Patch Editor in Chief: ‘We’re The Grateful Dead of the Internet’
Three years later, Hale Global continues to show Tim Armstrong how it should have been done.
By Richard Horgan – adweek.com
February 3, 2016
Patch Editor in Chief Warren St. John has been enjoying a relatively unique experience. In fact, in the more than two decades that he has been a journalist, he says he’s never encountered anything quite like it.
It all goes back to July 2014. That’s when AOL sold Patch to investment firm Hale Global and St. John, formerly with the New York Times, was brought on board. In the time since, he’s helped rebuild Patch from a content and editorial perspective. And today, his team of 65 full-time reporters is at the center of an unusual media transformation.
“We’ve grown every month for 18 months, and now we’re reaching more than 18 million users a month,” he tells FishbowlNY. “Our traffic and revenue have doubled year-over-year. We now have 900 Patch sites, 850 daily newsletters and we’re profitable.”
St. John credits a “relentless focus on news reporting” as one of the main drivers of the Patch rebound. His team constantly publishes updates about school closings, car accidents, power outages and so on, and follows up to get the full stories.
“The audience is enormously responsive. You might call it crowdsourcing; I call it community sourcing,” St. John says. “People will tell you when they see something happening, share tips, photos.”
In that sense, Patch today has become a little like the Grateful Dead. “There’s something very Deadhead-y about it,” says St. John. “There’s a kind of love for this thing that’s revived and works and is useful. People want to be a part of it.”