Patch is In Town. Does the Local Paper Care?

AOL is committing millions to hyperlocal sites in hundreds of markets. So why do local newspapers seem so unconcerned?

The new hyperlocal AOL project Patch is adding more new Websites every day, with microsites set up to cover towns like Huntington, N.Y., and neighborhoods within cities, like Washington D.C.’s Georgetown area and dozens more in between.

A Patch spokesman tells E&P he’s “heard” there were 152 Patch sites, though he was quick and correct to say sites were being launched so quickly he didn’t know for sure. One day before making that statement, there seemed to be 130 Patch sites in existence.

By the end of the year, more than 500 are projected to be up and running in 20 states. A visitor to patch.com can click on a state name and then watch a list develop of cities and neighborhoods with “older” Patch sites — ones that started earlier this year or last month — and ones marked “New!” that were most recently added. 

Yet despite this massive new launch, there’s a sense that the established papers in the markets where Patch is arriving aren’t paying it much heed. Each Patch site will be aimed at covering a town or neighborhood with as few as 15,000 residents or as many as 70,000. In some of those smaller ’burbs, reporting its own birth may be the biggest news some Patch sites will carry for quite a while.

Patch’s principal competitors are the established area weeklies or small dailies owned by big chains. Patch executives don’t have many stories, anecdotal or otherwise, of any of them reacting to Patch showing up in town. Very few, if any, it appears, have improved their Websites to counter it.

A top executive at Seattle-based DataSphere, an operation not dissimilar to Patch that runs hyperlocal sites for TV stations, isn’t a bit surprised by the non-reaction. “We haven’t seen that either, nor have we seen [the newspaper industry] watching Patch, frankly,” says Gary Cowan, vice president of products at DataSphere. With virtually no notice from newspapers, DataSphere has launched 750 hyperlocal sites nationwide. In one week alone in mid-September, DataSphere added 20 new sites just in the Grand Rapids, Mich., market. DataSphere says it expects to have 1,200 sites by the end of the year.

All of which raises the question: Why the lack of reaction to the Patch or DataSphere rollouts?

“Either it’s because those papers are really just content to concentrate on their print product, or they don’t have the platform to do it right,” DataSphere’s Cowan surmises. “But it is funny they’re not doing anything about us or Patch. If you don’t figure out that more and more consumption of content is happening online, someday you’re going to wake up and be very surprised.”

What’s more, Cowan says, television stations at least know that they don’t understand. They don’t believe they cover local advertisers in the same way newspapers do, so they are happy to let DataSphere sell local Web ads for them. The company has deals with broadcasters like Raycom Media, LocalTV LLC, Fisher Communications and Hubbard Broadcasting.

The Patch idea is be small everywhere, adding up to one big revenue stream. AOL acquired Patch last year, and estimates it will spend $50 million this year to get itself up to speed covering such news in local communities.

What they’ve created is sites like its Morristown, N.J., operation, which soon after its launch — it was Patch’s 100th site — trumpeted “King’s Parking Lot Expected to Be Finished” to readers, a good, but perhaps not completely necessary accounting of a paving job at a local supermarket that was clogging up traffic on a busy adjacent road.

“There is a lot going on in Morristown, but, let’s be honest — it’s still a pretty small town,” John Dunphy wrote in the lede of one column.

Patch’s presence is being recognized by other hyperlocal Web sites. On the “In Alameda Blog,” which is on SFGate.com (but is a feature that is neither written nor edited by the San Francisco Chronicle), blogger Susan Davis last week welcomed the debut of the Alameda Patch site, edited by her friend Eve Pearlman. “I’m cool with it,” Davis wrote. “I mean, there’s plenty of room for more writers in Alameda and there’s plenty of stuff to cover there.” She tells E&P, “I welcome the liveliness and richness that’s introduced as more hyperlocal blogs come online.”

Other small-town publications are beginning to take notice — to a point. But newspapers don’t seem too concerned.

Jack Bates, executive director of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, said he knew of no newspaper that was planning or already executed any changes to its Website because of Patch. “I guess newspapers just think it’s another bump in the road,” says. “It’s not on newspapers’ radar screens. It just may be newspapers think it is just another oar in the water at this point.”

Whatever the metaphor, to some degree Bates might be correct. Studies have shown that Web surfers don’t rely all that much on hyperlocal sites for community news.

“Let’s face it, we’re a weekly for a reason,” says Jim Rule, the publisher of The Acorn, a weekly newspaper serving Calabasas, Calif., and several other surrounding suburbs in Northern Los Angeles and Ventura County, where Patch also launched a site. “Most of the time around here, you don’t need to know what happened at the city council meeting right after the meeting.”

He’s not at all dismissive of Patch, nor is his managing editor, John Loesing. “I think they’re doing a good job staying on top of local stories,” says Loesing. And both men recognize Patch has at least one advantage: “They’ve got deep pockets,” Loesing says. Adds Rule, “Any competition you keep your eye on, but especially this one. When you see AOL is behind this, it raises an eyebrow.”

Still, the Acorn, which boasts 52 pages in its current issue, has heft and authority. “Credibility is a long hard thing to accomplish,” says Loesing, a veteran newsman. “We’ve been here for 35 years.”

Rule says he’s so far not noticed Patch siphoning any readers, advertisers or influence away from the Acorn.

But even in the smallest communities, there are plenty of places for advertisers to reach local readers. For example, Patch plans to start a site in Doylestown, Pa., the county seat for Bucks County — a community that includes a bohemian population in New Hope, weekenders and transplants from New York City, commuters to Philadelphia, farmers and horse breeders. About 600,000 people live in Bucks, many clustered closer to Philadelphia but likely just as many who consider Doylestown their hub.

Bridget Wingert, editor of the eight-year old weekly Bucks County Herald, says, “Just yesterday we collected all the publications around here on a desk, and I think we came up with 17,” including the Herald’s own monthly Area Guide — which, as it turns out, will soon be moving out, the hard way. “We’re about to kill it,” she discloses. “The competition for advertising is just incredible.”

When she was earlier told about Patch coming to Bucks County, she not only hadn’t heard of Patch — but didn’t seem particularly convinced it was a good idea. “We don’t have the number of visitors to our Website we expected,” she says. “And we’re already entrenched.”

She has improved the paper’s site by contracting with the British-based PageSuite, which has added a digital “page-turning” feature. Ben Edwards, PageSuite’s marketing manager, says the page-turning feature can make classified ads more valuable and allows a paper to link to advertisers’ Websites. Wingert charges $5 to hyperlink to an advertiser’s site. That doesn’t sound like much, she says, “but from 100 customers a week? For us, that would be great!”

Even with modest ambitions, advertising in small communities can be tough. It’s hard to make sweeping conclusions about all of the Patch’s sites, but few of them seem to carry much advertising thus far.

Patch’s President Warren Webster says the sites offer “a few different buckets” for advertising, including paying to enrich the free listings of local products and services. Patch also pushes advertisers to offer coupons on the site. There’s only one editorial employee per site — the editor, who is usually a young man or woman being paid in the range of $30-$40,000 a year.

The editor typically has a few years experience, usually at another community paper. They get paid about the same or less than what they got paid at those papers, but as Patch’s Calabasas, Calif., editor Arin Mikailian points out, at his old paper he was watching reporters leave who weren’t replaced.

To aid in producing content for the sites, Patch uses freelancers. Webster says the project has about 11 per site, who get paid 50-75 cents a word. So costs are low, and as AOL has stated publicly, it can be profitable because it will operate for the fraction of the cost of brick-and-mortar-and-print operations.

For one thing, its editors don’t have offices. Morristown’s Dunphy usually works with his laptop out of one of three coffee shops. In Calabasas, Mikailian works out of the library. 

Webster says Patch has a 59-point process for selecting its coverage markets, including the number of households, average income and the retail environment and voter turnout. Webster says Patch likes towns with a “strong, vibrant civic-minded” vibe and good Internet connectivity. He claims Patch checked 66,000 census tracts to come up with its target locations. He says Patch has “exceeded” revenue estimates thus far, though he won’t reveal what those are. But the markets in which Patch operates have an online revenue potential of $20 billion, Forbes reports.

“The challenge for Patch is getting it established,” says Morristown’s Dunphy, who despite talking about the small city charms of the place, puts in major hours editing freelance and community submissions, collecting videos and being Patch’s public face in the community. He also collects and writes the nitty-gritty stuff, from police logs and city council meetings, and all Patch editors spend spare moments Tweeting about events and news in town.

“It’s a lot of work,” he says. “It’s 24/7. But there is definitely a sense of accomplishment and that you’re doing something valuable. One of the hardest things is that you can’t always be working and you have to figure in a way to get some downtime.”

In Calabasas, the Acorn doesn’t sell much advertising on its site. It once put print advertisers ads online as a bonus, but discontinued that practice. “We didn’t hear any complaints about that, so that tells you something,” says Rule. 

The Acorn has improved its Website and added a Facebook page, and Rule says it’s likely that its online presence will be improved further in the near future, with or without prodding from Patch. But he doesn’t seem to be absolutely convinced that’s imperative. Rule recalls, “A few years ago, I was at a California Newspaper Publishers Association conference and the speaker asked, ‘How many you have a Website?’ and we all rose our hands. And then he asked, ‘And how many know why?’ and all the hands went down.”

There’s a different feel to the Calabasas Patch, maybe because of its strong use of videos of everyday things like dance recitals, and its coverage of things that at first glance might not seem like stories. In that sense, it seems a little less stiff than some community papers. For example, one recent article titled “The Price of Having Famous Neighbors,” got a little testy about star-searchers bugging the locals. There was also an opinion piece about ways to keep things peaceful among the canines at the dog run.

Mikailian says that when the site launched in April, some people got to know it via its coverage of a fatal motorcycle crash — the kind of bread-and-butter of small-town papers everywhere.

As far as the long hours go, “That’s just the nature of the business,” says Mikailian, who goes around town passing out his business card. “I’m not married with kids, so it’s just me, myself and I right now. I didn’t get into the business to work 9 to 5.” And as a younger veteran of another Los Angeles area weekly, he says, “The only thing different to me is the medium. We do the same kind of stories the weekly papers do, only we do them every day, online.”