Castro Valley Patch is under new management.  Again.

Hale Global, Patch’s new parent company, laid off upwards to two-thirds of Patch editors on Wednesday, including Castro Valley Patch’s most recent editor Amanda Aguilar.

According to a discussion thread on the El Cerrito Patch, which also lost its editor, Autumn Johnson will now serve as its editor and that of “19 cities other cities in the East Bay.”   While Amanda’s name still appears on the Castro Valley Patch site, based on Autumn’s recent posts to the site, it appears that Autumn has assumed the editorship of  Castro Valley Patch.  

With an editor covering so many East Bay communities, it looks like Patch’s focus on hyperlocal community news is in doubt.

Since AOL launched Patch, what began as an ambitious effort to report on the type of everyday community affairs that many local newspapers have abandoned in recent years, has shrunk into more of a syndicate of some blogs, meeting notices, and re-posts of sensational stories from other Patch sites.

“Where Patch could have done better was to let our best practices ride out for longer than just a few months.  When something was working and working well, why move on to something else right away?” former Castro Valley Patch Analisa Harangozo wrote me tonight.  “For me as an editor, it was probably one of the best experiences of my life that I’ll always look back on with nothing but appreciation.”

Tom Abate,  another of the many former Castro Valley Patch editors since the site launched in 2010, sent me this note:

“I was listening to a radio story on the way into work this morning about a law working its way through the state legislature, that would put the strongest restrictions in the country on law enforcement use of drones.  And I smiled in satisfaction because I “broke” the story about the Alameda County Sheriff Department plan to bring a drone online.   I did it in a story for Castro Valley Patch after attending a meeting of the Sheriff’s Advisory panel.  That story was picked up and followed by BANG.   The Sheriff’s proposal was the subject of an op-ed in the New York Times.  The Sheriff got stopped and now we may have a law in California to prevent other cowboy sheriffs from going drone happy.   And my story on CVPatch set off the debate.   So my feeling is we did the journalism.   Sadly, the business model wasn’t there to sustain the effort.”

In an unincorporated community, where some 63,000 people have no elected local government, finding transparency can be elusive.  It’s disappointing to see the ambitions of Patch fade as the realities of its business model forced it to scale back and seek inconsistent strategies in coverage.

As corporate media abandons coverage in our communities, Castro Valley Matters hopes you will find a home here to learn and discuss what matters to Castro Valley.