Patch Is All Over New Hampshire, Covering The Nation's First Primary

By Joe Pompeo

MANCHESTER, N.H.—Residents of New Hampshire are by now accustomed to all the giant buses and satellite vans bearing the big, splashy logos of the bigger cable and broadcast news brands trawling through their streets. 

Outside the debates in Manchester and Concord this past weekend, there was a slightly less imposing-looking green RV bearing the friendly logo of Patch, the 23-state hyperlocal news network first launched in 2007 and then acquired in 2009 by AOL, which expanded Patch from a few dozen websites two years ago to more than 850 today.

The R.V., which was rented in Massachusetts for the lead up to Tuesday's primary, is a first for Patch, a spokeswoman, Janine Iumunno, told us.

"It's our 24-hour news operation home base, manned by our local and regional editors," she said. "It serves as their home base for coverage. It will be hitting candidate town halls and appearances, polling stations, rallies—any place where there's reporting to be done."

It's also part of a bigger story, the one about the earnest (and reportedly money-bleeding) corporate-backed community news venture striving for a bigger presence on the national stage.

The 2012 presidential race suggests a pivotal opportunity for Patch, whose impact so far has mostly been provincial. There have been times when Patch reportage put local sites on the map, such as the Ridgewood, N.J. hub's scoop last May that Gov. Chris Christie, then still being floated as potential 2012 G.O.P. contender, . But the quality and content of the sites, each of which employs a single full-time editor-reporter to oversee day to day operations, (a grueling 24/7 slog, by some accounts), varies widely. And not all Patches have been able to expand beyond the formula of community meetings and softball coverage.

But for the lucky ones that have presidential hopefuls passing through as many of their local high schools and diners as possible during the primary season, the Patches have a way of being bigger than themselves, if they deploy their local knowledge to avoid getting bigfooted by major media organizations.

Of course this was all part of Arianna Huffington's plan for Patch when her six-year-old Huffington Post was acquired by AOL last spring. In the wake of the merger, she handed the task of integrating Patch to one of her top newsroom lieutenants, executive editor Tim O'Brien. The idea was to leverage the network's local reporting muscle in a way that would benefit the larger AOL and HuffPost brands.

Eight months later, Patch was being touted as a key part of HuffPost's 2012 election coverage. (The Huffington Post has its own team of reporters on the ground here, who have been a visible presence on the trail so far.)

"Working with Patch," Huffington said in a statement back in November, "including our 48 early primary and caucus Patches—we'll give our readers a 360-degree view of the candidates and concerns that matter most to them."

Here in New Hampshire, where the candidates are running around having their final pow-wows with voters heading into tomorrow's primary, there are 10 Patch sites with 12 journalists between them, including two regional editors to coordinate the coverage. Patch reporters were on deck at both debates this past weekend, such as the one sitting next to Capital at the NBC News/Facebook debate on Tuesday morning, who was liveblogging furiously. Several of his colleagues were there, too.

"As we were in the room watching the debate, we heard that an Occupy N.H. protester had been arrested outside the event," said regional editor Marc Fortier, in an email. "[Patch editors] Carol Robidoux and Ryan O'Connor leapt into action, ran across the street, and spoke with the Occupiers, while Tony Schinella, our Concord local editor, got the details on the phone from the Concord P.D. I'm sure our influential Republicans in the room thought we were all crazy as we yelled and shouted at each other across the room, with two of us running out mid-event, but we got the story up before anyone else had it, as far as I'm able to tell."

A Patch reporter was likewise squeezed into the scrum at last night's Mitt Romney/Chris Christie rally at a high school in Exeter, which turned out to be one of the most frenetic and media-friendly events of recent days. He may not have been able to get more eyeballs on his coverage than bigwigs like The New York Times and Boston Globe, whose Romney beat reporters were also present, but he did produce several video-equipped items for his own constituents. (Exeter, as it happens, has a Patch site of its own.)

There have been a few bigger coups, as well. The Concord site was the first to report on , for which it was rewarded with pick-up in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic Wire and others, said Iumunno.

And yesterday morning, "I saw the chairman of the state G.O.P. walk by the RV, so I ran after him, turned him around and invited him into the Patchback for a video exclusive," said Dan Tuohy, another regional editor, via email. "I , just before the guy went live on Fox."

If Tuohy's name sounds familiar, you may remember him from a campaign segment last Friday with CNN's Ashleigh Banfield, who asked him to weigh in on the New Hampshire primary.

"It's pretty remarkable that you've dispatched journalists all over the ground in every key state for reporting on the primaries," said Banfield.

"We've been all over New Hampshire just trying to catch up with the candidates," Tuohy replied. "It's local news. The New Hampshire primary is a national event, but all politics is local, and our editors at Patch.com are making it happen."

As for the Patch R.V. in New Hampshire (there's a to give it a proper nickname), it goes back to the rental company on Wedesnday after all the votes have been tallied. Iumunno said the company is still working out its plans to have a vehicle on the ground in other primary states.

"Our readers are loving it so far," she said.