A Patch for South Euclid?

I once called South Euclid the Rodney Dangerfield of suburbs. We don’t get no respect. We’re considered the poor little brother of the East Side, so much so that people in our conjoined twin Lyndhurst continually ask for surgical separation even though South Euclid is the stronger of the twins and Lyndhurst would shrivel up without us. South Euclid may be poor, but we’re scrappy and we don’t pine for others’ approval.

Nowhere is that more true than when it comes to media coverage. Our town is underserved with the Sun Messenger which has one reporter covering several burbs and scant coverage on TV unless something terrible happens – if it bleeds it leads. Oh, and a few independent bloggers like myself. That’s not enough for a city with a population of 22,000.

There is another online news source, known as the Patch. Several local suburbs each have their own piece of the Patch. Cleveland Heights population about 46,000 has a Patch. Westlake, population 32,500 has a Patch. So do Solon, population 23,000 and Twinsburg, population 19,000. Beachwood has its own Patch, even though their population is less than 12,000. Patch combined Mayfield Heights, Mayfield Village and Highland Heights into one Patch and called it the Hillcrest Patch, covering a population of 30,700.

Why don’t South Euclid and Lyndhurst have a Patch? The combined population of SE-L is over 36,000, more than Westlake, more than the Hillcrest triad and three times that of Beachwood.

To know the answer to that question, you need to know the truth about what Patch really is. The Patch Media Corporation is owned by AOL, which a friend of mine likes to call “Asshole online”. Thus Patch isn’t some kind of “voice of the people” as they like to sell themselves by allowing any idiot to set up a blog there. It’s the same corporate owned BS as any other news outfit under a different name.
 

Take a look at the screen grab. Most of the communities here skew white, and either are part of the outer ring of suburbs or have very large populations like Cleveland Heights and Lakewood, places too big to ignore even though we’d like to.

Like any other corporation, they follow the dollar. And the powers that be at Patch have determined that South Euclid and Lyndhurst do not have the right “demographics” to satisfy the requirements for our own piece of the Patch pie. In other words, we’re not rich enough or white enough to merit a Patch of our own.

And that’s why South Euclid and Lyndhurst don’t have a Patch and we don’t need one.