In October 2009, Patch began opening their hyperlocal news sites around the NY market. Sean Roach was hired to build and manage Patch’s Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow branch site and in a recent article he wrote for Columbia Journalism Review, Roach said, “the backbone of the website’s offerings would be local news and information, with the goal being the digitization of a community,” when describing the initial push into the market.
According to Roach, Patch saw a paradigm shift in how the company delivered news to their regional audiences over the period of two years that he was an editor. After Patch’s parent company AOL was acquired by The Huffington Post in 2011, “the Patch site itself was redesigned to make it easier to aggregate stories from other news and information sites, a practice perfected by HuffPo.” Roach also states that as Patch looks to profitability, “the effort to find the balance between shoes-on-the-ground reporting and search-engine pop that aids profitability will result in sites that have a dramatically different character than they did even a year ago.”
Own a local business?