Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
A high number of Patch editors from Rhode Island and around the country were laid off today. While the corporate-owned community news websites aren’t informing the community about the changes, the people that built and kept the sites vibrant, who are now without a paycheck, are.
We spoke with Olga Enger, the former editor of Newport Patch who says she is going to start a locally-owned hyperlocal site to serve the community and she already has a Facebook page.
Listen to our conversation:
What a wild week local journalist Joe Hutnak just had.
The Patch reporter filed top notch coverage of the Woonsocket Democratic mayoral primary last week and was invited to appear on WPRI Newsmakers to discuss his excellent effort. Ted Nesi called his story “the best analysis I saw of what Baldelli-Hunt did right.”
But Patch didn’t let Hutnak appear on WPRI’s popular Sunday politics show. “The day after we invited Joe,” Nesi told me, “I got a call from someone higher up at Patch saying he wouldn’t be allowed to join us on TV due to the ‘current circumstances’ there.”
The circumstances were that Hutnak had already been laid off. His last day was Tuesday but he had known since August, when company-wide cuts were announced, that his position would be eliminated by mid-October.
Hutnak was one of the original Patch employees in Rhode Island and served as the editor of Johnston Patch for much of his tenure with the company. Johnston and Smithfield Patch sites have become zombie sites. Zombie sites, what Patch is calling “unstaffed sites” don’t have dedicated editorial resources and are populated with non-local stories.
Here’s how the former editor of Watsonville (Calif) Patch, described the new incarnation of the site she launched in 2010:
Restructuring at Patch eliminated my position. It will also change how Watsonville Patch is managed going forward.
Let me be clear: Patch is not closing. In fact, none of the local Patch sites will go dark. But Watsonvlle Patch will no longer get as much local attention from an editor.
What does that mean? We’re giving you the site.Watsonville Patch is now your free, hyperlocal community forum. Write blogs. Post your events and share announcements. (Just please be nice to each other.)
Now that Hutnak doesn’t work for Patch anymore, he can make his own decision about appearing on TV. And now that he doesn’t work for Patch anymore, Nesi and Newsmakers may want to interview him about that, too. Hutnak might not want to answer too many questions about the his former employer, as here’s what a former Patch employee told Romenesko about the severance offer for those who were formally laid off yesterday.
Make it to Oct. 15 and the employee gets 2 mos severance. They can receive an additional 2 weeks pay if they agree to sign a separation agreement and forgo certain rights that are as yet undefined.
There’s been a lot of changes at Patch, the network of local news websites, since I left the company two years ago.
Back then, the AOL-owned company was launching new sites nationwide with reckless abandon. It preached the gospel of community journalism and prided itself on outfitting its editors with tools and resources to cover their towns. It was a fun place to work and morale among my co-workers was very high.
Now all that has changed. For the worse.
When I worked there, Patch employed 19 full-time journalists to staff 15 sites in Rhode Island. Each site had a healthy freelance budget and a part-time community editor. Now, there are only 10 full-time journalists working for the 15 local sites; freelance budgets and community editors have been eliminated altogether.
And as of today, Patch’s initial business model of having one editor dedicated to a community is gone too.
Every local editor in Rhode Island is now responsible for multiple sites. This has been happening through attrition for about a year, but Patch in RI is undergoing a big reshuffle this week.
Many local employees have been discussing the changes on social networks, but to my knowledge there has been no formal announcement from the company. Suffice to say, the folksy pictures of local editors at the top of each site now have little to no relationship to the reality of the staffing situation anymore.
Patch invested heavily in Rhode Island when it needed to develop an audience. Now that it is a known commodity, the company is dramatically scaling back. Employees are being given fewer resources and are expected to produce more results. Many openly complain about their jobs and their community on Facebook. Sales staff is gaining influence over editorial decisions.
This isn’t the model for community journalism, this is the model for corporate journalism.
Last week we reported that education activists plan to attend Thursday’s Board of Regents meeting to protest new graduation requirements tied to high stakes testing. Today, the Providence Journal reports that “If those rules were already in place, 44 percent of this year’s seniors would be in jeopardy of not receiving a diploma, based on their poor math performance last year on the [NECAPs].”
Proponents of the change say it will help raise the level of education in the Ocean State, while opponents, according to ProJo education writer Jennifer Jordan “say education officials are forcing students to bear the consequences of a failed education system — with disastrous consequences. Without a diploma, young people cannot join the Army, participate in programs such as City Year, or apply to college.”
Speaking of high stakes testing, the Journal also runs this AP story about the El Paso, Texas school district that “was trying to push out hundreds of low-performing sophomores to prevent them from taking accountability tests.”
More WPRI poll results: Gov. Chafee is still unpopular but his approval rating is improving, while Angel Taveras and Gina Raimondo are deadlocked each with 58 percent approval ratings … it’s gonna be an interesting gubernatorial campaign in 2014!!
Did you know conservative pundit Ann Coulter uses Rhode Island as an example when she advocates for voter ID laws. According to Politifact, she told “The View” on Thursday, “One of the first states in the union to pass voter-ID bills was Rhode Island, 85 percent Democratic legislature,” she said. “And who pushed it? A black Democrat in the House, a black Democrat in the Senate. That’s a fact.” It’s true our voter ID law was supported by minority legislators in both chambers but it’s not true that our law was among the first in the country.
Even the gas is better in Massachusetts, or at least cheaper.
I mentioned Patch in yesterday’s Progress Report and it attracted some interesting comments. It’s true that Patch is slashing editorial budgets while increasing the workload on the local editors. It’s also true that many of the local editors don’t place a high value on hard news. One Patch editor told me they don’t even cover their local school committee!! Cranston Patch, on the other hand, does a great job doing real journalism on the community it covers.
Best correction of the day: “The tortoise won its race with the hare in Aesop’s fable about those animals. A clue in Sunday’s crossword puzzle inaccurately described the race’s outcome.”
The first presidential debate is tonight … here’s how the candidates will try to dodge the tough questions.
Today in 1967, the legendary Woodie Guthrie died.
Congratulations to Barrington for becoming the first town in Rhode Island to ban plastic grocery bags, and here’s hoping many more municipalities follow suit; such restrictions serve as a great aid in cleaning up Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island’s greatest natural asset.
Speaking of firsts, the first offshore wind farm in the United States, which should generate enough electricity to power almost 20,000 homes, could be built off Block Island by 2014, says the Providence Journal. If you’re worried about the five, 600-foot-tall turbines effect on the environment, this is what the ProJo says the project will do to keep things cozy for wildlife:
“During construction, Deepwater would use a spotter boat and would suspend work if [endangered North American right] whales get too close. The company would do above-water pile driving to reduce underwater noise when the turbines’ foundations are being anchored to the ocean bottom.”
There could be another civil liberties controversy brewing in Cranston, as Senate candidate Sean Gately is now making an issue out of the school department’s decision not to let the Cub Scouts recruit new members on school property.
Better late than never, the ProJo editorial team runs a post mortem on the 38 Studios debacle, laying the most blame on Don Carcieri and the least on Linc Chafee … meanwhile Curt Schilling will get the worst of it tonight on ESPN as he’ll be featured in a documentary about athlete’s who go broke.
The biggest chain of weekly newspapers in Rhode Island has a new publisher and she is doing something a journalist should never do, namely saying things that are patently untrue: “Our position in our markets is definitely positive as we continue to be the dominant news source for our communities,” Jody Boucher told Ted Nesi in an email. No they aren’t. In fact in almost every community Southern Rhode Island Newspapers has weekly papers in, their properties are a distant second to Patch sites.
Speaking of which, Patch is taking on the Valley Breeze now, too.
Today in 1800, Nat Turner, one of America’s greatest revolutionaries, is born.
Rhode Island sure is a complex place politically. While Pat Smith points out this morning that we’re the only state with a Democratic-leaning legislature and without a Republican governor to pass a voter ID bill, the New York Times points out we’re also the only state without a Democratic governor to move forward with a health care exchange. Does this make us moderate, or erratic?
Brendan Doherty’s job for the next couple weeks is to make himself seem more liberal than he actually is, or would be if elected to Congress … and while the conservative, Mitt Romney-supporting, former state cop will begin that effort in earnest today, Dan McGowan offers a great primer on the differences between him and Democratic incumbent David Cicilline.
While Ted Nesi points out that Mike Riley, the Ayn Rand acolyte running against Congressman Jim Langevin got mentioned on a national blog, Politfact points out that his message to Rhode Islanders, as evidenced by his radio ads, has included “a gross distortion of very common practices allowed by law and the U.S. Constitution.” Going back to the gold standard may well be a good idea (according to the Ron Pauls and John Galts of the world) but if anyone’s acting like a “shark” in the campaign for second congressional it’s Riley.
If you’re keeping score at home: House Speaker Gordon Fox isn’t supporting Rep. Jon Brien’s write-in campaign but conservative Woonsocket state Senator Marc Cote is … most interesting that both Reps. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt and Bob Phillips decided not to weigh in.
As we predicted on Twitter a few weeks back, there’s a new Patch site coming to Rhode Island real soon … Smithfield Patch will launch within a week, according to Johnston Patch editor Joe Hutnak who will edit both sites.
Here’s a scary statistic: 28 percent of Rhode Island parolees return to the ACI within a year. Are we letting bad people out of jail or do we need to do a better job of rehabilitating prisoners and helping them readjust to life on the outside?
Please, for the sake of our state’s reputation across the country, let this rumor not be true. Buddy Cianci is smart, well-connected and a very nice guy … but Rhode Island needs him back in office like we need another 38 Studios fiasco…
How bad is economic inequality getting in America? This from NPR: “One recent study suggests the income gap might be greater today than even during colonial times – even when you account for slavery.”
The Providence Journal describes the conditions of a Middletown group home for children that caused the state to inspect all of its 76 facilities around the state: “broken glass littering the floor, trash strewn in different rooms, and a foul odor in the air, according to the police report.”
It might not be a story that attracts much attention, but it’s an important one none-the-less. The very least fortunate among us, literally orphans and other at-risk kids, are living in conditions described by police as being “deplorable.” If, as a community, we don’t want to afford these tremendously disadvantaged children a suitable home simply because it’s the right thing to do, then we should at least do so because the alternative is surely much worse for Rhode Island in the long run.
While I linked to a clip from Annie yesterday, it’s important to note that there is rarely a wealthy industrialist like Daddy Warbucks who swoops in from the private sector to rescue these kids from state care. It’s up to us to ensure that they grow up to be healthy productive members of society.
Seems like we weren’t the only ones to find Anthony Gemma’s lack of support for Democrats a bizarre. Former congressman Patrick Kennedy chided the increasingly irrelevant candidate for his comments on the Buddy Cianci Show, reports WPRI and RIPR. “This is about Rhode Island, not about each candidate, and I don’t think Mr. Gemma understands this,” Kennedy said. Ian Donnis makes an interesting observation about Kennedy carrying this message for Democrats: “Kennedy, now out of elective office, allows the current members of RI’s congressional delegation to avoid the fray while simultaneously delivering a sharp message that will draw considerable media interest.”
Woonsocket Patch reports on CVS dropping out of ALEC and lets Rep. Jon Brien, the local face of ALEC, get away with a pretty disingenuous description of the far-right wing bill mill.
“ALEC is described by board member and Woonsocket Rep. Jon Brien (Dist. 50, Woonsocket), as a bipartisan group that puts lawmakers together with businesses to come up with ideas (ultimately, legislation) “That will foster a free-market society,” reads the article. ALEC is roughly about as bipartisan as the Rhode Island General Assembly and I’m not quite sure how voter ID and Stand Your Ground laws help “foster a free-market society.”
Speaking of voter ID laws, Vice President Joe Biden continued the White Houses assault on the often-disenfranchising election laws.
A blog that bills itself as being “home of the most self-aggrandizing commenters” details a Twitter exchange with Portsmouth Rep. Dan Gordon. The author of the post describes the Twitter exchange as “pretty odd behavior from an elected official, but Dan Gordon is no ordinary state representative.” True that!
Gordon wasn’t the only Rhode Islander whose handiwork was featured on an out-of-state website yesterday. Freelance photographer and RI Future contributor Ryan Conaty had a . His pictures will be in Sunday’s print edition.
The Boston Globe reports that Mitt Romney worked at Bain for three years longer than he has claimed in the past.
Tomorrow is Woodie Guthrie‘s birthday. It’s also the nine-year anniversary of Rhode Island’s most embarrassing moments in recent memory: when Governor Don Carcieri had the State Troopers raid the Narragansett Indian Reservation because they weren’t paying taxes on cigarette sales.
So let me get this straight: Mitt Romney avoids paying taxes and Republicans call his actions patriotic. But when a Native American tribe does so, well send in the troops.
