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.
I love this city. I know that Oakland has problems, but it also has an incredible amount of potential. I hope that we can become the “model city” that Mayor Dellums has promised. Unfortunately, we have a very long way to go, and many of our most politically active residents and elected officials seem to be more interested in feel-good nonsense than real solutions. In this space, I offer my personal commentary on our progress.
I used to blog with dto510 at Future Oakland. You can read some of my older posts in the archives. I also cover local politics and development for the Oakbook.
I realized recently that I had neglected to post the good news here, that although I narrowly missed being elected delegate to the California Democratic Party, I managed to snag an appointment by representative Sandré Swanson. All of our local state and federal elected officials have a few slots for delegate appointments, so I'm grateful to have had this opportunity to continue my quest.
Shortform news items from and about the city of Alameda. "'News' is anything that anybody doesn't want somebody to know." We welcome letters from our readers. You can e-mail us at aanbletters@actionalameda.org
Peter Calthorpe is a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a Principal at Calthorpe Associates. He has helped solidify a growing trend towards the key principles of New Urbanism: that successful places - whether neighborhoods, villages, or urban centers - must be diverse in use and user, walkable and transit-oriented, and environmentally sustainable. His work has focused on how regional-scale planning and design can integrate urban revitalization and suburban renewal into a coherent vision of metropolitan growth.
After studying at Yale's Graduate School of Architecture, Calthorpe promoted energy-efficient buildings and solar design initiatives at the Farrallones Institute, the California Office of the State Architect, and with Van der Ryn, Calthorpe and Partners. In 1983, he established Calthorpe Associates, allowing him to successfully implement his philosophies of regional design through cutting-edge projects in Portland, Salt Lake, Austin, the Twin Cities, and Los Angeles. During the Clinton Administration, Calthorpe provided guidance for HUD's Empowerment Zone and Consolidated Planning Programs as well as the HOPE VI program to rebuild failed public housing projects. His international work has demonstrated that community design with a focus on environmental sustainability and human scale can be adapted throughout the globe. Chosen by the State of Louisiana to lead long-term planning efforts following the destruction caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Calthorpe is now the Lead Planner for the "Louisiana Speaks" planning initiative, and his firm is helping advise the Louisiana Recovery Authority on how southern Louisiana can recover from Hurricane Katrina while restoring wetlands and other ecologically sensitive areas.
We are an informal group of Alameda friends and neighbors who began sharing emails and links about the former Naval Air Station, the SunCal Corporation and its ballot initiative to redevelop Alameda Point. We were soon buried in information about it all.
After putting in a lot of time and effort in finding answers to our questions, we decided to build a website and make it available to everyone in the community. We hope that you find it useful!
The City of Alameda should be a place where families can raise their children and enjoy our beautiful scenery along the San Francisco Bay. But an enormous piece of our island is off limits because it is a toxic mess. After more than 100 years of military and industrial use, Alameda Point sits in decay and disrepair. We believe that it is our responsibility to clean up Alameda Point to make way for outdoor recreation, schools and housing. We support the plan to revitalize Alameda Point because doing nothing is no longer an option.
The Around Dublin Blog was launched on October 27, 2009 by John M. Zukoski and Jimmy Y. Huang as a resource for neighborhood information in Dublin, California.
As proud new home owners who are excited about Dublin’s impressive achievements and vast potential, they started to read the Staff Reports, follow City Council meetings, and consult Dublin’s City Staff to learn more about the many exciting developments throughout this beautiful emerald city of Northern California. Once they realized that other residents would be interested in the information they have collected and digested, they started this website to share what they know, evaluate each project on its own and in the greater context of the city, and provide a forum for interested residents to contribute their perspectives.
I have been in love with the craft of news reporting, writing and editing for, well, let's just say a long time.
While I've covered a lot of beats, I have concentrated on politics, public policy and governance.
I studied at El Camino College and Long Beach State University where I was honored to serve as editor of the campus newspaper, the Daily 49er.
Professionally, my journalism has graced the pages of the Los Angeles Times, the LA Daily News, the Oakland Tribune and the Sacramento Bee, among others.
In recent years my reporting has increasingly appeared in the online world -- not only here on my blog but also on the (now defunct) PolitickerCA.com site as well as on the California Independent Voter Network site.
The hyperlocal blog for Berkeley, covering news, resources, debates, the arts and anything of local interest.
Berkeleyside welcomes story ideas, photos, videos and commentaries on any aspect of Berkeley. Contact us through tips@berkeleyside.com.
Welcome to Beyond Chron, the Voice of the Rest. We provide coverage of political and cultural issues often distorted or ignored by the Bay Area's largest newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. Beyond Chron presents a critical look at the cutting edge issues of the day. Beyond Chron is published by the San Francisco-based Tenderloin Housing Clinic. Clinic Director Randy Shaw is the paper's editor. Shaw is a longtime San Francisco activist who has published three books on activism, The Activist's Handbook, Reclaiming America, and his new work, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. The University of California Press published all three books. Paul Hogarth is Beyond Chron's managing editor. Hogarth is an activist and attorney who has been both a college journalist and a former elected official in Berkeley.
To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. — Edward R. Murrow
I'm a Berkeley native but I have been living in Oakland for the past 10 years. This blog is devoted to informing the public and keeping those that are interested up to date on my lawsuit against the City over Measure Y. I am a lawyer and I have been representing myself in this action. I graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law (UC Berkeley) in 1992. In my day job, I represent public entities, including school districts and community college districts. However, the lawsuit I have filed has nothing to do with my job. I hate corrupt, lying and insincere politicians. I love my neighborhood and I believe Oakland has great potential. I also love fighting for things I believe in.
Debunking politicos, spin, and propaganda since 2003.
East Bay Conservative takes a look at events in Oakland and the surrounding areas from a non-Leftist viewpoint. This does not necessarily mean we’re actually conservatives, as traditionally defined across the US. We’re not evangelical Christians, we’re pro-choice, and we’re not particularly fond of guns. That being said, we stand opposed the throngs of people in the Bay Area who can properly be called Leftists — those who believe things such as:
* There is no reasonable maximum tax rate. The more you tax people, the better.
* Government services generally, or always, work better than those provided by private industry.
* Organic food is meaningfully better for people and/or the environment than regular food.
* Schools should receive as much money as possible, and no one should ever ask what they use it for.
* The homeless should never be regulated or constrained in any way.
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.
In the present, Oaklanders make decisions that shape the future. This blog comments on those decisions from the perspective of a real estate and marketing consultant who lives in Old Oakland and grew up in Rockridge.
Information and analysis to support responsible participation. Serving the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Merritt in Oakland, California.
Grand Lake Neighbors is a group of volunteers working together to preserve and improve the Grand Lake district of Oakland, California. Our mission is threefold:
* Communication – Sharing information and keeping each other informed about issues in our area.
* Solving problems – Tapping into the incredible talent in our neighborhood to address specific problems.
* Effecting change – Being an agent for improving our quality of life.
We work with neighborhood groups and individuals to tackle issues such as:
* Public safety
* Noise
* Attracting new retail merchants
* Supporting existing businesses
* Local cultural events
* Beautification and streetscape improvements
* Building Neighborhood Watch block groups
* Traffic
* Parking
California Political News, Contra Costa and East Bay News & Politics
Livermore Links is the hyperlocal news blog focusing on the Livermore Valley, located in the East Bay's Tri-Valley region.
I recently wrote a blog post listing some of what I consider to be essential Oakland experiences. I added to that original list some suggestions provided by my blog readers, and now I intend to go through the list and blog about each of these experiences. As I blog about them, I’ll update this page with links to the corresponding blog posts and it will be easy to tell what I’ve done because I’ll mark them in bold and move them to the top of the list.
After MOBN! had its budget meeting, took votes there and then surveyed its membership electonically, the results were clear:
* Hands off the police department;
* The city can’t fix this its fiscal problemswith program reductions;
* City salaries and benefits are out of control;
* Fixing these problem will take broad-based, across the board personnel cost reductions in every department.
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.
Josh Richman covers state and federal politics for the Bay Area News Group – East Bay.
A New York City native, he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and reported for the Express-Times of Easton, Pa. for five years before coming to the Oakland Tribune and ANG Newspapers in 1997.
He is a frequent guest on KQED Channel 9’s “This Week in Northern California;” a proud father; an Eagle Scout; a somewhat skilled player of low-stakes poker; a rather good cook; a firm believer in the use of semicolons; and an unabashed political junkie who will never, EVER seek elected office.
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.
The Sacramento Press will be the most comprehensive, local news source and information center for the Sacramento Metropolitan Area.
We are a strictly online newspaper. Our writers are primarily volunteer Community Contributors.
We combined the best tools on the web and built an outstanding platform from scratch. This platform enables people to tell stories about their neighborhoods and have thoughtful conversations about these stories. Then our editors place the best content on the front page and section pages to highlight great work.
Calendar of political events for San Francisco.
With more than 12 million unique visitors per month as audited by the ABC, SFGate is the leading news and information Web site for the San Francisco Bay Area. Reflecting the diverse spirit of the region, SFGate delivers the most up to the minute stories, in-depth special reports, unbeatable local sports coverage, the best regional listings and cutting edge entertainment coverage.
SFGate is home to the San Francisco Chronicle, plus Web-only features by SFGateÕs own editorial team - the Bay Area by the people who know it best
Sfbg.com is one of the longest-running news-focused web sites. Our searchable archives go back to January 1995, and feature over 50,000 pages and files. Over the years we've expanded our coverage and our reach, focusing on the debate over public power, the string of wars in the Middle East, and our annual nude beach pages. We regularly cover all aspects of art, culture, and entertainment, with our Lit, Noise, Club, gift, and event guides.
Launched in August of 2004, SFist is the most popular local blog in the Bay Area. It has posts ranging from in-depth features to insightful interviews, to bona-fide scoops. Its staff is as eclectic as the city they love. SFist has been mentioned by the San Francisco Chronicle, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, and several local media outlets. It was named the Best Local Blog by SF Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. SF Weekly said the site is "so distracting that it keeps us from doing any work," and that the site has its "nose in just about every nook and cranny of San Francisco." The Guardian said that SFist was "blog heaven" for their readers and the Chronicle is thankful for SFist and its "constant flow of information." San Francisco magazine readers picked the site as the Best Bay Area Blog.
One’s inclination when ones clothing catches fire is to run around waving their arms wildly to douse the flames. By slowing down and being mindful of our actions, it’s easy to remember to stop, drop and roll.
Contact me at JKWBlog@gmail.com
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.
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 Black Hour Internet Radio Show is an internet radio show based at Laney College in Oakland, CA.
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.
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.
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 SECRET NEWS reflects a better vision for Emeryville, one that addresses the needs and desires of the people who live and work here. It was born out of frustration and some outrage over the direction the city is headed, and the desire for something better. Citizens are demanding better schools, quality housing and jobs, more parks, and neighborhoods safe from excessive traffic, pollution, and noise. We want a city government that is accountable to the people it serves. At a community meeting in Emeryville in June 2008, residents discussed their vision for Emeryville and what community benefits the city should provide. It was decided that a newspaper would be a great way to reinforce that vision, keep people informed and involved, and provide an alternative to the misinformation generated by the City Council and Chamber of Commerce. THE SECRET NEWS aims to provide Emeryville residents with a way to participate in shaping the future of their city.
SF Weekly's news, politics and opinion 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.
Walking. Bicycling. Alternatives to Driving Everywhere. Social justice. Alternatives to suburban boredom and waste. And the infrastructure and technology needed to get there.
I'm a writer, editor and Web site builder. My new book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, now available from your preferred bookseller. I was co-founder of Salon, where I served as technology editor and later managing editor and VP/editorial operations for many years. I'm also author of the book Dreaming in Code.
