Dia de Los Muertos dancers, photo by Kwan Booth
Today, after months of planning and programming, a new community news site went live: Oakland Local. And while there are now thousands of hyperlocal, city- or region-focused citizen media sites around the world, Oakland Local is one of the few that offers a blend of nonprofit underpinnings with a staff of independent, professionally trained journalists.
My friend Susan Mernit — we’re two of the founders of the Public Media Collaborative — is the founder of the community news and information hub, which she describes as “a site for Oakland focusing on social justice issues, including climate change, air quality, food access, arts as activism, and identity, race and ethnicity.”
Susan adds: “Oakland Local is launching in partnership with 35 local nonprofit, neighborhood and community organizations. We combine postings of their news and information with blogging and with reported stories from a top quality news team (Susan Mernit, Amy Gahran, Kamika Dunlap, Kwan Booth, Ryan Van Lenning and others). We are media partners and collaborators with Spot.us, Newsdesk.org, The Center for Investigative Reporting, New America Media, Endless Canvas, Youth Rising, Youth Radio and Youth Outlook. Our site offers forums, a directory of 320 local nonprofits and a blog directory of 180 active local bloggers.”
The site’s launch was financed with a New Voices grant from J-Lab, funded by The Knight Foundation, which has been leading the charge to find innovative business models for news enterprises around the country. (Disclosure: I received a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007.) See the site’s About page for more info about the site’s mission.
Follow @oaklandlocal on Twitter. Its Facebook fan page is here.
Oakland Local holds promise as a template for other community-focused ventures. I’ll be watching the site’s progress in the coming weeks and months, and hope you will, too.
Cross-posted to Socialbrite.org.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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