Some of The Oaklandside’s best work happens in collaboration with local independent reporters. We’re eager to work with more local journalists and writers to share Oakland’s stories, serve local information needs, and amplify important perspectives from across our city. We have a simple web form for pitches below, and here’s some more information to help you get started.
Stories and formats we’re interested in: We especially love hearing about issues and events happening in specific Oakland communities and neighborhoods that might not be on everyone else’s radars. Please note that our daily photojournalism needs are covered.
We’re a small team, and unfortunately, we’re not always able to respond to every pitch. If your pitch resonates with our founding values and our editorial mission, doesn’t overlap with a story we already have in progress, and we’re able to properly support your pitch with editing bandwidth and funding at the time you submit it, we will do our best to get in touch.
Compensation: We pay $250 for stories that take about two days of reporting and writing, and up to $1,500 for in-depth features and investigative reports that take much longer to produce. We’ll work with you to figure out how long your report is likely to take and offer you a clear rate ahead of time.
We don’t currently run opinion pieces or op-eds. The building blocks of our work are facts, research, and interviews centered in Oakland.
How to check whether your idea is a fit for The Oaklandside before you spend time filling out the form: 1. Read what we publish to get an overall sense of how we aim to serve our communities. You can sign up for our newsletter to get fresh stories in your inbox. 2. Check out our founding values.
We publish stories that are closely tied to people and issues in Oakland. We don’t publish stories on regional, state, or national issues that aren’t rooted in our city.
We’ll never take your pitch and assign it to one of our in-house staff reporters. If one of our full-time reporters is already working on a story very similar to yours or has expressed interest in doing so, we will let you know immediately, consider whether there might be a good opportunity for the two of you to collaborate, or work with you to find another fit.