Patch now has over 1 million subscribers across its 14,000 AI-generated local newsletters. Of course there's very little original reporting happening here -- it's mostly aggregating information from public sources. Much of its utility, it seems, comes from its automated events listings. Patch has reportedly been profitable for about a decade, so someone is consuming this stuff.

This is obviously a far cry from the original mission Tim Armstrong envisioned when he founded it -- to put journalists in 800 separate hyperlocal communities. It was famously a huge cash drain for AOL, which eventually laid off at least half of the staff before offloading it onto a private equity company.