How Cityside turned a local news blog into a scalable nonprofit journalism network
Co-founder Lance Knobel explained how to build a sustainable journalism outlet without introducing a paywall.
When Lance Knobel moved to Berkeley in 2005, he wasn’t looking to reinvent local journalism. He had spent much of his career far away from city council meetings and neighborhood debates, working in global business journalism. He had edited a major business magazine in London and later ran the magazine for the World Economic Forum, the organization best known for its annual gathering in Davos.
But after settling in the Bay Area, Knobel noticed something surprising: even in one of the wealthiest and most educated regions in the country, basic local news coverage was disappearing.
Berkeley had the ingredients that, on paper, should have supported a thriving local news ecosystem. It was home to a world-famous university, an engaged population, and a community that cared deeply about civic issues. Yet as regional newspapers contracted, the kind of routine coverage that keeps residents informed — development fights, city government decisions, neighborhood issues — was quietly vanishing.
“The Oakland Tribune back then had a full-time reporter assigned to Berkeley,” Knobel recalled. “But it was clear a lot of Berkeley news was going uncovered.”
By 2009, Knobel, his wife Tracey Taylor, and journalist Frances Dinkelspiel decided to fill that gap by launching Berkeleyside. What began as a side project eventually grew into Cityside, a nonprofit journalism organization with dozens of employees, multiple local newsrooms, and a revenue model built around memberships, philanthropy, sponsorships, and events.
The journey from neighborhood blog to sustainable news organization required several major strategic pivots: professionalizing the operation, abandoning the pursuit of profits, and building a model that could expand without losing the local focus that made it valuable in the first place.
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.
Let’s jump into it…
Starting small and proving demand
Berkeleyside didn’t begin with a grand business plan. In its earliest form, it resembled many digital publications of the late 2000s: a reverse chronological blog where the founders wrote about whatever interested them.
Knobel rejects the idea that “blog” was somehow a lesser format. At the time, blogging represented a major shift in how information moved online. But the initial version of Berkeleyside was undeniably informal.
“We wrote about all sorts of quirky things,” he said. “We did some reporting as well.”
The site wasn’t immediately attempting to replicate a traditional newspaper. The founders weren’t covering every government meeting or maintaining a full roster of beats. Instead, they started by identifying gaps in existing coverage and responding to what the community found valuable.
That feedback came quickly.
“Even though we were doing really modest things, the reaction from the community was extraordinary,” Knobel said. “People stopping us in the streets and saying, ‘I never knew that,’ or ‘It’s so great you’re doing this.’”
Those reactions convinced the founders that Berkeleyside wasn’t merely a passion project. There was genuine demand for a dedicated local news source.
The timing was important. Large metro newspapers had historically covered nearby cities like Berkeley, but their shrinking economics made that increasingly difficult. When newspapers employed hundreds of journalists, assigning reporters to individual communities made sense. As newsroom headcounts collapsed, those positions disappeared.
“The guy who was reporting in Berkeley made it very clear that his job was on the chopping block,” Knobel said of the Oakland Tribune reporter covering the city at the time.
Soon after, that beat disappeared.
Berkeleyside’s opportunity existed because legacy newspapers were retreating from exactly the kind of granular coverage that communities still wanted.