What the Hell happened to the Renton Patch?

There was a time when the Renton Patch was my go-to source for local news. Now? It's merely a link dump, a confusing mess of regurgitated news stories from towns I've never heard of. During the Superbowl, the Renton Patch on facebook posted this: "Toddler Walks Out of Child-Care Center Unnoticed" It seemed a strange time to post a story like since we were all watching an AMAZING game at the time. I clicked on it though and read that it happened in Germantown and thought, "Does Seattle have a Germantown?" And then I thought, why am I reading this random story from some town in Maryland? The Superbowl was on and our guys were kicking ass! The old Renton Patch (former editors) would have at least posted something acknowledging this, maybe a Seahawk photo for us to like and a chance to post comments and connect with our neighbors during this exciting time for our city.

If it weren't for the occasional cut&pasted story from the Reporter newspapers there would be nothing "local" about the Renton Patch but the incessant real estate listings.

When the Patches first started sprouting up on the internet a few years ago I was excited about the idea of "hyperlocal" news. Jenny Manning was like our own personal reporter. She was at nearly every important event in the city, snapping photos and posting articles in real time. One morning I heard sirens in my neighborhood - a house had caught fire and cops and firefighters were on the scene. So was Jenny, and in less than an hour she had interviewed the authorities, wrote the story and posted it along with photos. Now that's service!

The stories we get now are  "How to Treat a Bulging Disc in Your Lower Back" and "The Best Educational Apps for Kids" and a bunch of random news stories from places far away from Renton. If I want to read stuff like this I can go to Yahoo news. I want the Renton Patch to be like it used to be, about Renton. I want Jenny back!

But they let her go this summer, along with hundreds of others in a big restructuring of the company. "They" being the money men at AOL who saw questionable profitabilty in Patch, not the positive impact it was having on communities. It looks like even more Patches will soon dry up as this week the new owners at Hale Publishing laid off hundreds more employees via conference call: http://consumerist.com/2014/02/03/its-nothing-personal-hundreds-of-patch-employees-laid-off-during-c....

I was never an employee, just a blogger who wanted to share my perspective of Renton with others in my city. This will probably be my last post though, since no one seems to be listening anymore. I just wanted to point out that for a while there, we had a good thing going.