My problem with Patch: An open letter to Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong

My father was an editor at National Geographic for 30 years. I was ten years old when Watergate broke, and it transformed my life. I love journalism, at least when it’s good. I also know the difference between a photograph that is a work of journalistic art and a piece of garbage snapped by a kid with a flip camera. I care about the aesthetics of the thing; otherwise I would simply quit. For the past few months, my passion has been to elevate Patch, or at least my local Patches, from flip-camera ghetto to sparkling journalistic juggernaut. Why shouldn’t the photographs in Patch be as good as the ones in National Geographic? Because we’re local we can’t be great?

Of course, that will take money. While a 16-year-old may be happy, at least for a few weeks, to make $200 a week taking pictures, he also wouldn’t put care into the process. After driving around for six hours a day for three days and then spending a fourth and possibly fifth day writing captions and uploading the pictures (remember, this is 40 pictures, each telling a story), he might figure he could make more with a lot less hassle working as a waiter or a lifeguard. In short: in journalism, you often get what you pay for. And right now you are paying for a lot of burnout and turnover.

Arianna, you just announced — on the Patch site for Wayland, New York, no less — a new initiative of community bloggers. You explained it this way:

What’s so exciting about Patch is that it will bring quality, comprehensive news coverage to places that need it most. It’s no secret that a disproportionate amount of news coverage is centered on our country’s major cities, with their multiple newspapers, competing TV stations and armies of bloggers. Which, of course, is all well and good. But Patch’s unprecedented contribution will be to bring that same energy and quality coverage to the suburbs, villages and small towns too often neglected by traditional media. As much as any major American city, these towns provide a snapshot of our national story, a real-time portrait of the way we live now.

If you are going to aim high, you should be willing to pay for it. I’m not talking about Graydon Carter numbers. But if you want this thing to work, you should pay your photographers and videographers as much as you pay your editors. If you want to play it safe, give them a year contract and see what happens. Right now, you are exploiting and ultimately driving away the very people who would give everything, if paid, to make Patch work. There is no other way around it.

We want to destroy the competition and make a name for ourselves. This is easier than it sounds. One of Patch’s competitors in the Maryland suburbs is the Gazette newspapers, a series of local sheets that are owned by The Washington Post. Last year I took some pictures of actors in a local play for the Potomac Gazette. The arts editor, a hippie who was babbling about Vietnam while I was trying to explain the importance of great photographs, didn’t use my shots. Her preference was for stock photos provided by the actors.

If Patch cannot crush this competition, it doesn’t deserve to live. You just need to pay us what we are worth.

Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.