Patch

I'm sure any expansion plans rely on the same "formula" of demographics they used to determine their existing locations. I guarantee you'll see Patch serving Vail, Colo. before Ault, Colo.

 

I cover sports pretty extensively, even middle school and rec sports, because it's an easy way to draw people in to see the other stuff. Also easy to do things like video and photo with sports.

 

It's early. Jury is still out.

But the Patch sites in my community are fantastically bad. I'd out myself with specific stories, but I've witnessed flagrant abuses of journalism ethics, stories based on incorrect facts and some of the worst writing I've encountered in our area from any competitor.

Bully to the qualified folks who are running sites (I know many who are), but some of your peers are making the entire Patch brand look idiotic.

 

I'm painfully aware of this, and it sucks. I would also add that if you're seeing concrete journalism ethics violations, you should tell the regional editor for that place, so that the person doing them can get sacked. Then again, as a competitor, it isn't exactly in your best interests to do that...

I've dealt with the reverse here. For an adjacent site to me, one of my bosses got a 30-minute phone call from the editor of a local weekly about how we had to take down a comment. The comment in question? Someone making the general statement that the weeklies in the area sometimes got things wrong. Didn't specify the weeklies by name or even say, "They get everything wrong!"

I'm more of the mindset of schiezainc. Editorially, more competition should push people to do better work, especially in places that have stagnant or no competition. If everyone is doing a good job, then everyone will probably benefit. (Numbers I've seen suggest that Patch sites boost online numbers for other news outlets.) The papers at the most risk will be the ones that do a poor job as-is, or the blogs and online news sites who don't / didn't update daily because they viewed the paper and not another online news company as their competition.

 

Wasn't us was it? (Fingers crossed. lol)

 

To answer the original question: My guess is it's a soft roll-out with the intent to eventually sell it to some larger company for many millions of dollars once the infrastructure is in place.

 

haha, Nope. The other bad guys

 

AOL currently owns it; kind of hard to go bigger than that, unless they want to sell it to a mortal enemy like Google, Microsoft, etc. They bought it for a couple million early in 2010, although one of the conditions was that the original founders would stay and run it.

 

I believe that Tim Armstrong was one of the founders of Patch before he became the CEO of AOL.

 

It's kind of stating the obvious: Content is going to be uneven depending on the people you have doing it. I know the writer/editor for one neighborhood in California, and she's an in-in-her-veins veteran, and they're trying to cover everything that moves -- although sports is one of the current holes in their coverage. But she's really enjoying it; in many ways, it's back-to-the-old-days city journalism.

 

I don't know about the SF side of the bay, but the East Bay sports operation seemed to be well run and well staffed.

 

This person is in a Long Beach neighborhood in Southern California. She's basically taken to covering everything in her own neighborhood, and her husband (also a news guy) pitches in, too...