May 19, 2011

Street Fight

In a memo to editors, Patch editor-in-chief Brian Farnham outlines a plan to increase traffic by increasing article production, saying the process of ramping up production would involve “adjustments,” but wouldn’t be “painful.” David Hirschman reports Patch currently requires every site to post a minimum of four times per day. Farnham tells the regional editors:

If one of your sites is producing less than 4 posts a day (and unfortunately, there are a lot of these — nearly 350) immediately talk to that editor about it. This should not be a punitive conversation, it should be a collaborative discussion about how to improve things. (Are they spending too much time reporting and writing long articles? Are they too caught up in editing freelancers?)

Farnham tells Hirschman that the memo was intended as a call to action.

We have a culture of urgency. It’s still in our DNA, because we still consider ourselves a startup even though we’re bigger than most startups these days. So, anyways I fire off a lot of stuff. The whole point of that was meant to say: when you look at data there is this correlation. It’s sort of the most common-sensical thing you could say which is if you write more articles, you’ll affect growth positively.

> Patch adds 33 sites in key states that play an early role in the presidential election

Support high-integrity, independent journalism that serves democracy. Make a gift to Poynter today. The Poynter Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, and your gift helps us make good journalism better.
Donate
From 1999 to 2011, Jim Romenesko maintained the Romenesko page for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit school for journalists. Poynter hired him in August…
Jim Romenesko

More News

Back to News

Comments

Comments are closed.