organization was full of untested ideas, generalized performance targets, and grinding workloads. But it also offered local editors the unique opportunity to test content, prove their worth, and exert some influence on the editorial focus of the organization. For someone just establishing his journalism career, the fresh attitude and encouragement from the top was exciting.

Putting aside the uniform look of Patch sites at that time, we were given the opportunity to set our own work schedules and, more important, editorial priorities. Some editors focused almost exclusively on sports and schools, while others preferred hard news and politics. There was little in the way of mandates; we were to post between three and five pieces of news and information a day, with an equal amount of Twitter posts and Facebook updates.

How did we measure success? Traffic was the only indicator that sticks out in my mind—reaching our monthly unique-viewer target. The objective was to hit unique-visitor numbers equal to half of our community’s population. The most recent census numbers showed Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow with a combined population of about 21,000, so I was aiming for 10,500 unique viewers a month.

Like the majority of Patch sites, my community had been chosen based on demographic indicators, including median household income, the performance of the school district, and the penetration of the Internet. The combination of these, and a list of other community-specific statistics, pointed to a measure of affluence in the local populace—which is not to say Patch was at all marketed as a luxury. The idea was to fill a gap in coverage left by retreating newspapers, and capture the advertising that went with it.

Most Patch editors recorded the news and civic conversation in a thorough, all-encompassing manner. For example, the Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow site began keeping track of Tarrytown Village Trustee work sessions and criminal court happenings in both villages. It was the first time anyone had done so. I also revived the police blotter, which no one had tracked for decades. Hard news was my site’s focus, and readers told me they were amazed at how much was going on in their seemingly quiet community.

Even before local editors got up to speed and their sites went live, it was a stressful job, due to the strain of trying to keep on top of every meeting, car accident, and sports score. The pressure was slightly alleviated by the power of the purse strings: We had a sizable freelance budget—some $2,000 a month—to experiment with general reporting and evergreen content. There was nothing better than seeing freelancers take on a regular feature, especially when that content would allow you to sleep in on a slow Sunday.

In Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Patch arrived at the perfect moment. The community was served by two monthly newspapers, The River Journal and The Hudson Independent, neither of which had a competitive Web presence, and by Gannett’s regional publication, The Journal News, which would sweep in only during a major event. It had been years since a newspaper chronicled the daily, or even weekly, pulse of the community. As in many towns, my Patch exploded, and became the only source of daily information. Within a year, I was exceeding my traffic goals.

Strangers, politicians, and police officers would strike up conversations with me around town. And if it was the first time I was talking to a new face, I knew which question would eventually arise: “But how do you make money?”

It was difficult to give a straightforward answer. Patch was a startup, with more than $50 million in investment capital to keep it running in 2010. The common refrain was that Patch had the goal of making its money through business listings and advertisements. But for months, my site recycled the same three banner ads—small, bottom-bar placements that, I assumed, were the cheapest ads in the arsenal.

So excited. So tired.

Andrew Kersey has never been so excited. Andrew Kersey has never been so busy. Andrew Kersey has never been so tired.
So began an article in the Los Angeles Times, when Patch launched sites in California in early 2010. The Times published an article on the expansion of Patch to the West Coast, using the Manhattan Beach Patch editor, Kersey, in the lead. Everyone at Patch read it, and local editors were sold on the accuracy of the piece based on those first three lines.

Many of Patch’s new hires came straight out of journalism school or from small, community publications. Even our more experienced editors, many of them refugees from a recently downsized newspaper, were thrown into an entirely different work environment.

You can’t comprehend the scope of a local editor’s workload by title alone. The duties included writing the majority of the day’s stories, editing, managing a budget, paying freelancers, editorial planning, reviewing metrics, attending weekend functions, taking photos, shooting and editing video, and a number of administrative activities that swallowed the hours. In short, the job entailed everything that makes a respectable local newspaper function—from publisher to reporter—and the hours reflected this reality. In 2010, and through most of 2011, I spent more than 60 hours on the street and behind the computer each seven-day week. It was hard to take a vacation and, if we did, most of us were incapable of turning off our phones and laptops.

Burnout became a big problem. Two great editors in my area quit within a year, partially due to stress. The company made a number of attempts to make the local editor position sustainable and more enjoyable: group activities for staff members, additional freelance money for hiring a vacation replacement, and permission to use regional content on the weekends, to give editors at least a day off from worrying about posting stories. While taking advantage of these opportunities could ease stress, it often meant the sites suffered in terms of day-to-day news relevance.

In hindsight, I feel Patch did an excellent job of setting ambitious workloads and hiring people who were eager to make their sites a reflection of their character and work ethic. The biggest drain was often representing the publication. Each editor’s photo is prominently displayed just below the masthead; we were the face of the local site, and, by proxy, of the company. So even when we weren’t working, local editors were on the job, especially if we lived in the community we covered.

And living in or close to your coverage area was more than encouraged—relocation was often a requirement when a local editor accepted a position. So was living up to the company’s philosophy on connecting to the local community through charities or volunteer organizations. Editors were asked to volunteer five days a year. Some of us bemoaned the additional hours; others, myself included, found real satisfaction in the spirit of the practice. Although it raised some conflict-of-interest concerns in the beginning, I joined a local ambulance corps. When there was a big story involving emergency medical services, I was adamant about keeping things out of the press until a police officer or citizen “tipped me off” to an incident that I may well have been at the night before. While it made my job more difficult, I’m glad I joined. I still volunteer with the ambulance corps today.

In addition to the editorial and volunteer work, we fought to get our sites noticed—on and off the clock. The marketing dollars that we were given, if any, usually came with the understanding that we would be manning booths at community events, or taking the lead in finding sponsorship opportunities, like supporting the local hayride or Little League team.

It seemed I could control every aspect of my site’s being, but making it sustainable was out of my grasp. And for me, it was aggravating to know that my site was not profitable.

In many small-town publications there is a thin wall between advertising and editorial. At my previous job, with a twice-weekly newspaper, the wall literally had a doorway that connected the two departments. At Patch, the dividing wall between editorial and advertising seemed so high at times that it was impossible to know where we stood in relation to those on the other side.

As editors, we were told only general information about revenues, sales, and business strategy, at least in the beginning. Many of us rarely saw our ad managers. My area went through four ad-sales agents, only two of whom I met. I didn’t envy their job: Our salespeople were stretched thin, sometimes covering more than three Patch sites, making their positions more difficult than ours, at least from a relationship-building perspective. By the nature of the position, local editors were the ones best-positioned to pitch potential advertisers, but that was off-limits, and to preserve editorial integrity, Patch made sure the division was strict.

Church, meet state

This began to change. In 2011, as reports leaked to the media noted, editors were encouraged to collaborate with members of the ad sales teams to better both the journalistic and advertising sides of the business. Some saw something sinister in this; as reports in Business Insider framed it, Patch was “juicing” its sales by asking editors to “start drumming up ad sales leads.”

But there was nothing quid-pro-quo about it and, to me, certain collaborations just made sense. If a new business is opening in a small community, for example, the event has both news value and potential advertising value. As far as I was concerned, the ad manager was one more set of ears on the ground that I desperately needed. My only question was, Why wasn’t Patch already doing this?

Still, local advertising was only one side of the equation. As a national company, Patch was also gathering prime eyeballs—local, mostly affluent readers—that could be valuable to major national brands. While I was at Patch, the focus was almost entirely on local businesses, with a limited interest in national advertising, which I thought was unsustainable. But that seems to have changed somewhat. This was particularly evident during the Christmas season, when I saw ads by Target, AT&T, and major banks on Patch sites.

Meanwhile, toward the end of my tenure, editors were slowly beginning to see some of the financial numbers behind our sites—how profitable or unprofitable they were generally, on a month-by-month basis. What financial information we didn’t receive from the company often appeared in the press. (For example, a headline from Business Insider near the end of 2011: “Leaked: AOL’s Top Ten Patch Salespeople, and How Much They’ve Sold in 2011.”)

Readers are not enough

In the second half of 2010, Patch made headlines with hundreds of site launches and an endless stream of new hires. While business publications and media pundits argued over the Patch model and the quality of journalism it produced, the most interesting shift was occurring at the editorial level.

Engagement became the buzzword. The goal was to tailor content that would make people stay and play. To push this transition, we were given content mandates for the first time. This radically reshaped how we had to think about our audiences and what made our sites relevant. It wasn’t about the number of eyeballs seeing local news, it was about comments and cultivating user-generated, free content.

The first push was an attempt to cater to mothers, and to make Patch information more relevant to the everyday family. Many editors were transparent with their audiences about the new content requirements. They published the mandates, in abbreviated form, as a letter to their readers, notifying them of the changes. On my site, I implemented some of the changes grudgingly.

Wednesdays were to be called MomsDays, and we were given five pieces of content that someone apparently thought would appeal to the mother demographic. We were to post stories about a shopping bargain in town, and about a nice thing for moms or parents to do as a getaway from the kids, as well as a generic question intended to spark a conversation in the comments section, an article highlighting a standout student in the community, and a weekend planner specifically aimed at families.

To develop this content, Patch sites were to put out a call for mothers looking to be a part of a “Mom’s Council,” which was supposed to function as a sounding board and give MomsDay some editorial direction.

Thursdays, meanwhile, were aimed more at families in general. We were urged to publish a list of events in the surrounding areas, a gallery of open houses, a community photo slideshow, a list of five things you should know for the day or weekend, and a puff piece highlighting a local restaurant.

What worried me and many other Patch editors was that this focus on catering to a certain audience ignored the progress many of us had already made at cultivating readers in our communities. And some editors worried that it would outright alienate readers, even those mothers being targeted. I was definitely part of that crowd, and considered the content ideas antithetical to the entrepreneurial editorial mindset I had come to enjoy.

Practically speaking, implementing the initiative meant we had less time to focus on traditional newsgathering and less money to spend on freelance stories that we already knew our readers liked. Although we were encouraged to find a way to come up with the kind of copy headquarters now wanted at little to no cost, such stories still had a price—in time and freelance expense, especially if you wanted to maintain your site’s regular flow of features and hard news.

By the end of 2010, Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow Patch had some of the highest unique-viewer numbers in the Hudson Valley, but without looking at the statistics, I knew the content mandates had bombed with my audience. The comments weren’t forthcoming and, later, when I began to drop the mandated features, nobody complained.

And by the time I left Patch in September 2011, the majority of these MomsDay and other content mandates had been quietly phased out; mere remnants of this marketing push are all that exist today on Patch sites around the country. Yet the mixed results from that operation didn’t produce a dramatic rethinking of the practice of top-down content mandates; that continued. Now they were about types of content (video, photo galleries, Q&As) and the number of posts we were expected to crank out. Patch kept experimenting with such goals in regional testing areas. It seemed there was an ongoing effort to devise a formula that would result in the maximum amount of views and engagement—whether that formula was run in Tarrytown, NY, or Palo Alto, CA.

The start of content mandates also signaled the slow reining in of freelance budgets, which were then consolidated at the regional level. This resulted in more generic content that could be shared with other sites in the region, like county news or home and lifestyle features. Weaning local editors off of their freelance checkbooks had the effect of lightening the workload (less to edit, less to plan), but it also made the sites less local. There were times toward the end when I hated myself for having the Saturday landing page look more like the front page of the regional Journal News than the Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow Patch.


Huffington Patch

The Huffington Post deal was signed during the 2011 Super Bowl, with AOL agreeing to pay $315 million for the news aggregation site and for Arianna Huffington’s leadership over all of AOL’s media activities—including Patch. Employees were notified the next day via a conference call, only after the news had already spread on the Internet about the deal.

As editors, we often speculated among ourselves about the fate of Patch and AOL, and how each major announcement, merger, or acquisition would affect not only our daily workloads, but the viability of the entire online news model. Nothing was bigger than the HuffPo announcement, and changes were swift.

Some readers observed that there was a general Huffingtonization of Patch after the deal was made—and it was true that some of the hallmarks of HuffPo were quickly implemented. Within a few months, the call went out that Patch would “hire” up to 8,000 bloggers. We were to ask politicians, school-board members, and local business owners to create regularly updated columns, for free. Signing up bloggers became part of our job descriptions, as did giving their work a cursory edit.

The Patch site itself was redesigned to make it easier to aggregate stories from other news and information sites, a practice perfected by HuffPo. There was renewed emphasis on search-engine optimization and tagging articles with keywords. Requirements on content counts were also relaxed, but that didn’t mean much, as most sites had begun running aggregated stories or cross-posted content from neighboring Patches. It was becoming easy to have more than seven stories a day.

For AOL and The Huffington Post, the relationship between local and national news properties was seen as mutually beneficial. Patch editors could feed AOL and Huffington Post ground-level perspectives during local elections, for example, or through photo galleries, like one commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

But the messages from the top about how Patch was going to maintain its local reporting—while making a drive toward profitability—seemed at times conflicting. For example, Arianna Huffington indicated she wanted to see small teams of reporters tackling a community, negating the need for freelancers, a point that was picked up by Bloomberg News. Others at the top of Patch maintained that the company would keep a freelance force to help shore up local reporting.

Overall, the Huffington deal did help solve one of Patch’s problems: the workload placed on local editors. With more free content, more cross-posted stories, and more aggregation, it became easier to set the site on autopilot. Which, of course, can be dangerous.

Near the end of the year, some media-business outfits were saying it was “do-or-die” time for Patch. Business Insider estimated in December that Patch would lose “at least $100 million this year,” according to calculations based on “documents we’ve obtained.” In an earnings call with analysts in February, though, AOL’s chairman and CEO, Tim Armstrong, and other company officials pushed back, saying they had invested $160 million in Patch in 2011 and that nearly half of its 863 local sites were generating about $2,000 a month in revenue by the end of the year. They said they expected more growth this year, and claimed that they already had 50 percent of the total Patch revenue from 2011 on the books for 2012, though they didn’t say how much that was. Arthur Minson, AOL’s chief financial officer and president of AOL Services, told analysts that the original business plan for Patch assumed that local sites would break even within three to four years, and produce “healthy margins thereafter. That continues to be our assumption.”

And, it is worth reiterating, AOL is still investing in Patch. Personally, I have no doubt that Patch as a whole will be profitable at some point, and that cutting costs at the local level will help that. But that could also mean a marked shift from what made the company so exciting for me in 2010.

Then and now

Just before handing in my resignation at Patch, I began working on a series with the local historical society entitled “One Century Ago.” We would transfer (from microfilm to JPEG) and then post the front page of the local newspaper from a hundred years ago. It was a fun tidbit that let people reflect on how the villages had changed, while giving a little historical context to the modern community.

Yet what struck me is how little difference there was between what I kept seeing on the front page of the old Tarrytown Press-Record for each week back in the day, and what would be on the front page of a solid Patch site in 2011. A great local newspaper or local news site has everything—from trustee meetings to petty theft, from church service times to seemingly trivial society pieces. There is a formula for local news, and it works. If done right, in a thorough manner, a news site can captivate a community—it can bring its audience online, it can digitize a town.

I would say the Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow site succeeded in digitizing the community through solid reporting. Many other Patch editors accomplished this as well. However, that didn’t always mean advertisers were eager to support our sites and it didn’t mean that the sites were financially sustainable, given money spent on employees, freelance costs, and the corporate backend. And still there is the local editor’s punishing workload.

No doubt the Patch model will adjust to market realities. It is still focused on that original goal of total community integration. The effort to find the balance between shoes-on-the-ground reporting and search-engine pop that aids profitability will result in sites that have a dramatically different character than they did even a year ago.

If anything, I think Patch’s trials and errors will show that online local news can be sustainable, even profitable, if you have good, hardworking journalists, a strategy to keep costs at a minimum, and a willingness to stick to what has made community news a staple across America for decades. It’s a challenge, and I wish my former colleagues the best of luck. 

The print version of this story, which appeared in the March/April 2012 issue of CJR, featured two sidebars: “A brief history of hyperlocals” and “Tim Armstrong Still Believes.”

If you'd like to get email from CJR writers and editors, add your email address to our newsletter roll and we'll be in touch.
FacebookTwitterEmailPrintMore sharingMore sharing


MORE IN COVER STORY
A Narrowed Gaze

READ MORE »
Sean Roach worked for Patch from November 2009 to September 2011. He is a freelance writer based in New York and also works in public relations. He is currently running for elected office in the Village of Sleepy Hollow.

Comments Post a Comment
Thank you for the great look at how Patch operates and at the hard work/agility needed to keep the local sites running. However, the graf concerning the overall business prospects seems too rosy. How can you have "no doubt" that "Patch as a whole will be profitable at some point"?

The numbers you cite as a kind of rebuttal or context to BI's $100 million loss claim are dismal. You say that Armstrong claims: "that nearly half of its 863 local sites were generating about $2,000 a month in revenue by the end of the year"
Let's assume that not "nearly half", but all 863 of the Patch sites had been generating $2,000 a month in revenue for the entire year. Punching that into the calculator reveals a total of $20.7 million in revenue for that dream year.

So, roughly, it would take eight years for Patch to be operating at that level...where all 863 sites are generating $2,000 in revenue, for Patch to recoup its $160 million.

And did you mean to say "profit"? Because if that is merely revenue, and not actually profit on top of what it takes to staff and maintain a Patch site...then the math performed above is not even relevant.

I don't mean to pile onto Patch here. But this kind of idealistic naivete -- observable since at least 2003 -- that all that's needed is hard working journalists and good civic journalism to make a strong business...is not at all a helpful insight for the industry.

#1 Posted by Dan Nguyen on Mon 12 Mar 2012 at 12:58 PM

Interesting piece. While reading this, I felt like I was reading my own personal memoir from time spent working at Carll Tucker's Main Street Connect. Aside from the scale of the businesses, the only difference I can see between Patch and MSC is the relationship between advertising and editorial.

MSC has no wall or door separating the departments. They lived in the same room together and fed off each other. Tucker's "Annual Visibility Packages" gave advertisers editorial coverage through "advertorials," except they were presented as regular news. They appeared on the page with an ambiguous "AVP" badge, but there were no disclaimers that indicated the content was paid for.

A brilliant revenue-generating concept, but a travesty to the editorial process. The difficulty of balancing the need for advertising with the need to maintain independent editorial coverage is nothing new, but it takes on an entirely new meaning with the internet and its vagaries. Maybe Patch will figure it out, maybe someone else will. Maybe some already have.

#2 Posted by David DesRoches on Mon 12 Mar 2012 at 01:03 PM

Too long; didn't read past FIRST FOUR PAGES. Jesus you guys get to the point. AOL IS wonDeRFUL AND WE LOV EIt SO MUCH.

#3 Posted by Rebecca Schoenkopf on Mon 12 Mar 2012 at 10:33 PM


Excellent piece and even though I didn't join Patch until 2010, my experience matched yours in a number of ways. I had a lot of experience running my larger digital news operations and my own web site, which is probably why I was so frustrated by the amount of "guidance" from Patch HQ and my regional editor.

I loved the work and the people I covered. But I was frustrated when my desire to report deeper pieces conflicted with that "5 posts a day" mandate. And there were management issues I won't get into in public.

So my old town is now in its third local editor in 18 months, and it saddens me to see the site posting stories that are sometimes literally a headline with a link to the story that was published by a local newspaper. It's one thing to be beaten by a competitor. But not even making the effort to write a version of the news makes the site almost useless in my mind. Patch needs to be more than the local stenographer and entirely too many of their sites have slid into that role.

#4 Posted by Rick Ellis on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 01:56 AM

"Too long; didn't read past FIRST FOUR PAGES. ..." This is the mantra that's killing journalism. As soon as newsrooms embraced people with this attitude and started listening to them, the battle was lost.

#5 Posted by Robert Knilands on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 08:01 AM


Definitely a detailed insider view of Patch's hyperlocal approach. I always felt it was going to be very hard for a website to make money on the local level. They would have to include a high number of regional or national advertising to make it work.
But for Patch, the biggest issue was content. It was just plain bad. One overworked person cannot do everything, and once someone uses the word "aggregate"...to me it means death to a website. On a community level, this just doesn't work. You have to hire a person to go out and report local news. There's no other way to get the level of detail needed to support a local website. Editors think there are other ways...there are not. Technology helps, but doesn't replace a person asking the right questions during a city council meeting.

I'm all for looking at new exciting ways to reach out to readers. Change is a must. We must adapt. The digital age is here. But it's also important to remember there are some old school ways of doing journalism (and business) that still work. Especially at the local level.

#6 Posted by Peter Weinberger on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 09:42 AM
Peter,
Are you the Peter Weinberger who has published the Claremont Courier online as a PDF behind a paywall for awhile now? And worked as photo director at the Charlotte Observer? If so, hi, and it's great to read your perspective here. If not, hi anyway, and thanks for the perspective.

#7 Posted by Andria Krewson on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 11:47 AM
Thank you Sean for giving us a peek inside Patch. As someone who has been working in local online news for most of the last 17 years (first with a newspaper company and now on my own), your experiences are very familiar to me.
But I have to disagree with the notion that national and regional advertising will be the thing that makes local news profitable. In fact, it's probably the opposite. Big advertisers buy in bulk and expect bulk rates. Google, Facebook and the many ad networks out there have driven the price of advertising down so low that you can't make money with them on a local level.

When I see a national ad on a local site that is pulling in maybe (if you are lucky) $2 per thousand impressions, what I really see is a lost opportunity that could be sold to a local advertiser for $10.

Local sites do not scale in a way that makes CPM based advertising profitable. Let's say your monthly cost to run a Patch site is $10,000. Best case scenario, if you run several ads on each page and average $10 CPM total, you would need a million pageviews a month just to break even.

Successful local news sites like The Batavian and West Seattle Blog tend to not use CPM ads, and instead focus on providing local businesses with other online sponsorship and promotional services. The total local advertising pie is actually bigger than national advertising, anyway.

I think it's possible that a network like Patch could be profitable. I just don't see them doing what is needed to make it work. Certainly, if they think national ads will save them, then they are in for a rough ride.

#8 Posted by Kirk Caraway on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 01:44 PM
Even before local editors got up to speed and their sites went live, it was a stressful job, due to the strain of trying to keep on top of every meeting, car accident, and sports score. The pressure was slightly alleviated by the power of the purse strings: We had a sizable freelance budget—some $2,000 a month—to experiment with general reporting and evergreen content. There was nothing better than seeing freelancers take on a regular feature, especially when that content would allow you to sleep in on a slow Sunday.

So let me see if I have this right: each editor was doing the work of two editors and a staff of reporters, but I think it's safe to guess that each one was only paid the salary of one editor: and relief came in the form of $2000 per month to pay freelancers? And that $2000, spread over a sufficient number of freelancers to make enough of a dent in the workload to allow an editor to sleep in on Sunday, meant that freelancers were getting paid--what? The whole undertaking seems predicated on everybody being hugely overworked and underpaid. Except, presumably, the brains at the top who came up with this business model.

I know from experience that editing even a small weekly local paper can scarcely be done in a 40-hour week; but a small locally-owned local paper doesn't have the expectation of such astronomical profits, and doesn't build a business plan on fantasy fiction. The expectation that magic unicorns bearing panniers filled with ad dollars would descend from the sky when all this superhuman labor got the site to its pageview goals seems to have kept management in a chronic state of the fidgets; hence the constant tweaking of the content strategy and production processes. The move to aggregation of regional content was not so much relieving the editors of their workload as a first step toward dispensing altogether with the need for them, even at the cost of the very commitments to being local and unique that originally defined the whole undertaking. The expectations were not adjusted; adjustments were inevitably in the direction of somehow wringing even more out of the staff, including leaving it to them to figure out how to get people to write for them for nothing.

#9 Posted by Kia Penso on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 04:15 PM
Dan - You are right, but according to Patch and AOL, they have a long-term strategy for making each Patch site successful and if I recall Tim Armstrong's 4Q talk, it is making them profitable over a number of year -- most Patch sites are still less than two years old. They definitely have a strategy, and while the numbers may not look good now, you can't call it quits on Patch for at least another two years (If investors stick with it). That' my opinion though.

Rebecca - Stopping at four pages out of five? There was only one paragraph on the final page.

Rick, David and Local Journos - Yep it is a hard job, but it is also very rewarding when it works right.

Peter - I would note that content does vary widely from site to site, and many, if not most, editors are pretty damn good at their jobs. But we always needed more people when I was there. It's still a need in terms of local journalism as a whole. I don't think free content and citizen participation can fill the void.

Kirk - I think regional and national ads will make Patch profitable. Local sites that are already established, like the ones you name, seem to have a much easier time due to access and familiarity with the population and its businesses (At least from my discussions with them).

Kia - I have to say that everyone, even the folks at the top, worked pretty hard at Patch. When I was there it was almost a 24-hour culture. You knew someone was up covering something, fixing a bug or trying to put out a fire at all levels of the company. I have my own opinions on aggregation, which I think probably align with yours. I don't ever see the local editor position going away at Patch - the face on the top of each page is pretty significant.

#10 Posted by Sean Roach on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 07:40 PM
You know, folks, I'm really going to have to go with Rebecca Schoenkopf (commenter No. 5) being ironic. As in: She was joking. And taking a jab at AOL.

#11 Posted by Marc Levy on Tue 13 Mar 2012 at 10:55 PM
Patch is to local news as Starbucks was to local coffee shops. If you support Patch then you support the death of independent media, which is free from of the major corporate leash.

#12 Posted by Richard Nixon on Wed 14 Mar 2012 at 02:24 PM
It's about a guy who falls in love with an activist. She is very into human rights and fighting abuse against people in africa.
REI Coupon Code

#13 Posted by Irene Fritzscher on Sat 24 Mar 2012 at 01:06 AM
Great article, Sean. You were one of the fairest and most organized local editor i wrote for during my time with Patch. Other local editors, though, bent to the towns they covered. For example, if the p.r. person at a school didn't like a student's quote - a high school student - the local Patch editor would send me a note that the quote was removed. How can journalism be unbiased when the very organization covering the news bends to pressure?
I wish you the best in your career, and thank you for the opportunity to work with you.

#14 Posted by Anonymous on Sat 24 Mar 2012 at 01:37 PM
I have to agree with Anonymous in that I feel that my local Patch is a poor substitute for (declining) local newspapers - as they seem as if they refuse to cover a number of controversial issues. My expectation was that a blogging platform with their lofty ambitions would do more to represent a variety of views. My local patch is not really doing that. As Anonymous said, it appears that local power brokers have veto power over its stories. Which is really intolerable in some situations. Particularly when it comes to some important issues like electoral integrity and corruption.

If Patch is the future of the US's local news reporting, then a crucial piece of the machinery for maintaining our democracy is in big trouble.

A better model in my view would allow all of the people residing in the served communities to post articles and rotate them higher based on the readership and measures of readership engagement. No censorship.

#15 Posted by Walt on Mon 2 Apr 2012 at 08:01 PM
As editor of my town's weekly newspaper, I happened across this account of the Sleepy Hollow Patch's editor's too-brief career, and found it to be very well written and enlightening. I love being a weekly newspaper editor but made peace with the fact long ago that no matter how many tidbits or stories we manage to uncover we cannot possibly print them all in any given week, nor have I ever printed a newspaper without a shortcoming of some kind. That is what makes the printed weekly newspaper so wonderful - it is a human, breathing thing. Sean discovered that by accident when he found the front pages of the old local newspaper in the history books. That is what more young journalists ought to strive for - to print an actual newspaper is a thrill. All else is just a firefly's flicker on a screen.

#16 Posted by Willow on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 02:40 AM
Stuff like this is why I want out of the biz ... who needs to be wired/plugged in all the time?

#17 Posted by SocraticGadfly on Wed 11 Apr 2012 at 07:55 PM
Read this after hearing the author on NPR today. Nice piece, and very informative. It explains a lot to me.
The content on these sites has been steadily decreasing since the start of the new year -- on any given day, what I see on my local Patches is invariably some stupid poll (this week's is for "Best Cupcake" -- I'm not kidding) or a puff piece on the "winner" of the poll (it's a joke; you can vote as many times as you like). Also, there's a lot of house-for-sale real estate content.

From what I understand from a local editor who works on the Main Line, just outside Philadelphia, editors no longer have any freelance budget at all, except for $25 or $50 here and there over the course of a month, as long as every buck spent is approved by their regional "editor" (who does no editing whatsoever). That's not exactly a recipe for a nimble news organization.

It's no wonder the Patch in Ardmore, Pa. has seen two very good editors last less than a year each. The last one (one of the rare ones with experience) was excellent, but then he was just gone. I can't say I blame him.
There also might be something about the name. "Patch" sounds silly and unsubstantial, and when the stuff that fills the pages lines up with that definition, people are going to become annoyed. I think this is why Patch has gotten so much attention in the media. They've hired a lot of people, and that's a good thing. But they are killing them off by overworking them and underpaying them. It's also annoying that the thing has so much potential, but that poor management can never let well enough alone.

The prediction I get from the local editor I know is that she'll be out of a job shortly after the November election -- if she is still there by then. Alas, she's looking for work in marketing.

#18 Posted by Samantha on Tue 17 Apr 2012 at 03:09 PM
Great article Sean. When you left Patch here in Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, it did not take long for Mary and I to follow. We often pondered how you could possibly muster the energy to accomplish what you did. Your amazing ability to keep your finger on the pulse of the community without casting flavoring of your own was unique and exceptional, and we feel that the TT/SH Patch has deteriorated into mostly links from other communities, which frankly does not interest us. We hope you are well and enjoying what you are currently doing. All the best!
wes&mary

#19 Posted by bob westerfield on Sun 2 Dec 2012 at 10:00 AM
- See more at: www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_constant_gardener.php?page=all#sthash.9zJmNYfk.dpuf