Problems at Patch.com

Many are in major metro areas. Many are not.

And tell somebody who got laid off from his newspaper two years ago and couldn't get a full-time job until Patch showed up that a $40,000 job is no big deal.

Hey, I don't know if it will last or if it's sustainable. I know a lot of good journalists are working now who wouldn't be without Patch. Many of them are my friends. They're doing good work. I'm happy for them.

 

How about this:

You can say the same thing, every day, at newspapers and on TV stations across the country. Would you say Fox News tarnishes the entire brand of TV journalism with its faux news coverage? Would you say Fox News tarnishes its actual brand every time a panelist says something racist about Obama? Would you say the Podunk Gazette tarnishes the entire brand of print journalism every time Joe Blow misspells Timmy Teuzcuaoski's last name? Would you say the Boston Globe tarnishes its actual brand every time it runs a puff piece about the Red Sox?

Conversely, would you say the good work of someone is minimized b/c he happens to work for a shit publication? How unfair is that, to not give a writer an opportunity simply b/c you think his "brand" has been tarnished?

Patch is imperfect. It is no different than any other journalistic entity. Some people do good legitimate work there, some people do shit that would get laughed out of a halfway decent college newspaper--just like thousands of other journalistic entities. There are also newspapers and websites and TV stations out there that produce interesting content but are not journalistic endeavors. They were there long before Patch arrived and will be there long after it departs (which it will). It is foolish to say the entire brand is tarnished or enhanced by any single entity.

Or how about this:

So now online writers should be punished because the Internet is now a large enough niche to deserve its own category? What if the person had won a prize in a more traditional category? Would you belittle him for a lack of competition? "That's like Marisa Tomei winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for My Cousin Vinny, it was a down year for movies so it shouldn't count."

If you had the respect for journalism and journalists that you say you possess, you'd appreciate the boost winning an award--any award--provides. People work in shit conditions for shit bosses for shit wages and go to sleep every night worrying the phone call that is the end of their career will arrive in the morning, and they should be applauded whenever they win something that alleviates the mood a little bit instead of belittled.

I never laid the whole "you're not a journalist" crap on you. That said, to correlate the criticism of a non-journalist at SportsJournalists.com to the criticism fielded by writers covering a sport they never played is obfuscation of the highest (or lowest) sort. EVERYONE'S a consumer of media, but that doesn't make everyone a watcher of media. You reading newspapers and absorbing media and being the subject of stories for more than 30 years makes you no different than anyone else. We expect a little more from people, inside and outside the media, who critique the industry, and your criticisms lately have been less and less relevant and more and more "well, you wrote something I disagree with so you're wrong." That doesn't fly with anyone here regardless of credentials.

And if you don't think journalists defend their profession's standards and assign criticism where due, then I must believe that you are in your first day here. You can say a lot of things about SportsJournalists.com, nothing more inaccurate than we are reluctant to defend the industry and blast those who diminish it. Just because some of us don't think Patch is the death of the industry doesn't mean otherwise.

Great. Neither am I. So get used to me calling you out for your crap.

 

To be fair, Patch isn't in a ton of major metro areas, unless you consider somewhat-hipster city areas (Brooklyn NY, the Boston suburbs) or depressed urban areas (Newark) major metro. Not all editors make the same, either - the vast majority do, because most of us aren't in those areas.

Also, it's not a popular point, but $40k (plus excellent benefits) is well, well above what I was getting as a reporter. My old paper, I don't think anyone was close to that among the reporting staff. Given the Brave New World of newspaper salaries, where another chain in Rhode Island advertised a salary of $18k to $23k, I think the Patch salary is pretty competitive.

 

I've won awards in the past. But in all honesty it takes time to get all that stuff together for a contest and in this day and age of shrinking sports staffs, I ain't got the time anymore. Oh, that and they used to give us a little bonus if we won, they stopped doing that a couple of years ago.

 

Awards are great if you want to work in Farmington.

 

I work in Patch mom's town, and I would venture to guess that 99 percent-plus of the people here don't give a shit about this issue, even while we're having some good Lincoln-Douglas debates about it here.
Also, while we're calling this a Patch issue, this town had an online news site that was simply converted to a Patch site when its owner became Patch's R.I. publisher. There were no major changes to its operation, and involved the same people - it's like the site simply received a facelift. There were also conversations about incorporating it into either one of the competing weeklies in town before Patch came along.

 

I had a problem with the print page function on a Patch site crashing IE on my work PC. Frustrating when a simple task causes a browser to crash.

 

This has been my experience as well. Meaning, there is little difference in an average article's popularity whether I write it or it is, say, a little photo submission from a middle school track meet or a press release from a school about a health fair.

I always make sure to properly attribute, yeah. But I don't think the readership cares about where the information comes from as long as 1) you tell them where it's from and 2) the biases are upfront and clear. Newspapers run event calendars and "community news" all the time.

 

Readers' opinions of your work don't reflect whether or not you've achieved journalist standards.

If you don't aspire to journalism, fine. Patch can be a wonderful little community bulletin board that replaces the one that used to hang just inside the door at your local grocery store.

 

Neither do awards though, according to some. I'll send a carrier pigeon though to the journalism seer at the top of Mt. Pious, and he'll let me know how I'm doing.

Of course popularity isn't everything. But it's also stupid to pretend that you don't want people to actually read what you write and post. Balance is a good thing.

 

You speak of brand, but what does a brand say about your work. You've worked for the Tampa Bay Devils Rays. Are you saying anything good you did there was negated by the poor brand?

Good journalists don't have to be at Patch forever. I still content no one will be at Patch in a few years, especially local editors, as Huffington tries to move the site to a HuffPo local model.

 

The Devil Rays brand was terrible. Worse than I even realized when I started there.

The previous ownership had alienated the fans and the business community.

It made it nearly impossible to sell them -- especially with the attitude they had and the prices they expected.

It's why I left.

You'll notice that new ownership not only made changes on the field, they changed the brand. They're the Rays now. They have a new logo and new uniforms.

And they became much more fan friendly and business friendly.

Was I still an employee of a Major League Baseball team? Yes, but only by default. The definition of a Major League Team is based solely on their membership in Major League Baseball. No matter how poorly they're run or how much damage they do to the brand, that doesn't change.

Journalism is different. You can't "join" journalism, you have to achieve it. And if you fail to reach the standards of it, you are no longer a journalistic entity.