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 during the fall by the reporting students of Cynthia Gorney and Kara Platoni, and in the spring by the students of Richard Koci Hernandez and Kara Platoni, both journalists who have covered the Bay Area for years.
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.
– The staff of Oakland North