Oakland Local: Nonprofit news hub launches

Dia de Los Muertos dancers, photo by Kwan Booth

Today, after months of planning and programming, a new community news site went live: Oakland Local. And while there are now thousands of hyperlocal, city- or region-focused citizen media sites around the world, Oakland Local is one of the few that offers a blend of nonprofit underpinnings with a staff of independent, professionally trained journalists.

My friend Susan Mernit — we’re two of the founders of the Public Media Collaborative — is the founder of the community news and information hub, which she describes as “a site for Oakland focusing on social justice issues, including climate change, air quality, food access, arts as activism, and identity, race and ethnicity.”

Susan adds: “Oakland Local is launching in partnership with 35 local nonprofit, neighborhood and community organizations. We combine postings of their news and information with blogging and with reported stories from a top quality news team (Susan Mernit, Amy Gahran, Kamika Dunlap, Kwan Booth, Ryan Van Lenning and others). We are media partners and collaborators with Spot.us, Newsdesk.org, The Center for Investigative Reporting, New America Media, Endless Canvas, Youth Rising, Youth Radio and Youth Outlook. Our site offers forums, a directory of 320 local nonprofits and a blog directory of 180 active local bloggers.”

The site’s launch was financed with a New Voices grant from J-Lab, funded by The Knight Foundation, which has been leading the charge to find innovative business models for news enterprises around the country. (Disclosure: I received a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007.) See the site’s About page for more info about the site’s mission.

Follow @oaklandlocal on Twitter. Its Facebook fan page is here.

Oakland Local holds promise as a template for other community-focused ventures. As my Socialbrite colleague Amy Sample Ward writes:

“There’s a lot of very cool activity happening lately around local websites. The social web has opened a lot of doors for communities and collaborations and changed the way many people view the definition of community — on the web, communities can form easily and quickly around ideas, interests, and anything else — as physical geography isn’t important. Now that social media tools have reached a certain level of ubiquity for those online (we can’t forget that many people are still not even online at all), we see people and groups turning the tools back around to help connect those who are geographically close.

“The latest work we’ve been doing with the Social by Social concept (using social tech for social good) is to help apply the ideas and lessons we originally wrote about for nonprofit organizations to also be applicable to the work of local governments and communities (moving from connecting communities of interest to communities of locality).”

I’ll be watching Oakland Local’s progress in the coming weeks and months, and hope you will, too.

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz.

JD Lasica, founder and former editor of Socialbrite, is co-founder of Cruiseable. Contact JD or follow him on Twitter or Google Plus.