PATCH.COM LAYS OFF
HUNDREDS OF
JOURNALISTS, WITHOUT
WARNING
Patch.com laid off hundreds of employees Wednesday morning, without apparent warning, meaning that most of the network's local websites will cease to produce news, local or otherwise. The decision was made by Hale Global, the "turnaround" company that bought Patch.com from AOL earlier this month.
Employees were stunned. "[W]e were all laid off this morning without being given the opportunity to let our readers know that we are gone," one wrote in a social media posting Wednesday afternoon.
Just a few years ago, Patch.com looked like a promising competitor to local print newspapers. Building on a network of stringers and part-time professionals, it sought to apply Internet technology to hyper-local news markets. It failed to live up to its early commercial promise, however, and its formal end may be near.
http://www.newsmax.com/us/patch-media-layoffs-aol/2014/01/29/id/549846
Hundreds of staffers were laid off via conference call Wednesday at the struggling hyper-local news site Patch, two reports said.
Mediate reports estimates of the layoffs were as high as 90 percent of the staff.
Media blogger Jim Romenesko wrote the editorial staff purge was executed by brand-new Patch owner Hale Global, which purchased the site from AOL Jan. 15.
In an excerpt of the conference call reprinted by Romenesko, the 10 a.m. brush-off was delivered by Patch chief operating officer Leigh Zarelli Lewis.
"Patch is being restructured in connection with the creation of the joint venture with Hale Global," the excerpt said. "Hale Global has decided which Patch employees will receive an offer of employment to move forward in accordance with their vision for Patch and which will not. Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at Patch and today will be your last day of employment with the company. …Thank you again and best of luck.
"Technically, we were laid off by AOL," a former editor emailed Romenesko. "I presume that was a condition set by Hale. Second, I have it on good authority the layoffs were 80 to 90 percent of Patchers."
Another noted:
"I was hired in 2010, survived two rounds of layoffs but not the third. I was told middle managers in editorial were on a call earlier this week and being asked about which local editors are worthy. Based on info from HQ, I had one of the top sites in all of Patch for the past 2 years, but now I’m on the outs. Sounds like politics and not performance is the deciding factor for most, if not all, of us."
The dismantling had long been rumored, with the site being dubbed AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's "white whale."
Mass layoffs were conducted last summer, when some 500 jobs were eliminated.
Still another editor with over three years experience at Patch emailed Romenesko, that: "We knew it was coming, but the silence from New York over the few months was deafening.
"They left us in a state of suspended animation. For those of us who killed ourselves working for this company, it was a real slap in the face."
Mediate reports estimates of the layoffs were as high as 90 percent of the staff.
Media blogger Jim Romenesko wrote the editorial staff purge was executed by brand-new Patch owner Hale Global, which purchased the site from AOL Jan. 15.
In an excerpt of the conference call reprinted by Romenesko, the 10 a.m. brush-off was delivered by Patch chief operating officer Leigh Zarelli Lewis.
"Patch is being restructured in connection with the creation of the joint venture with Hale Global," the excerpt said. "Hale Global has decided which Patch employees will receive an offer of employment to move forward in accordance with their vision for Patch and which will not. Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at Patch and today will be your last day of employment with the company. …Thank you again and best of luck.
"Technically, we were laid off by AOL," a former editor emailed Romenesko. "I presume that was a condition set by Hale. Second, I have it on good authority the layoffs were 80 to 90 percent of Patchers."
Another noted:
"I was hired in 2010, survived two rounds of layoffs but not the third. I was told middle managers in editorial were on a call earlier this week and being asked about which local editors are worthy. Based on info from HQ, I had one of the top sites in all of Patch for the past 2 years, but now I’m on the outs. Sounds like politics and not performance is the deciding factor for most, if not all, of us."
The dismantling had long been rumored, with the site being dubbed AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's "white whale."
Mass layoffs were conducted last summer, when some 500 jobs were eliminated.
Still another editor with over three years experience at Patch emailed Romenesko, that: "We knew it was coming, but the silence from New York over the few months was deafening.
"They left us in a state of suspended animation. For those of us who killed ourselves working for this company, it was a real slap in the face."
http://www.masslive.com/news/worcester/index.ssf/2014/01/massive_layoffs_at_patch_cut_i.html
WORCESTER — Patch Media Corp. told hundreds of employees this morning that they no longer had jobs.
"Hale Global has decided which Patch employees will receive an offer of employment to move forward in accordance with their vision for Patch and which will not. Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at Patch and today will be your last day of employment with the company," said Leigh Zarelli Lewis in a 10 a.m. conference call Tuesday morning with those employees who lost their jobs. "Thank you again and best of luck."
A Patch employee included in the layoffs said that "many" of the writers for central Massachusetts have been laid off. Patch coverage in the towns and cities of Marlborough, Grafton, Westborough, Framingham, Holliston and Hopkinton are among the communities that could be affected.
As many as two-thirds of the writers for Patch sites in Massachusetts may have been cut, according to former employees who lost their jobs in the layoffs. In Connecticut, where Patch has 67 sites, one former employee said that less than 10 Patch employees remain with the editorial staff.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after Hale Global bought the company from Aol on Jan. 15, according to news site JimRomenesko.com andTechCrunch. This is the second round of layoffs Patch has endured in less than one year, with staff cuts having been made in May 2013 and then a combined layoff in August and October 2013 when roughly 500 employees were let go. At that time, a number of sites, including Shrewsbury, lost local reporters and became "unmanned" sites using regional or general content written for all Patch sites.
"Hale Global has decided which Patch employees will receive an offer of employment to move forward in accordance with their vision for Patch and which will not. Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at Patch and today will be your last day of employment with the company," said Leigh Zarelli Lewis in a 10 a.m. conference call Tuesday morning with those employees who lost their jobs. "Thank you again and best of luck."
A Patch employee included in the layoffs said that "many" of the writers for central Massachusetts have been laid off. Patch coverage in the towns and cities of Marlborough, Grafton, Westborough, Framingham, Holliston and Hopkinton are among the communities that could be affected.
As many as two-thirds of the writers for Patch sites in Massachusetts may have been cut, according to former employees who lost their jobs in the layoffs. In Connecticut, where Patch has 67 sites, one former employee said that less than 10 Patch employees remain with the editorial staff.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after Hale Global bought the company from Aol on Jan. 15, according to news site JimRomenesko.com andTechCrunch. This is the second round of layoffs Patch has endured in less than one year, with staff cuts having been made in May 2013 and then a combined layoff in August and October 2013 when roughly 500 employees were let go. At that time, a number of sites, including Shrewsbury, lost local reporters and became "unmanned" sites using regional or general content written for all Patch sites.
Patch served as a nationwide news site focused on local coverage with editors based in individual communities. Each community had one editor who focused on local news reported daily. At the peak, Patch had nearly 1,000 sites.
Can you still call it AOL Patch? I am not sure because they mostly sold out to an entity called Hale Global recently as per the Wall Street Journal.
hump day havoc: patch does mass layoffs
Can you still call it AOL Patch? I am not sure because they mostly sold out to an entity called Hale Global recently as per the Wall Street Journal.AOL Inc. effectively abandoned its ambitious strategy of reinventing hyper-local news when it agreed Wednesday to sell a majority stake in the Patch website network to technology investment firm Hale Global.Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The companies anticipate closing the deal in the first quarter.The deal is touted as a joint venture between AOL and Hale Global, which says it specializes in turning around underperforming businesses…..Hale Global and AOL say Patch will be relaunched as a place for contributors and businesses to create “locally-themed news and content.” ….”We are committed to bringing users, local businesses, writers and advertisers together into a Patch experience full of innovation and growth,” said Charles Hale, CEO of Hale Global, in a statement.
Well corporate raiders, acquirers, whatever you want to call them never seem to follow through on the warm and fuzzy moments do they? With them and underperforming assets it is all about business. And the bottom line.
Well as of today all of our local Patch sites are kind of over. The web pages are up but this morning AOL Patch did mass layoffs. It is all over social media and the news is slowly trickling to traditional media. It is “off with their heads” Wednesday.
Romenesko has covered it the best thus far. He has a recording of “Hello You are Fired”
Part of what was said (courtesy of Romanesko):
Hi everyone, it’s Leigh Zarelli Lewis. Patch is being restructured in connection with the creation of the joint venture with Hale Global…..Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at Patch and today will be your last day of employment with the company
I’m told that hundreds — two tipsters claim two-thirds of the editorial staff — have been laid off by Patch’s new owner, Hale Global…“The patch years were years of being aol’s tool and plaything. Killed myself, almost literally. Left with literally nothing. Better off dead.”“I was a local editor for Patch for 3.5 years, up until about an hour ago. ….We knew it was coming, but the silence from New York over the few months was deafening. They left us in a state of suspended animation. For those of us who killed ourselves working for this company, it was a real slap in the face.”
I have many friends who worked with Patch since it’s inception. Some were traditional journalists and writers by trade. People like Tom Walsh, who is now the Public Information Officer of Lower Merion Township. Or former Managing Editor of Main Line Media News, Tom Murray and Sam Strike from the now defunct Suburban and Wayne Times, Tom Sunnergren, Anthony Leone. And more.
Heck, when Patch was in its embryo stage I was a freelancer for photos and occasional articles for mostly Ardmore Patch.
I have been critical of Patch in the past couple of years. It had gone from being this wonderful hub of hyper-local news to a mish mosh of spelling and grammatical errors with very little emphasis on what was happening in the communities it was covering. But yet, there were Patch sites that continued to stand out – locally Malvern Patch until Pete Kennedy left, Phoenixville Patch, Tredyffrin-Easttown Patch, East Hampton Patch andRadnor Patch.
If I had to pick my favorite it would have been Radnor Patch, where Sam Strike was editor. She is a friend and I have always loved her writing and photography skills.
If I had to pick a golden time for a lot of the local Patch sites, it would have been when Tom Murray was a Regional Editor. A real newspaper guy, he really taught me how to write when I used to contribute to then Main Line Life Newspaper.
But this morning for my remaining friends at Patch like Sam Strike it was “hello, you must be going, you are fired.”
Sam Strike wasn’t the only fine Patch person who got the axe today. Bob Byrne of Tredyffrin Patch and it looks like West Chester Patch and Malvern Patch and the list goes on. Basically if you go to Patch, click on the editor’s hyper link. It goes to an “oops there is nothing here” page. That is how I am counting up who is gone from our region.
I have been in touch with some of the Patch people I knew today. Tom Sunnergren who now writes for places like ESPN.com and hibu (you know those Malvern Life and similar “Life” magazines we get in the mail now once in a while?) and I spoke this afternoon for a few minutes.
Tom said he left Patch in August 2013 for a new position and when he thought he saw the final handwriting start to appear on the wall. He told me he believes all the Patch editors in our region is gone. He said enjoyed his experience at Patch, they gave it the “college try”. He remarked towards the end of his tenure there was a period of mixed directives that was hard on editors.
We spoke about Patch being almost a social experiment after a fashion. He remarked it would serve as a cautionary tale to the next group that tried this hyper-local formula.
Not to armchair quarterback but at first Patch had too many sites and tons of people working for them. Then they kept cutting people but not consolidating Patch areas to keep up with the layoffs. First they were right there with your hyper-local news reporting on local issues from local meetings. Then they were not covering the news but telling you that you could blog on Patch “for free”.
The Patch sites around here operated under a mushy soft news umbrella after Tom Murray left the Regional Editor spot for another job.
Sam Strike now former editor of Radnor Patch sent a note out to her e-mail list this afternoon:
Date: Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 1:23 PMSubject: It’s been a pleasure
Hi all,I wanted to let you know that it has been a pleasure working with you all over the years (some many, some few). Today Patch laid off the majority of its staff, myself included.I’ve been doing local news in Radnor for a decade. And I’ve enjoyed it. But I think it’s time for a new challenge.I have been and will continue to be pursuing work in the public relations/communications sector. I would appreciate any leads that you may encounter.My Patch email will be shut down at 5 p.m. today
I was also in touch with Anthony Leone today. He used to be a Patch editor I worked with at the Haverford-Havertown Patch. Anthony always had an uphill battle while at that Patch and so did every subsequent editor because it wasn’t just the Havertown/Haverford Township Patch. They also tossed in the town I used to live in when I lived in Lower Merion: Haverford.
Haverford, Lower Merion Township should have been attached to Bryn Mawr or Ardmore Patch but only the local editors ever got that. Anyway, I asked Anthony what he thought and this is what he shared with me:
While it is a shame that this happened to so many of my former Patch colleagues, some of whom I have worked with personally, it is not a surprise. I do wish them the best of luck. One of the wonderful things that I have discovered since I left Patch in July 2012 is the fact that so many former Patchers are still in contact with one another and offer support.Since I left Patch, I’ve written a lot about it on my blog What Burns My Bacon, but I thought in the beginning that they were filling a true community need, something that the readers really wanted. But over time decisions were made and it started to have a negative impact on Patch and its readers. I just hope someone can take the best parts of Patch, fix the things that were wrong with it and make something that will employ journalists and give readers what they truly desire: Original, local news.
So now what? What is the future of journalism? Regionally and locally our newspapers have had to keep cutting back while beefing up on things like new technology and an online presence.
Years ago I had the good fortune to become aware of a blogger named Karl Martino who was one of the folks who thought up this amazing blog, a blog community really, called PhillyFuture.org which is now defunct. One of his topics there was the future of journalism. I wish I still had those posts he and others wrote. (he still blogs at paradox1x.)
Journalism was so different when many of us were little kids. Real newspaper people and hard-core editors chasing the story.
Then came the failures.
I remember the first time The Philadelphia Bulletin closed. 1982. Then the name was bought and it was resurrected for a second life. Then it died again in June 2009. It becamedeficit omne quod nasciture or everything that is born passes away.
Patch was launched in our area on or about September 10, 2010. One of their editors wrote at the time:
“Want the facts without bias? A team of trained journalists covering every government meeting, every school board hearing and keeping the community abreast of local events? A brand new online newspaper launching Sept. 10, 2010 in Ardmore. Patch.com is owned and funded by AOL, supports community journalism on a “hyperlocal” level. Patch will cover all of the goings on in its three namesake communities, and will be updated multiple times every day with breaking news and information. “
The initial Patch sites in the greater Philadelphia area went “live” at 10:55 a.m. on September 10, 2010. The Patch editors were ironically all fired by that time today.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote an interesting article about the future of journalism on Attytood this past October 16th.
He said in the article titled Like it or not, this is the future of American journalism :
I think we’re seeing that since actual civic-minded good-for-you news and investigative reporting — propped up for more than a century by department store ads, classifieds and crossword puzzles — has zero economic value in the digital free market, there’s only one thing that will keep it alive. And it’s not really what those hundreds of journalism reform articles I read over all those years were about — things like reader engagement and crowdsourcing and using social media (although those things matter).It’s really just about very rich people.And not just any very rich people, but very rich people with an agenda.
Given the state of politics and craziness that has defined the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise again of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News I am almost surprised he was able to articulate much of this particular piece.
But is he wrong? Sadly, I think not.
Who will be our voices in Chester County now? We get some coverage on TV if too many people in Philadelphia aren’t being murdered or politicians aren’t causing scandal. But as far as local news, we don’t have much coverage by the Philadelphia Inquirer (they jettisoned their Chester County bureau a few years ago), and the Daily Local and Main Line Media News are stretched thin.
Will we be our own voices? We have all but run out of our traditional real-time story tellers A/K/A reporters and editors.
Not surprisingly most major media outlets like the New York Times are now starting to report on the Patch editorial massacre today. They all are saying that neither AOL Patch nor new owner Hale Global would comment on the layoffs.
Interestingly enough according to Fox News a Patch that survived with editor intact apparently is Greenwich Patch. As in Greenwich, CT. Why? Because Tim Armstrong (AOL) lives there basically. Fox reports that AOL still owns 40% of Patch.
To now former Radnor Patch Editor Sam Strike and Tredyffrin-Easttown and lately Phoenixville Patch Editor Bob Byrne I wanted to say thank you. They were among the last editors standing until today that I really respected. They are true journalists and are people of integrity.
My friend and former editor (as well as Patch Regional Editor) Tom Murray said to me today “Very sad day when journalist and friends lose their jobs.”
Please feel free to share your thoughts.
What is the future of media? Journalism?
Good morning,
ReplyDeleteNice to see the TPP still having problems, hope that damn thing dies a quick death but I'm sure it will be back.
So my area was actually colder than Fred's yesterday, 9 vs. 14. It's 10 this morning but the warm up begins this afternoon, high projected above freezing :)
I'm caught on reading and keeping an eye on emerging markets, still feels like 2008 to me. Have a great day.
Yeah , be glad you weren't in Atlanta ! Folks still trying to retrieve abandoned cars I see.....
ReplyDeleteTPP bogged down - Harry Reid good for something !
Emerging markets acting like Atlanta driving with two inches of snow on the ground ......... ........rather than 2008 , it seems like summer of 2007 to me , you can smell the smoke in the air so you know something is burning , flames just not visible yet !
Have a great day , be safe out there !