It’s not up yet, but there’s a new hyper-local news website coming to Milwaukee – and it’s got some big bucks behind it.
Patch.com, an offshoot of AOL Inc. (the entity formerly known as America Online), is about to enter the metro market. The organization has hired two local editors and begun to hire additional personnel for full-time positions that include benefits.
And the operation appears to be willing to buy experience: Its first hire was Mark Maley, former editor-in-chief for the Journal Sentinel suburban Milwaukee papers and their affiliated hyper-local NOW websites. No. 2 was Dustin Block, former city editor at the Racine Journal Times who left that paper three years ago and since then has run the start-up Racine Post website along with former JT publisher Pete Selkowe.
Both Maley and Block carry the title of regional editor. In addition, we’ve learned that at least one reporter/editor has been hired to cover Caledonia, the Racine County municipality north and west of Racine.
“We will have about two dozen community sites in the Milwaukee region,” says Sherry Skalko, Midwest editorial director for Patch.com.
Skalko says the mission of Patch “is to provide community news and information at the local level,” focusing on places especially that appear under-served by local media, including online. Content is provided both by the regional editors, some additional employees, and a team of freelancers and other contributors, Skalko says. It includes print stories as well as pictures and video.
“Robust” business directories and detailed events calendars are also part of the mix, and Skalko says they’ll have more information than others in that space. “Because of the way we are set up, with one dedicated editor and a team of freelancers, we feel that we provide an important service to readers and customers that they won’t find anywhere else.”
Patch.com was founded by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. Skalko says the goal is “to deliver the most comprehensive day-in, day-out information in individual towns and villages,” including coverage of all manner of local government bodies – planning commissions, city councils, library boards and more – as well as “the unveiling of the new scoreboard at the high school football field, festivals and farmers markets and things like that.”
The operation is backed by an investment in the range of $50 million, says Robert Hernandez of Online Journalism Review.
A companion nonprofit, the Patch.org Foundation, proposes to partner with community groups to fund Patch news and information sites “in communities that need them most: inner-city neighborhoods and under-served towns around the world,” the company says on its website. (A story last month in LA Weekly, though, questions just how deep the commitment to diversity really is, at least out in Southern California.)
A local-charity component is built into the Patch.com business model in other ways, with donated advertising to charity as well as the operation’s “give 5” program. “We require every employee in our company to volunteer on five specified days during the year,” Skalko says.
The Patch.com website lists nearly 500 job openings off all kinds around the country, including two dozen in southeast Wisconsin, of which 18 are editorial jobs. A Huffington Post contributor reports the organization hired 600 journalists in 2010, making it the leading job market for journalists this year. Beyond its surging full-time staff, the sites are building networks of freelance contributors whose work will be edited by the Patch.com editors, who also will report and write stories themselves.
There’ve been some hiccups nationally, with some contributors fired for plagiarizing other sites and complaints of a demanding workload, among others detailed in this Business Insider story that also includes responses from Patch.com.
But both from its hires and from the naming of an editorial advisory board with respected names like Jeff Jarvis and University of North Carolina professor Phil Meyer, the operation looks like it’s seeking professional credibility in the wildly uneven space of online journalism. Indeed, a lot of its coverage priorities look surprisingly like the traditional fodder of community papers, yet which have often been downgraded over the last several decades for space and for fear of turning off readers perceived as bored by government news.
The Atlantic website asked in this recent roundup, “Will AOL’s Patch kill your local newspaper?” More pointedly, Hernandez of Online Journalism Review recently asked, in a puckish mood, “Is Patch evil?”
His conclusion: No it’s not. But it does represent a serious potential threat to other players seeking a slice of the online advertising pie – and for that reason alone will bear watching.
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Speaking of the Journal Times – the newspaper’s top story Sunday finally got around to asking the question Pressroom Buzz raised a while back – just where is the evidence for the “massive food share fraud” that the paper trumpeted six months ago?
Nowhere, yet. But just ask the official who first raised the alarm: Racine County Executive William McReynolds. He’s still convinced it’s out there.
Even he acknowledges an element of cognitive dissonance in the story, though: “We made a big deal about this and we have not delivered,” the paper quotes him as saying recently.
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