I thought this was interesting and timely. I read this article from the January 24th issue and remembered one of my students from my Mediabistro course was working for AOL's Patch site in Maryland. Erin Donaghue took Zachary's and my course late last year and she is one of these new journalists mentioned in the article who is learning how to report digitally and to create interesting new content on a local level. I personally don't think that I would access the new AOL homepage for my first stop of the day's perusal of local events as it looks like a Yahoo page and had more information than I needed about celebrities. But AOL's development of Patch sites around the country (there are currently 700 Patch sites operating in the US) is fascinating.
I looked for video on Erin's site but didn't see any yet, but did find some video from my hometown's Patch site that used mostly Voice Over and some handheld video footage of roads and a flooded rivers. It seems like their PatchCast video on this site is mostly a driver to their articles as there are no talking heads or reporting of people. It's definitely modeled after The New York Times Timescast series but less interesting as animations of an article on a website and static footage with no people is nothing I would be looking at on a local news level.
If I am one of those people training local journalists to create news and lifestyle content online, than hopefully these newsmakers will be creating more compelling original content than I just saw on PatchCast. So far, it's not so impressive.
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