After recently announcing that it was going to hire 800 journalists and reduce its reliance on freelancers, now AOL's Patch.com is saying it wants to bring on 8,000 bloggers in the next week, reported Forbes blogger Jeff Bercovici.
This is despite the class-action lawsuit over unpaid labor that a group of bloggers has brought against AOL and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington. AOL acquired the Huffington Post in February for $315 million.
Patch.com, a network of 800 hyperlocal news sites, is recruiting bloggers in anticipation of its launching a blog platform on May 4. Each website is expected to sign up 10 new community bloggers as part of a “full-on course correction heading Patch in the direction we want to go," said Brian Farnham, Patch's editor in chief, as quoted by PaidContent. Farnham added, “Our mission is to serve local residents with news and information they need. We’ve been doing that with professional journalists. That’s not going to change. What we’ve added is on top of that.”
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» Knight Center (The Huffington Post makes distinction between bloggers and professional journalists)
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
