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Local Patch sites get even patchier in latest round of layoffs

Patch, the once promising hyperlocal network, today took a scythe to its remaining workforce, laying off hundreds of employees.

Locally, Chris Orchard, editor of Somerville Patch, announced his layoff. The editors of the Belmont, Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Braintree, Charlestown, Hingham, Jamaica Plain, Malden, Melrose, Milton, Roslindale, Waltham, West Roxbury and Weymouth Patch sites were apparently let go - all of their profile pages on their sites have been deleted.

Some of the sites were already being edited from remote locations, following an earlier round of layoffs between August and October.

AOL recently announced it was essentially handing over the chain of local news sites to Hale Global, a "technology holding company" with offices in Burlington.

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Comments

Add Somerville to your list. Chris Orchard's farewell announcement

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Mark Ouellette, editor of the Malden Patch and Melrose Patch, has been axed. His profile page gets a 404 error on both sites.

Frankly, I'm not surprised. I say it time and time again, but Dan DeMania and Chris Caesar totally had Melrose and Malden covered. They were really into it and it showed. Content has been on the decline without them, and from the looks of it, this isn't the only area where talent was lost and the pressure was on to feed the readers mundane crap.

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Agreed. Malden Patch has been useless to me since Chris Caesar was sacked. I hope someone snatched him up and gave him a great job.

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Add Waltham to the list. Ryan was great. He seemed to be everywhere all the time and was great about involving local officials or police in the conversation. I loved his ultra-local reporting. There wasn't always super big news to report but when something happened he was ON IT and followed up. I'm sad!

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...Does Adam just buy the remaining Patch sites from Hale with the coins we donate from our sofa cushions and use it as a springboard to global regional domination?

I have about 45lbs of pennies in some coffee cans to donate to the cause. Who else is in?

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I looked at a few Patch sites in my hood and my friends' when we were going out. I never once saw something I hadn't seen somewhere else first, better, and more readable. I mean when you're consistently beat by Metro, you're in trouble. It was always sort of a surprise to hear about each round of layoffs because it never appeared that people actually worked there. The news/reviews all seemed to be identical. Too bad about the suburban branches, though, where people seem to have liked their staff.

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Comments on Facebook indicate that Charlie Beitrose, who edits both the Watertown and Newton Patches, might be out as well.

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...anyone who could ask questions and put words together sensibly, who could also customize themselves a nice wordpress site, could get in the game.

I worried about patch at first, but it never came to my city. My city of 91k still has a daily and I've sort of settled in on what I think is a niche that doesn't take away from them. I don't do hard news. I do what they haven't been able to manage: Mainly, a comprehensive events calendar, music, arts, embedded city council video without written story or commentary, and crowd-sourced image galleries when the weather gets interesting enough to do so. I put up event flyers and announcements, some fancier than others, on the same space as more flushed out stories. I'm also more on the ball with school and parking ban announcements, somehow, but perhaps that's because I'm well practiced in paying attention to those things from being a teacher.

Anyway, I'm putting myself out there as an example because I think it's possible to replace patch with sites run out of dens, attics and basements that are a level up from blogs and a level down from full-on papers, if you fill a niche that your local paper doesn't want or fails to adequately deliver content in.

You might even make a small profit in your new side job, if you promote the heck out of it in social media and slowly retrain your city's media habits. In my example, the only overhead is my small monthly hosting fee and the occasional cheap run of business cards. No actuall employees, no problem.

If you want it to be a real business, that's another matter.. not sure my market would support it. I guess patch was able to determine that when they opened up in every city/town adjacent to mine.

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so we can all take a look for ourselves? Thanks.

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A quick google search came up with this.

http://cityoflynn.upsidemedia.com/

It would have been easier to just have clicked on his name in the post above since that is where I found it.

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That site looks old, and last post mentions a migration to a new site.

From knowing Seth (sort of, really only just through FaceBook/Blue Line to Lynn fanpage), I think he runs: http://lynnhappens.com/

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I'm surprised you found it! It was a personal blog from when I was new to Lynn. It migrated to another personal blog, but it isn't the same kind of thing as LynnHappens, which isn't personal at all.

http://lynnhappens.com

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I don't know if I would say that "anyone who could ask questions and put words together sensibly" can do it...but YES, this is the challenge. If you have a few hours a day and you really care about your community, then you can fill the void. However, you can't quit your day job and you can't find the time to hustle the ad revenue you'd need to survive. Small profit? Maybe a $100/month? If you could set up a stream of such revenue, maybe that would be worth something, but it is hard enough to find time to do the few hours a day or week for just content, let alone selling advertising and sponsorship. In my case, the town is 14,000 people. The numbers are too small to work for any existing business model. But the "passionate local" model can work great as long as somebody has the time to do it.

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You're not far off. I think with the population of Lynn, it's possible to do even better than $100 a month in revenue, but with the time that I have, mine rarely exceeds that amount. If I put more into sales, I know that I could, but I could never (nor do I want to) quit my day job.

I also have other responsibilities, boards I belong to, a neighborhood association, professional responsibilities related to my day job, and other secondary sources of income. In other words, I rely heavily on people providing me with content to post. I learned how to do that from my days running a public access tv facility. Yes, if you have the right kind of information on public access, people will even tune to _that_ channel. So, imagine how well it can work on the web, when the site delivers useful content and sheds the space constraints and schedule of the paper and the production value, relatively, is much higher.

I've been doing hyper local since joining the fight for LPFM in the mid-90's. I went from radio, to tv, to internet, and have carried a little bit of the best of each medium forward - well, what I like about each medium, at least.

/now that you have my resume...

I've been keeping an eye on communities that are launching non-profit hyper-locals, as well. But for http://lynnhappens.com, I think I'd like to keep it as is, save for a few extra features in the pipeline that will increase revenue and perhaps even allow me to hire someone part time. (Dreaming a bit, here..)

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My site is http://LynnHappens.com

You pulled up a personal blog that hasn't been active in years! I keep it up there..because why not. I haven't used my blogspot blog in a long time either, except for a helpful widget in that sidebar that allows me to see recent posts from other blogs. It's all focused into LynnHappens, now, with a lot less of my opinion taking up space.

-Seth

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Wow their new web site sucks! Every mouse click produces a popup window. Rapid page refreshes make commenting nearly impossible even for those willing to give them access to their facebook info.

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Works wonders...

(sorry adam!)

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I have adblock installed on every computer I use. I wouldn't browse the web without it.

I value UH and would be more then happy to donate far more in cash then what he would get from my ad views if I didn't use a blocker. I wish I had that option.

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along with Flash block. Some sites are sneaky. Commenting doesn't work when blocking ads on a page.

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For a couple of years, The Patch was a good source of info. I was even thinking about ditching my West Roxbury Transcript subscription, as everything in there had already been covered in a more timely manner by The Patch. No more. I still look at the daily emails, but the amount of content now is pathetic.

RIP Patch.

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I could tell they were spending almost all their time on click-bait like "Which restaurant changed ownership recently?" or "What restaurant closed today?" which they probably just auto-generated based on the town records. The real reporting was pretty decent, but it was very sparse recently.

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