Oakland Local awarded one of three Bay Area innovation grants by Renaissance Media Center

Published on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Last updated on 07:25PM, Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Renaissance Journalism Center has awarded $20,000 grants to three Bay Area projects to test innovative models for gathering and distributing community news. The grants represent the first awards under the Center’s Media Greenhouse, which are designed to strengthen community and ethnic news media outlets and the groups they serve.

Oakland Local is THRILLED to be one of the three recipients of an award. Our funding will let us pilot two small-scale projects designed to deliver news and information to residents who utilize inexpensive, low-end technology cell phones--making our community partners, local news, and calendar all way more accessible to more people around the city.

The other two recipients are:

Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a media technology center, to support the development of a neighborhood news network (n3) program. BAVC will train community television news producers and make use of a high-speed fiber optic network to enable live broadcast and Internet streaming of the news programs. The grant will help launch the first three neighborhood sites.

Nichi Bei Foundation, a nonprofit educational and charitable organization, to support the launch of an online community hub to serve the news and information needs of the pan-Asian American community. The award helps the foundation, which publishes the Nichi Bei Weekly newspaper, to expand its content, audience and fundraising capabilities by going online.

“News media outlets across the nation are struggling to adapt and survive as technology and business practices change,” said Jon Funabiki, Executive Director of the Center. “We hope these experiments—which are modest, yet daring at the same time—will offer lessons for all journalists, but especially those committed to community coverage.”

The Media Greenhouse is administered by the Renaissance Journalism Center, an interdisciplinary center that works to identify and spark promising new journalistic models and practices that serve, strengthen and empower communities.

The Renaissance Journalism Center is an initiative of San Francisco State Journalism Department in partnership with ZeroDivide. Support for the Media Greenhouse comes from ZeroDivide, the Ford Foundation and the McCormick Foundation.

About Susan Mernit
Susan Mernit is the founder of Oakland Local. She is also a circuit rider for The Community Information Challenge, a program of The John S and James L Knight Foundation, and a consultant to non-profit and community organizations. Susan lives in North Oakland, near the Santa Fe school, with her partner, her housemate, a rescue dog named Cazzie, and a yard full of ants. She is an aspiring gardener, a long-time blogger & entrepreneur, and a recovering journalist who's found home in Oakland.
Ryan Mickle commented at Wed, 10 Feb at 11:16pm

Congrats, Susan and the rest of the Oakland Local team. What an honor and a worthwhile investment in celebrating and documenting Oakland culture.