Editor's Notebook: Patch Celebrates its 100th Site Launch

My, how time flies.

I can still remember the moment I accepted this job with Patch. It was April 2009, and I was sitting in a coffee shop on Wickenden Street in Providence when I got the offer to be one of the company's first local editors. It was an exciting prospect for a young journalist like myself, but also a scary one. I had a lot of fears. What is this Patch? Is it really the future of community journalism? Will it survive?

Many Newporters have asked me those same questions over the past few months as Newport Patch has started to integrate into the community. The answer I've told all, and that I'll share here with you, is that Patch is an organization of passionate individuals that's working to build a sustainable online model for community journalism. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here in Newport—news is news. The decisions made at the City Council meeting, the accolades earned by local youth, the latest scores from the Rogers football game—they're all just as important and meaningful online as they are in print. But what we do offer that's different is an interactive, free news source that allows you to find out what's going on in the city, while also directly uploading your own news with your neighbors.

Today, Patch celebrates its 100th site launch in Morristown, NJ.

It's a big deal for all of us here, but particularly for those like myself, who have watched the company grow from a small staff of about 30 to a nationwide organization that's now delivering news in 100 communities across nine states, including Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth.

I took a leap of faith when I started with Patch in 2009, but every experience I've had has proved to me just how important the work is that we're doing. Before I moved back to Rhode Island to cover Newport, I was serving as the local Patch editor in Scotch Plains-Fanwood, NJ, two small, close-knit communities just outside New York City. Like some Newporters, the residents there were also skeptical of me and Patch upon first meeting. But we worked hard to cover their communities day-in and day-out. During my time, I wrote 650+ stories and uploaded thousands of photos, on everything from a contentious school budget to the library's new Abraham Lincoln exhibit. By the end of my term, the borough council had passed a resolution in honor of my work.

This is by no means an anecdote intended to pat myself on the back. But it is intended to show the meaningful, and positive, work Patch is doing. We're in Newport because we care, because we believe news is a lot like an ecosystem, and the more coverage a community gets, the better it is for it.

On Monday, a native Newporter shared with us how reading Newport Patch "makes me feel like I'm home." This is precisely the reason we're here. We want to bring Newport to life, online. We've done it so far with our coverage of the Rogers High Summer Workforce program, our reporting on the ongoing issues of the homeless on Broadway and with our up-to-the-minute updates from the Newport Folk Festival. We'll be doing a lot more in the days and weeks to come.

We can't do it without you, though, so please do upload information on local events, spread good news through the announcements section, and share news tips with us via e-mail at lindsay@patch.com.

And, most importantly, tell us what you love (or hate) about what we're doing. What do you like about the site? What could we be doing better? The great thing about Patch is that we're open to ideas, and are constantly adapting our sites to better serve our communities.

While we may be 100 sites strong as of today, our main focus is on the work being done in each individual community. We're here to serve you, Newport, and we thank you for the support and feedback you've provided thus far. Here's to many great news days ahead.