Cityside - American Journalism Project

Cityside is a nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism organization in the Bay Area with two local news sites, Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside.

Cityside launched The Oaklandside in 2020 with support from the American Journalism Project and Google, immediately creating the largest civic newsroom in Oakland and providing critical news and information to underserved communities. It also operates Berkeleyside, the successful digital local news outlet that became a nonprofit organization in 2019, and provides core infrastructure and business competencies to both newsrooms.

With support from the American Journalism Project, Cityside is showing how a successful local newsroom can leverage existing infrastructure and management team experience to scale its impact. We are now working with organizational leadership to position Cityside for future growth and expansion into new markets.

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We seek to bring an ‘asset mindset’ to our coverage, reporting on and highlighting the brilliance and value of Oakland’s people, institutions and communities, alongside our honest and uncompromising reporting on Oakland’s greatest vulnerabilities.”

Editor-in-Chief Tasneem Raja

Leaders

Lance Knobel

Co-Founder and CEO

Lance Knobel was a co-founder of Berkeleyside and worked as a journalist for nearly 40 years. Much of his career was in business journalism. In 1999-2000 he was director of the Programme of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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Tasneem Raja

Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Oaklandside

Tasneem Raja has been a consistent innovator in nonprofit news. She was the co-founder and executive editor of The Tyler Loop in Tyler, TX, a senior editor of NPR’s Code Switch, and senior editor for data journalism at Mother Jones.
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Tracey Taylor

Co-Founder and Editorial Director

Tracey Taylor was a co-founder of Berkeleyside. Before that, she wrote for The New York Times, the Financial Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Tracey has worked as an editor and publisher for business magazines and at the Financial Times in London.
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