Problems at Patch.com

Right. Do more with less.

Still don't think that's the same as this:

That's a clear directive that quantity comes before quality.

 

YF, I've got a question.

I work at a chain of five weeklies and a daily. I am the editor of the news section for our second biggest weekly. Every week, I put out what I feel is the best product of local news in our area (I have the state's biggest paper to compete with but they rarely travel south of Providence, compete with another weekly paper that does a pretty good job with news but slacks on sports and compete with a Patch site that spends about 80% of its time doing flower stories).

My question is this. Because the three other news editors in my organization 1.) Don't care a single bit about the paper, 2.) Are too busy with family life to put in an honest 40 hours and 3.) Are woefully unqualified for their job (respectively), how does that affect the work I do?

Technically, we're all under the same banner as an organization. But the work I do has NOTHING to do with them and vise versa and, honestly, I'm a little ashamed to be compared to them.

If I go and break some mega news story, is it somehow brought down because of the work of my coworkers in different papers? I think not which is why I think you're full of it in this regard.

The people who read my paper don't read the sister papers in my organization and probably aren't aware of the flaws of them. Just like people from one town who read a quality Patch site aren't aware of the shit ones.

To lump everything together is just ignorant of the facts.

 

There are plenty of journalists who can be considered experts on a given topic, including at least one who has posted multiple times in the last couple of pages. But the journalism industry is a bastion for individuals who choose to pass themselves off as experts on any number of topics with no real justification other than "I said so." (In fact, this entire board is based on that phenomenon.)

As a journalist, I would like to believe that what we do is inherently better than what non-journalists do, that it somehow makes us smarter, more worldly. As a realist, I know that's bullshit. The title of "journalist" doesn't endow one with some divine sense of omniscience any more than putting on fire boots makes one a hero.

Another thing journalists are supposed to be is open-minded. But this thread has devolved into "attack the guy who's not one of us." (Of course, YF's methods of pontificating at the drop of a hat on myriad subjects with virtual certainty should endear him to the average newsroom denizen, who does the exact same thing day after day in real life and cyberspace.)

The typical direction this thread has taken comes from an insulated arrogance that is embarrassing to the profession. Case in point is 2mcm's post. It drips (no pun intended to either party) with condescension, the kind that is counterproductive to the idea of disseminating information to the "other people" out there, those to whom we're constantly trying to prove our expertise. A successful journalist who wants to get his point across would be a little more nuanced and intelligent in his arguments. "We're smarter than you, so shut the fuck up" is neither a good marketing campaign nor a successful business model.

 

schiezainc, thanks for the question. It's a good one, and I think it helps to reinforce my point.

Your papers are all owned by the same company, but are they branded together?

You say you're a little ashamed to be associated with them, but if you're not operating under the same brand, that association is weakened.

If you work at Patch, where all of the sites are branded together, you're work is associated with the very worst work that appears under that banner -- even if its 1,000 miles away.

That's the whole gist of my point.

 

And your point is wrong, again.

The only thing the same about the Patch sites is the name. Not one reader who reads the Boston Patch site cares one bit about the Connecticut site.


Just like CNHI (a major newspaper owner corporation, for our coffee friends) has lots of newspapers all over the US. A paper in Alabama doesn't care one bit what a paper in Tennessee reports on. Neither do their readers. Yet, they are still owned by the same people and perform journalism every day.



And YF, you've mixed up so many points, changing arguments in mid-sentence that whatever you were arguing has become muted.

 

YF's contention about the brand can't really be answered unless we know Patch.com metrics. How many visitors go to more than one Patch site and what sites do they visit?

 

Yeah, they're only connected by their name. As if that's a small thing.

schiezainc is embarrassed by his co-workers and they don't even work under the same brand.

As for CNHI, they're papers do not operate under a single common brand. The papers aren't named CNHI Podunk or CNHI BFE like Patch's sites are.

 

From at least an industry standpoint, YF's last point is spot-on. The worst of community journalism is inevitably associated with the name "Patch." If it wasn't, then why do we have pages and pages of posts ON THIS THREAD joking about the "Patch" operation? YF is not making the wrong point; he's making the same point as many journalists (hallelujah, praise the lord) allready have. Of course, if journalists knew what readers actually thought, the industry would likely be in much bettter shape.

 

As is any message board. Or bullshitting with friends in a bar. Or most of our real-life conversations, come to think of it. As with the understood "is" in hedlines, a sense of the understood "in my opinion" would save a lot of angst around here. What traditional journalistic endeavors have is in general a tradition of passing down standards (which are pretty solid in the main), a name that can be a go-to for sources who know what the brand stands for (something good in the main) and the resources for news-gathering and things like FOI.

What I mean: The top baseball writer among those for the NYC papers could quit today to start a blog, and it could obviously become a go-to source real quick. That person has been inculcated with journalistic principles over the years. That's what's lost when we have folks thinking they can be a news source by being a blogger from their teens. They don't get the training or constructive feedback, just a buncha "attaboys" in the comments field.

And that's what I'm afraid is being lost in the denigration of conventional journalism, getting us closer to Fenian's scenario in which people die of poisoned water that no one was there to dig into.

As for Patch, I'm sure some journalism, as something honorable and not something to mock, is being done, as well as some crimes against journalism.

 

Dools, I agree with your initial point. As I said, there is expertise out there, and such a thing is a valuable commodity. As for my fear, it's not as dire as the poisoned-water theory. Rather, I think the information age has, with a few notable exceptions, essentially closed the gap between journalists and non-journalists as it relates to gathering information and processing it. Journalists at the top of the profession have access that non-journalists will never have. But the great majority of journalists, in newsrooms throughout the country, aren't getting much more, if any, information than the average person with an intellectual curiosity can't find for themselves from an ever-growing number of sources. This reality should prompt journalists to work harder and dig deeper for information that is at least unique, if not otherwise important. Instead, it seems to me it too often calcifies the obstinate "I'm a journalist, I know better" attitude that doesn't serve journalists or the industry we're so quick to defend.

 

I don't care for 2mcm's post, either, but overall, YankeeFan is getting slammed for the content of his posts, not because he is an outsider. There are plenty of people out there who have never worked a day in their lives as journalists who have something intellingent to say about the topic. YankeeFan simply hasn't shown that he is one of them, at least not on this thread.

 

Now you're switching your argument to morale? Hope you didn't dislocate something with that stretch.

If the measure of journalism is the committment to the right things by the powers that be, you could probably count the number of news papers that count as symbols of journalism on your fingers. Maybe you'd need your toes. Maybe.