Hyperlocal AI with a Million Subscribers

Patch built a newsletter system to be not hard-nosed journalism but a community-building tool.

Patch, according to Warren St. John, its CEO, is “a little shop that’s trying to do this kind of antiquated thing that everybody is giving up on.” That “antiquated thing”—hyperlocal news—became less old-timey when, last spring, the company announced the rollout of AI newsletters that could reach as many as thirty thousand communities. Give the site your zip code and it would produce a daily or twice-weekly newsletter customized for your town, for a minimum readership of one subscriber. “Once we get a sign-up, then we start generating it,” St. John told me. Since then, PatchAM, as it’s known, which carries local and national advertising, has been activated in fourteen thousand communities and has accrued nearly a million subscribers.

PatchAM provides the most value to places with few or zero outlets providing local news. The newsletters rely heavily on aggregation, automated event calendars, and posts from Nextdoor. They ask users to submit photos of their pets and throw in a riddle. “This is a utility,” St. John said. “This is not the high church of journalism. This is about creating a foothold in a relationship and meeting a need.” The PatchAM for my community—Frederick, Maryland—is functional, if strange. The top item in a recent newsletter (with national corporate sponsor T-Mobile) announced the public meeting of an obscure domestic violence panel. Others pulled items from a high school newspaper and from a national outlet, Straight Arrow News, that rates the bias of news stories (it happened to mention our city). There was nothing from the Frederick News-Post, our six-days-a-week paper, or the Baltimore Banner, which sometimes covers our county. I asked St. John if this was by design—it was not—though he stressed the newsletters try to avoid niche or divisive topics, such as local politics. “People don’t want everything about their community, they want the most important things,” he said. “They don’t want to know that tomorrow night in town is third-grade parent-teacher night. That’s not broadly relevant. But they would want to know that the Greek food festival is on Main Street this weekend and everybody’s invited.”