We work for you \u2014 reporting on the stories our community needs. Our journalists attend city council and school board meetings, follow tips and make the calls to keep you informed on the important issues in Berkeley. Will you chip in today to support that work during our year-end fundraising campaign?<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/large-Cityside-Staff-Portraits.jpg\")
Alejandra Armstrong, Cityside\u2019s audience engagement editor, is responsible for ensuring that the journalism from Berkeleyside,\u00a0 Oaklandside, Richmondside and East Bay Nosh is published with readers front of mind. Credit: Kelly Sullivan for Cityside<\/p>\n
Berkeleyside\u2019s audience engagement editor, Alejandra Armstrong, has been honored by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists with the Unsung Hero award for 2025. And our sister newsroom The Oaklandside took home an Excellence in Journalism award for a story also published by Berkeleyside.<\/p>\n
Armstrong, who joined Cityside in 2022, is responsible for ensuring that the journalism from Cityside\u2019s four newsrooms \u2014 Berkeleyside,\u00a0 Oaklandside, Richmondside and East Bay Nosh \u2014 is published with readers front of mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Long before a reporter begins reporting, Armstrong makes sure they have addressed the fundamental questions: Why are we doing this? Who is it for? How will it help them? What is the best way to convey this information?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Armstrong\u2019s talents in optimizing Cityside\u2019s journalism to best serve its diverse communities, and her expertise in search engine optimization, audience data analysis, social media, and newsletters, have helped build a large and highly engaged audience. More than 600,000 people visit Cityside\u2019s sites every month, and our newsletters routinely achieve open rates that exceed 50% \u2014 with some as high as 60%-80%. Cityside\u2019s social media accounts have more than 147,000 followers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe role of an audience editor in local news organizations is still relatively new, but with the right person in the position, one whose editorial judgements are as strong as their analytical skills, it can be transformational. This is something Alejandra demonstrates every day at Cityside,\u201d said Tracey Taylor, Cityside\u2019s co-founder and chief content officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m honored to receive this award,\u201d said Armstrong. \u201cI really enjoy the work that I do at Cityside \u2014 working with incredible journalists and finding creative ways to distribute information to our communities. I especially like hearing from readers, taking their feedback and coming up with actionable responses. A lot of audience work is done behind the scenes, so being recognized by the SPJ board really means a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Oaklandside wins award for interview with Pamela Price
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Darwin-BondGraham-and-Roselyn-Romero.jpg\")
L to r: The Oaklandside\u2019s Darwin BondGraham and Roselyn Romero were honored by SPJ NorCal with an award for a 2024 interview with then Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price. Credit: Kelly Sullivan tor Cityside<\/p>\n
Berkeleyside\u2019s sister newsroom The Oaklandside was also honored at SPJ NorCal\u2019s 2025 Excellence in Journalism awards<\/a>. The newsroom\u2019s senior news editor, Darwin BondGraham, and its public safety reporter Roselyn Romero, were recognized for their September 2024 in-depth interview with the then Alameda County District Attorney titled \u201cPamela Price wishes more people understood the job of district attorney<\/a>.\u201d The story was published on both The Oaklandside and Berkeleyside.\u00a0<\/p>\n Romero was also a finalist at this year\u2019s San Francisco Press Club awards<\/a> for an Oaklandside story she reported with Momo Chang about how some Oakland Chinatown residents were rethinking crime prevention<\/a>.<\/p>\n SPJ NorCal bestowed two Career Achievement Awards this year: one to Kevin Fagan, who recently retired from the San Francisco Chronicle, for his decades of award-winning, on-the-ground reporting about the realities of homelessness in the Bay Area; and the other to Monica Campbell, a longtime public radio reporter and editor who spent her career as an immigration reporter in the Bay Area and Latin America, and now leads the state-funded California Local News Fellowship program, based at UC Berkeley. (See all the 2025 winners<\/a>.)<\/p>\n SPJ NorCal\u2019s 40th annual \u201cexcellence in journalism\u201d awards ceremony will be held Thursday evening\u00a0 at Bayview Opera House in San Francisco.<\/p>\n \u2026 We have a small favor to ask.<\/p>\n We work for you to provide free and independent journalism covering the stories that matter most in Berkeley. And we rely on readers like you to make our work possible. That\u2019s why we\u2019re asking you to contribute to our year-end membership campaign today. We\u2019ve set a goal to raise $180,000 by Dec. 31 and we\u2019re counting on readers like you to help get us there.\u00a0<\/p>\n Your support will enable us to continue doing the work for you and our community to provide the reporting Berkeley needs. So, what do you say, will you join us in doing the work?<\/p>\n “*” indicates required fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We work for you \u2014 reporting on the stories our community needs. Our journalists attend city council and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[2466,32987,143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-51711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-home-lead","9":"tag-how-we-work","10":"tag-oakland","11":"tag-oakland-headlines","12":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}