At the end of a long bar table in the Clayton and Lindbergh Starbucks, Ryan Martin, Gabrielle Biondo, and Kurt Greenbaum are hard at work. They type on three identical Mac laptops, all bearing identical stickers for Patch.com, the latest startup venture by the former Internet giant AOL, which has invested at least $50 million. This is Patch’s answer to the 21st newsroom, the rhythm of the news cycle measured by the grinding of the espresso machine rather than the pounding of the printing press.
Although they’re iffy on how long they actually spend in their makeshift newsroom—“It’s really hard to quantify something like that,” says Martin, local editor of the Maplewood–Brentwood Patch site—they pride themselves on their accessibility to the communities they serve. It’s not always this Starbucks, or Starbucks in general, but it’s any place where they can best be found by the communities they cover.
“Just check our Foursquare accounts,” Martin jokes. “What is this, like my third or fourth coffee shop of the day?” A collective laugh follows.
“Seriously,” says Biondo, local editor of the Town and Country–Manchester Patch site. “I do a lot of work from home. I do a lot of work from Starbucks. I do a lot of work from the board of aldermen meetings. It just depends on where you are and what’s happening.”
Newspapers aren’t dead—yet. But in a flourishing digital culture and an increasingly wobbly economy, coverage hasn’t been that consistent, especially when it comes to school board decisions and fire-board elections. It’s a void in reporting that Patch hopes to fill with its online network of hyperlocal news sites that covers specific communities. St. Louis, with 24 sites all based in the county, is the only Patch region in Missouri. Martin’s site launched on October 13 and was the first site to go live in the St. Louis area. Patch made up all but 36 of the 724 ‘newspaper‘ launches last year, according to a recent Vocus state of the media report. Altogether, there are at least 800 Patch sites nationwide with estimations that it’ll grow to 1,000 before the year’s end.
“A ton of research goes into picking new Patch communities,” says Warren Webster, president of Patch Media. “Most of all, we're looking for towns and neighborhoods with above-average community engagement—residents who are involved and passionate about where they live. We look for strong school systems, vibrant business communities, and high voter turnout. Our model also depends on being able to cluster a large group of Patch communities together. For all these reasons, the St. Louis area scored high via our methodology.”
But they are quick to note that Patch.com is not just some neighborhood news blog with corporate backing.
“I love blogs, I read a lot of blogs, but we’re not a community blog. We’re covering news in the community,” says Kurt Greenbaum, one of two regional editors for St. Louis and a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor. “We’ve got reporters and journalists who are helping us to do that. And we’re covering it at a real, real hyperlocal level, because we think that’s where the opportunity is and we think there are people who really care about that.”
Don Corrigan, editor-in-chief of the Webster-Kirkwood Times and the South County Times, agrees that community journalism fills a need for residents who couldn’t get that kind of news from the regional dailies. “We’ve been doing it for almost 35 years,” he says. “We found that the people in our communities obviously appreciate it a lot. What we hear from our readers all the time is, ‘You know, we can’t do much about what goes on in Washington, D.C., or what goes on in the world, but we can do something about what’s going on in our backyard.’”
Yet, some within the journalism industry question how meticulously Patch freelance reporters, whose stories make up the bulk of the content, report and write when they’re not paid very much. Patch doesn’t disclose salary or budgetary information, but some in the St. Louis area say they get $25 a story, $50 with photos. Others are concerned with Patch’s staying power and fear that, with AOL’s money, it could knock off some local competitors that have been invested with a community longer. Corrigan, whose circulation area now includes two Patch sites (Kirkwood-Webster Groves and Sunset Hills-Crestwood), says he doesn’t feel threatened. Both papers reach more than 63,000 homes and attract readers to their websites. But for other community newspapers that don’t have a strong web presence, their concerns are valid, Corrigan says. A Patch spokeswoman says the company doesn’t disclose its traffic numbers.
Greenbaum is quick to add that Patch isn’t looking to replace already established news outlets, just supplement them. It’s an attitude shared by Post-Dispatch, the region’s only daily newspaper, and editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel of the St. Louis Beacon, a regional online news site. People are going to be better served if there lots of organizations springing up and trying new things,” Freivogel says. “One way or the other, it comes down to ‘Are you valuable to the people you’re trying to serve?’ And you rise and fall in the end based on how good of a job you’re doing.”
But Corrigan, who also teaches journalism at Webster University, isn’t discounting Patch. “Nobody has found it really profitable to do local news except community newspapers. Patch is obviously trying to challenge that assumption,” he says. “I’m not sure the web is going to allow them to succeed, and the reason I say that is, not that they can’t put up good stories and get out good information, but they still have to have a business model. At some point, they have to figure out how to get advertisers in there to support that business model. So far, nobody has cracked the code to figure out how to do that. Every newspaper that has a website has been trying to figure out how to make it profitable. Nobody has found the magic formula yet. It’ll be interesting to see if Patch figures out a way to do that.”
Patch is banking on its local editors to be the permanent face for each site, rather than freelancers. All of the local editors have some kind of background in journalism. Biondo, who, along with a freelancer, broke the story on the Town and Country alderman being censured, worked in broadcast for 13 years before switching over to online news. Martin interned for the Post-Dispatch after he graduated last May from the University of Missouri with an emphasis in infographics. After being hired by Patch and selecting the community they wanted to cover, both went out to introduce themselves to the top officials.
“So it’s a lot of word of mouth,” Greenbaum says. “It’s a lot of using social media. Ryan tweets. Gabs tweets. They have Facebook pages for both of their Patches.”
“You’d be surprised at how many people look at the sticker and ask me what it means, too,” Martin interjects.
“And people now come up to me in the board of aldermen meetings, and say, ‘Hey, I went on the site, I signed up for your newsletters,’” Biondo says. “So they’re paying attention.”
Already, Martin thinks, his efforts and work have gotten noticed. “My site’s about to hit its three month anniversary and now I just feel like I’m completely embedded into the community, like talking to the people everyday and no longer having to explain what I’m doing. They know now and it’s really cool to see that engagement.”
UPDATE, 2/11/11: Janine Iamunno, Senior Communications Director at Patch.com's New York office, contacted us by email to state that Patch.com is unable to publicly confirm freelance rates, but that the amounts quoted above are incorrect.
