Long Island Business News editor leaves for AOL startup

David Reich-Hale, the editor of the Long Island Business News, has left the Dolan Media publication for a job with Patch, the new AOL news venture.

An item on the publication’s Web site states, “Reich-Hale will head the Long Island editorial operations for Patch.com, a hyper-local series of sites AOL bought last year and plans to roll out across the country. There are currently seven Patch sites on Long Island.”

Reich-Hale becomes the second editor of a business weekly paper to join Patch. Earlier, John Ferraro, the editor of the Hartford Business Journal, was hired to oversee the Connecticut operations.

In a going away message, Reich-Hale wrote, “It’s saying goodbye to six years of ingenuity, in which we turned a sleepy Internet site into one that experimented with new blogs, expanded the Flash Report to twice per day, added video reports and, for a short time, put together a weekly Podcast. I haven’t listened to those Podcasts in years, but I’ve been hoping the iTunes store’s archives suffered a glitch and lost those forever.”

Reich-Hale also spent four years at American Banker before joining Long Island Business News in 2004.