OaklandNews - Oakland news from blogs, newspapers and other media

The short story

OaklandNews is a site that aggregrates into one place as much interesting news about Oakland as we can find. We built it as a tool to help ourselves and others stay connected with all that’s happening in Oakland. Eventually, we hope to do some cool stuff with it.

The long story

A little history, first.

Sometime in the 1990s, before I’d met her, Jeannette Sherwin began publishing a little watchdog web site - really a newsletter - called OaklandNews. It was scrappy, biting, funny, insightful and well-read inside of City Hall. Jeannette knew everyone in the city and where a lot of skeletons were. But most of all she loved Oakland and wanted it to be a better place. At the time, Jeannette was writing her newsletter in Microsoft Word and copying the content up to the web. In the summer of 2002, I emailed Jeannette out of the blue and asked if she’d let me give her Plain Jane web site a makeover. We converted it into a blog (the archives are here) and gave it a spiffy little logo with a flaming typewriter, and all was right with the world. I’m pretty sure I ended up with beer or wine as part of the deal. Best of all, Jeannette and I became friends.

Jeannette passed away in January of 2004, leaving the website in my hands. OaklandNews wasn’t really anything without Jeannette. So the site sat there for four years, untouched. My only accomplishment: not letting the URL fall into the hands of domain name squatters. Many times, I kicked around ideas for resurrecting it. But a demanding job, a grueling commute and life in general kept anything from ever happening.

So here we are today. This is not the old OaklandNews. For now, it’s a place where we’re trying to pull together links to as much of the interesing Oakland news as possible. Lots of automated news aggregators have come and gone, but none has ever met our needs: to touch the pulse of the city and give readers a sense of place. We’ll humbly try that here. Four years ago, there were just a handful of Oakland-focused sites. Lately, lots of great blogs and community sites have emerged to give us a much better picture of the social and political vibrancy of the city. Aggregating all of them into one place, along with the mainstream media news, seems to make sense.

There’s more we’d like to do, time willing. And suggestions are always welcome. For the moment, though, this is where we’re at.

OK, some obvious questions:

Q: Aren’t you stealing content?

A: We certainly don’t see it that way. We’re just republishing headlines and excerpts from stories and blogs and prominently linking out to the original sources, much like Google News does. We view OaklandNews as a gateway to all the great Oakland sites out there.

That said, if someone feels we’re trampling all over their intellectual property, then by all means contact us, and we’ll exclude you from the site.

Q: What if I want my site included in OaklandNews?

A: Great! We’ve spent a lot of time trying to track down many of the best blogs and news sources. But we know there are others. Drop us a line if you see one we should add.

Q: How do you decide which news to post?

A: There’s no fancy algorithm at work here. Just our very subjective news judgment. We scan everything from all the various sources, excluding the stuff that seems least relevant. We’ll post most everything we come across. But if you’re looking for wall-to-wall coverage of the latest sensationalistic murder trial or pro sports coverage, this is probably not the right place.

Q: Will there be any original reporting or writing?

A: Maybe. Want to write for us?

Q: How often is the site updated?

A: At least once a day, more likely a few times a day as news warrants.

Any other questions? Pipe up in the comments section below.

Some quick tips:

- The date on each story is displayed as “today,” “yesterday” and so on. This is so you can easily find and scan the most recent news.

- The all-important link to the original story or blog post is after the word “Source.” Go there to get the full story.

- We’ll be adding email subscriptions soon so you can get email reminders whenever there is new content. Done

That’s it for now. Thanks for visiting.

Michael Bazeley
April 2008