Despite all the bad news this year, people are still building communities, opening local businesses, and working to improve the world around them.

We’ve been covering these street-level stories in San Francisco for years. Today, we’re officially writing about them in Oakland as well.

You can find our daily articles about the city at hoodline.com/oakland, and at twitter.com/hoodlineoak and facebook.com/hoodlineoak.

Local news budget cuts have left only a heroic handful of publications and reporters covering what’s going in Oakland, even as the city goes through an especially intense time. So like in San Francisco, we’re going to be writing about the mix of business, cultural and civic happening in neighborhoods— stories that might go uncovered otherwise, that matter if you live or work near where they happen.

Initially, our coverage will focus on the core downtown and uptown business areas, along with nearby happenings in West Oakland, Temescal, the greater Lake Merritt area, as well as other neighborhoods and business corridors. We’ll be increasing our number of stories and the geographic scope of our coverage from there.

If you’re familiar with our work in San Francisco over the years, you’ll know that our readers play a major part in nearly everything we publish.

Several times each day, we respond to reader tips that develop into compelling stories. You can tell us what to write about at tips@hoodline.com or by texting (510) 757-9959.

If you want to write about Oakland with us, follow this link and tell us more about your interests. We pay per article, and have some part-time editing roles in Oakland available too.

We also use local data to try to figure out what’s really going on in cities, whether from public data sets or from partners. We’ll be taking a more analytical view of the big issues and trends in Oakland around housing, transportation, the health of the local business economy, and more. If you’ve got some data-wrangling skills, we're hiring.

One last thing. Do you have some early feedback for us? Tell us what you think via this quick survey