Another day, another shakeup within AOL’s content empire. Patch editor-in-chief Brian Farnham is off to pursue other projects. But before he goes, he wants to thank several people–so many people that it requires a 1,400-word missive on the Patch blog. In a sharp break with the current fashion, it is not devoted to the organization’s numerous failings and/or troubles.
First off, he explains, he’s only leaving because he loves “creating things from scratch,” and while Patch is still evolving, “it has definitely left ‘scratch’ in the dust.” With that reassurance, he goes on to thank Tim Armstrong, his Editorial Directors, the revenue team, and local editors.
Of course, he does take a moment to gripe that everyone’s a critic and he’s sick of it:
Allow me this indulgence of a paragraph: I’ve never worked for a company that has been as scrutinized, criticized, and coal-raked as this one. As Jon likes to say, you’d think we were creating toxic waste, instead of, you know, free useful information. We have critics on Wall Street, critics in the media, local critics, national critics, the business press, the journalism reviews, bloggers, etc. There are so many that I’ve come to think of them as a single large, screechy, off-key band called BI and the Haters. It’s music to kill yourself by.
But he quickly tacks back to rallying the troops: “I think it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t be constantly deboned by all these critics if we weren’t doing something really interesting and potentially threatening.”
In short, it’s the utter opposite of the resignation letters written by some of his more irascible corporate siblings.
