A directory of bay area community sites and bloggers

92510 East Bay Blog

If one mayor represented all of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, that person's 2.5 million constituents would live in the country's fourth-largest city. And just as these East Bay counties are very different from the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area, the East Bay Express is a very different paper. From the international populations that make Oakland and Richmond so dynamic, to the ideological diversity that separates Berkeley from Walnut Creek, our readers are united by their love of a region that is second to nowhere in beauty, livability, intellectual firepower, and cosmopolitan charm. Every week, the Express provides these well-educated world travelers the only medium dedicated exclusively to them. From our authoritative cover stories; to our in-depth local reporting, arts and dining coverage; to the area's most comprehensive weekly calendar; the East Bay Express has been this vibrant region's leading voice since 1978.

Bay Area Budgeter

Cuz the rent keeps going up, the taxes keep rolling in, and the grocery store NEVER doubles your Qs! I've been online for about fourteen years now, since the days of Lynx! Ever since text-browsing my first website, I have been hooked on the internet and the vastness of its potential.

El Cerrito Focus

El Cerrito Focus is a Web site dedicated to covering local news and events which affect the community of El Cerrito, Calif. We are a group of six UC Berkeley Graduate Journalism students who will be covering your community over the next several months. We’re here to report the news that matters to you, El Cerrito, so consider yourselves in focus.

Livermore Links | Livermore News

Livermore Links is the hyperlocal news blog focusing on the Livermore Valley, located in the East Bay's Tri-Valley region.

Marin Retail Buzz

Think of West Marin and you think of rolling hills and wild beaches, with some farmland, a few small villages and a lot of national parkland. And while West Marin contains more than half of Marin County's land, it is home to just 3% of the county's population. The size of the retail sector is quite small. According to the West Marin Chamber of Commerce's business directory there are 14 retail stores in West Marin, with a similar number of places to eat and drink (for some reason this list doesn't include any stores in Bolinas or Stinson Beach).

Mission Loc@l

Mission Loc@l believes that by covering a neighborhood fairly and thoroughly, we can build community and a sustainable model for quality journalism. As part of that effort, we seek collaboration and experimentation that will serve the community we cover and journalism. In the Mission District that means being a bilingual site and using print, multimedia and video to deliver information that offers diverse residents a way to connect and stay informed. The site launched in October 2008, opened an office in the Mission District in January and many of us are Mission residents. The project is part of an initiative in hyper-local coverage developed by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and supported by the school, the Ford Foundation and other donors. Our aim is to become a self-sustaining model for public private partnerships that involve journalism schools, private foundations and community supporters. This summer’s staff includes five interns from UC Berkeley, one intern from SF State and a visiting scholar from Mexico. We also participate in collaborations to mentor young journalists.

Oakland North

Oakland North is a news project of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. With support from the Ford Foundation, graduate student reporters at the School are creating focused news outlets to concentrate on different parts of the Bay Area. Our goals are to improve local coverage, experiment with online and digital media, and listen to you–about the stories and features that most interest you, the issues that concern you, the information services you want, and the reporting you’d like to see undertaken in your own community. Oakland North is staffed this fall by the reporting students of Cynthia Gorney and Kara Platoni, both journalists who have lived in Oakland for years. You can click here for bios of all 18 students. We hope to keep Oakland North a source of news and community conversation, and we welcome all comments, corrections and suggestions. Please check out our sibling news outlet across the bay, Mission Local, covering San Francisco’s Mission district; and look for the launch this fall of the new Richmond Confidential. We all take seriously our Ford Foundation mandate, which is to explore new ways to give communities back the coverage they’re losing as regional newspapers shrink–and also to be inventive about what digital journalism can do for all of us in the future. We’re learning new ways of telling stories in sound pictures, in cellphone dispatches, and in other forms of back-and-forth still under development.

Richmond Confidential

With a grant of $500,000 from the Ford Foundation to develop digital news sites, student reporters with the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley are covering neglected Bay Area Communities during core reporting classes. The funding also allows the school to hire two full-time multimedia instructors to teach multimedia skills during the reporting classes and oversee the development of these news websites. The Bay Area communities, increasingly ignored by the local news industry, are the focus of our “hyperlocal” websites.

San Jose Inside

The Bay Area

Welcome to The Bay Area, a new New York Times blog covering stories of interest to readers from the nine counties that embrace neighborhoods from Mountain View to Mt. Tam to Mt. Hamilton, Pleasanton to Palo Alto to Petaluma, San Jose to San Rafael to San Pablo, Fremont to Fairfield to the Farallones. You get the idea. Think of The Bay Area as a café with good coffee (or tea), comfortable armchairs and permission to talk to one’s neighbors, who are generally interesting and informed. Here, you’ll find conversations on the region’s politics, entertainment, crime, education and, of course, food. It is a discussion that is taking place in all the local micro cultures and micro climates, among neighbors, bloggers, family members, friends and co-workers. We will point to interesting stories in The New York Times, which recently launched the Bay Area Report, a section with coverage of news, arts, wining, dining and lifestyles that appears on Friday and Sunday. We will also highlight local news and information from regional media, bloggers, student publications and Twitter. We will report news live from meetings, public gatherings and other events. Join us, please, with your ideas and comments, photos and videos (bayarea@nytimes.com). The Bay Area is more than a region around the San Francisco Bay. Wallace Stegner might call it a geography of the spirit. And there are fault lines rumbling every day.

The Berkeley Blog: Provocative Thinking From UC Berkeley

We created this interactive site to give voice to the ideas and opinions of our professors in a forum that encourages public comment. Our authors include more than 140 UC Berkeley professors and scholars who share their thoughts on topical national and global issues. As the nation searches for answers to a litany of burning questions and issues, the site serves as a virtual blackboard for the game-changing ideas pulsing around the Berkeley campus.

The Happy Capitalist

Observations and commentary from an over-fifty financial planner. The markets had a second consecutive week of gains and are showing signs that we may have the first monthly gain in stocks since August. The last two days of the trading week had investors trying to interpret the Fed's plan to buy treasuries.

The Public Press

Welcome to the Public Press, an emerging concept for a noncommercial daily Web/print/broadcast collaborative news service. The idea is to put journalism first -- operating as a nonprofit organization that prioritizes public service over commerce. One idea is to eliminate advertising altogether, creating a robustly independent specialized vehicle for serious news. A newspaper born in the 21st century could experiment with new forms of "reverse" publishing -- pulling commentary, blogs and alternative news perspectives into print dynamically.

Tri-Valley Biz Blog

TVBB is a business news blog focused on the businesses large and small of the Tri-Valley and how they imapct the communities, whether good or bad.

We Fight Blight

Fight Blight in South Berkeley-North Oakland BLIGHT: The state or result of being blighted or deteriorated; dilapidation; decay; urban blight. Something that impairs growth, withers hopes and ambitions, or impedes progress and prosperity. To have a deleterious effect on; ruin
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