Happy Birthday Concord NH Patch!

At 4 p.m. on Friday, June 17, 2011, Concord NH Patch was launched, offering New Hampshire’s capital city another news outlet and online community resource. 

It was an exciting afternoon. I spent the previous two weeks in training and building all of the elements for the site, including hundreds of stock photos taken around the community and numerous stories produced for the launch. 

The site was then turned on … and there was no turning back.

When I walked up to The Draft to begin the Tuesdays with Tony editorial board hours earlier today, I was thinking about all that work when we first started, not knowing if the community would take to what we were going to offer them. The other thing that struck me was this: I was walking inside the restaurant at the exact time the site was turned on three years before. 

Anyone who has ever worked for a start-up or built something from the ground up knows that the process isn’t easy. It’s a lot of work, tons of hours, extra hours on top of those normal hours, never stopping for anything. It can be a thrilling experience. And well worth it, too.

In the case of Patch, there was a need for an alternative media outlet in the community and readers have really taken to what we’ve been doing the last three years. 

Along the way, I’ve produced a lot of posts and stories – more than 20,300, as of this moment, for the thousands of people who enjoy and also rely on our free news. There have been small and big stories alike, national headlines made, an unheard of amount of political coverage and breaking news, and exclusive videos seen nowhere else. Concord NH Patch has also won a bunch of awards. 

As we enter our fourth year, there will be more changes. A redesigned site is coming soon and it will be like nothing you've seen before. While the responsibilities of most Patch editors have changed in the wake of new ownership and restructuring, not unlike what all media companies are going through (including local ones), what we hope to offer you will remain the same. 

If you like what we're doing and own a business, please contact our sales representative Anne Wakeman at anne.wakeman@patch.com and make a commitment to advertise on the site. Concord NH Patch has a huge audience. Our rates are very competitive. Let us deliver customers to you! 

In closing, a big, very big actually, thank you, to all of you, our readers, for taking the time each day to look at what we're doing. Thank you for subscribing to our daily newsletter, joining us on Facebook and Twitter, and sharing our links with your friends and neighbors so they too can keep up with what is going on in Concord and the capital region. You have all truly made this site as great as it could possible be and I’m so grateful for that.

Best, Tony