Will Patch Survive?

A departure from the usual subject of this blog. Some of you may have heard that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (clearly not as heroic as his name might suggest) has decided to close down some 400 of Patch's 900 sites and lay off hundreds of Patch employees. I don't know if our local sites or editors are among them. I hope not. 

But it does conjure up a world without Patch. And that world would be a very different place for many of us in Albany. Who else is there to cover our local news? I mean, who else cares about this little square mile of urban village by the bay? For years we complained about going unnoticed by the Chron for sure, but also by the Coco Times and other papers closer to home.When Patch came along, we finally had a place that could be about us, in all our shame and glory. A place where we could rant, politic, and plead, or just find out what's happening when.

The AOL business model for Patch leans almost entirely on advertising. No ads, no revenue. Local participation drives numbers, and the more numbers the more ads. While it is not the readers' responsibility to figure out how to make Patch succeed as a business, if we want Patch to stick around than it is indeed our job as readers and writers to speak up for ourselves and to be engaged. 

There's surely enough happening around here to keep Patch interesting. But are there enough interested readers to keep Patch alive?

Just as there's no substitute for local businesses and restaurants, there's no replacement for a local news source, even if it is hosted on a server somewhere in the cloud.