Berkeley J-School: Multimedia Boot Camp --> Local News Sites

First week of graduate school in Journalism at Cal: a crash course in audio and video editing, and Flash animation. Why? Because the school (and the Ford Foundation, which is funding this project) recognizes the role of multimedia, multi-platform storytelling in the future of journalism.

Next, the students targeted local communities, asked what locals would want in local news, and then set about building web sites. They went live at the end of October.

There's one San Francisco site:

• Mission Loc@l

And six East Bay sites:

• Oakland North


• El Cerrito Focus


• inEmeryville


• East Bay West Online


• The (510) Report


• Albany Today

You access them all at: localreport.org

Award winning photojournalist and now J-School faculty member Richard Koci-Hernandez even created a video piece on the project (Vimeo link), but it's not as interesting as clicking around the student's local news sites.

Living on "crash curve"

The Oakland Tribune finally fills in a few details on the fatal car crash that happened at the foot of our street last December, with a feature on what some of our neighbors call "crash curve".

The young radiology student's car missed hitting [Sue] Yascolt's house by about 20 feet.
But if he had struck her home, he wouldn't have been the first. Yascolt's home has been hit five times by vehicles.

They installed a new metal guardrail last week, which does help reduce the anxiety we feel when walking to the playground. A bit.

Link

Typographic City Posters

Chicago designer Jenny Beorkrem at Ork Posters creates boldly graphic maps breaking cities up into their component neighborhoods using only boundary lines and all-caps typography (DIN 1451, for those who care about these kinds of things). Each map is available in either poster or screen print editions, in a variety of colors.

Right now the choices are limited to Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Manhattan, and San Francisco, but apparently Beorkrem's initial run was successful enough that she's quit her day job to focus on this full time.

Of course in musing about what an Ork-style Oakland might look like, I found this map (commissioned by the city in 1982) that the Oakland Museum uses to catalog its collection.

Link

Via Brooklyn Based.

I've lived here three years and only just discovered the theme song.

I had a dream that A Prairie Home Companion to Oakland, and began the show with a novelty number celebrating various names of local landmarks, including a weak rhyme of "Alameda".

Apparently such a song actually exists, having been written and recorded in 1963. Had I been alive in the Bay Area at that time, or were I a current patron of The Alley on Grand Avenue (where the song is sung by Rod Dibble at the piano bar most every Tuesday through Saturday) I would have already known about the city's official* theme song, "Oakland", by The Goodtime Washboard Three.

The song's brief but colorful history was featured in a writeup in Oakland Magazine last March. And there is an MP3 available for download from the Oakland Public Library.

Of course if your tastes run more towards E-40 or Keak da Sneak than Garrison Keillor, this probably isn't for you.

(Via the useful local information source wrapped in a visual nightmare that is 94611.net.)

*The only citation of the song's status as the city's "official" song comes from the band's washboard player Wayne Pope, who asserts that Mayor John Houlihan made the pronouncement shortly before his indictment, conviction, and jail term for embezzlement.

Oakland Getting Sweet Revenge for the Old Time Gibes of San Francisco

Oakland Goods found this feature in the NYT archives from May 7, 1906. It describes San Francisco's gentle mockery of Oakland by comparing it to New Yorkers' attitude towards Brooklyn.

Then suddenly, in the wake of the great earthquake and fire, Oakland was thrust into the spotlight as a base of operations for aid and relief efforts.

Human nature is the same in most parts of the world, and the inhabitants of Oakland have been tempted sorely to profit by the catastrophe in the big city that so often sneered at them. But as a rule they have acted marvelously well....These cheerful, warm-hearted, careless, rather lazy people of the Pacific Coast have proved themselves in this emergency "pure gold."

I wonder if a modern newspaper could stave off bankruptcy by adopting an old-timey copywriting style. I'd be willing to pay to have a paper like that delivered to my door.

Link to article (PDF format).

MOA (Metropolitan Oakland Area): "California is Climate"

Oaklandish posts a 1953 promotional film that sells the benefits of Oakland's weather--asserting that better health due to year-round warm temperatures will "increase factory production."



Via Zennie Abraham.

East Bay Monthly: the local storytelling scene

Now appearing on doorsteps in "select neighborhoods in Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont, Lafayette, Moraga, Orinda, Albany, El Cerrito, Kensington, Alameda and Alamo" --not our neighborhood, mind you (not select enough, apparently. We'll have to pick it up at the local coffeehouse)-- is the latest issue of The East Bay Monthly.

This month's feature story is a 4000 word survey of the storytelling scence. Writer Autumn Stevens interviewed a bunch of local storytellers, and put together a nice article on the theme of "not just for kids." The article includes a description of yours truly:

More closely resembling, with his neat button-down shirt and perpetually earnest expression, a middle-school English teacher than a flamboyant performing artist, Ereneta introduces a Louisiana folktale about two sisters.

Middle school teacher, eh? I was hoping for sophisticated yet approachable, with hints of cherry and oak, and a nutty finish.

Maybe I should switch to a dinner jacket and bow tie. Or bring along poor Yorick here more often.

Photo by Lori Eanes.

Oakland Crimespotting

Wow. Information designers create a super-functional interactive map of crime reports in Oakland (a mashup of data from the city of Oakland's nearly useless CrimeWatch map)

This isn't about the market performing better than government, because this isn't for profit. It's about smart people applying technology in smart ways.

Link

OaklandGoods

A relatively new blog about Oakland retail, dining, and living, cited a few posts ago for its writeup on Loard's Ice Cream.

If they (or her, or him) can keep this up, it could grow into a terrific placeblog. I've subscribed in bloglines. Here's hoping.

Link

Loard's, Loard's, Loard's

Last summer I couldn't find anything online about Loard's, our local ice cream shoppe.

Now it's been blogged, featured in the East Bay Express, and loards.com has gotten a slightly more modern makeover.

From the Express:

...Loard's makes relatively small batches of ice creams with relatively high fat content (about 16 percent), and what's known as "low overrun" — a minimal amount of pumped-in air, the notorious filler in big-factory ice cream.

I prefer it to the Fenton's, I gotta say.

This fall we're gonna host an ice cream social and have a Loard's/Fenton's faceoff, so that others will come to understand.

Jon Carroll on Goose Poop

Living near the shores of Lake Merritt, we learned that what looks on the horizon like an endless lush green lawn around the lake is really a stinky squishy carpet of goose poop.

Smart Growth, Too Early

The cover of the East Bay Express reads "GHOST TOWN: What if they built the development of the future and no one came?"

They're referring to Oakland's Fruitvale Village, of course.

But while they devote a lot of ink to the legitimate financial woes of the retailers who have moved in there, I found two key takeaways:

1. It's too early to sound a death knell on a smart growth project. (Although it would suck if the BART stations developing transit villages right now with private developer financing bailed on retail altogether).

2.Beignets.
I smell a Field trip!With coffee! And lots of powedered sugar! (And for us, it means a ride on a train. How can you beat that, kids? A train AND square donuts!)