Patch

That is the other key. These local editors have to rely heavily on freelancers, which can lead to problems.

 

Patch's problem is its decentralized approach. You get bad local and regional editors, and an area can be behind the curve until corporate catches on.

 

To be fair though, isn't this a problem for any large chain? I'm sure regardless of what time frame you look at, Knight-Ridder or Gannett or JRC or the New York Times Company had plenty of papers that didn't follow protocol or were estranged from the central company.

From what I've seen, HQ does a good job of providing policy and telling you where it is accessible, for constant reference. Can't force the horse to drink though even if you lead it to water sometimes. (Or is it camel? I have no idea.)

 

Is this the same person who has been receiving a lot of positive attention for her coverage of a recent act of violence? She was able to get on the scene first because it was a few blocks from her home office.

I could see an appeal in a back-to-basics approach, but I worry people like that would be burned out by the always-on-call demands.

 

Reviewing the L.A. Times story that mentions her, yes, that's indeed the one.

 

We have a few Patch sites in our large metro area and none of them are considered competition.

Admittedly, there was some nail-biting going on at the beginning, but as time has gone on the sites are just so bad that we've completely lost interest in following them anymore.

They tried to poach a few of our top stringers, but we started scheduling those guys weeks in advance to beat them to it. Lately, they've been stuck kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for copy. I recognize some of the names as people who we turned down for an internship. Others have told me that some of their stringers are still in school.

As others have mentioned, the keys to success are sports and local news. At the beginning, the Patch here was covering little league and adult rec league sports (yes, really). They don't break any news at all. Any breaking news usually goes up for them about an hour after they've seen it on our site and then (hopefully) confirmed it themselves.

 

But they'll tell you where the crappy open houses are for that weekend. Plus you can get lists like you do at Bleacher Report.

 

I'm really rooting for Patch to work because I have so many friends who run competent, engaging sites.

But for every good site they have, you get one where the editor goes several days between putting up a story where even one person is quoted.

We had breaking news in our community on Wednesday. When the reporter came back, I asked her if she saw Patch there.

"Nope," she said.

 

To play devil's advocate... I cover middle school pretty regularly, precisely because no one else covers or cares about it. That alone has gotten me access to other stuff in town. It's not sexy, but if the issue is "what sports are relevant in town?", then the small rec leagues effect more people and have more interest than high school teams. Something like half the K thru 7 kids in my town play youth soccer, vs. maybe 50 kids if you combine JV and varsity girls and boys soccer.

That being said, I still cover high school. (I'm in a small enough town where I can get to most of the sports except for the local private school.) And I definitely agree with you on the breaking news. Most sites are probably going to make-or-break either on their ability to 1) keep up with breaking news or 2) to outclass or out-mine competition when it comes to features, profiles and other info on a daily basis. If you're just doing aggregation or running press releases or things after the fact, you're going to fail or get fired.

(My personal pet peeve in my area is seeing some sports coverage two days after the fact. Yeah, no one else "beat" us on the story, but the audience interest in it is also no doubt dissipated.)

 

Are you talking on Patch or in the two weeklies in your area?

If you're talking Patch, I agree. There's absolutely no reason, whatsoever, that there's not at least one fresh sports story on the site, every day, an hour or two after the final whistle. Some of the Patch sites in our area will cover the same game we do (I work for one of the above weeklies in the area) and not put it online for two or three days, giving us a chance to "catch up", if you will, and eliminating the only advantage they'd have over us as a daily web site.

If you're talking about the weeklies themselves, well, there's not much we can do to get the news out faster. Unfortunately, we're in the midst of a war between which product our focus should be on. If we're focused on the print, then we shouldn't have a web presence, period. At least not a free one. By doing so, we're ruining any and all incentive to pick up our paper. If we're focused on the web, though, then the paper itself becomes irrelevant as all the news is going to be out there before we ever go to press.

It's a fun battle though. I enjoy it.

 

Nah, I'm talking specifically about Patch with my remarks. The immediacy that the site provides should be exploited by its editors, but isn't always. Usually, if I'm writing a sports story, the latest I'll run it is 6 a.m. the next morning. If I know the Big State Daily is there, like with URI games, then I make sure the story goes up that night.

I think the weekly aspect makes sports coverage much, much tougher, since it can render some games on the schedule completely moot that I can cover completely. However, because you aren't under daily pressure, it also allows for things like features, interviews and more long-form stuff that I can't do.

Also, of course, my two competitors in my area have much more institutional knowledge to draw upon. I have no searchable database of past stories, or statistics from past seasons, to fall back on. I'm lucky in that two other editors near me did cover my town at one point, but both are busy with new towns now, and neither did sports. I know that Player X is having a great year, but I have no clue has much they've grown since freshman year, etc.

EDIT: And I hear you on the "free online vs. paid print" debate. That was held at both of the previous papers I was at, and both of them tried halfway approaches that I thought were pretty ineffective. Either give everything out for free like the Big State Daily, or put up a restrictive paywall like the Medium-Size East Daily, or put nothing but colossally huge news online.

The worst to me is how behind papers are technologically with most of their websites. Something Awful manages to have sections where only subscribers can comment - Why can't newspapers? In my area, they also had a monopoly on message board traffic from two local college hoops teams, did nothing to update the boards for 10+ years despite persistent trolls and free upgrade options out there, and now lost both populations to other sites.