Problems at Patch.com

Oh, so now you think you have the chops to judge every journalist at Patch. And people think I come on here with an ego?

Again, you can try to justify it all you want, but you are rooting for people to lose their jobs. Saying that is classless given the economy and the state of journalism is kind.

 

I have my opinions on the matter and you go into insult mode.

I'm shocked.

If you look at Bleacher Report posts, there are more than a few on here who want that site to fail. Are those posters classless?

 

Anybody who does any work for Patch without getting some compensation is a fool. Nobody is arguing that. If the paychecks go away, the work should go away, too. But that hasn't happened to this point.

Stitch suggested asking Arianna Huffington about her plan for Patch. From what I've read, either she is lying or she is not going to go the unpaid blogger route there.

 

I said that anybody who thinks they can judge every journalist at Patch is showing a bit of ego. I said that rooting for people to lose their jobs is classless.

Not the same thing as hurling direct insults and you know it.

 

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying I thought people were currently blogging for free for Patch. Just that I think that's the future. I don't know Huffington's plans for Patch, and quite frankly I am not all that eager to spend a whole lot of time investigating it, b/c my fear is that Patch is dead site walking and it pisses me off to think of AOL fucking up another journalistic enterprise.

And if Bleacher Report croaked tomorrow, I'd do a jig.

 

I want a high-quality Patch network with good journalism to succeed, which does occur on some of the local sites.

I don't want a site that posts top 10 lists and open houses (framed as editorial instead of advertising) to succeed.

And, yes, I can judge if something is high quality or not. It's called personal taste.

You can call that attitude classless if you want.

I won't convince oop, because he mentioned we're just speculating about Patch anyway, especially about its finances. I think it's safe to say Patch is bleeding red ink. How much, we don't know, but there is no way in heck it comes close to breaking even. I wonder if revenues exceed 25 percent of costs at this point, which means Patch exists based on the good graces of Armstrong and now Huffington.

 

No, you weren't talking about high quality. You were talking about such low quality that it doesn't deserve to exist.

You admit you are rooting for Patch to fail, do you not? Yet you even admit that some of the sites are quality and with Patch's approach, that only happens when you have a good LE. So, you are rooting for a business to fail even though good journalists will lose their jobs.

 

Would someone please post a link to a well written, well reported article from Patch?

How about a well written, interesting profile?

Does anyone have a link to a Patch article that could just have easily appeared in a bigger newspaper and not looked out of place?

 

I'll post it again -- in Baltimore, it seems Patch is ahead of the Sun in at least a few cases:
http://insidecharmcity.com/2011/02/08/baltimore-sun-rips-off-patch-com-story-on-ko-public-affairs-astroturfing/

And I'll also judge Patch by the fact that it's hiring some quality people.

I think Rick makes a good distinction between rooting for Patch to fail and hoping that other business ventures don't copy their model. But if we want journalism to survive, we have to hope that *someone* makes it work. Newspapers are going to keep getting smaller -- I don't think they'll completely die, but the 1980s are NOT coming back.

Bleacher Report is a totally different issue. That's sheer unadulterated crap (with a few exceptions) written for free by people (again with a few exceptions) who would never get hired at an actual news organization, and its SEO deals ensure that it draws traffic away from people who are actually doing research and professional-quality work.

Patch, on the other hand, has hired people with an experience from major papers. (The two I know best are from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and USA TODAY.) Plenty of people on this board have said they've interviewed. And offering $40K -- again, more than some people at large metro or national newspapers are making, particularly if they're considered "online" staff despite outstanding qualifications -- ensures a better quality of applicants than Bleacher Report.

I don't read it because my local Patch isn't quite as good as the local weeklies that are tossed into my driveway -- one of which is quite clearly funded by real estate folks but is far more in-depth on local issues than the major metro 12 miles away. But would it be nice if someone actually made hyperlocal work? Absolutely. In my case, I have free newspapers that do that, but that's not true everywhere.

 

That original Patch story is pretty good.

 

Do you mean something beyond a good gamer? The Patches I lived near did a pretty nice job with sports, granted they had a regional editor that coordinated most of it.

 

Yeah I've written what I feel are some pretty good gamers...some I read on other sites are just awful. And now I'm taking a pay cut, plus they still owe me for a feature from three weeks ago...