Problems at Patch.com

You were who I had in mind. For some reason, I was thinking you had left Patch. My bad.

 

We just did informal reader surveys, and most of the people we spoke with who still buy our paper do so for high school sports coverage.

That said, there was no Patch rep at the state championships I covered over the weekend. Somebody was there covering for a bunch of Patch sites last year.

All the champions from my area live in towns with Patch sites. Those editors (most of whom follow me on Twitter) didn't even re-tweet my plausibly live updates, and I used hashtags for all the schools/towns.

 

Yeah - they buy the paper. One thing I'd like to see my own company add is some sort of option to purchase some sort of hard copy. Right now, you can't even buy framed pictures or mugs / t-shirts with photos on them, etc.

 

With Patch's reliance on stringers to provide a chunk of copy, I wonder how that'd work copyright-wise.

 

The contract you agree to means we own all your content, unless you manage to negotiate something different.

 

That's why some very reliable freelance photogs here won't work for the Patch sites. They make too much $$$ selling reprints of their own work.

 

The only thing keeping Patch going is that it was born as Tim Armstrong's vanity project before he got to AOL, and he is still the CEO of AOL. If he leaves that post, Patch goes away the next day. The CEO just doesn't want to have to call himself a failure.

 

Will the freelancers get a beer tap and nap time, or trips to the Dominican Republic?

 

The bit about Patch not hiring full-time local editors any more is inaccurate, not that Romanesko seems to care.

 

Go to the link. He posted a response.

He's always fair like that.

 

Fair? Romanesko posted that Patch is not hiring full-time employees. Iamunno told him that was false. It is false. Rather than concede that he was wrong, he posted something else about sales people letting go.

He could have done both, but he chose to ignore the point he was wrong about. I would not call that fair.