When I tell people that I don’t believe there are any communities left in America, I usually get one of two responses. Some people’s eyes widen with the look of recognition and say something like, “You know, I’ve been thinking the exact same thing.” Others shake their heads vigorously and insist that there are still communities. Sometimes, they even maintain that their own neighborhood, small town, or even suburban subdivision is a community; often it’s self-evident to them that a bunch of people living in the same place constitutes a community.
But at the end of the day, mere proximity isn’t enough. A community is not simply a bunch of people living near each other. Rather, it’s defined by the relationships those people have with each other. And in modern American society, when most people spend most of their waking hours away at a job, a school, or off frolicking there’s not much time left for building those relationships.
To me, one of the signs that communities have eroded is the simple lack of communication among people who live near each other. Many Americans have little or no contact with most, or sometimes even any of their neighbors. How can a community build the relationships needed to thrive when the people who supposedly live in one are more or less strangers? In a modern world of harried individuals rushing to and fro, how can people build and maintain a community when they have so little actual face time with each other?
A string of local, online newspapers would have us believe that it is helping to build those 
connections. Patch is a website dedicated to news gathering in very small areas. Its main page shows that so far it is established in 18 states. On each state page there are dozens of sub-pages for micro-regions. So for example, in my state of Maryland, there are 52 Patch pages.
The news coverage in these Patches is very traditional and very local, dealing with issues like schools, police, business, and government. Events of interest are posted, there’s a yellow pages of sorts, and letters to the editor are still welcome. In essence, Patch is attempting to create a modern version of local newspapers, hoping to be, in its own words, your source for local knowledge.
So the question then becomes: Does something like Patch help mend the bonds of community or simply further scatter the broken links?
Obviously, the jury’s still out. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind about this model. Firstly, while Patch peddles the notion that each of its pages serves and works with “the community,” of course the real goal is to make money. There’s no sin in that, and best of luck to them, but isn’t a case of organic local community building. 
Patch was founded by Tim Armstrong, who is now CEO of AOL, and he had that mammoth company buy Patch when he took over. Not too long afterward, he led AOL’s purchase of The Huffington Post. So even though the About page at Patch bandies the word “community” nine times, the word its owners are most concerned with is “profit.”
Not to be cynical, but I think it’s fair to ask, is AOL’s Patch helping build community, or is it merely selling an image of it? And a deeper look at Patch shows it to be less a series of very local papers and really more like series of regional papers with many overlapping local home pages that share a lot of information and are overseen by a single editor.
In other words, the supposed micro-localism of each individual patch is a bit of smoke and mirrors. This is essentially a new model for the struggling newspaper business, moving online and cleverly refashioning local news by threading disparate areas together into a larger region.
Like any profit-oriented business, Patch had to determine its target audience. And what they came up with is upper middle class suburbanites, who by default are mostly white. In Maryland, for example, there’s a Patch for Towson, the suburb where I work. There are also several dozen Patches around our little state for places that used to be small towns but have long since been gobbled up by development and transformed into sprawling suburbs.
But there’s no patch for the part of Baltimore City where I live. Indeed, there’s only one in the entire city, something they call North Baltimore. However, while Baltimore is very 
much a city of neighborhoods, there is in fact no neighborhood called “North Baltimore.”
So perhaps it is the case that Patch is not helping rebuild communities, but rather is helping foster the illusion that they still exist. After all, if you were going to pick a name for a make believe community, North Baltimore has a much nicer right to it than The Very Residential Northern Chunk of the City That Has a Somewhat Suburban Feel to it and is Mostly Home to Lots of White People with Money.