CEOs must love it when small folk call them evil—nice guys don’t wind up masters of the universe. Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Eric Schmidt—you know they get it all the time. (Google Google and evil or Apple and evil if you have doubts.) But it’s Apple and Google choosing up sides to see who gets to rule the Internet—as Tim Wu details in his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.
Lake Effect News and Southland Savvy are examples of the kind of sites that Patch is supposedly grinding under its heel. Each was launched by a print veteran who wanted to stay in the game—the first by Lorraine Swanson after the lakefront weekly she edited, the News-Star, went out of business was sold by its owner, Wednesday Journal Inc.; the second by Dennis Robaugh, after he’d been laid off as managing editor of Sun-Times Media’s SouthtownStar. Both sites are now moribund. But Robaugh is a regional editor for Patch, and Swanson is one of the local editors he’s hired; she runs the Oak Lawn Patch.
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Patch spokesperson Janine Iamunno told me, “We studied daily newspapers in like-sized communities to Patch markets and found that on average we can operate at 4.1 percent of the cost.” Patch doesn’t pay for newsprint and doesn’t pay for real estate. Fay’s salary is about $40,000 a year—not so wretched—and because she’s expected to live where she works, she’s got a one-bedroom apartment over a Caribou coffeehouse in Winnetka. Her “office” is her backpack. “We are all completely 100 percent mobile,” she tells me. “At any given time I’m carrying around in my backpack a laptop, a camera, a video camera, a voice recorder, a traditional pen and paper, a mobile Internet card, a smart phone, and assorted chargers.” She checks her pack. “A press pass,” she adds. “A police scanner—it’s not that heavy, I get used to it. When I was in journalism school I carried most of this stuff around with me to classes.
“A lot of these suburbs we’re covering are not super bike friendly,” Resnick tells me. “I love biking through Winnetka because it has some supergreat paved roads, but it’s chock-full of big cars getting to where they’re going fast. And at night it’s pretty bad because they’re small towns and they’re not very well lit so it can be a little dangerous.”
So Patch isn’t a perfect fit. What’s more, the business strategy puzzles her. “They decided to throw tons of money into this project to rejuvenate news in the community,” she says, but “it’s more my generation who gets their news online, not the people they’re trying to reach, like our parents and grandparents.” But as she wonders how long Patch will last, she gives it its due: “It’s given a lot of journalists their start.”
So is Patch evil for being a collection of kids relocating the nation’s newsrooms to suburban coffee shops? If the next time Sofia Resnick falls off her bike she doesn’t hop right back up, Patch might have to answer for that. But you can’t exploit someone who doesn’t think she’s exploited. And when you’re 22, flinging the news giddily to the winds like so much confetti—much like I was doing at about the same age for UPI, come to think of it—you don’t.
