The Oaklandside Is Creating a Blueprint for Nonprofit Local News

Last June, the nonprofit organization Cityside launched The Oaklandside, then an eight-person newsroom, to cover hyper-local Oakland, Calif. news. Despite launching just a few months into the pandemic, the publication has since surpassed many of the internal benchmarks it set to measure success. The modest venture of launching a local newsroom caught the eye of publishing executives across the country because The Oaklandside offered a new approach to solving a tenaciously stubborn problem: finding a sustainable business model for local news. In recent months, publishers like Axios and 6AM City have championed a newsletter-centric model for reviving local news, which hinges on the idea of building out and scaling a for-profit news operation with a small team. The Oaklandside presents an alternative vision: a newsroom intensely focused on an individual market, supported by a nonprofit parent organization. Its relationship to the audience it serves resembles community organizing rather than solely reporting. Initially, the project faced significant headwinds due to the pandemic, said Lance Knobel, co-founder and the CEO of Cityside, but has since found steady footing. “How do you pay for journalists?” Knobel said. “Our theory is that you need the newsrooms to be intensely focused on the local. Twelve years with Berkeleyside convinced our team that focusing on a single city was important to what we do.” While the Cityside team has no concrete timeline for expansion, it plans to move into neighboring markets in the next few years, Knobel confirmed. Exceeding many first-year goals The Oaklandside aimed to reach 100,000 unique visitors by December, a benchmark it has surpassed, averaging 184,000 unique visitors per month in 2021. Heightened readership in March and April has inflated its 2021 average, as the site received 240,000 and 160,000 visitors, respectively, thanks to surging interest in vaccination efforts. Rather than subscribers, the nonprofit has members, a designation that refers to anyone who has made a financial donation of any amount to the publication. The Oaklandside hoped to accrue 1,000 paying members by the end of 2020, and it currently has 2,142. The median annual donation at The Oaklandside is $112. The publication also has one newsletter, which publishes three times a week and reaches 17,768 free subscribers. In total, The Oaklandside is on pace to generate $1,546,000 in revenue in 2021. Broken down by source, $964,000 comes from philanthropy, $300,000 comes from memberships, and $282,000 comes from its corporate sponsorships. 'Off to a hot start' From the beginning, the founders of The Oaklandside put a premium on incorporating feedback from the Oakland community. As part of this effort, The Oaklandside staff embarked on a months-long listening campaign before launching the publication. Staff asked residents what issues were important to them and what they wanted from a local news organization. The publication has a number of resources on its website proving its commitment to community accountability, including a page that lists the founding values of the publication and its vertical How We Work. The Oaklandside also values the diversity of its readers, publishing articles in Spanish and using the texting service Subtext to share critical information with thousands of subscribers about pandemic-related news. To reach Oakland citizens unlikely to visit the website, staff even took to distributing flyers and stapling posters with vaccine information throughout the city. This focus on reaching the community has played a vital role in its surviving the pandemic, said Joseph Lichterman, communication and editorial director of journalism nonprofit Lenfest Institute. “The Oaklandside was intentional about not jumping in and publishing, but instead doing focus groups and talking to leaders in neighborhoods to understand what they wanted from a news organization,” Lichterman said. “They went in with a service mindset, and I think that allowed them to get off to such a hot start.” Structure of The Oaklandside and Cityside The Oaklandside is the sister nonprofit to Berkeleyside, which journalists Frances Dinkelspiel, Lance Knobel and Tracey Taylor founded in 2009 as a for-profit publication. In December 2019, the Berkeleyside founders unleashed a cavalcade of changes: converting the publication into a nonprofit, launching Cityside as its nonprofit parent and announcing the debut of The Oaklandside. The team also named Tasneem Raja as the editor in chief of the Oakland outpost and its fourth founding member. Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside operate largely independent of each other. Both rely on Cityside to fundraise, secure sponsors, spur audience development, monitor membership, test new products and generally serve as the support system for their coverage. By centralizing these tasks, the two newsrooms gain the operational advantages of a larger newsroom while maintaining their distinct identities. This year, Berkeleyside is on track to generate $1,424,000 in revenue, and its median annual member donation is $93. As Cityside expands into new locations, the operational efficiencies it gains will continue to compound, reflecting the benefits of a hub-and-spoke model. However, The Oaklandside team plans to prioritize listening to and reflecting the communities at the heart of any future outposts. Newsletter Platform Substack Goes Local