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.
Kathryn Harper is a Renaissance woman; she has worked as a librarian, psychotherapist, and community advocate. She grew up in the snow belt of Syracuse, New York, and headed to Austin, Texas, in 1994 for the sunshine, job opportunities, and barbeque. In 2004 she moved further west to the scenic and culturally diverse San Francisco Bay Area. Kathryn is also a self-taught artist, poet, and an omnivorous, voracious reader. Believing passionately in the innate creativity of all humans, she dedicates her life to igniting curiosity, promoting creative and critical thinking, and inspiring enthusiasm for lifetime learning. Kathryn can always be persuaded to savor a good meal, play board games, or dance. She lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband, her amazing daughter Claire (born 9/8/07), and Stella the cat.
Alemany Farm is a 4.5 acre working organic farm in southeastern San Francisco. The Farm is collaboratively managed by volunteers, San Francisco city officials, and residents of the Alemany community. Friends of Alemany Farm (FoAF) is a volunteer-managed project sponsored by the San Francisco Parks Trust. We are dedicated to working hand-in-hand with the surrounding community to increase food security and support environmental education for all San Francisco residents. FoAF oversees organic food production at the site, offers workshops and educational courses, coordinates the volunteer efforts, manages a free neighborhood produce delivery, and hosts field trips for children and adults.
Alternatives in Action is a non-profit that works with youth who have leadership potential and prepares them for college, career and community. Many people see youth as a problem to be solved. At Alternatives in Action, youth solve problems. Through education, skills-building and real world experiences, young people, some of whom may otherwise fall through the cracks, become successful, contributing adults and leaders in their community.
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.
Great Oakland Public Schools is a coalition of Oakland families, students, teachers, principals, nonprofit, community, and civic leaders united around a positive, student-centered, results-oriented, innovation-encouraging vision for public education in our city.
Our mission is to provide leadership, advocacy, and information to continue the successful education reforms in Oakland, further empower Oaklanders to influence education policy, and ensure that all students have access to quality school options in their neighborhood and throughout the city.
We are committed to continuing and deepening the successful reforms that have made OUSD the most improved school district in the State of California over the last five years with API gains of 92 points.
We will make an ongoing effort to include every school community in our activities and mailing list, and will collaborate with and monitor the decisions of school board and district leaders in alignment with our vision and beliefs about Oakland public schools.
During the summer of 2009, we completed the latest draft of the Declaration of Community Beliefs and Visions for Oakland Public Schools after capturing the community feedback we received from previous drafts.
Livermore Links is the hyperlocal news blog focusing on the Livermore Valley, located in the East Bay's Tri-Valley region.
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 Local is a news & community blog for Oakland that combines reported stories, blog posts & news and events from over 35 community and nonprofit partners. Updated several times a day, OL takes a social justice approach to Oakland issues including food access, climate change, development and transportation. We are diverse and reflect many voices...and we welcome new bloggers, community members, and writers. If you are a blogger in Oaktown, list yourself in our directory--we have 186 blogs there--are you among them?
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.
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.
Teacher, Revised is for teachers and by teachers. It is an education grab bag of classroom reflection, a compilation of news that matters to teachers, essays, interviews with the brightest minds in pedagogy, and even the occasional book and movie review. Basically, it deals with anything that affects teachers, could make teachers’ lives better, or that we all should be very, very afraid of.
But it’s also more than that. As teachers, we are in a state of perpetual revision. We revise our lesson plans, our classroom management strategies, our seating charts, and our teaching philosophy. The ability to do this with sincerity and courage—often in the moment—is essential to a teacher’s shelf life. Without that, we “go bad.” Undoubtedly you are familiar with the stench of teachers who have reached their expiration date. It ain’t pretty. To avoid this, we must make a life partner of revision. It is the natural preservative that keeps us fresh. This means looking inward and outward—reflecting on our own practice, and keeping an ear to the ground for what’s new (or old) in the world of education.
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 Black Hour Internet Radio Show is an internet radio show based at Laney College in Oakland, CA.
The Education Report was born in June 2007. Ever since, people have been using it to dish, vent, debate, and muse about their experiences and impressions of Oakland’s schools. I’m always open to tips — blog ideas, especially.
You can reach me most easily at kmurphy@bayareanewsgroup.com, or by calling (510) 208-6424. You can also follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/katymurphy.
Welcome to The Island, Alameda’s online news source. This site is written and edited by Michele (Marcucci) Ellson. Ellson’s journalism career stretches back 17 years, with her most recent gig as a staff reporter for the Bay Area News Group based in Oakland. Her work has appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times. She is the winner of several journalism awards, including a Sigma Delta Chi award for investigative reporting, Associated Press and James Madison Freedom of Information. She was also the publisher of her own monthly ‘zine, sacred cow. Ellson has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Buffalo State College.
I am a Mommy raising our daughter to protect and respect the environment. I wonder, what does it all mean? What can I do (what can we all do) to make our world a better place?
There are so many apartments and condos throughout California and beyond that have no curbside recycling programs. Imagine the hundreds of thousands of children who attend school every day, and have no idea what this simple, common idealogy really means?
It’s the same all over the world. Knock on a door. Pick up a phone. Stop a stranger on the street. Ask a question. You might get the brush off, or you might hear a story. Oakland and Berkeley are no different from anywhere else. Yet, in this metropolitan area of half a million people where 89 languages are spoken, tech entrepreneurs share buildings with potters, and one of the world’s great universities sits not five miles from one of the world’s great ports, too many stories are left untold.
The OakBook wants to tell some of those stories. And we want to offer a place where you can tell yours. We will bring you news from the schools your children attend, the ways your neighborhood is changing, new art, new theater, and new places to eat and drink. Our website invites you to give your take, whether it’s on an old cafe, a new charter school, or some outrageous plan hatched in City Hall. We’d love for you to tell us what we should be covering. So, send us your feedback. We want to hear from you
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.
The SF K Files is a place for parents who are seeking a kindergarten in San Francisco. The site offers up reviews of public, private, and parochial schools, as well as lots of advice and opinions from the community of parents who frequent the blog.
California is crumbling. The schools are being attacked. How are we going to get out of this mess? I'm a middle school history teacher in San Leandro, California, and a Union activist. I'm fed up with political excuses for creating substandard schools that don't serve the very kids who have the greatest need. Please share your comments with me at mistermorse109@yahoo.com.
News from UC Berkeley covering the full breadth of the ideas and inventions percolating up from this community of 50,000 students, professors, and staff.
