Oakland North is a news project of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. We started in 2008 with support from the Ford Foundation, but currently operate as an independent local news organization supported by UC Berkeley and your donations. (Click this link to be directed to the online giving page for the Hyperlocal News Fund.) Oakland North, and our sister publication Richmond Confidential, are entirely staffed by graduate student reporters at the J-School. During the fall semester, our students are working for our core “boot camp” class in learning to report, a class we fondly know here as J200. In the spring, a smaller group of students pursue the continuation course, J201, as an elective, working on more complex, ambitious reporting pieces. Our goals at Oakland North are to improve local coverage; to experiment with online and digital media; to teach young reporters to excel in their fairness and commitment to accuracy; and to listen to you–about the stories and features that most interest you, the issues that concern you, the information services you want, and the reporting you’d like to see undertaken in your own community. We aim to explore new ways to give communities back the coverage they’re losing as regional newspapers shrink–and also to be inventive about what digital journalism can do for all of us in the future. We’re learning new ways of telling stories in sound, in pictures, in cellphone dispatches, through data visualization, through social media and in other forms of reportage still under development.