The Oaklandside

About The Oaklandside

The Oaklandside is an independent nonprofit digital news site serving Oakland, California. Launched in 2020 by the Cityside Journalism Initiative, it was the organization's second newsroom after Berkeleyside and one of the largest startup newsrooms in Oakland at its founding. The Oaklandside reports on housing, education, policing, and community issues through an equity lens, amplifying community voices and delivering practical, actionable information to residents. It is free to readers and funded through philanthropy and reader donations, with initial seed funding from the Google News Initiative and the American Journalism Project. Its editor-in-chief is Tasneem Raja.

Founding and Launch

The creation of The Oaklandside was announced in December 2019, following Berkeleyside's conversion to nonprofit status. The new Oakland journalism platform was initially funded with $1.56 million from the Google News Initiative, the organization's third collaboration in its Local Experiments Project aimed at building sustainable local news models. The American Journalism Project, a nonpartisan venture philanthropy organization dedicated to local news, contributed another $1.56 million for business, technology, and fundraising capacity, plus close strategic support. The site officially launched on June 16, 2020, but its newsroom of seven had already been working for months: when the pandemic stopped nearly everything else in the spring of 2020, the staff decided they needed to get to work immediately. The official launch came after the team had already covered early-pandemic Oakland, including protests, school closures, and eviction protections.

Cityside Journalism Initiative

The Oaklandside is published by the Cityside Journalism Initiative, a nonprofit parent organization created by the team behind Berkeleyside, the independent online local newsroom in Berkeley that had operated for more than a decade. Cityside's other publications include Berkeleyside, Richmondside, and East Bay Nosh, a food publication; together those sites reach more than 500,000 people in the East Bay every month. Co-founder and CEO Lance Knobel has argued that intensely local focus is the key to sustainability: twelve years with Berkeleyside convinced the team that focusing on a single city mattered. Cityside provides shared infrastructure — fundraising, technology, and business operations — that lets each newsroom concentrate on reporting. The model has been studied nationally as an alternative vision for local news: a nonprofit parent organization supporting market-specific newsrooms rooted in their communities.

Leadership and Newsroom

Tasneem Raja is the editor-in-chief of The Oaklandside. A trailblazer in nonprofit and community-led journalism, she is a former senior editor at NPR and Mother Jones and had previously co-founded The Tyler Loop in Tyler, Texas, a community-supported newsroom she launched with no funding and no staff. At launch, The Oaklandside employed eight editorial staffers, making it one of the largest newsrooms in Oakland. Early beats included housing and homelessness, covered by Natalie Orenstein; education, covered by Ashley McBride, formerly of the Poynter Institute; arts and community, covered by Azucena Rasilla; and managing editor Jacob Simas. The newsroom has since grown, and veteran investigative editor Esther Kaplan later joined the staff. The team describes its relationship to its audience as closer to community organizing than traditional reporting.

Housing and Homelessness Coverage

Housing is a core beat at The Oaklandside, reflecting the severity of the Bay Area's housing crisis and its disproportionate impact on Oakland. Early coverage included a frequently updated FAQ on evictions during the pandemic, practical guides to tenant protections, and accountability reporting on how the city spends housing dollars. Reporters have covered encampment clearances, the city's homelessness response, affordable housing development, and displacement in historically Black neighborhoods. The coverage is deliberately service-oriented: rather than only documenting problems, The Oaklandside aims to give readers information they can act on, from knowing their rights as renters to understanding what their elected officials are doing about the crisis.

Education Reporting

Education is another foundational coverage area. Ashley McBride's reporting on a nine-year campaign to remove police from Oakland schools was among the newsroom's early signature stories, exemplifying its focus on systemic issues and community-led change. The Oaklandside covers the Oakland Unified School District's budget crises, school closures, teacher strikes, and the experiences of students and families, with an emphasis on equity. Its education reporting has been recognized by California education groups for helping increase public understanding of schools. The newsroom treats schools as civic institutions where larger questions about race, resources, and governance play out, and it seeks out the perspectives of students, parents, and educators alongside officials.

Policing and Public Safety

The Oaklandside covers policing and public safety with an eye toward accountability and historical context. Managing editor Jacob Simas's early reporting examined how curfews have been used throughout history to suppress social justice movements and curtail the movement of people of color. The newsroom has investigated the Oakland Police Department's practices, police budgets, and the city's alternative approaches to public safety, including violence prevention programs. Its approach combines data-driven accountability reporting with stories that center the experiences of residents most affected by policing. In a city with a long history of tension between police and communities of color, the outlet's equity lens shapes which questions it asks and whose voices it amplifies.

Equity Lens and Community Voices

Covering Oakland "with an equity lens" is The Oaklandside's defining editorial commitment. The newsroom has said it wants to be the place where readers hear perspectives and voices they will not hear elsewhere, deliberately seeking out communities that mainstream coverage has overlooked or misrepresented. Its arts and community coverage celebrates Oakland's cultural life, while its service journalism — explainers, FAQs, and guides — treats readers as participants in civic life rather than spectators. The outlet's coverage of the pandemic's early months illustrated the approach: one reporter called 40 pharmacies to find out which were open and where people could get prescriptions filled, producing information of direct use to residents.

Funding and Nonprofit Model

The Oaklandside is free to read, supported by philanthropy and reader donations rather than subscriptions or paywalls. Its launch funding came from the Google News Initiative and the American Journalism Project, each contributing $1.56 million, with both funders explicitly having no input or influence on editorial decisions. Since launch, the outlet has diversified its revenue, raising money from foundations and individual donors, including matching-gift campaigns such as the first Local News Day. The newsroom has consistently exceeded its early benchmarks: it aimed to reach 100,000 unique monthly visitors by the end of 2020 and instead averaged 184,000 per month in 2021, with surges during coverage of vaccination efforts. The nonprofit model has allowed it to focus on impact rather than page-view growth.

A Model Studied Nationally

The Oaklandside's launch drew national attention from publishing executives because it offered a new approach to a stubborn problem: finding a sustainable business model for local news. Where for-profit startups like Axios and 6AM City championed a newsletter-centric, small-team model, The Oaklandside presented an alternative vision — a newsroom intensely focused on a single market and supported by a nonprofit parent organization, with a relationship to its audience that resembles community organizing as much as reporting. Despite launching just months into the pandemic, the publication surpassed many of its internal first-year benchmarks. Industry observers have treated Cityside's model as a template for reviving local news: build deep trust in one city, share infrastructure across sister newsrooms, and fund journalism through philanthropy and reader support rather than scale-driven advertising.

Newsletters, Podcast, and Products

The Oaklandside reaches readers beyond its website through email newsletters and a weekly podcast about Oakland news. Its newsletters deliver the day's most important local stories along with service information, and the podcast extends the newsroom's explanatory journalism into audio. Like its sibling publications, The Oaklandside uses its products to build habitual relationships with readers rather than chasing viral traffic. Its stories are also shared across Cityside's network, and the organization has won recognition at the San Francisco Press Club awards. As Cityside has expanded to Richmondside and grown East Bay Nosh, The Oaklandside remains the flagship example of the organization's thesis: that a newsroom intensely focused on one city, backed by nonprofit infrastructure, can become a durable civic institution.