Susan Mernit, Oakland Local: Multiple Sources of Local News (Fund My Media Startup, Part 1)

First up: Jan Schaffer is introducing a J-Lab grantee Susan Mernit, who's about to launch a new community hub for Oakland CA: OaklandLocal.com

Notes from Susan Mernit's remarks:

Early in 2009, Mernit was angry about poor quality of Oakland, CA community coverage in wake of Oscar Grant shooting, so she decided to do a startup.

OaklandLocal.com launches in Oct. Different model: Working with pro reporters, bloggers, and have reached out to thousands of local community organizations.

There's so much being talked about in Oakland, but you can't easily find that unless you subscribe to the local groups.

In Oakland, tons of community groups -- but very few are blogging. They rely on e-mail blasts, newsletters, sites that are mostly pdfs. OaklandLocal.com built a Drupal tool that takes e-mail blast and puts it on the web to make it findable. We're releasing that tool back into the Drupal community."

Oakland Local will also include a database of community orgs, a directory of local bloggers, calendars, and original reporting.

"Every group we've approached has agreed to work with us, except 2, and they want us to launch first and then talk to them. This is unusual in Oakland, because most of these community groups don't talk to each other. A lot of silo's we're busting."

Mernit is going over her frugal budget, wise use of resources to get Oakland Local to launch. Right now, Oakland Local is being run out of Susan's large dining room.

Question for Susan Mernit: "How do you reconcile outreach to "interest groups" with traditional journalism of maintaining a distance."

Susan Mernit: We think our readers are smart enough that is we label the source of the content (community groups, bloggers, reporters, etc.) they'll know the difference and draw their own conclusions. My partner says right now I'm strip-mining people's goodwill to launch, and he's not wrong. People, myself included, really want to contribute to get this project off the ground.

Part of my reason to do Oakland Local is to replicate it. If it works, we'd look at starting others. But main goal is to make this work.

Several years out, Oakland Local could be East Bay Express only different. Go-to starting place for local news and launching pad for community members who want to connect or develop writing/networking skills.

Question: What does Susan Mernit think about the hyperlocal site MissionLocal in SF?

Mernit: "I'm leery of drive-by journalism. I'd rather have UC Berkeley send us some journalism students and we'd give them deeper grounding with community ties."

NOTE: This is a transcript of my liveblog from Fund My Media Startup, a workshop by J-Lab presented Oct. 1, 2009 at the conference of the Online News Association in San Francisco.

I've made a separate blog post for each speaker's session in the daylong event. Index of sessions