You’ve probably noticed that AOL’s Patch.com is flourishing across southeastern Wisconsin, with sixteen cities having that hyper-local website model, among hundreds of Patch.com websites across America. Wisconsin’s current Patch websites offer local news, respectively, for these communities: Brookfield, Caledonia, Fox Point-Bayside, Greendale,Greenfield, Hudson, Menomonee Falls, Mount Pleasant-Sturtevant, Muskego, Oak Creek, Port Washington-Saukville, Shorewood, Sussex, Waukesha, Wauwatosa, and Whitefish Bay.)
A New York Times about Patch from January 2011 notes that the service has problems, including uneven quality and limited traffic at some individual sites.
Patch’s Wisconsin properties are all serving affluent towns, so Whitewater may not see something like it. I think that’s a mistake — we’re a town that needs more news, not less, and a Patch website might have a better go of it in a town with a university. Add our campus to the mix, and we’re as big as some of the towns that now have AOL’s service.
(Quick note: I have no connection to anyone at Patch.com, and no interesting in writing for these websites.)
But if not Patch, then perhaps something like it, as NYT reporter Verne Kopytoff notes that Yahoo! and Google both have an interest in hyper-local news delivery.
Competition is good for a community, and Whitewater could use more rather than fewer newspapers, radio stations, websites, blogs, pamphlets, pigeons with messages on their legs, etc.