Somerville Patch

[mary388.livejournal.com]

Has anyone noticed a drop in the quality of the information in the Somerville Patch? It does not have as many Somerville centric articles. Now the articles seem to be very generic and have little of the political
scene. Has Chris Orchard left?

Comments

[ron_newman]

Patch fired Chris Orchard in January. They fired several other popular local editors (such as Belmont's and Waltham's) around the same time.

I've repeatedly suggested that the replacement editor, John Waller, introduce himself on Facebook or LJ to discuss his vision and plans for Somerville Patch, but he hasn't replied to any of my suggestions. Maybe he'll be more responsive to you. The e-mail address currently on the site is Somerville@Patch.com , but maybe also try john.waller@patch.com .

[mary388.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Ron. Barely even read the Patch now. Why did they fire Chis Orchard?

[ron_newman]

Better to ask him (or his successor) than me. Or ask these people.

[fangirl715.livejournal.com]

*Potentially triggery*






No kidding--here's an example of a current headline: Missing Student Found Dead, Child Rape Charges, Home Values, Best High School in MA and Wegmans Opens This Weekend. Gotta love how the unfortunate dead student and the child rape ties in with Wegmans' opening, eh? (Yes, people did comment and complain about that, but they haven't changed it yet.) Not to mention the blog purporting to tell "the truth about the pit bull rescue movement," which, from what I can tell, seems to be obsessed with listing all the pit bull attacks in the country and proving just how eeeeeevil pit bulls and the people who love them are...never mind that dogs of all breeds have been known to attack people, not just pit bulls. I don't recall seeing that before the change in January, but it's up almost every day now.

[tom kiley (from livejournal.com)]

PATCH fired most of their staff. It seems like the few people that are left recycle the same click-bait type articles.

Don't know about the Somerville site in particular though.

[jdh0625.livejournal.com]

The Patch project was losing a lot of money and had two big rounds of layoffs in August 2013 and in January 2014. Orchard survived the first round, but it seems like even most of the popular/successful editors were shown the door in the second round.

The Somerville Patch is pretty useless at this point. The Somerville Journal and the Somerville Times are still around for day-to-day news -- is there anything else out there?

[courtney o'keefe (from livejournal.com)]

mem_winterhill had this DSLJ thread going recently: https://tinyurl.com/k6lkkgr