Patch Passes a Milestone — More Than 500 Sites

This week marked a major milestone for the Patch.com national network of local news sites, to which El Cerrito Patch belongs.

Wednesday saw the 500th hatch of a Patch — Hopkins Patch — in Hopkins, MN, a town just west of Minneapolis of 17,000 people (about the size of Albany). It grew from the 1887 founding of a threshing machine company. The Wikipedia entry for Hopkins says it has twice been in the Guinness Book of World Records, "once for world's tallest water tower, once for most bars per person."

While El Cerrito Patch, like each of the other Patch sites, belongs to the national Patch network, it operates under the independent direction of a local editor (me) and a crew of local journalists. We got our packaging from the national Patch brand, but the contents are devoted entirely to bringing you the most comprehensive coverage of El Cerrito that can be found. What you find inside the package is, in short, what we members of the community of El Cerrito are creating.

Nevertheless our membership in the greater Patch network means we can also draw upon the vast resources of America's fastest growing news organization. We are happy to welcome Hopkins Patch to the family. (And we are happy to note that the outside temperature in El Cerrito at the moment is 57 degrees, while that in Hopkins is 20, which may explain Hopkins' abundance of bars.).