Patch’s Biggest Blunder: Ignoring Cities 

Guest post by Merrill Brown, a member of the founding team of Court TV and the founding Editor in Chief of MSNBC.com. Brown advises digital media start-ups and is a Venture Partner at DFJ Frontier. 

As the management and ownership of the hyperlocal media venture Patch endure contortions about the AOL company’s future, there’s an enormous amount of punditry concluding that Patch’s failures are both about its model and about the impossible nature of succeeding in providing digital news and information to local communities. Some of it is wise, but most everyone is missing a critical point. READ MORE