While others threaten to bring old media, white supremacist ways back to Oakland, with Google’s money, Zennie62Media’s Oakland News Now continues to expand it’s news distribution reach via tech.
Oakland News Now has added the brand domains OaklandNewsToday.com, OaklandCommunityNews.com, TechOaklandNews.com and a very special domain, AfroTechNews.com, to form yet another innovation in Oakland media tech.
Never before has an online Oakland news effort been so focused on making sure the right keywords are matched with the right content so you can easily find it online. Today, Zennie62Media’s Zennie Abraham has OaklandNewsNow.com, OaklandNewsToday.com, OaklandCommunityNews.com, OaklandNewsOnline.com, TechOaklandNews.com, OaklandSportsToday.com, LasVegasStadiumNews.com, and a very special domain AfroTechNews.com.
Plus, Zennie Abraham still has Oakland’s first blog, Oakland Focus at OaklandFocusBlog.com, and this new designation for our 10th year of CES Las Vegas coverage, CESLasVegasNews.com
And this effort is not “domain squatting”: each one is tied to a new area of Oakland News Now, or an existing area that needed better branding. All of this to address the real news crisis in Oakland.
A Lack Of A Black-Ran, Tech-Oriented News Approach In Oakland
The Oakland of the past was marked by news that was brought from a truly diverse group. The late, legendary, Bob Maynard was the African American owner and publisher of the Oakland Tribune. He passed away, and the organization and news brand he left behind lost its black-ownership and diverse news focus, and reduced itself to something that didn’t represent Oakland.
Not surprisingly, the new owner, the Bay Area News Group, dropped the name “Oakland Tribune” in 2011 and replaced it with “East Bay Times”, effectively saying to black Oaklanders like this blogger that it didn’t want to be associated with black Oakland. The only publication remaining with an African American-ownership was the Oakland Post, with Paul Cobb as it’s editor and publisher. That was one reason I started Oakland News Now in 2018, but the approach is different.
Oakland News Now is the center of a larger experiment in a smartphone-based news delivery network with the Zennie62 YouTube Channel at its center. News can be broken in seconds and from anywhere in the World, and that has been done here.
This video-blog post and livestream at OaklandNewsNow.com, for example, was made by Morgan Back from Gaza in June of 2018, and without warning to Zennie62Media, but totally authorized as per our process. One she posted it on YouTube, just minutes later it became an automatic post at Oakland News Now, and was number one in a news search for “Gaza Protests” for eight full hours after that. That’s the Zennie62Media approach, and no one else does it. It took two years of coding and testing by me before it was launched. But we don’t stop there.
Zennie62Media’s OaklandNewsNow.com is also upfront about where our backing comes from for a post. If Maria Ayerdi Kaplan or Insight Terminal Solutions is our content development and content marketing client, we say so. Why? Because many voices have been closed out of what I call “white supremacist” media, and were being buried by unfair content; our service exists as a corrective.
Zennie62Media’s Oakland News Now is for-profit and reflecting a philosophy that innovation in media tech comes only went a profit-motive is applied; a non-profit focus in Oakland media has translated into some old-media type being over-paid and burning through investor cash. That’s not Zennie62Media’s Oakland News Now.
I also believe that Oakland and America still had not got the message that there are blacks in tech, and right in Oakland – I’m one of those people. I was even written up in The Next Web in “Failures In the Startup World.” There are many other people, blacks in tech, that old media, white supremacist Oakland and East Bay publications have deliberately ignored.
Thanks for opening a market for Oakland News Now.
Stay tuned.