Susan Mernit to launch Oakland Local with New Voices grant

My good colleague and friend, Susan Mernit, has some great news to share. She has been awarded one of the eight 2009 New Voices grants awarded by J Lab with Knight Foundation support this year! Considering the grants fielded applications from over 300 applicants, she is thrilled to have gotten this two-year grant support.

So what's the funding for? It's to kick start Oakland Local, a new site for Oakland. Says Susan, "Oakland Local will be a daily-updated web site and mobile service with a focus on environment, climate, transportation, housing, local government and community activism in Downtown, Uptown, North Oakland, West Oakland, Fruitvale, Lake Merritt, and the Dimond District."

She plans to have an editor, a publisher and three paid part-time reporters who will produce content, along with community contributors. And of course, the site will be mobile-friendly as well, given current trends towards news distribution via mobile devices.

The site will also geotag content to an XML data map, encourage users to interact via cell phones and employ a range of social networking tools to surface, share and make discoverable so much of the amazing organizing and activism in Oakland.

Susan says:

"For me, the Oscar Grant shooting were a transformative factor in applying for this grant. I saw that there was a gap in reporting that none of the blogs or local news outlets, as good as they might be, actually filled--and that lots of the best discussion was happening in smaller groups, on the margins, where people new to Oakland (like myself) or people who were not part of a particular community, might not have access to that information.  The vision here is to marry a deeper aggregation of community and non-profit content with more considered, analytical coverage of a narrow set of issues that have huge resonance for so many people in the O--and see what we can learn from the mix."

Susan co-created New Jersey Online with Jeff Jarvis back in 1995 and, with this new project, hopes to offer an opportunity to provide so many groups working on issues in Oakland an opportunity to have their work and views be heard and seen.

This is a very exciting project to those of us interested in the gaps in information needs on a local level. Personally, Susan, I wish you the best in this new endeavor!