Podcast appearances and mentions of lance knobel

Jamil Jan Kochai, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Susanne Pari, moderated by Lance Knobel Stories transcend borders, build bridges across cultural divides, and foster empathy. Join Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Susanne Pari to explore themes of identity, displacement, and the impact of historical events on individual lives. With the support of SACHI Buy the books here 

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It's no secret that local journalism has struggled since the Great Recessions, with hundreds of newspapers shuttering and thousands of reporters losing their jobs. Over the past few years, entrepreneurs have launched dozens of local news startups to help fill in the gap, but there's still an ongoing debate as to whether local news should be a for-profit or nonprofit industry.   Berkeleyside is one of the few organizations that has tried both models. For the first several years of its existence, it was a for-profit entity, but then in 2019 its founders switched it over to a nonprofit model, and it's since expanded into three separate verticals that cover the bay area, with a fourth launch planned for 2024.   In an interview, co-founder Lance Knobel walked me through how Berkeleyside came to be, why it switched to a nonprofit model, and how it generates revenue through a combination of grants, memberships, sponsorships, and large donations.  

Aamina Ahmad, Uzma Aslam Khan, NoViolet Bulawayo, Lance Knobel Three supremely talented writers with a global perspective will open our eyes to historical and contemporary cycles of oppression and resistance. Booker Prize finalist NoViolet Bulawayo (“We Need New Names,” “Glory”) has constructed a postcolonial fable in which animals stand in for humans. Uzma Aslam Khan's “The Miraculous History of Nomi Ali” is set in the Andaman Islands during the Japanese occupation of WWII. And Aamina Amhad (“The Return of Faraz Ali”) explores the social labyrinths of Lahore through the eyes of a displaced man.

The pandemic has hurt many industries throughout the United States. For local news media, the COVID-19 public health emergency was nearly catastrophic. Already threatened with economic demise because of the rise of digital advertising and how consumers use free social media tools to consume news, the pandemic put further financial stresses on local news outlets by impacting advertising from shuttered restaurants, bars and small businesses. All of this came at a time, of course, when local news—with information on the immediate impact of the public health emergency, among other topics—was more important than ever.  However, despite the strong challenges for local news outlets, the future may not be so bleak for the industry. Why? A growing number of nonprofit news media ventures are seeking to fill the void for quality local news efforts. Across the country, citizens are increasingly getting local news from new digital ventures focused on a specific region or city. Perhaps most important, philanthropists and major foundations are investing in these new efforts, increasing the chance for sustainability and impact and creating a new future for local news, even at this challenging time. This program will introduce viewers to two nonprofit efforts—MLK50 (covering the intersection of poverty, power and policy in Memphis), and Cityside (with the Bay Area outlets Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside)—as well as to the co-founder of a new venture philanthropy nonprofit, the American Journalism Project, created to make local sites more financially sustainable.  Please join us for an important conversation on the future of local news and why the future may be in a new generation of nonprofit news outlets. Wendi C. Thomas and John Thornton will participate virtually; Lance Knobel and David Cohn will be on-stage. SPEAKERS: Lance Knobel, CEO, CItyside Wendi C. Thomas, Editor and Publisher, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism (Participating Virtually) John Thornton, Founder Texas Tribune; Co-Founder American Journalism Project (Participating Virtually) David Cohn, Senior Director, Advance Local; Cofounder of Subtext—Moderator In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been hosting our live programming via YouTube live stream. We are slowly reopen our building to programs with live guests and live audiences. This hybrid-program was recorded with participants in both our auditorium and via video conference on July 15th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. NOTE: This podcast may contain explicit language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The pandemic has hurt many industries throughout the United States. For local news media, the COVID-19 public health emergency was nearly catastrophic. Already threatened with economic demise because of the rise of digital advertising and how consumers use free social media tools to consume news, the pandemic put further financial stresses on local news outlets by impacting advertising from shuttered restaurants, bars and small businesses. All of this came at a time, of course, when local news—with information on the immediate impact of the public health emergency, among other topics—was more important than ever.  However, despite the strong challenges for local news outlets, the future may not be so bleak for the industry. Why? A growing number of nonprofit news media ventures are seeking to fill the void for quality local news efforts. Across the country, citizens are increasingly getting local news from new digital ventures focused on a specific region or city. Perhaps most important, philanthropists and major foundations are investing in these new efforts, increasing the chance for sustainability and impact and creating a new future for local news, even at this challenging time. This program will introduce viewers to two nonprofit efforts—MLK50 (covering the intersection of poverty, power and policy in Memphis), and Cityside (with the Bay Area outlets Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside)—as well as to the co-founder of a new venture philanthropy nonprofit, the American Journalism Project, created to make local sites more financially sustainable.  Please join us for an important conversation on the future of local news and why the future may be in a new generation of nonprofit news outlets. Wendi C. Thomas and John Thornton will participate virtually; Lance Knobel and David Cohn will be on-stage. SPEAKERS: Lance Knobel, CEO, CItyside Wendi C. Thomas, Editor and Publisher, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism (Participating Virtually) John Thornton, Founder Texas Tribune; Co-Founder American Journalism Project (Participating Virtually) David Cohn, Senior Director, Advance Local; Cofounder of Subtext—Moderator In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been hosting our live programming via YouTube live stream. We are slowly reopen our building to programs with live guests and live audiences. This hybrid-program was recorded with participants in both our auditorium and via video conference on July 15th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. NOTE: This podcast may contain explicit language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every October for the last 5 years, some of the brightest and most inquisitive minds around gather in Berkeley for Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas. This 2-day event, which takes place on October 5th and 6th this year, is all about introducing you to new thoughts and ideas meant to expand your way of thinking and look at the world in a new or different way. To preview this years festival, we have the people behind its creation on the podcast today: Helena Brantley, who came on last fall to recap last years festival, and Lance Knobel, founder of Berkeleyside. We also talk about the benefits of opening your mind to ideas you never once thought to consider. Follow on Twitter: @UnchartedIdeas Website: www.berkeleyideas.com 1:27 Getting started 5:36 Founding of Berkeleyside 8:13 Marketing and developing Uncharted 16:04 Uncharted this year 23:57 Conservative speakers 25:51 Finding speakers 30:54 Expanding the festival 32:16 Expanding ideas 36:39 Youth involvement 39:31 Changing opinions 45:49 Getting youth more involved 51:08 Taking Uncharted on the road 53:42 Wrap up/ information Thanks for watching! Listen to The Marc Guzman Experience on iTunes, iHeartRadio or Watch on Facebook or YouTube. WEBSITE: http://www.MarcGuzman.com FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/MarcGuzmanHomes INSTAGRAM: http://www.instagram.com/MarcGuzmanHomes SNAPCHAT: http://www.snapchat.com/add/MarcGuzmanHomes TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/MarcGuzmanHomes Company Website: http://www.BGAM.us

Scott Budnick is best known as the executive producer of the Hangover movies, the highest grossing, R-rated comedies in history. But unknown to many, Budnick’s mission is to reform the criminal justice system. In October 2016 Budnick sat down with Lance Knobel, founder and curator of the Uncharted Festival of Ideas in Berkeley, to talk about why he founded the Anti Recidivism Coalition in 2013, an organization of very high-achieving, formerly incarcerated young adults who work to support one another while stopping the flow of men and women into the criminal justice system. Every year in Berkeley, Uncharted draws together some of the world’s leading thinkers for conversations that provoke, entertain, and attempt to shift the needle towards a better future. Uncharted is produced by Berkeley’s independent news site, Berkeleyside.  

Co-founder and co-editor Lance Knobel discusses challenges and mission of Berkeleyside, a pioneer in the field of online local journalism and a blueprint for hyperlocal news.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:You're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l expertly celebrating bay area innovators on your host, Lisa Kieffer. And today I'm interviewing Lance Nobel Co founder and Co editor of Berkeley's award-winning independent online news site, Berkeley side. What is the secret to Berkeleyside side's success? What Speaker 2:accounts for Berkeley side's particular sort of ambition and success? First, [00:00:30] everybody involved in Berkeley side, particularly the three founders, myself, Francis Tinkle Spiel, and Tracy Taylor, all of us came to Berkeley side with a lots of experience, you know, many decades of work in journalism. So we bring that knowledge and experience to it and I think that shows in how we cover things, how we write about things, our seriousness, our intent, all of those things manifest. I think we're also incredibly fortunate [00:01:00] in the nature of Berkeley. Um, that can't be denied. Um, this is a city, first of all, where there's tons of news. We're never short of interesting, fascinating, complex things to write about readers. Yes, that's the second part. Readers who really care, um, and are very, very engaged, which is, I don't think that common. I think there's no denying that Berkeley ins have [00:01:30] a particularly intense involvement in what's happening in their city. Speaker 2:How do you get your stories? We get our stories in a number of ways. Um, one obviously is, you know, the conventional journalistic way of getting stories. I'm pounding the pavement, speaking to people, going to city council meetings, seeing that there's a hearing on a building, all of those very, very conventional things. What is new for Berkeleyside and I think for many others is that [00:02:00] our community is also an incredibly important source of news for us. That may range from getting a phone call or a tweet or a Facebook comment. Hey Berkeleyside I heard sirens, what's going on? And that would trigger a call from us to the police or that these news stories that come to you? Yeah, we, we get, we don't just mindlessly retweet things. We, we, we try and be quite rigorous about things. But if, [00:02:30] uh, somebody particularly, you know, often, you know, at this point, we're seven years old, so we know a lot of our readers, particularly the people that are engaged and get in touch with us, said, you there are people we, we've got a lot of faith and trust in and they've established a track record that's different than just getting something out of the blue. Speaker 2:But, you know, we get a lot of tips, which as I say, maybe very simple, um, I smell smoke. You know, is there something happening? What's the helicopter doing over, you know, my street, [00:03:00] uh, you know, I hear police sirens. You know, we had a fascinating story, uh, just a few weeks ago where somebody phoned us and said, I came across a really strange thing and it was a pile of discarded ballot papers that county ballot that sent out. Somebody had found a bundle of, I forget what it was, 43, just in a recycling bin and said, what on earth is going on? And so he had himself phoned [00:03:30] the, uh, registrar of voters who said, that shouldn't be happening. And then the police got involved and they said, this is evidence of current. And he called us and said, you might want to look into this and Emily Ragu. Speaker 2:So our amazing, you know, senior reporter, you know, she kind of got on the trail and you know, she on Facebook and Twitter said, hey, are people having issues with the mail? And it turned out that this was not an isolated incident that [00:04:00] the mail carriers and Berkeley have been so kind of overwhelmed by the volume of mail, particularly in the election season, but also the fewer resources in the post office or there are fewer mail carriers for greater volume being required to do double shifts. So all of these things, people were getting their mail delivered at midnight. Uh, people were finding their mail had just been dumped. There were all sorts of problems and that all came from just one phone call. So, [00:04:30] you know, that's, I wouldn't say it's typical, but it's not uncommon for something different from nature. Newspapers like New York Times. I mean, don't they get tips as well? Speaker 2:And of course, most famously in this last election season, neither one of the New York Times reporters, when she looked in her mailbox or the New York Times, they're where the Trump tax returns. Unfortunately, only one set of tax returns from way back when. But you know, that that was fantastic investigative journalism that [00:05:00] just fell into her lap. So yeah, that does happen. But I think it is the case that, you know, local news has a particularly intimate relationship with its readers. Um, and so we benefit from that. It's also the case that, you know, we're in a world where everyone has the ability to be an observer reporter in their way, whether it's through things they say on Facebook or Twitter and, you know, we're harvesting all [00:05:30] that. And I think, you know, when I worked in journalism, you know, in the pre-digital age, all of us were aware of kind of getting letters written in green ink, um, which is the sign of a kind of crazy, cranky person. Sometimes they're interesting things. More often than not, it's a sign of a crazy cranky person that has no, no, no. A basis, in fact. So that kind of thing has always happened, but there's so many new avenues and I think the, uh, intelligent [00:06:00] news organization finds ways to tap in, harvest, all those new ways of getting information. Speaker 3:You make a distinction between content providers and real journalism and the dangers that we face when real journalistic investigations, et Cetera, don't happen. You've been known to solve what is known as wicked problems. Is this one of the challenges and the problems that you're trying to solve at Berkeley side? I mean, in general? Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, we're, we're incredibly committed to [00:06:30] a profound belief in the importance of journalism for our democracy in a city like Berkeley. No one else is really going to be the watchdog of what's happening. You know, we're pretty rare in being, you know, journalists that show up every city council meeting. Uh, we show up every meeting of this happening, adjustment forward. Uh, we show up to the school board, all of these things you need, you need the sunlight, uh, that, you [00:07:00] know, good journalism can provide. I think that's incredibly important. The thing I'd shy away from is creating this kind of hard and fast distinction between journalists and others. We're fortunate in this country that we don't have any licensing scheme for journalists. Many, many, many years ago I ran a small publishing company in Italy and to be journalists Sta in Italy, you know, you needed to have, you know, that license to show you [00:07:30] were a professional journalist. Speaker 2:No one level you could say, well that's good. Everybody has to have certain professional standards they meet and you know, why shouldn't they be licensed the way doctors and lawyers, given that you believe journalism is important, shouldn't you have something that says this person is fit to serve as a journalist? I would reject that. Absolutely. I suspect if anyone, and maybe uh, president Trump will try this, if anyone tried to do it, I'm pretty sure it would be shown to be unconstitutional as [00:08:00] a suppression of the free press and free speech. People commit acts of journalism all the time and they don't have to necessarily be journalists. I don't believe that there is a sacred class to whom these acts of journalism are a kind of holy order with a secret language and a, you know, a decoder ring. Speaker 3:It's been a bit of a wild west lately. There've been some fake news sites, especially during this election cycle Speaker 2:is a huge problem. And [00:08:30] you know, our friends at Facebook, you know, down there in Menlo Park, one would hope if there is a sense of responsibility there, they need to look at their algorithmic approach to showing people things that allegedly they'll be interested in where wholly fake news. I mean there are organizations that have set up to provide fake news because they know it can appear in people's Facebook feeds and you can monetize that, you know, [00:09:00] if you get traffic to your site. This is horrific. Uh, you know, Brian Stelter who talks about the media on CNN has done some fantastic work and has spoken out in really incisive ways about how to guard against fake news. And you know, we all need to be aware of that. Any of us who are in our forties, 50s, 60s, we didn't grow up in a digital age. Speaker 2:Um, we grew up in an age where newspapers were on paper or you listened to the radio or watch television, but we [00:09:30] learned the cues where you could discern between what is authoritative and what is fake. Or at least you thought you did and you knew you, you gained a good sense of your something that was the national enquirer by the supermarket checkout. You would guarded that as having a different relationship to the truth. Then, uh, the New York Times or the La Times or the San Francisco Chronicle, you kind of understood that at a very [00:10:00] instinctive level in the digital world, a lot of those cues have been removed. You're the, the generation that's growing up that's wholly digital. I'm confident my two sons will never buy a paper newspaper, but they, I think you have from a very early age, you develop the instincts to understand what's real and what's fake in a digital realm. Speaker 1:Their children may have a critical analysis that many, many people do not get educated. Speaker 2:But I think all of us need to learn [00:10:30] and find ways to make that discernment and to learn to that filtering process to learn what can I trust, what can I believe in and how can I develop the skills to dig in and find something? Is that real? Before I mindlessly repost it and send it and share it with my friend? Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. [00:11:00] Today I'm interviewing Lance Noble, Co founder and Co editor of Berkeley side. You lived in England for like 20 years, 27 years, and then you came back to the states. How did the idea Berkeley side enter your framework? Speaker 2:Very simple and very innocent. Tracey Francis and I, Tracy, who's my wife, Frances was a friend. Our children went to school together, so we were all journalists, all knew each other and we were aware [00:11:30] and lamenting the fact that the city we live in, there was no way to find out what was going on. When you landed in Berkeley. Yeah, we moved to Berkeley. When we moved from London, Tracy and I, you know, in Speaker 1:what was going on at the time. What were people reading? Speaker 2:If you wanted local news, there was nothing. I mean there was a, the Berkeley dally planet eat, which at that time was still coming out on paper twice a week. But the Berkeley daily planet was, you know, very clearly about advocacy journalism. It covered some things. It ignored other [00:12:00] things. If you wanted to know what's happening at Berkeley High, you would never read about it in the Berkeley daily planet. If you wanted to know, you know about crime, you know, they did the occasional police blotter item, but that wasn't, uh, the core of their being. They were trying to press a point of view and to give a perspective as they saw it on a, you know, the politics of the city and particularly the politics of development and things like that. There was no where, other than the occasional [00:12:30] story in the chronicle maybe, but there was no one that was regularly covering what's happening in our city. Speaker 2:And we thought, hey, we know how to do this. And we started it thinking this is something that will be interesting to do from time to time. And you were thinking digitally at the time. Oh yes, from the word go. It was going to be native to the Internet. I mean, seven years later I think we'd been proved right in that no dream whatsoever of putting ink on paper and [00:13:00] you know, having the delivery trucks rollout or any of that sort of stuff we believed in. And we're very committed to this being a digital, uh, new source. But at a very early stage people said, this is great, you know, where have you been all my life? What were you telling? What kind of stories? Just stuff that struck our fancy. Um, both, both things. Both little things. You know, I saw this, I was curious about it. Speaker 2:I tried to find out, but also, you know, started going to city council and writing about that. And He, Berkeley and [00:13:30] Berkeley, eons have a very distinct view of themselves. I can recall people pushing back at us and saying, well, you haven't been here for 20 years so you don't understand anything and you're never going to understand anything because he, and uh, we rejected that. We didn't think that person or people that said that were correct. And I think, you know, we've had the last laugh on that one. Let's talk more about that. How you ramped up, what got you on the map? All of our, our growth has been organic. [00:14:00] You know, people saying to friends, Hey, you know, did you see this story on Berkeley's side? What on earth is Berkeleyside? Oh, you don't get Berkley side. You know, you should have a look at it and it ran. Speaker 2:It remains free and you do. So it has been entirely growth by word of mouth, but there is beyond doubt. There are some stories that, you know, capture greater attention. You know, an early story in Berkeleyside was the gourmet ghetto mountain lion, you know, which [00:14:30] we covered, you know, from early in the day. It happened in the middle of the night. Uh, you know, a mountain lion wandered down from the hills into the gourmet ghetto was seen, reported to the police, the police, you know, deployed, uh, eventually found the mountain lion much to the sadness of many. But I think the only choice the police had was they had to kill this mountain lion. All of us, you know, from comics and TV shows, you think, oh, why didn't they use a tranquilizer [00:15:00] dart? It turns out that if you shoot a mountain lion with a tranquilizer dart, it can probably run for a mile and a mile and a half. Speaker 2:And you do not want a mountain lion running through the streets when, you know, we have, you know, homeless people, we have children that might've been out, you know, for some reason, um, a whole bunch of reasons where you do not want a mountain lion running through the street anyway, the police had to kill this mountain lion. Uh, we wrote about this, uh, it's the kind of story [00:15:30] that does go viral. And so that gave us a burst. Fast forward to when there were the large black lives matter protests and demonstrations in Berkeley. You know, we covered that literally around the clock, you know, reporter following what was happening, writing about it live, you know, tweeting, Facebooking, updating the story on our site. You know, posting videos round the clock without cece and our readership really spiked [00:16:00] during that, Speaker 3:picked up by other news outlets. Speaker 2:It certainly was picked up in many places. We covered it better than anyone else. You know, the protests were big enough that lots of media were covering that story, but we covered it. You're so visibly better than anyone else. Lots of people learned about Berkeleyside then. And that gave us a huge base. The balcony collapse, uh, you know, was a story covered all around the world. But several days after the balcony collapse when most of the world's media had left because the story had [00:16:30] moved on, you know, I think in the next two or three months after that collapse, we published 60 stories about the balcony collapse. So we are committed to what's happening in this city and we follow stories with an intensity and a concentration that other people are just not going to do. And you know, the thing we always talk about as both our joy and our burden is that, you know, when people smell, spoke or hear a siren, [00:17:00] the immediate thought they have or hear a helicopter they think is, I need to look at Berkeley cyclists. They're going to tell me what's going on. We love that. But it also means, you know, we have to be on our toes all the time to reward that faith that people [inaudible] Speaker 3:we'll have that. We'll be reporting on it. Yeah. Know, I feel like with this recent election that there's almost a bigger faith in local news coverage because so much of the national media gave a pass to the president of luck. There were a lot of issues around media. Yeah. I think cable news [00:17:30] blew it. Yeah. Speaker 2:More than, uh, newspapers blew it. I mean, the Washington Post in particular I think did a fantastic job of covering your David Farren told on the fraud of the Trump foundation. Um, you know, if he doesn't win the Pulitzer and every other prize going, something is very wrong. So there's some that did a very good job. Yeah, New York Times was very up and down. It had, you know, Maggie Haberman and a few others. There were some great reporting, but there were also, you know, totally freaking [00:18:00] out about the nothing burger of the emails on Hillary's side and also for a long time normalizing very abnormal behavior. In the case of Trump, I mean, they eventually caught on and called lies, lies. But there was, it took a long time. Speaker 3:And what was, what were the cues that were missed there? If the data was wrong, the polls were wrong. Speaker 2:This is not my area of expertise. I read about it endlessly, but you know, I'm reading other extras that the Poles actually weren't wrong. Nate silver has pointed out that the polls [00:18:30] are going to turn out to be more accurate for 2016 than they were for 2012. What wasn't accurate were the state by state polls. The national polls got the vote pretty close. Hillary is going to end up being probably 2% with 2% more of the vote. Then Donald Trump at the level that counts, uh, the 50 contest in our states with electoral college. Some of the polls fell down very badly. You know, Michigan, Wisconsin. Speaker 3:[00:19:00] You've talked about some of the challenges facing Berkeley side. I just read a University of Missouri study that said many of the challenges are reduction in revenue from display advertising and just being sustainable. You've managed to stay sustainable. Can you talk about what your revenue model is and some of the things that you're doing in order to remain sustainable? Speaker 2:We make revenue three different ways and I think it's an important that we have different, we have a diversified source of revenues. Uh, we're not relying on any one source. [00:19:30] I think that's incredibly important for us. Advertising remains the most important source. The second important source of revenue for us is our members. Berkeleyside doesn't make people pay for the news. And as far as we're concerned, we'll never make people pay for the news, but we allow people to pay for the news. What we have found remarkable, and this is another area where I think Berkeley in this are proving to be a very special breed of people. When we ask people, do you want to pay for the news? A lot [00:20:00] of people say, sure, I'll pay something. And we have about 1200 people who pay an average of about $70 a year Speaker 3:membership. Do you say pay what you can? You Speaker 2:know, if you go to the support page on Berkeleyside, uh, what you see prominently is give 25, 10 or $5 a month. But you can also see below that give whatever you want. And so it's choose your own menu. Is this growing every year? Have you been met? Every year has grown, no question about [00:20:30] it. And we think there's a lot of room for growth in the revenue there. But as I say at the moment, we have about 1200 members a giving an average of $70 a year. So those members, our readers and certainly our members, overwhelmingly Berkeley fans. And then third area of revenue. And it's another one where we think there is a lot of room for growth is events. You know, we've recently had the fourth edition of the uncharted ideas festival. It's grown every year. How many [00:21:00] people came out? We had about 400 people. Speaker 2:You know, one of the reasons why there are a number of reasons why we think there is a lot of potential with uncharted and potentially other events. Um, one is, although there's a lot of room we believe for growth with our core Berkeleyside, the advertising, the membership, we're clearly geographically constrained with that. There are only so many people, so many advertisers that want to reach those people. So many people that could be members with uncharted, we don't have [00:21:30] that geographic constraint. We have a scattering of people and at the moment it's only a scattering. But you know, there's a couple that comes every year from San Diego. You know, they make it kind of part of their plans. A, some people come from uh, Napa County and you know, they, you know, one woman said to me, this is so fantastic, you know, nothing like this happens where I live, you know, I'm going to get all my friends to come so we're not geographically constrained. Speaker 2:We're also not constrained in terms of the companies we can go to [00:22:00] who can sponsor on charter in their mini Davos, which I used to run Dava. So I actually don't think it's a mini Davos in any way. Cause Davos is about, uh, the super rich and the super powerful, the dirty secret of Davos and many things like Davos is powerful. People are often uninteresting or certainly uninteresting at the level of ideas. It is vanishingly rare for a CEO to be interesting, at least [00:22:30] interesting on a public stage. Most of them are trained to give you oatmeal all the time because what's wrong for them is saying something that's going to be interesting or quotable or different. That's a bad thing for them. We don't want those people that uncharted, we want people who are going to provoke you and make you think and make you challenged what you've always thought and perhaps you disagree and perhaps you disagree, but certainly introduce you to things you never thought [00:23:00] about before. Speaker 2:That's a very, very different challenge. And the liberation for me of doing what we do with uncharted is I can pick people who have no impressive title whatsoever that people have not heard about, but they are fascinating thinkers and we can put them on stage. And I, you know, I, I kind of hope and believe you will be hearing from these people, but you don't need those credentials in advance to get on the stage. That uncharted. And that's, that's very liberating for us. And I think it's fascinating [00:23:30] for the people who come. So, so it's advertising membership events and we think that tripod of revenues is he to our health. I have noticed on your site, and I also read about it in the chronicle, that you are introducing something that your readers Speaker 1:to invest. This is an interesting democratization of a local newspaper. Speaker 2:Well we think, we think it's, it's good and we're increasingly certain that we're the first news organization, maybe the first media organization to [00:24:00] do this. A direct public offering is a very little known, the long existing way to offer an investment direct to the public without going through a stock exchange, without going through an investment bank, without, you know, the kind of Kickstarter and things like that or you know, I think a great way for people to raise money in various ways. But this is actually a real investment. The States Department of business oversight reviewed what we were doing. [00:24:30] They had to license us and were going directly to our readers and to other interested people. You have to be a California resident. That's the only qualification to encourage them to invest directly in Berkeley side. And it's something the Green Bay packers did a, you know, the only community owned team in the NFL and it just felt this is the right thing for us. This Berkeley side, we're all about the community we serve. So this is the right way for us to raise them. Speaker 1:Does feel good [00:25:00] to invest in your community? Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. It's, it's main street, not Wall Street. People must be really watching this. Um, we had a very good story. I'm Nieman lab. The Neiman center is at Harvard University. They a study and a research, uh, the media, you know, funded by the Neiman Foundation, a Nieman lab wrote about it. So I think a lot of people in the know in media and journalism would have seen that at the San Francisco Chronicle. Just wrote about it daily. Cal wrote about it and I think we'll get more [00:25:30] coverage for it because if there's one thing journalists are very interested in, it's what's happening to other journalists. Right? So I think it's the kind of story that, um, we think, you know, we'll get picked up and other people were right about it. We're licensed to raise $800,000. That's our goal. Um, that's what we're really committed to. We're about a quarter of the way there and it's very, very early. Speaker 1:I'm sure it's closely watched because it could become a great model for other [inaudible]. Speaker 2:That's exactly right. I, I don't think there's any one model for what's going to make local [00:26:00] news thrive, but I think our diversified revenue stream and our using this direct public offering as a way to raise the capital so we can fund our ambitions and you know, we want to do so much more. That's why we're raising capital. Speaker 1:What is the future of Berkeleyside? Speaker 2:We are committed to covering Berkeley as well as it can be covered. That's the core of our existence. Will we create at some point Oakland side that's such an enormous task and Berkeley as a city of 120,000 [00:26:30] people, we've largely bootstrapped our way to covering that. Covering a city, the complexity of Oakland, four times the size of Berkeley, more than four times the complexity of Berkeley. You'd need really significant investment to do that. Well maybe one day, I don't think in on a five year horizon. That's the right thing for us. Um, we are strategists. Where are you? Where are you going to be? I'm very skeptical of the value strategy. I [00:27:00] I think know strategy is helpful in that it can present different scenarios and things like that. I think people that plan out what they're going to do that never happens. Uh, you know, plans, confront reality and things change. Speaker 2:I'm a firm, firm believer, you know, there's this notion of design thinking. You talk about innovation, you've probably encountered it but you know, design thinking as opposed to engineering thinking and engineering thinking would be, yes, we have a strategy and I've got 20 steps that are going [00:27:30] to take me to this goal that I've decided is where we want to get. Um, a design approach is more, I know it's going to be a chaotic process. I know that there are going to be twists and turns that one can't predict, but I have a north star that I'm, I'm aiming at and that we will find our way to and our north store is, is being the best possible local, independent online news provider. Um, our core focus is Berkeley [00:28:00] because we solve Berkeley. We may say, Hey, we've got, got it right in Berkeley. Let's look at who knows what other other areas. Speaker 2:Um, but we need to get Berkeley, right? And we think there's, you know, we think we've done a great job over seven years, but we've got a long way to go to, to really solve that and say, this is done. You know, it's sustainable. It's, it's working. There's no question about its future. Now we can start looking at other things. [00:28:30] I knew it'd be a real distraction for us to say, Hey, let's add two other cities or something like that. That's a way to, to collapse. At the very early stage of this conversation, you asked about lots of online news operations of folded a, the one thing that is certain in a lot of people have gotten wrong is journalism doesn't scale. We've done a lot of good things with Berkeley side, but that doesn't mean it's an algorithm that you can just roll out in another city and you'll get it right patches. Speaker 2:A [00:29:00] fantastic example. They made the mistake of thinking you create a 800 patches patch, part of AOL, a now owned by a mysterious, uh, you know, uh, private equity group that they're just Zombie sites that don't do anything. But you know, they said, oh, just like newspaper chains. We're going to create a digital chain and we're going to create 900 of them over the next two or three years. That's nonsensical. That doesn't happen. And you know, we know because we [00:29:30] know the difficulty of doing it right in Berkeley, how hard it is to get it right for your city. And that's what, they're not fungible and journalists aren't fungible. You need to the right person and the right people who know and are committed to that city. If you go to berkeleyside.com and look at the contact page and our phone numbers, their email addresses are there. You can write to us tips@berkeleyside.com and if you're interested in the investment, it's invest.berkeleyside.com [00:30:00] you know, we are open. We want to talk to people. We want to hear from people. We're very engaged with our Speaker 1:right off the canvas and the we work building lean and mean take sack. We very lean very much. Thank you for being on the program. Thanks a lot, Lee. You've been listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes university. Tune in next week, Friday at noon. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jamelle Bouie is the Chief Political Correspondent of Slate. In October 2015 he sat down with Lance Knobel at the Uncharted Festival of Ideas in Berkeley to talk about the 2016 election. Rather than delve into the horse race of candidate nominations, Knobel asked Bouie to offer a framework for understanding this election — does the party actually decide who the nominees should be, how does campaigning and financing impact outcomes?

Alice Dreger is an historian of medicine and science, a sex researcher, a mainstream writer, and an (im)patient advocate. Her most recent book is Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science. She also made headlines in 2015 when she resigned from her position at Northwestern University for what she said was a lack of academic independence. In October 2015, Dreger sat down with Lance Knobel, curator of the Uncharted Berkeley Festival of Ideas, for a spell-binding conversation.

For his latest book, “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness,” health-science expert Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta set out to answer a simple question: why do we believe in the health and beauty treatments that celebrities tell us will transform our lives, when they have no scientific foundation? Caulfield is in conversation with the Uncharted Festival curator, Lance Knobel, at the 2015 Uncharted Festival of Ideas. 

The nuclear crisis in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is confusing and frightening. Three Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists - Thomas McKone, Edward Morse and Robert Budnitz - discuss the facts about radiation safety and risks, detection and the implications for human health and the environment. Lance Knobel moderates Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 21582]

The nuclear crisis in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is confusing and frightening. Three Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists - Thomas McKone, Edward Morse and Robert Budnitz - discuss the facts about radiation safety and risks, detection and the implications for human health and the environment. Lance Knobel moderates Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 21582]

The nuclear crisis in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is confusing and frightening. Three Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists - Thomas McKone, Edward Morse and Robert Budnitz - discuss the facts about radiation safety and risks, detection and the implications for human health and the environment. Lance Knobel moderates Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 21582]

The nuclear crisis in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is confusing and frightening. Three Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists - Thomas McKone, Edward Morse and Robert Budnitz - discuss the facts about radiation safety and risks, detection and the implications for human health and the environment. Lance Knobel moderates Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 21582]