Introduction

People are launching blogs all over the greater San Francisco Bay Area to cover their cities, towns and neighborhoods and report on topics of interest. We created the BayNewsNetwork to showcase this diverse array of blogs and make it easier for people to find these new sources of news and information.

This is part of our goal at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and its Knight Digital Media Center to foster conversation among journalists, bloggers and reporter-publishers who operate local and niche news sites, share resources, provide training and promote best practices and innovation in online news publishing.

Feeds

The directory both consumes and produces RSS feeds. Several times per day, we check for new posts from all of the sites in our directory. We then show a handful of the latest posts on most of our pages (for example, the Concord "area" page shows recent posts aggregated from blogs about Concord, followed by descriptions of Concord-related blogs). Blog "details" pages show posts that come from just one blog.

You can subscribe to our aggregated RSS feeds by clicking the orange RSS button wherever you see it. It looks like this:

Full RSS feed for this view

Alternatively, use the RSS subscription icon in the URL bar of your browser (most browsers now have this feature).

Getting Listed

If you blog about some aspect of life in the Bay Area and would like to be listed in our directory, please create an account on this site.

Note: It is not sufficient to simply live in the Bay Area and be a blogger.
Your site must provide coverage of the Bay Area in some way to be listed.

Once you've activated your account, log in and click the "Profile" item in the menu. From there, you can:

• Edit your personal profile
• Register a new site or blog
• Edit details about an existing site or blog
• Change your password

One person can participate in more than one sites/blogs, and more than one person can participate on a single site/blog. For security reasons, only the person who initially entered the site in our directory can edit its details. This person is known as the site "lead." To have the project lead for a site changed, the existing lead can contact us with a request.

We'll review your submission shortly after it's been submitted. Once approved, your site will be included in the directory and we'll start integrating its RSS feeds.

When editing site details, please provide the following information. Entries that do not include these items may not be approved:

• Site title
• Site URL
• RSS/Atom feed URL
• A List of the primary authors who contribute to the site (they can create their own accounts on this site, and the site lead can include them as authors).
• Which categories/beats you wish to be listed under (feel free to recommend new ones).
• Which geographical areas you cover, if any.
• A screenshot/thumbnail in JPG or PNG format, 200 x 200px square. Please give your thumbnail image file a descriptive name, such as in_berkeley.png.
• Blog description of approximately 75-100 words in length. Descriptions that are too brief may not be included on the directory homepage. Please check for spelling and typos.

Updating Your Listing

Log into the directory, click on the Profile link, then "My Sites." You'll see a list of all sites that list you as a contributor. If you are the lead contributor to any of those sites, that site's link will be clickable and you can proceed to edit its details.

Contact Us

Questions? Comments? contact us - we'd love to hear from you.