Charlie Breitrose confirmed that he was laid off from his job as editor of Newton Patch. He doesn’t know what will happen to the site. According to media blogger Jim Romenesko and several other sources, AOL laid off hundreds of people today as part of its joint venture with Hale Global.
Newton Patch editor laid off. Are lights out at site?
by Nathan Phillips | Jan 29, 2014 | Newton | 7 comments
I can’t say I’m surprised but it’s still sad to hear – one less source of local news.
It is sad. I never dealt with Charlie, but it’s truly a bad sign.
Patch was really great when it first came out. Melanie Graham was always on top of breaking news. But, I can’t say I’m surprised, either. Sometime over the past year, I noticed less and less Newton-centric content, more ads, more promotional blog posts, and articles that were on every other Patch site as well. It’s a shame. Hoping for the best for all the Patch editors who lost their jobs!
Here’s more details about the Patch situation from CommonWealth magazine.
This is actually part of a much larger news trend away from geographic targeting and toward interest-targeting. Think Boston Globe versus Pinterest.
In the sense that that geographic sameness is an “interest group” it is, in fact, rather small. Consider that the entire universe for Newton-interest news is potentially 80,000. However, not all of those people will truly be interested in a regular basis, so the audience is much less. Now divide that audience by three key news sources: Boston Globe, TAB and Patch.
The problem is that news gathering remains an expensive enterprise. You still need to pay a reporter, that reporter can only write as many stories as they can report in a day.
Some technologies are trying to change that, like CO Everywhere, a Boston-based mobile app that tries to aggregate social information based on your location. Dataminr is also doing some interesting work in confirming Twitter information, but that hasn’t filtered down to the local level yet.
Meet the new boss? I see a posting from today, Jan 31.
@Adam: Looks like one reporter did this story for multiple sites. Boss appears to be or was the Marblehead editor.
And here’s how hundreds of Patch employees found out that they were out of a job.