About Berkeleyside

Berkeleyside is Berkeley, California’s news site.

We don’t aim to be comprehensive (yet), but we want to show the extraordinary diversity of people, issues, events, food and environment in our city on the Bay.

If you want to contribute to Berkeleyside or just have some ideas you want to share, please let us know, and read through the Notes for Contributors below.

You can contact Lance, who co-founded the site with Tracey Taylor and Frances Dinkelspiel.

Contributors:

Lance Knobel (co-founder) is an international consultant and professional writer. In 1999-2000 he was Director of the Programme of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. He was also Editor-in-Chief and Managing Director of World Link, the magazine of the World Economic Forum. He was an Adviser in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit  in London. His journalism credentials include being Editor-in-Chief of Management Today, the leading business magazine in Britain and founder and Editor of Designers’ Journal in Britain. He has published four books on architecture and design. His blog, Davos Newbies, has been running since 1999.

Frances Dinkelspiel (co-founder) is a professional journalist and author. Her book, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, published in November 2008, is a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. Frances spent more than 20 years in the newspaper business, working as a reporter for the Syracuse Newspapers and the San Jose Mercury News among others. Her freelance work has appeared in the New York Times, People Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press and San Francisco Magazine. Her blog, Ghost Word, covers books and literary events in the Bay Area, and she writes a City Brights blog for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Tracey Taylor (co-founder) is a professional freelance journalist whose writing appears regularly in  The New York Times, the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Diablo Magazine among others. Her articles cover a broad range of subjects — including business stories, features on food, homes and architecture, as well as profiles and interviews. Tracey writes On the Block, a Bay Area property blog, for the San Francisco Chronicle and  Home Girl, an independent real-estate blog.

John Seal A movie connoisseur with a penchant for natty hats, John lives in that city next to Berkeley called Oakland. John writes a weekly film recommendation column at Box Office Prophets, as well as a column in The Phantom of the Movie’s Videoscope, an old-fashioned paper magazine, published quarterly. He also writes regular film reviews for IMDB which can be read here.

Kim Weisberg has lived in Berkeley since 2006. She is proud to have been published in such little-known but well-loved places as It All Changed In An Instant and the upcoming Aiming Low Back Burner Recipe Book. You can catch her ramblings about cooking, home organization, and just about everything else on her blog, Kim’s Kitchen Sink.

Notes for contributors:

Berkeleyside will thrive by developing a vigorous community of readers and contributors. Ideally, many of our readers will also be contributors: offering comments, sending in pictures, writing posts for the site. At this early stage in the site’s development, we are going to be rather deliberate about bringing on new writers.

We want Berkeleyside to reflect the passionate, diverse voices of Berkeley, but we also want it to remain a place of civility and respect for other people. Guidelines for comments are simple: be brief, be relevant, be informed, be polite. We screen comments from first-time users before they are published. We will delete or censor any comment that:

• is abusive
• is off-topic
• contains ad-hominem attacks
• promotes hate of any kind
• uses excessively foul language
• is blatantly spam

Repeat offenders will be banned from commenting on the site.

If you’re interested in doing more than commenting, we expect our posts to adhere to the same standards we demand of our comments. Here are some other guidelines that should be helpful.

We love people that want to specialize. If you, for example, want to attend all of the meetings of the Berkeley school board and report on them, that would be hugely valuable for Berkeleyside. If you want to take photos of the best front gardens in Berkeley and post them to our site, we’d love it.

We want you to be transparent. If you have a financial interest or a friendship or an enmity that is spurring you to write something, you should tell the readers.

Strive for accuracy. Try to get your facts right. If something is wrong, we want to correct it as soon and as visibly as we can.