Problems at Patch.com

You get used to it, it's not so bad.

 

The world needs ditch diggers too.

 

Noticed my wife looking at a patch site today. When I asked about it, she said "Moms love it."

 

This post really had some promise, but then you went and put Patch in there.

 

I like to check the patch from my hometown because my high school's basketball team is very good. The writing is appalling though.

 

They do a lot of parenting content.

Oh, by the way. I heard there was an all-hands call today. The sky is falling!

 

How many all-hands conference calls are there in a month?

 

Perhaps I wasn't fully explicit -- the point here is that it's not yet a content mill, so why root for it to fail on the off chance that it might become one?

 

It's not about rooting for it to fail.

We all saw how traumatic it was when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News went out of business.

And, we saw how shocked Moddy and others were when Fanhouse got blown up.

Path now employs hundreds of journalists. It would be a shame if three, six, or twelve months from now we had posters here expressing shock that Patch was closing down and putting then out of work.

I think we just want some folks to open up their eyes to reality. A (free) site with no advertising isn't going to be around for very long.

 

Because maybe when it fails just like all the other similar ventures, the legions of people in the business who are convinced that they can produce local news from professional journalists on online ad revenue alone will finally see the light and we, as an industry, can stop wasting time and venture capital on it.

 

"we, as an industry, can stop wasting time and venture capital on it."

Right, because the newspaper industry is so healthy right now and its future is positively outstanding.

 

I think they have one a week.