The impetus for starting Oakland Local was the murder of Oscar Grant. I’d always thought many people in Oakland lacked a media outlet—blog or news site—that reflected who they were and what they cared about—but I’d always felt like starting one myself was more than I wanted to take on.  Did I have the focus to get it going? The commitment to social justice it would require to continue?

But then, as the information about Oscar Grant’s death unfolded, and people reacted to the killing of a hand-cuffed young man on a train platform, and to the failure of BART to be immediately accountable, and to conditions that made some people not want to acknowledge Grant’s death as the outrageous event it truly was, it became clear, in those days following the killing, that a lot of voices were being left out of the media conversation.

Problem was, to my eyes, that the coverage was unbalanced—there were accounts of merchants’ whose shop windows were broken as a demonstration turned violent, but no accounts of people of color whose voices went unheard by mainstream media, or whose grief was treated as colorful and exotic. And then there was the question of police accountability—and responsibility—in this death.

As the New Years’ week went on, and events unfolded, the coverage improved a bit—but not really enough.

Why weren’t there more local people of color voices being heard? Why did so much of the media degrade into us and them? And why weren’t more perspectives on Oscar’s death, the BART police, and what passed for justice able to be accessed?

“There has to be a way to have a more diverse range of voices be heard in Oakland, “ I told my friends and my partner. “This is just not balanced, not rounded in any way.”

Those feelings gelled into the idea of a new site for Oakland after I met Kwan Booth, now our senior producer (and an OL principal), who simultaneously corrected some of my misconceptions (“People are talking,” he said, “But not on blogs and social media sites where you can see it,”) and agreed with some of my arguments (“Yes, the blogosphere and the media are pretty siloed here.”)

We started to talk about the idea of building something for Oakland that would be more open than what we saw in January 2009—a news & community hub that would be a platform for multiple voices, a place where people with diverse experiences and views could all share and be heard.

And here it is, a year later, and we’re into the third month of operating Oakland Local. 

Thanks to a grant from J-Lab’s New Voices program and hard work by a lot of people, Oakland Local is up and running. Judging by our growth over the past two months, jumping from 10,000 to 19,000 unique visitors a month, there seems to be a genuine need for a site that is diverse, community-focused, and speaks to a wider audience. Our blend of reported news and community voices also seems to have hit a mark, with some member-written stories getting over 1,000 page views apiece.

Interestingly, while the spark for Oakland Local started with Oscar Grant’s death, a lot of what we have done to carry it forward speaks to his life.

The OL coverage of this one-year anniversary of his death—with his killer not yet tried—honors the vibrancy and humanity of a life lost way too young. It reflects our commitment to highlight the opinions and views of people who too often feel pushed outside of the mainstream, made into the Other, and our promise to ourselves to speak truth to power.

Oakland is a city where moving forward to solve our problems means talking clearly with one another, then making things happen, We can say “We are all Oscar Grant,” but what makes the statement meaningful is how we listen to one another, how we get out of our silos.

This entry is part of our Oscar Grant Memorial Tribute. See the full series here.