Problems at Patch.com

I saw a Patch editor who used to work at my paper at Super Bowl Media Day yesterday, and thought that might be a sign of hope… however temporary. :-\

 

According to a Patch editor on Twitter, Rhode Island is losing nearly all of its editors. At one point there were 15, now looks like it's going to be down to two or three.

 

Heard from a source that everyone in Michigan is gone.

 

Man, that was very Lumbergian.
"Yeeeeahhh .... if you could just ... not work for us anymore, that'd be great. Thanks."

 

Nope, not half of Rhode Island - all of the editors were laid off, according to one editor.
Nobody seems to know what's going to happen with the sites going forward. One editor said sites may still exist, but not sure how'd they remain hyperlocal.

 

Two managers remain, yeah. The sales staff was also laid off. My assumption would be that they're going to just be responsible for overseeing sites - moderating comments - and making sure they're populated with aggregated articles. Theoretically, you could make money on them if you only have one employee working on, say, 10 sites, just because the expenses would be so low. You would just have to sell a few ads to make something. However, it's so, so low revenue that I'm not sure why anyone would want to.

 

I think it is a short-term solution until they can figure out how to adopt the platform and use the brand.

 

I got an offer from Patch out of the blue when they were ramping up hiring.

I passed ... mainly because my wife thought their business model was terrible. She teaches financial literacy. We both agreed that ... believe it or not ... my print job was safer.

That proved to be true.

 

A former co-worker was a Patch editor in California and was part of the layoff. She just posted a link to her goodbye column of Facebook. It had a glaring grammatical error in the first sentence.

Sigh.

 

Volunteer proofreaders could fix that. They might even win a dinner.

 

Fixed that for you.