Cityside Journalism Initiative

Oakland, California, USA · Founded 2019 · Nonprofit network for community-centered local journalism

Overview

Cityside Journalism Initiative is a Bay Area nonprofit that publishes three independent local news sites—Berkeleyside, The Oaklandside, and Richmondside—as well as Nosh, an East Bay food-and-drink vertical. The organization was created to preserve the close civic relationship of a neighborhood or city publication while building shared capacity that a single small newsroom usually cannot afford: fundraising, sponsorship sales, membership, product and technology, audience development, events, people operations, legal and administrative support, and long-term planning. Its stated mission connects local reporting to community ties, civic engagement, and democratic health.

Cityside is not a conventional chain that reproduces the same publication in multiple markets. Each newsroom has its own local identity, editorial leadership, source networks, and coverage priorities. The common structure sits behind the journalism, allowing reporters and editors to concentrate on city government, education, housing, public safety, transportation, culture, food, and neighborhood life. The model is therefore both centralized and local: centralized where scale improves sustainability, but intentionally place-specific where trust and reporting knowledge matter most.

From Berkeleyside to Cityside

The institution grew from Berkeleyside, launched in October 2009 by journalists Frances Dinkelspiel, Lance Knobel, and Tracey Taylor after they concluded that Berkeley was losing essential local reporting. The publication developed from a small digital startup into a widely studied local-news operation supported by advertising, readers, events, and eventually philanthropy. Its founders treated the business model as part of the journalistic project, testing membership, live events, sponsorship products, and an unusually ambitious community-investment campaign.

Between 2016 and 2018, the for-profit Berkeleyside raised more than $1 million from hundreds of readers through a direct public offering. Cityside says more than 300 participants became shareholders and that all consented to the 2019 conversion to nonprofit status; a Lenfest Institute case study counted 355 investors and described it as the first direct public offering undertaken by a local news organization. The conversion transformed community investors into what Cityside calls Foundation Members and supplied the institutional base for expanding beyond Berkeley.

Cityside was founded in 2019 by Dinkelspiel, Knobel, Taylor, and Tasneem Raja, who brought experience from nonprofit, data, and community-centered journalism. The new nonprofit received federal tax-exempt status in January 2020. Its first expansion was The Oaklandside, launched in June 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic after extensive listening work in Oakland. Richmondside followed on July 1, 2024, after research and conversations with Richmond residents about information gaps in a city that had experienced severe contraction in independent local reporting.

Newsroom Network

2009

Berkeleyside

Cityside's original publication: an independent digital newsroom covering Berkeley government, education, housing, public safety, business, culture, and neighborhood life.

2020

The Oaklandside

A newsroom built from community listening, with an explicit commitment to amplifying local voices, serving underserved residents, and investigating systems rather than isolated symptoms.

2024

Richmondside

Independent local reporting for Richmond, developed after months of information-needs research and launched in response to the city's shrinking traditional news infrastructure.

Regional

Nosh

Award-winning East Bay food-and-drink journalism, published across Cityside's audience network and focused on restaurants, workers, small businesses, and the region's food culture.

The network gives Cityside several layers of coverage. City-focused reporting maintains accountability at the municipal and neighborhood levels. Shared specialty coverage—most visibly through Nosh—recognizes that culture and commerce often cross city boundaries. Central audience and business teams can also distribute successful products, sponsorship formats, newsletters, events, and operational practices across multiple publications without erasing their editorial differences.

Community Listening and Service Journalism

Cityside's most distinctive editorial idea is that community engagement should shape reporting before publication, not merely promote stories afterward. Before launching The Oaklandside, the organization conducted extensive listening to identify what Oakland residents believed existing media missed. The newsroom then developed structures for continuing feedback, including Mission Metrics, a pilot in which paid community advisers representing Oakland's districts evaluated whether the publication was meeting its founding commitments. Cityside has also supported first-person projects such as Amplify Oakland, designed to let residents describe their experiences in their own voices.

This approach produces a substantial amount of service journalism. During the pandemic, Cityside newsrooms published practical information about tenant protections, business relief, public-health data, and restaurant operations. They have produced election guides, wildfire and emergency resources, transportation and road-safety reporting, housing explainers, public-records investigations, and accountability coverage intended to help residents act on information. Partnerships with organizations such as El Tímpano, Youth Beat, Oakland North, and other community groups extend the reach of reporting and provide publication or training opportunities for people often underrepresented in mainstream media.

Revenue Model and Financial Position

Cityside keeps its journalism free to readers and supports it through a diversified nonprofit model that includes individual donations, memberships, foundation grants, sponsorship and advertising, events, and other program-service revenue. Sponsorship products connect local businesses and institutions with East Bay audiences, while philanthropic support underwrites reporting and organizational growth. Cityside's published editorial-independence policy states that donors and sponsors may not assign, review, or edit journalism, and that editorial employees do not produce sponsored content.

The latest publicly available Form 990 covers the fiscal year ending December 2024. Cityside reported $5.30 million in revenue, $5.14 million in expenses, and $1.07 million in net assets. Contributions supplied $4.37 million, or 82.5% of total revenue; program services supplied $782,193, or 14.8%; and other revenue supplied $144,441. The figures show both the scale Cityside has reached and its dependence on philanthropic support. Revenue grew substantially from $3.81 million in 2023, a year in which expenses exceeded revenue by $422,127, while 2024 ended with a $161,724 surplus.

The fundraising mix is broader than a simple donation button. Cityside accepts recurring and one-time gifts, donor-advised-fund grants, stock and IRA gifts, planned gifts, matching gifts, foundation support, and sponsorship. The legacy of Berkeleyside's direct public offering remains important because it established a durable principle: readers could act not only as an audience but as capital providers and institutional stakeholders in local news.

Leadership, Governance, and Workplace

President and CEO Lance Knobel leads Cityside's business and organizational strategy. Co-founder Tracey Taylor serves as chief content officer, and co-founder Tasneem Raja serves as chief strategy officer and editor-in-chief of The Oaklandside. Other senior functions include development, client partnerships, community journalism, events, product and platforms, and people operations. As of the organization's current team pages, Zac Farber is editor-in-chief of Berkeleyside and Kari Hulac is editor-in-chief of Richmondside.

The board is chaired by Mike Olson, co-founder and former CEO of Cloudera. Other listed directors include Candice Fortman, Evelyn Nussenbaum, Emily Ramshaw, Martin Reynolds, Susan Stutzman, and Lisa Armstrong, bringing experience in nonprofit news, technology, fundraising, education, and newsroom leadership. Cityside's policies commit the organization to editorial independence and to building a staff and contributor base that reflects the racial, economic, generational, gender, and experiential diversity of the communities it covers.

In fall 2024, Cityside signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Cityside Pacific Media Workers Guild after less than six months of negotiations. The agreement formed part of a broader investment in people operations, benefits, professional development, onboarding, and workplace systems. LION Publishers recognized that work with its 2025 Operational Resilience Award in the medium/large revenue tier, citing the collaboration between management and the guild and the organization's people-centered response to operational pressures.

Recognition and Journalistic Impact

Cityside and its newsrooms have received recognition for journalism, community engagement, press freedom, leadership, and business innovation. LION named Cityside Publisher of the Year in 2020. The Institute for Nonprofit News gave The Oaklandside a Game Changer award for Mission Metrics, describing the newsroom as a leading example of community-centered launch strategy. Tasneem Raja received the International Women's Media Foundation's 2024 Gwen Ifill Award for leadership, mentorship, diversity, and inclusion. Colleen Leary received the Local Media Association's 2023 Innovator of the Year award for revenue work that included new sponsorship products.

More recent recognition includes the 2025 LION Operational Resilience Award; the Berkeley Public Library Foundation's 2026 Pat and Fred Cody Award for Cityside's contribution to local journalism and literary civic life; and a 2026 James Madison Freedom of Information Award for The Oaklandside, recognizing reporting and legal challenges involving public-records access and restrictions on journalists. These honors reflect Cityside's two-part theory of sustainability: a newsroom must produce consequential work, but it must also create the operational and revenue systems that allow journalists to continue producing it.

Current Strategic Position

As of August 2026, Cityside is one of the more developed examples of a multi-city nonprofit local-news network. It has moved beyond the single-site startup stage without becoming a generic regional publication. The three city newsrooms preserve local identities, while the parent organization provides shared systems and an executive team capable of fundraising, product development, labor relations, sponsorship, audience work, and expansion. That structure may be especially relevant to communities too small to support a full standalone publishing operation but large enough to require dedicated reporting.

The central risk is the same one facing much of nonprofit journalism: philanthropic revenue remains dominant, while the costs of maintaining multiple newsrooms, competitive salaries, benefits, technology, legal support, and audience growth are persistent. Expansion also creates a tension between scale and intimacy. Cityside's value depends on not allowing centralization to weaken the close relationships, local knowledge, and responsiveness that made Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside influential. For Newsjunkie's purposes, Cityside is an important case study in treating local journalism as civic infrastructure: free at the point of use, locally accountable in its reporting, and sustained through a combination of community support, philanthropy, earned revenue, and shared nonprofit capacity.

Cityside Journalism Initiative
PO Box 70004, Oakland, California 94612
EIN: 84-3448887 · citysidejournalism.org

President and CEO: Lance Knobel

Chief Content Officer: Tracey Taylor

Chief Strategy Officer / Editor-in-Chief, The Oaklandside: Tasneem Raja

Board Chair: Mike Olson

Newsrooms: Berkeleyside · The Oaklandside · Richmondside · Nosh

Donations and support: lance@citysidejournalism.org · Sponsorship: colleen@citysidejournalism.org · Media inquiries: tracey@citysidejournalism.org ·

General support: hello@citysidejournalism.org

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