A former Ithacan editor, colleague and friend of mine, Erica Hendry '09 launched her Patch.com site in Vienna, Virginia today. I am not the first to say this, but I will say it here — Patch is the new big thing in online media. At a time when all newspapers are suffering, at least the big ones (with national readership) have made the shift to online. But it is the small, local dailies that have been slow to move content to the Web and they undoubtedly suffer for it. The scarcity of online local news creates a vicious cycle that simultaneously fails both readers and the newspaper — because there isn't much of it there, people do not turn to the Internet for their local news.
The Patch.com model offers a solution to end this cycle. Each bureau is run by an editor (like Hendry) who assigns stories to freelancers. Deputized reporting, check. There are 100-plus Patch sites across the country, and the corporation plans to hit 500 before the year is up. It recently launched PatchU, through which its sites are teaming up with journalism schools to train the journalists of tomorrow.
The thing is, Patch is an AOL subsidiary. So it's not independent, but corporate-owned. The concept sounds like an independent one to me... citizen reporters, incorporating the pro-am idea (an example of this is the Vienna bureau's being run by an editor who, though a qualified and relatively experienced one in Hendry's case, is still a recent college grad).
Though it is not truly independent, could Patch mark a convergence of two once-opposite types of news outlets, the corporate and the independent? Could the Vienna bureau and others like it serve their communities by remaining independent of power, politics and advertisers — while under AOL ownership? Or is this just the media giant's attempt to own your neighborhood?
No comments:
Post a Comment