Concord NH Patch Turns 8: Thank You, Capital Region Readers!

CONCORD, NH — Concord NH Patch turns 8 today. Hooray! The site was launched on the afternoon of June 17, 2011, by founding editor Tony Schinella (me). The New Hampshire sites – along with Iowa and South Carolina – were created as "primary" Patch sites before the 2012 election as an experiment by then-Patch owner AOL to see if its online news and community websites would work in these states after already having great success in places like Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

Right out of the gate, NH Patch sites made their mark and Concord quickly became the flagship for the state. Audience, accolades, and awards followed for the scrappy team of journalists running around with cameras, posting remotely from their computers, something that was rare in local NH journalism at the time (now, in some cases, it's the norm). It was a very exciting time.

One of the most rewarding things about coming to work at Patch was that people immediately took to it; readers who didn't know me started calling me "The Patch Guy," they would introduce themselves like they knew me, and would start sharing their thoughts about our community. It was clear that readers valued what we were doing.

During the first year, the Concord site broke some big stories. One of those was when one of Mitt Romney's sons, while meeting with voters at Havenwood Heritage Heights, shared a "birther" joke just before the first-in-the-nation primary. The story quickly went viral. While some news outlets stole my footage, others aggregated and credited it properly (family members across the country saw it on the evening news, which was cool). Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post, which was purchased by AOL the year before, highlighted the story in her column celebrating the first year of that partnership:

Primary-State Patches: An exemplar of the synergy between The Huffington Post and Patch is our constantly-updating Election 2012 liveblog that regularly pulls in content from our primary-state Patches — including, as just one example, when HuffPost helped elevate the Concord Patch’s scoop in New Hampshire that one of Mitt Romney’s sons had made a birther joke about President Obama.

An executive with the company, for an internal memo, asked me how I got the exclusive. It's advice I've been telling reporters for years: There are no small stories; go to everything you can get to – because you never know what might happen.

Cake Videos

To celebrate that first year, a cupcake was purchased and a video produced. It was a silly and fun way of saying, "thank you," to readers. But the annual birthday posts became a good way to reflect on the previous year. When I worked in print as a writing-editor, I would irregularly do this in a column (especially during the slow summer months, when copy was needed). In the case of Patch's first birthday, it was about just getting started.

Four months after the Concord NH Patch celebrated its first year, it was named the Best News Website in the state by the New Hampshire Press Association and Media Outlet of the Year by the state Grange. Not too shabby.

A month later, the windows on one of the city's new elementary schools, part of a $90.8 million consolidation project, began to spring leaks. Roof leaks were reported at the Abbot-Downing and Mill Brook schools, too (years later, the windows were found to be defective and replaced). After the election, it was discovered that voters in the city offered some amusing write-in votes… and a lot of people were beginning to think that elections in New Hampshire were becoming unbearable.

Most Read Posts

Here are the Top 10 most read posts on Concord NH Patch (since September 2014):

• UFO Update: Craft Was Seen in Concord, Boscawen
• Shredded Chicken - Who Knew it Was So Easy?
• More UFO Lights Seen Over Concord
• Immigration Checkpoint On Major New Hampshire Highway
• 8 Tiny Houses for Sale in NH
• Mass. Woman Arrested for Exposing Herself on I-93
• EMTs Sent To Fatal Gun Shot Wound Call At NHTI
• 'Mass Of Warm Rock' Bubbling Under NH, VT: Report
• 2016 New Hampshire Primary Results: Voters Swamp Polls
• 24 Arrested in Manchester Drug Dragnet

It doesn't appear as if there was a second birthday video (Seriously? C'mon!). It's OK though because it was a busy time continuing to work to ensure that Patch in New Hampshire had a future with more stories, increased engagement, and advertising, and the site being redesigned, too. Presidential politics never really ends here but it was a critical sink-or-swim moment and changes in the industry were already beginning to occur with legacy media outlets never mind startups. Personally, staying in startup mode (hungry and active) is my preferred way of working. While settling in is a good thing, being nimble is better.

Not long after Concord's Patch site turned 2, it won more awards: The site took 2nd place in the Best News Site category in the NHPA's 2013 Better Media Contest and also won 2nd place in the Champion of Right-to-Know category for "Inside Job," a series of stories of how a Concord School Board member became the SAU 8 business administrator. One of the judges stated in their comments, If Patch hadn't asked, no one would have known … asking questions is the point of everything, right?

Patch was also the only news outlet in the city to ask about the maintenance costs for the Downtown Concord Complete Streets project – an estimated $16.2 million during the next two decades – after spending more than $12 million upgrading it. Five years later, taxpayers are just understanding now that this could be a future problem to the city's bottom line. Another story that made headlines nationally was when Mayors Against Illegal Guns brought a bus to Concord and held a rally outside of the Statehouse in June 2013. Pro-Second Amendment activists – including one who was arrested – showed up to protest. A number of news outlets ran video footage captured by Patch of Daniel Musso being Tased by police.

There were more exclusives – like the murder of a homeless man along the Merrimack River, how a family coped with the devastating loss of a young Concord mom from opioids, and a man and girl who perished after an accident on Clinton Street.

'Ch-ch-ch-changes …'

Year 3 was a volatile one for Patch with a major round of layoffs in mid-2013, and more in early 2014, after a turnaround company, Hale Global, purchased the sites from AOL. Since that time though, Patch has been hiring journalists.

With new ownership came new responsibilities like those editors on what became known as the "lifeboat" getting more communities to cover as well as another redesign (I once had 15 in two states; I now have 4, which is a really good place to be). But with these changes came better economics for what the company is trying to do. It's hard trying to provide something for free to readers when nothing in the world is truly "free."

Good stories continued though: Patch was the first news outlets in the state to write about the opioid crisis with any depth at all. It happened quite by accident, too: There seemed like a lot of heroin arrests in the police reports and overdoses on the scanner (at all hours of the day). Contrary to popular belief, the city has always had heroin users; I knew some when I worked at Thursday's Restaurant in the 1980s as a teenager. But it was more of a city or jazz drug; the users managed to work day jobs and control it. There was very little of the chaos that is so prevalent today.

The public information officer at the CPD at the time, Lt. Timothy O'Malley, said he had been noticing an increase in heroin arrests, too. While meth was a problem everywhere else (like it is here now), he ran the opioid numbers and they were stunning. When asked about the state data, an official quipped that they were wondering when a journalist was going to request info about it.

Staggering Stat: Since Sept. 3, 2014, the Concord NH Patch site has collected nearly 19.9 million page views. During that same period, all 12 NH sites collected about 55.3M PVs.

Five years later, opioids are still a crisis but it's a regular news story. All it took was someone to ask the questions in the first place to reveal what was going on.

"Tuesdays with Tony" were editorial meet-and-greets that I hosted at The Draft on South Main Street. It was similar to the old editorial board meetings we used to have as print editors. While lightly attended, they were fun and gave me a chance to be available to readers personally (and grab a beer, too). I may restart them at some point. It gave Patch the chance, too, to host Birthday #3, in public with a huge cake, with everyone singing, "Happy Birthday."

More Big Stories

For the 4th birthday, New England Cupcake created one that matched the green P corporate color, which was very cool. Paul Brogan, who has written extensively on the site, won a New Hampshire Press Association Best Blogger Award that year. So, along with best-selling author, he is an award-winning writer, too. It's all about community, in other words. About six months later, the site had one of its best months to date – doubling its audience when compared to the same time the year before.

There were also a lot of big stories that might not have amounted to anything had no one shown up or asked. One was then-U.S. Senate candidate Scott Brown taking a canoe ride on the Merrimack River with Sheriff Scott Hilliard. Seems like a silly enough story … until a political tracker jumps into a canoe and follows them! Boom (or, Splash?): HuffPost headline, hundreds of shares on Twitter, and it becomes one of the biggest political stories of September 2014.

The Vegas Block apartments – now, an upscale building – was ordered vacated. "Smacked" synthetic cannabinoid led to overdoses in the state. Journalist James Foley was also killed by Islamic State terrorists (It has been a painful joy running-hobbling through the annual Freedom Run for Journalists set up in Jim's honor).

At the 5th birthday, we celebrated stabilization and growth – the site cracked the 4M page views mark. And there were more stories, too, both exciting and tragic: Patch was the first news outlet to post returns from the 2016 NH primary (sans Dixville Notch) that began Donald Trump's road to the White House; a highway flasher from Massachusetts got arrested on her way to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway; a woman was found passed away in White Park; the Steeplegate Mall was sold; and the life of Molly Banzhoff, a local middle-schooler who died from a brain tumor, was celebrated (and still is today via #HeartMollyB). Brogan also wrote this really great piece about what the site meant to him.

By B-day No. 6, the Patch site in Concord was holding its own and showing even more growth. Patch expanded to 1,100 sites and Concord was in the Top 10. UFOs appeared in the sky above the city, weather, power outages, traffic alerts, and sobriety checkpoints were popular with readers, while major drug busts continued. Everyone was walking around the city's new downtown playing Pokémon GO and the city lost a lifelong champion of the arts, Van McLeod.

A 7th Birthday? Nope

Everything in 2017 was pretty good, too. There were a ton of stories written and Patch, as a company, also grew to more than 1,200 sites. The Concord site, at that time, had become the 6th busiest site in the company (based on page view goals).

One of the highlights of 2017 was meeting the McBride family and learning about their sister, Shirley "Tippy" McBride, who has been missing from Concord since 1984. This story – again, not unlike others – came to be because one person, in this case, Stacie Murray Coburn of Nashua, came forward and asked questions about information she had forwarded about the investigation. The story won a NHPA Crime and Court Award this year.

There was a shooting in Penacook, a softball coach in Concord and substitute teacher in Pennsylvania was arrested on a sexual assault charge, a mass of warm rock bubbling under the state, and a freak pre-Halloween storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands including many in Concord.

At the same time, I was tired, needed a break, and (mistakenly) took one. So, there wasn't a seventh birthday post. Missing that seventh birthday was like forgetting something important, something I have (thankfully) rarely felt. In many ways, it was good to step away from something you know and love – because it makes you appreciate it more when it's gone.

8 Is Great

Which is why Concord NH Patch turning 8 is so meaningful – probably more than all the others. Response from the community during the last two months has been overwhelming. And it's not just about the great numbers – although, those have been good (page views for the month of May were more than double what they were in March with June tracking to be even bigger); but all of the notes, emails, people giving me hugs around town, and saying, "Glad you're back …" Just, wow ...

In closing, a few quick favors – and this is really important, especially if you have read this far. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our newsletters, create an account and post comments directly on the site, and share your calendar and event listings so I can help promote your stuff during the next year.

Reach out to me with any tips or information about anything and everything going on in the city that you think I need to know about: tony.schinella@patch.com.

While our city seems to be constantly unraveling due to crime and drugs (and has been for years), news is not just those topics. Journalism is not about being stenographers for government officials either. During my time here, I've published more than 42,000 stories and posts … but there is so much more work to be done, more questions to be asked, and more things to see and stories to tell. Keep in touch please and, again, thank you so much.