Oakland Local went live in mid-October after months of planning by editor Susan Mernit and her editorial team.
Mernit says during this early start-up stage, Oakland Live will be publishing 3 new stories a week, plus blog posts and community content. The site will update a minimum of two times a day Monday to Friday, and possibly three to five times a day. The site is running investigative stories, news, features, and more.
“Being a partner means we post their content on our site as community news, offer them training in social media and using our platform to blog and write articles, and ask them to promote us in their newsletters and materials.”
Oakland Local’s core staff includes the following people:
Susan Mernit herself, as Editor/Publisher. She assigns stories, raises money, writes blogs & articles, and works with nonprofits and community organizations.
Kwan Booth, Senior Producer. Kwan assigns stories, works with our youth reporters, writes and produces content and handles much of our community outreach and training. A West Oaklander, Kwan is passionate about poetry, art, beats, music and empowering others, especially around the digital divide. Contact Kwan at kwan@oaklandlocal.com
Amy Gahran, Senior Editor, Amy focuses on environment, transportation, development and, of course, “the emerging Zombie beat.” A mobile news guru, Amy is passionate about training and speaking truth to power. A new North Oakland resident, she sees the Town with fresh eyes. Contact Amy at amy@oaklandlocal.com
Kamika Dunlap, reporter, is an award-winning investigative reporter and a former staffer at both The Oakland Tribune and The Mercury News, who focuses on reform issues.
Barbara Grady, reporter, was most recently the issues reporter for The Oakland Tribune and MediaNews Group, covering such issues as youth violence, and homelessness. She focuses on environment issues and youth issues.
Ryan Van Lenning, reporter, focuses on food access and sustainability issues for Oakland Local. He contributes frequently to Green Options, Matador Travel Network, Planetwize, DGuides, and Ethical Traveler.
In addition to this core group, Oakland Local is working with six additional writers, photographer and reporters, including Rhyen Coombs, who worked on The Chauncey Bailey Project, Carmel Wroth, recent UCB grad, Elise Ackerman, formerly of The Mercury News, and Ian Martin and Alison Yin, photo-journalists.
The core team of reporters is supported by an extensive network of connections with local organizations.
Oakland Local has signed up 35 nonprofits and community organizations as partners, out of a total targeted list of about 75.
“Being a partner means we post their content on our site as community news, offer them training in social media and using our platform to blog and write articles, and ask them to promote us in their newsletters and materials,” says Mernit.
Partnering groups are all either within local neighborhoods or cover topics of focus for the site, and include extremely active larger organizations (staff from 25-30) such as Urban Habitat, The Lao Family Fund, Communities for a Better Environment, Just Cause Oakland, and smaller groups (15 and under staff) including Oakland Rising, InsightCEED, East Bay Asian Youth Center, and Kids First Oakland.
Mernit says local non-profit organizers and new folks have expressed delight and surprise at the depth and range of Oakland Local first set of partners, and have remarked on how joining with Oakland Local is one of the few efforts they have seen the smaller non-profits make in what is she describes as a “often a siloed and racially segmented city.”.
As part of the site’s partnership efforts, Oakland Local is offering training in blogging, news literacy and social media. Recently it sent partner organizations to the Public Media Collaborative event “Social Media for Social Action” in Oakland on Oct 23rd. Mernit says they will do two Brown Bag lunches every month that will offer training to partners, starting in early November.
On the technical side, Oakland Live is built in Drupal. “We’ve spent $3,000 to build it, and it uses 40 different Drupal modules,” says Mernit. “Three of the modules are original or highly customized and will be documented and given back to the community.”
The three new modules are: an email to RSS tool meant to publish organization email blasts and newsletters; a feed-handler to aggregate RSS feeds by topic; and a calendar import/export tool that feeds from Gcal to Ical and into then a Drupal calendar module.
“We are also using a Drupal mobile plug in so we have a basic mobile interface, and we have enabled SMS text alerts as an option, using another Drupal module,” Mernit adds.
While the New Voices grant is helping Oakland Local get off the ground, Mernit says the goal is to secure additional funding, build the member base, and introduce a portfolio of revenue strategies for earned income.
“Oakland Local’s immediate priority is to secure additional grant funding; we have participated in an OSI application with The Center for Investigative Reporting, and are planning to apply for investigative reporting funds from The Journalism and Ethics Foundation,” says Mernit. “We have also met and/or spoken with The California Endowment, The Kapor Foundation, and the Irvine Foundation.”
Mernit and her team are also preparing a OSI Prison Justice Media Fellowship application for Kamika Dunlap and Barbara Grady to support their application for a series of stories on Reintegration and women prisoners planned for Oakland Local.
