Bummer: Reston Patch Editor Leaving

Reston Patch BFF and editor Karen Goff is leaving AOL's local news venture, according to our exclusive backchannel sources (okay, fine, our Facebook "wall.") Patch has fallen on hard times of late, and the company just laid off a whole slew of people, but our exclusive sources (okay, fine, Facebook again) tell us that she's leaving voluntarily to go to another gig.

This is a bummer for anyone who cares about getting local news from sources other than lazy, link-heavy filthy "web logs" or self-interested PR efforts. Many local Patch sites, frankly, are pretty crappy -- they either hired people who didn't know much about journalism or who were parachuted into a local community (or covered it from the adjacent county) -- or both. Karen had deep roots (get it?) here and a legit journalism background, so Reston kind of got lucky. Hopefully the folks at AOL will find the dusty resume of someone with a real journalism background in their warehouse full of unmailed promotional CDs from the late 1990s and hire a decent replacement, or else we'll have to actually leave the house figure out what being an "experienced journalist" is all about, the end.