Bloggers of the world, pull out your headphones and listen up: stop emoting about the Royal Wedding. That post on Foucault and Danger Mouse? Junk it. All the possible jokes about Rebecca Black have been made and beaten to death; quit trying to cook up a new one. It may be time finally to get out of mom’s basement, to stop [insert staletoast blogger cliché here].
It may be time to go corporate: Patch is looking for a few good keyboard pounders who can grind out a word count.
According to Forbes, AOL’s hyperlocal news network — which has a considerable footprint here in Northeast Ohio — has been trying to sign up 8,000 bloggers over the last week. Each site editor is tasked to have five to ten bloggers on board when Patch rolls out a new blogging platform on May 4th. The move is a shift in direction for the web site, which so far has had a slow-growth business plan. But as of late, much has changed in the Patchosphere.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2011.