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Local
papers, indie sites
faring fine vs. bigfoot sites
By Melanie
Bertoldi
Bulletin Staff
The emergence of
corporately-run local news sites such as AOL-owned Patch.com in parts of New England aren’t affecting local newspapers
and standalone news websites, according to their editors.
While a top executive at Patch says otherwise -- “We’ve never
been as confident,” Warren Webster, president of Patch, told the
Bulletin – one observer of online sites thinks that
the number of local readers switching from reading their traditional
newspaper to chain-owned websites is minimal.
“My sense is that if you go into most towns where there is a Patch,
a lot of people don’t even know about it, and the Patch sites
have very little in the way of advertising on them,” said Dan
Kennedy, founder of the Media Nation weblog and an assistant professor
at Boston-based Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
“How would an ordinary person find out that there’s a Patch
in his or her town? Conversely, if you pick up your daily or local paper,
they are constantly promoting their website,” he said. “(P)eople’s
habits are very slow to change, and they’re used to reading their
daily or weekly paper or both,” Kennedy said.MORE >
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