Oakland Local
(The Renaissance Journalism Center has awarded a $20,000 Media Greenhouse mini-grant to Oakland Local, an online community hub, for a pilot project to distribute news and information to residents via inexpensive cell phones.)
By Jaena Rae Cabrera
One might say that Oakland Local (OL) was born out of the storm of controversy that erupted with the BART police shooting of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day in 2009. Susan Mernit had moved to Oakland just a few months before the incident, and it struck a chord.
"It struck me that even though there's a lot of media in Oakland, like blogs, TV stations, newspapers and radio, there were a lot of topics that I was interested in and a lot of people I know whose voices weren't being broadly reflected," Mernit said. "What I learned from other people was that these conversations were going on, but not in places that were accessible to larger groups of people. So really, the catalyst for OL was saying we want to be a platform for diverse voices in Oakland so that when things are happening, not only can we surface interesting information not covered in traditional news media, but when things are covered in the traditional news media, we can also provide a broader view."
Mernit is the publisher and editor of Oakland Local, an innovative news and information hub for the communities of Oakland. The website launched in October 2009, and has since seen its visitors and community contributions grow.
"Oakland Local is a really refreshingly unusual animal in journalism because in Oakland you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a community group. It's just the culture here. Everybody's a part of something here," said Amy Gahran, senior editor. "Almost uniformly, the ways that they communicate keep them just below Google's radar. They're doing a lot of email newsletters, PDF files, in-person meetings, print newsletters; not stuff that is extremely findable through Google."
Oakland Local distinguishes itself from traditional news outlets by combining news stories produced by professional journalists with blogs, calendar posts and other materials contributed by the community.
"At the end of the day, we're not a journalistic endeavor. We love journalism and value journalism, but what we really care about is empowering community and civic engagement," Mernit said. "We want to provide information to people about issues and things going on and then let them have enough information that if they care, they can take action and get involved and respond."
One of the ways in which OL is trying to communicate more to its community members is through a proposal they sent to the Renaissance Journalism Center's Media Greenhouse. A majority of its community members are cell phone users, but many can't afford the expensive “smart phones” for which most news organizations formulate applications. OL wants to bridge this gap and design a way for owners of "crappy cell phones" to get relevant news about their communities.
"People have these cell phones, they are remarkably powerful tools and they're so valuable that nobody leaves their homes without them," Gahran said. "We want to be able to use this fact to connect people to their communities."
This project has two phases: conduct research and pilot programs.
"A big part of what we want to do with our grant is to conduct research because nobody is doing this. The closest is coming from some activist organizations who are using text alerts to mobilize people, and nonprofits using them for fundraising," Gahran said. "We want to borrow what they're doing and apply it to local news and information."
Their research will involve surveys and short interviews with people in the community.
"We want to try to get text alerts out there and make them flexible so people can subscribe. People can subscribe to their neighborhoods, topics or issues of choice so that they're not getting bombarded by information," Gahran said. " The trick is, obviously there are a lot of different ways we can go. The actual development costs will probably not be that much because we're not developing applications. We just need to figure out what people will actually want. What will they use and what makes sense for them to get through their cell phones. If we don't do that initial research, we could end up going totally off the mark. We want to get out into the community and conduct surveys and intensive interviews."
"I would love nothing more right now than to go to a high school, or an unemployment office or Walgreens and hang out and talk to people," she said.
After the research is compiled, the OL team will sift through the data and develop pilot programs to test different methods of disseminating information via text alerts, email and other cell phone features.
OL received a $20,000 Media Greenhouse grant to help the research, development and testing phases of this project.