Oakland gets headlines for its negatives all too often, and for good reason. There's little to offset a near-20-percent unemployment rate.
Think about that.
It means one of every five adults you pass by on the street is without a job. Plus, it means that the other 30 percent may be just scrapping by. That's a tragedy. Tech can help save that - starting an online business - but many don't have the know how, and it's even harder to teach people and hope they get it.
But it's got to be done. More on that later.
Oakland Mayor's Race Coverage!
On the matter of the Oakland Mayor's Race, The East Bay Express and other publications are finally giving all of the candidates attention. That's worth celebrating.
As stated before here, anyone who is able to get signatures and get on the ballot to run for Mayor of Oakland is to be honored with media attention. The point is to let the people decide who should be Mayor of Oakland, not the media.
Room 389 Gets Golden Bear Praise
While out in San Francisco at The Balboa Cafe, this blogger ran into Norm, who was a popular bartender at The Golden Bear, what's now called Room 389 (for 389 Grand Avenue). Norm had high praise for Room 389 saying "They've got the right mix of people to be successful." In other words, it's not all one color of people but well-integrated. Moreover, it's the kind of place were you see people from the neighborhood, much like The Golden Bear. Room 389 fills a social void on that part of Grand Avenue that's been ignored for too long. Pay a visit.
The one wish from this space is that they do a deal with the Chinese Food place next door called Golden Lilly. The family that runs the place has consistently good food and service. Bringing Golden Lilly service to Room 389 is the missing ingredient.
Oaktoberfest Today
If you're not into Fleet Week, or can do both, head over to Oaktoberfest in the Diamond District at Fruitvale and Mac Arthur for fun and food.
Councilmember Jean Quan's Newsletter Skirts Law
Oakland District Four Councilmember Jean Quan's latest newsletter comes close to being an ad for her run for Mayor of Oakland. This because of an entry about a mailer by the California Prison Guard union and on Rank Choice Voting.
Quan should have used a separate mailer to address those issues because she's running for Mayor. Otherwise it looks like she's using taxpayer dollars to finance her own campaign. In her newsletter, she states her own take, which is just like Quan would do in a newsletter for her run for Mayor, if she had one.
She needs to establish a newsletter for her campaign, and if she's done so, inform the media.
Zennie62 Growth
Finally, sorry about my lack of posts, but this blogger has worked to overhaul Zennie62.com to where it is now: as a major provider of online news. The last round of code changes has done the trick, search engine placement is perfect, and the next step is to expand the code fixes to the overall Zennie62 blog network.
Much to the surprise of many, one can take a blogspot.com blog and turn it into a competitor for online space against The LA Times, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and yes, SFGate.com and The SeattlePI.com.
And all of the code changes are not "black hat SEO" but obvious in-your-code-face fixes that blogger's do not write much about. In fact the last few changes were done on a hunch, not the result of research on what others have done. The hunch worked. Now, back to SFGate.com.
I continue to post at SFGate.com and The SeattlePI.com, because The Hearst Corporation has been a good organization to work with. Indeed, in the digital space, The Hearst Corporation properties have high potential. What really upsets this blogger is that SFGate.com and The SeattlePI.com can be, but are not as large as The Huffington Post. That's an issue. An issue I took up in a different way.
My nature is to be both entrepreneurial and scientific in my approach to media. The only way to show any media organization that there's a different, better way to do media, is to just do it. Google has been a major supporter here, by providing a fantastic platform in Blogger.com and great support.
What drives me, to a degree, is the fact that in the past newsrooms were closed to blacks, minorities, and women. Now, some want to save the same culture that discriminated against us for so long. It's time to destroy it and move on to a better, more democratic and meritocratic system.
What's holding back progress are the journalism schools teaching the old way, pushing stupid-assed ideas like "hyper-local" which is hyper-stupid, and not teaching students about the revenue side of the business. Perhaps because the J-School people don't know about it themselves. If they did, hyper-local blogs would never have been considered a good idea.
Why? Simple. By restricting news to local areas, the publisher reduces the level of potential revenue that can be made. Period. The rule in media is that big stories pay for small ones. You can't have a successful business with small stories paying for each other. The reason is that local blogs eat each other for attention, and so can't muster enough money to pay salaries.
Yet, Oakland North, and The Bay Citizen.org are with us. In the case of The Bay Citizen, which is the feature of this video...
...it will burn through the $5 million it got from Warren Hellman and that will be that, because it's hyper-local. I don't know who wrote their business plan, if it exists, but I'll bet it didn't factor in the increasing number of blogs in The Bay Area. The only factor that saves The Bay Citizen for now is the fact that the other blogs don't work with each other for some of the dumbest reasons. This is especially true in Oakland, where Oakland North is part of the scene.
In Oakland North's case it's the product of the Berkeley J-School and produces no revenue for itself to pay its student reporters. (Really, it's not worth a mention.) So students don't have to figure out how to sustain it, because the Berkeley J-School does that. The result is the students come away with an unrealistic view of media and no business experience in it.
That's the fault of the Berkeley J-School.
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