In the continuing media shakedown and restructuring that’s moving break-neck speed as America hurtles further in the 21st century, there’s good news and bad news. And here’s a daily double whammy:

THE GOOD NEWS: The Washington Post plans to expand in a big way and a lot of it will be new hires, including bloggers.

THE BAD NEWS: Patch, which had raised hopes that online reporting could play a major role in local reporting, and fears that it would drive local print papers out of business, is laying off hundreds of employees. The scene at Patch is now all-too-familiar for many of those who put their heart and guts into studying for a career in journalism, paying their dues, and working at their craft: they’re suddenly out of a job they loved and that they assumed would earn them income.

The good news from the Washington Post:

While Ezra Klein’s departure from The Washington Post has grabbed headlines over the past couple weeks, executive editor Marty Baron pointed out to staff Wednesday morning that the paper has recently hired several journalists and plans to bring more into the newsroom in 2014.

Baron noted that “The Fix” has recently expanded and said the paper’s “staff of politics reporters will grow by five early this year.”

Also, Baron said the Post plans to hire writers for verticals “on a wide array of subjects.”

“These blogs will both deepen our reporting in The Post’s traditional areas of concentration and broaden the range of subjects we cover,” Baron wrote. “Last year, we added highly popular blogs such as The Switch and GovBeat, complementing other policy-oriented blogs like WorldViews and Wonkblog. Some of our current blogs will get additional writers, enhancing our national and world report, and all of them will work with an expanded staff of photo editors and data visualization specialists. We’re hiring now for the additional graphics and photo staffers.”

Baron also said there are plans to redesign the website. And on the print side, he said the Sunday magazine will be expanded.

The bad news about Patch via Jim Romenesko:

I’m told that hundreds — two tipsters claim two-thirds of the editorial staff — have been laid off by Patch’s new owner, Hale Global. I have asked the company for confirmation. (It bought Patch from AOL on January 15.)

He includes some emails from former and present Patch employees. Here are a few:

“Technically, we were laid off by AOL. I presume that was a condition set by Hale. Second, I have it on good authority the layoffs were 80 to 90 percent of Patchers.”

“The patch years were years of being aol’s tool and plaything. Killed myself, almost literally. Left with literally nothing. Better off dead.”

“I was a local editor for Patch for 3.5 years, up until about an hour ago. ..We knew it was coming. but the silence from New York over the few months was deafening. They left us in a state of suspended animation. For those of us who killed ourselves working for this company, it was a real slap in the face.”

“Patch editors in Michigan were laid off today.”

“I was hired in 2010, survived two rounds of layoffs but not the third. I was told middle managers in editorial were on a call earlier this week and being asked about which local editors are worthy. Based on info from HQ, I had one of the top sites in all of Patch for the past 2 years, but now I’m on the outs. Sounds like politics and not performance is the deciding factor for most, if not all, of us.”and present Patch owners.

Go to the link to read it all including the update.

Forbes:

Hale Global, the firm that took Patch off AOL’s hands two weeks ago, describes itself as “an investment holding company…for special situations.” Just what does that mean? Apparently, the same thing as the “transition specialist,” the job title of George Clooney’s character in “Up In The Air.”

Having waited a decent interval, Patch’s new owners acted today, laying off most of the hyperglobal network’s employees, according to reports by Jim Romenesko and Business Insider. The exact body count isn’t known, but it almost certainly exceeds 400. That is, of course, on top of the 300 to 400 people that AOL let go last August, when it was still hoping to downsize Patch into the black by the end of the fourth quarter.

Nearly three-quarters of the approximately 1,000 community Patch sites will become “zombie sites” with no staff of their own, just repurposed content, reports BI’s Carlson. Meanwhile, AOL, which retained a minority stake in the new Patch, will assume financial responsibility for the layoffs, says Romenesko.

Tech Crunch:

Reporting indicates that AOL wasn’t too choosy about who picked up the money-losing property. Why does that mean layoffs are hardly surprising? Simply that you don’t buy a distressed asset in hopes of it continuing to lose money.

Whatever the value of Patch now, it had essentially zero in its prior form other than non-financial human capital. An asset that has negative cashflow is a liability, not something you buy and keep in its current form.

So Hale, the now majority owner of Patch, firing a chunk of the remaining staff isn’t much of a shock. Patch retains a certain revenue stream we can presume it wants to bank on, given that the network still holds an audience. But at its now prior size, that audience wasn’t enough to drive revenue sufficient to draw profits. And that’s the ball game. The old joke that the billion-dollar company that loses a dollar per year eventually dies is true.

So the Post is heading into a new expansion era and Patch now needs a huge bandage to halt the corporate blood-letting.

Yet, in the Post expansion it’s notable that one name has been missing: Ezra Klein, who couldn’t come to terms with the Post for a project he wanted to do with the paper. The Post’s publisher defends the decision to let Klein go to pursue his dream elsewhere:

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has absorbed the responsibility—much of it critical—for not keeping Ezra Klein and his proposed new digital-media venture at the Post.

How could Bezos, the digital entrepreneur who created Amazon.com, not buy into Klein’s vision of a website devoted to delivering news and opinion at the digital edge of journalism? How could he allow the phenomenally prolific creator of the Post’s Wonkblog to take his talents elsewhere?

Actually, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth was the decider.

“It just didn’t make sense for us,” Weymouth tells Washingtonian. “Ezra didn’t want it to be part of the Post. It would be completely separate and quite resource-intensive.”

…..Weymouth says she examined the business plan for what she termed “a kind of authoritative wiki,” and decided the investment didn’t make sense. Klein reportedly projected the cost of building his new venture to be upward of $10 million, with up to 30 employees.

“It seemed to be potentially a bigger distraction that would take resources without building the Post,” Weymouth says. “Had he wanted to keep Wonkblog within the Post, that would have been a different story.”

And so it goes — and Klein went.

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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