Patch Expands Hyperlocal News In West Roxbury

Published September 2, 2010

Patch’s latest hyperlocal newsroom covers not Boston, not Roxbury, but West Roxbury. The website just launched as part of Patch’s ambitious expansion into upper middle class communities. (Plum TV has the market on the upper class, such as Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.)

West Roxbury Patch logoBefore moving to Boston, I covered city politics and legal affairs for San Diego member station KPBS. When I arrived here, I was surprised to find such little “local” news.

Boston is a world city, where the most important things in health care and academia are happening. The mainstream media here, including WBUR, seem to avoid the stories they deem “parochial” — the school board meetings, the disputes over this new building or that giant pothole. (Indeed, WBUR’s audience consistently tell us they want less “local.”)

Patch aims to, um, patch these holes — reporting news of real importance to people in the community (and of little importance elsewhere). Consider this sampling of headlines from the West Roxbury Patch home page today:

Hyperlocal news is not novel to the Web, but the Web may be the only place it can survive. It’s cheap to produce, and if readers don’t like it, they can move on. Patch editors double as reporters and social media ambassadors and managers. They work at home or in the coffee shop, without the overhead of a newsroom. (Check out Brookline Patch editor Neal Simpson‘s new “cubicle.”)

Brookline Patch editor Neal Simpson's "cubicle" in Brookline (Neal Simpson via Twitter)

Brookline Patch editor Neal Simpson's "cubicle" in Brookline (Neal Simpson via Twitter)

Parent company AOL is investing $50 million into Patch this year, with plans to cover 500 communities nationwide — making AOL the largest journalism employer in America, according to the company. I know that (young) journalists in Boston are getting courted like crazy — I, too, was approached.

My friend Molly Connors (also a former WBUR freelancer) worked for Your Town — the Boston Globe’s answer to hyperlocal — covering Quincy, Scituate, Norwell and Hingham. (Gatehouse Media operates a slate of Wicked Local sites, including one for West Roxbury, and independent blogger Adam Gaffin runs the supper-aggregator Universal Hub.)

While at Your Town, Molly was offered the job as editor of Hingham Patch.

“It was significantly more than what I made at the Globe,” she told me. “The salary stability they offered got my attention.”

Molly ultimately turned it down.

“I wanted to stay at a really well-established news organization. I’m still early in my career, and feel like I have a lot to learn,” she said.

“I wanted to be surrounded by people who would make me a better reporter. And I was concerned that with all of the additional responsibilities that a local editor has, I wouldn’t be able to focus on what I really wanted to do — which is, be a reporter.”

[pullquote]Hyperlocal news is not novel to the Web, but the Web may be the only place it can survive.[/pullquote]

Indeed, there are plenty of Patch editors feeling overworked and under-appreciated. Molly says she was overworked at the Globe, too, but has fond memories for the skills she picked up there. Molly is now a staff reporter for the Cape Cod Times.

But will people read?

Media Nation blogger Dan Kennedy has done a lot of writing about this locally. Today he quotes from an article in the American Journalism Review that notes:

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, only 20 percent of American adults reported using digital tools to communicate with their neighbors or stay informed about community issues at least once in the past year. Only one in 10 reported reading a community blog at least once in the past year.

Kennedy says:

Disengagement from civic life is among the most persistent problems plaguing the news business. It doesn’t matter how good a job your local weekly newspaper or website does of covering your community if you fundamentally don’t care about what’s going on in your community. Thus, in order to succeed, a news organization must foster civic engagement in a way that actually builds an audience for its coverage of governmental meetings, neighborhood events and routine police-blotter news.

Patch is an expensive and risky experiment. West Roxbury is the 18th Patch community in Massachusetts; Hamilton-Wenham, North Andover and Salem are next. It makes Hubbub happy, because it means more sources for news — and more of my fellow journalists are employed. Will you engage?

Further Reading: