Hyperlocal news provider Patch’s start-up, Patch Labs, wants to help local journalists in the US go full-time covering their communities.
The outfit offers independent reporters a ready-made content management system in return for 10% of their revenue.
At present it only has a few hundred sign ups. But its director of growth and partnerships says Patch Labs wants to become “the CMS of choice” for hyperlocal journalists.
Press Gazette spoke to Sarah Gayden, Patch Labs’ growth and partnerships director, about how it works.
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What is Patch Labs?
Although she works for Patch Labs now, Gayden first encountered the system as a consumer. After leaving a job on the commercial side of The Washington Post, she set herself up in December 2020 running the hyperlocal North Salem Post.
“Within about six months I was revenue-positive and growing audience, and it was really sort of snowballing,” she told Press Gazette.
Gayden was hired by Patch Labs in October 2021 to oversee partnerships with, and development of, editors using the software.
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Patch itself employs journalists to provide hyperlocal news to communities around the US. What’s New In Publishing reported last year that Patch has approximately one journalist for each of the 1,200 locations it covers.
“If you’re getting your news from Patch, it’s in the Patch branding and your editor who’s delivering that news works for Patch as part of the Patch company,” Gayden explained.
“On the Labs side of things, it’s like a start-up inside of Patch. And it’s a team that had built out a content management system specifically for hyperlocal independent journalists. So another way to think of it as a SaaS [software as a service] product.
“These independent journalists are choosing Patch Labs to power their local news sites and they run them as their own owned and operated businesses, however they see fit, and Labs takes a 10% revenue share from whatever income those editors are earning.”
As well as article publishing, the CMS incorporates newsletter software and payment tools which run on Stripe.
Gayden said there are “several hundred” prospective publishers signed up – principally because there’s no cost to register. Gayden described those publishers as “a large pool of people that are kind of – they kick the tires, they’re experimenting with it.”
But of those, “30 to 50” are regularly posting and thereby growing their audience. She cited Oklahoma’s Broken Arrow Sentinel, Michigan’s Saline Post and the Rockton-Roscoe News in Illinois as among those doing particularly well.
Although the CMS is targeted at individual journalists, Patch Labs doesn’t exclude multi-person outlets. Not all are individual journalists: the Rockton-Roscoe News, for example, identifies eight writers on its masthead – though three of them are students.
Making independent local news pay
Asked what had been working financially for the successful publishers, Gayden said: “One thing that we are thinking about constantly is changing the revenue model for local news.
“We know that – hyperlocal news, specifically – it’s just not going to work on the page view model. You know, it’s not about scale, but it’s really about engagement.
“I’ll give you my personal example. I run [a Patch Labs site] myself. I’m in North Salem, New York, which has a population of 5,000 people. The traffic I’m going to get to this site is going to reach a ceiling, and it’s not going to be appealing to a major national advertiser, but it is going to be incredibly appealing to a small local mom-and-pop business here in town who wants to reach the people who live right here.
“And so what we’re seeing is if you look at revenue coming in per month, relative to the total addressable market, the people that live in an area, that those numbers are a lot higher than what Patch has historically seen.
“So it’s all direct-sold, old-fashioned, relationship-driven. We’re not doing any programmatic advertising. And so that’s been something that we’re seeing some success on and want to explore further and see how we can replicate that.”
Another commonality among publishers building revenue and audiences, Gayden said, was a “strong news background” or “just understanding of quality local journalism, thinking about what kind of information members of their community need and want.”
Those doing well were generally consistently publishing two or three times a day; successful coverage areas included high school sports, “local obituaries, milestones… small businesses, students in the community, all those things that get a little bit lost when these papers either get bought out by a larger entity… or [are] just gone”.
Some Patch Labs publishers have been so successful they have been able to go full-time, and Gayden says there are others who are planning to.
But Patch Labs itself is not profitable yet. In line with the effort’s name, was Patch running Patch Labs as an incubator for ideas it could later use itself?
“I think it’s a ‘both/and’ rather than an either/or,” Gayden said. “Yes, it’s experimenting for Patch, but they also want to really help solve the local journalism crisis that exists in the United States, and the primary mission is to help local journalists make a sustainable living doing what they love.
“When they first started this – looking into building this product base before I joined the company, it was: ‘How can we save local news?’ And what the answer they came to was that we can’t save local news if you’re not saving local journalists, so how can we help them make enough money that this is something that they can do and support themselves on?”
What do the publishers say?
Many of the publishers identified on the Patch Labs website post only infrequently, or appear to have stopped publishing altogether.
But among the active publishers with whom Press Gazette spoke, reviews were positive.
“I’m not sure I’d still be in the local news business without Patch Labs,” said Tran Longmoore, who runs The Saline Post and worked for the original Patch between 2010 and 2012.
While he said he had “a laundry list of about 10 things I’m hoping they build into the CMS,” Longmoore said the Patch Labs CMS was “light and easy to use. If you can use Gmail, you can use this CMS.”
Michael McGinniss, editor of the Rockton-Roscoe News, echoed the point about ease of use, emphasising the support he received from Patch Labs staff.
“I couldn’t have kept going without their encouragement and training. They advised me on how to generate revenue. We’re funded through a combination of donations and advertising. And each time I had a new opportunity, a new contact, or a new reporter, they gave me guidance on how to handle it correctly.”
Longmoore said that in the last year his site, founded in 2012, generated its highest ever amount of advertising revenue. John Dobberstein, who edits the 14-month-old Broken Arrow News, said “We expect to be profitable in our first full year and look forward to continued growth.”
“You have no idea how much better life is when you don’t come home from a 4-hour assignment to a crashed website,” Longmoore said.
“If you’re some indie or mom-and-pop publisher, I can’t recommend this enough.”
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