Saying Goodbye To Patch: Why It Mattered

Much has been written and talked about the Patch experience from both a national and local perspective but it’s the people who live in the towns we cover who will have the final word on what it means to have been a Patch reader and user.

Today, Oct. 15, marks my final day as a Patch editor, writer, digital content specialist, producer and user. So many titles for such a simple, yet profound, task: to chronicle the people, places and events who give our life meaning in the cities and towns we call home.

That’s the important thing to remember: That in the end, it’s not about the numbers, the metrics, the hype about what you do and how it’s received, but about the day-to-day experiences captured on both a local and global scale that essentially define the human experience, for better or for worse.

It has always been the writer’s job, the journalist’s passion, to serve as the conduit through which a town can connect to its life at home, at work and in the community. To give direction where meaning is sought, to give notice when something transpires, to give explanations when something essential arises.

We celebrate wins, we mark the passage of time, we mark the milestone events, storms and happenings. We marvel at birth, we mourn at the moments of death. We strive to give meaning to the mandates, changes, directions and departures that define a new or old course of action. We point out places to go, people to know and groups and organizations that bring neighbors together to help build community connections.

We aim to become better citizens and neighbors ourselves.

So we don’t get too bothered about the debates and discussions about what news is, how it should be told, what should be covered or not, whether the “new tools” or the “old rules” have been adopted or discarded along the way.

For us, it simply is a matter of being in the moment; of being on hand when news, small or grand, transpires. The best of us realize that to get the community engaged you have to engage within the community. Simply put: You have to show up, whether it’s to a community event, a civic meeting, a theater production, a tragic unfolding or a crowning affair.

Do your job well and you will forever be moved by the stories you tell. And in the end, there really is no final goodbye.

That lesson, for me, has been hammered home over the course of three decades marked by no less than six layoffs, firings, “resizings” and “restructurings” in the news profession. It has been that insane, but also that glorious.

Before Patch, I founded a site, MyPaperNow.com, that remains live to this day, complete with the more than 50,000 News-Shot postings published since November 2007. I’ll be posting there from time to time and working, too, to further the mission of Our Town Histories and its “Something Is Eternal” multimedia, digital oral history project.

I founded that project with the words of the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town, burning bright in my mind. I can think of no better way of saying goodbye to Patch — and in offering to you a reason why our time here together mattered most — than in recounting those words again here. As the stage manager said:

We all know that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Thank you for trusting me to tell you stories for today and for always. It’s been a great ride.