Frances Dinkelspiel, Cityside’s co-founder and executive editor, announced today that she is leaving the nonprofit organization after 13 and a half years to pursue new writing opportunities.
Dinkelspiel, along with Tracey Taylor and Lance Knobel, founded Berkeleyside in 2009 when they grew concerned about the decline of local news. From a scrappy start-up conceived and launched around Taylor and Knobel’s dining room table, Berkeleyside has grown into a nationally recognized news provider with three editors and six reporters, 519,000 monthly readers, 70,000 Twitter followers, and newsletters read by tens of thousands of people. Berkeleyside has built a loyal and engaged community of readers by providing thorough, high-quality coverage of the city council, school board, police, courts, UC Berkeley, the East Bay food scene and neighborhood stories.
In 2019, Dinkelspiel, Taylor and Knobel brought in Tasneem Raja, co-founder of The Tyler Loop in Texas, and the four of them launched Cityside, a nonprofit news organization now regarded as a model for other local independent news organizations. In June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Cityside launched The Oaklandside, a newsroom serving the information needs of the…
