AOL Brings in New Exec to Rethink Patch

Reuters reported yesterday that AOL has hired a new chief content (and strategy) officer for Patch. According to the report, Rachel Fishman Feddersen will come in to help rethink and repair the troubled network of community sites.

Here are the relevant/interesting bits from the article:

Feddersen comes to Patch from Sweden’s Bonnier Group, where she led digital content and strategy for the publisher’s popular Parenting Group, spearheading development of online extensions for magazines such as Parenting and Babytalk.

While Feddersen’s role is still being defined, she said she sees her job as crafting a cohesive strategy that takes the elements of what works best locally and weaving those principals into coverage across Patch’s network of sites. Essentially, she’s looking for a bottom up – not top down – content strategy.

I would thus assume that she’s going to identify “best practices” and successful “use cases” and generalize them across the organization. She may also bring a mom-centric emphasis to Patch (which would be smart). Even though Patch is positioned as a local news site, that’s the wrong emphasis. It should instead focus on features, profiles, deals, events/happenings and “news you can use.” Patch can also build out a much stronger local-social/interactive community element.

Here are some recent facts from the AOL Q4 earnings call:

• Patch ended Q4 in 863 [markets] and with roughly 10 million unique users
• Patch ended Q4 with roughly 6,500 advertisers (compare: ReachLocal had roughly 19K advertisers in Q3 2011)
• Patch’s sales force in Q4 at 230 people with the average [tenure] being about eight months…
• Ending Q4 2011, there were 401 Patches with about $2,000 per month in revenue…

Here’s more on RFF from her press-release bio:

Fishman Feddersen joins Patch from The Parenting Group, where she most recently served as Editorial Director, Digital Content, Strategy and Design, overseeing all digital development of the Parenting, Babytalk and Conceive brands and their online extensions. Under her leadership, the sites achieved record-breaking growth and won numerous industry honors and awards. Fishman Feddersen was named Media Industry Newsletter’s Digital Content Strategist of the Year in 2010 and was inducted into the Media Industry Hall of Fame in 2011. She has been creating, editing, and managing websites since the mid-1990s. Fishman Feddersen began her career as a journalist, with a focus on business, health and political reporting, and also served as one of the original six editors at Metrobeat (later CitySearch), a pioneer in the local space. Fishman earned a Master of Art & Technology degree from NYU as well as a BA in English from Amherst College.