About Oakland North

Each Fall, incoming graduate students undergo an intense five-day multimedia training program to prepare them for work on the Graduate School of Journalism’s Bay Area news sites, including Oakland North. Here are scenes from Fall 2010.

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.

We hope to keep Oakland North a source of news and community conversation, and we welcome your comments and insights. We 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.

You can also find reprints of many of our stories at the public interest news site Bay Citizen (whole stories) and on SFGate’s In Oakland blog (story excerpts.) You can connect with Oakland North on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

We welcome tips, questions, corrections and submissions for “You Tell Us,” our community op-ed page, at staff@oaklandnorth.net. Please keep in touch! – The staff of Oakland North

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. In addition to Oakland North, UC Berkeley journalism students report and write for Richmond Confidential and Mission Local.