The topic of AOL’s Patch has been on journalists’ minds before I asked the question at the Online News Association conference in D.C.

It has sparked debate and open conversation about whether this hyperlocal venture is part of the future of journalism or a sign of the end.

In keeping with the ongoing dialogue, I asked people to share their experiences and thoughts on Patch, and many of you did.

This post is a collection of tweets, emails and hallway conversations that I think capture the mood of those outside of Patch are feeling.

NOTE: I’ve be in talks with Patch since last week’s blog post trying to figure out the best way to express its point of view. Rather than craft a statement or respond to one or two of these reactions, and due to my deadline, we’ve opted to do a separate, follow-up post that will be a Q&A with Editor-in-Chief Brian Farnham.

While the details are still being worked out, I would like to crowd-source some questions. I will be bringing up the thoughts expressed here, but feel free to send me your questions, thoughts and concerns: r.hernandez [at] usc.edu

Sprinkled throughout the responses was a hopeful, wait-and-see sentiment, but it was overshadowed by a lot of unknowns and questions that have journalists confused.

Corona del Mar Today founder Amy Senk doesn’t understand why Patch moved into her community. “It’s such a small village, just 6,000 homes, with a daily successful news site (mine), a weekly Newport Beach paper with offices in CdM village, and two legacy papers that cover it,” she said in an email.

About an hour north is Pekka Pekkala, who asked the same question.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the question isn’t why come to a succeeding community, it’s why try where others have failed?

@DavidVeselenak was contacted by Patch for a possible job, but he’s not sure how Patch will turn out. Veselenak is open to working for them when “I see them a bit more firmly planted in the ground, esp. in Michigan.”

The perception of long hours for poor pay is an undeniable concern many have.

“It may not be evil, but it is a sweatshop,” said an anonymous commentator in the previous Patch post. “I was just hired by Patch last week as a copywriter and was assigned to write business listings as described in the article. IT IS A JOKE. … turns out they are grossly underestimated the time it takes to create a business listing.”

“I’d rather work at Walmart for that pay. At least I’d get an employee discount.”

That said, a few people have colleagues that expressed a more positive outlook and are loving their jobs.

At ONA10, I chatted with a friend who is a regional editorial director for Patch and asked for her take. She was genuinely excited about her job and hinted that Patch had more plans to grow. It is clearly a committed force.

Being journalists, though, there is an incredible amount of skepticism when it comes to Patch. When many in our industry have been laid off, furloughed or heard about the falling revenue, they can’t help but question how a company can being doing the opposite and investing in this venture, especially at such a fast rate.

But there is the counter perspective.

“I’ve seen first-hand a blog network try this before,” said Steve James, from The Dagger, a hyperlocal site in Harford County, MD. “They had posting and tweeting quotas, just like patch. They paid too much for the returns they were getting from advertising. The stronger blogs were supporting the weaker way out at the end of the long-tail. It lasted for a lot longer then I expected, but the hatchet fell, and fell hard. Mass layoffs and executives removed.”

For me, one of the toughest criticisms comes from two different people I spoke to at ONA10. They each told me they were literally warned by different Patch employees, saying “we’re coming to your town.” It did not sound like a possible partnership, but more of a competitive fight.

As National Public Radio‘s Vivian Schiller said, there is nothing wrong with competition. It’s a good thing. But if the goal is to serve the community, isn’t it better to work together for the community, rather than undercut each other for individual survival?

Well, obviously capitalism doesn’t make for great friendships. But, truthfully, those who were “warned” admitted that they really don’t feel threatened.

“In terms of putting me out of business, I don’t think so,” said Senk. “I mostly run as a labor of love and my profits are not great. I get a fair share of revenue from two legacy media partners that will want to help me succeed and not let Patch take me over.

I’m cautiously pessimistic about Patch because I think hiring reporters and creating more news outlets is a wonderful thing, but going into communities like mine and duplicating efforts seems predatory and not noble; and I have no sense that if sites like mine go away, that Patch has a long-term plan to keep the local news flowing.”

I asked people what type of relationship they wanted to have with Patch:

In an email, James said when Patch came to his community, “they originally made offers to our current writers to be editors,” but settled with former writers as freelancers.

“Also, I don’t know about this partnering thing,” said Senk. “I have been running Corona del Mar Today for going on two years and I understand that a Corona del Mar Patch is opening. I used to work with the women running Patch on the West Coast, so I emailed her to ask about it. She asked if I wanted a job but there was no offer of partnering, and the local Patch editor has not contacted me once — although several of my sources including a city councilwoman told her that she should do so. (I was copied on the emails a couple of times, so I believe that it’s true.)”

Taking all these perspectives in, I think this tweet from Andrew Sims said it best.

Doesn’t it really matter what journalists think? Probably not. What really matters is how the community embraces or rejects another source of news and information.

It’s on Patch to prove their worth to the community (and also its advertisers). That’s capitalism. That’s business. And that’s why we’re going to have to wait and see.

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail ([email protected]) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

Last week, I wrote about my skepticism of Patch.com, based on my assumption that the economies of scale available to a national chain of local publications online were no longer enough to overcome to the inherent cost advantages enjoyed by locally-owned publications.

Locally-owned publications don’t have to generate enough income to support regional managers and national executives. And if they’re boot-strapped, they don’t have to pay back VC or investors, either. That gives a local start-up a huge cost advantage in what’s become a brutal online publishing market.

If you’re going to start an investor-funded national chain of local news websites, you’re going to need to achieve some economies of scale that allow you to make enough extra income – as a chain – to overcome the cost advantage enjoyed by your locally-owned competitors. I dismissed several such ways that newspaper chains achieved that in the past, arguing that they’d been made irrelevant by the Internet. But a reader challenged me: Are there any economies of scale that could help make a national chain of local online news sites profitable?

Hey, I love a challenge. So here are two I thought of this week:

1. National training

I know from personal experience that it takes time to develop the experience to adapt to online publishing. You need to recalibrate your sense of what is news and how it should be presented to fit with the demand of blogging and initiating reader discussions. (If you simply write print-style articles then leave it to readers to talk about them, without direction – you’re going to fail. Trust me.) I’ve spent years learning how to build and lead an engaged community of readers, and I’m still learning.

A smart, focused national training program could help reduce the time it takes a local editor to produce an engaging website. Local website publishers who don’t have access to such training will take longer to get up to speed, potentially giving the nationally-affiliated site time to build a loyal audience for itself.

2. Search engine optimization

While any local publisher can learn search engine optimization [SEO] techniques, a national chain can give its local publishers an advantage by arranging for aggressive cross-linking among its sites. That creates a potentially huge number of inbound links, helping push the chain’s sites ahead of its local competitors.

In addition, by building a national brand for local news, the chain might be able to elicit more in-bound links to its sites from outside the network, the way that Wikipedia commands so many in-bound links from publishers looking for an easy place to link to provide their readers with background information on a topic. (Another analogy would be About.com – which is a national network for niche topics the way that Patch.com might be for geographically-targeted local news.)

The chain’s training program also could include instruction in SEO and encourage individual editors to cross-link to other network sites within their stories, as appropriate, further boosting SEO effectiveness.

While locally-owned websites might catch up on training, they can’t match the in-bound linking power of a network, making this advantage a sustainable one that might help swing a national network toward competitive advantage over local start-ups.

Will Patch.com, specifically, take advantage of these opportunities? Heck if I know. We’ll find out.

All this said, it’s not inconceivable that locally-owned start-ups could replicate the advantages of a national chain network by working together. An organization such as the Online News Association – but solely for independent publishers instead of being dominated by employees of newspaper chains – could arrange online and in-person training, as well as host a directory and forum for cross-linking among member websites.

So, while there might be potential economic advantages to hooking up a network of local news websites, one doesn’t have to become part of a corporate-owned network to realize them.