Editorials

This month the United States celebrates National Free Newspaper Week, and on April 1, an auspicious date with lively associations, the Berkeley Daily Planet will be celebrating our second anniversary of revived publication, timed to coincide with the 125th Anniversary of the founding of the city of Berkeley. It’s hard to believe it’s been two years, but here we are, doing well and even expanding. 

Our coverage continues to stretch up and down the East Bay. We started with the concept of “greater Berkeley” as our sphere of interest, and soon learned that the definition stretched all the way north to Richmond and south through Montclair, Grand Lake and others of Oakland’s diverse neighborhoods, because people in all of those areas are eagerly picking up the paper, reading it, and writing us letters about what they read. We’ve discovered that the region between the bay and the hills called the East Bay by San Francisco and West County by Contra Costa County has a unique identity all its own.  

We’re still not breaking even financially, but our growth curve would do credit to a high-tech startup. We’ve doubled our print run since the first issue. Our advertising is robust enough to increase our page count to 28 pages in this issue (we started with 8) and even perhaps 32 pages in the very near future. In April we’re launching a stand-alone real estate insert, because our advertising for that market has grown enough to need it. We’re calling it East Bay Real Estate because we’ve become aware that home buyers are looking beyond Berkeley in today’s hot market. 

Our most cherished small symbol of success is that we were featured in a New York Times crossword puzzle not long ago. (Clue: “city whose paper is the Daily Planet. Answer: Berkeley.”) The good gray east coast metro papers are sometimes slow to get the word about the West, so we’re glad to know that they know that we’re out here.  

Readers have written to us asking us what they can do to help us celebrate. You’ve been doing a lot already with your contributions to our opinion pages, which we think could easily be the best in the country. Unlike some other papers, we don’t pay our op-ed writers, or even solicit or censor them— we just take almost everything you send us, and you’ve sent us some fine copy in the last two years. (By the way, there’s still a lively controversy raging in the national press about why there are not more women’s voices on op-ed pages of other papers, but we’re proud to say that the Planet routinely has full representation from excellent women op-ed contributors.) We also appreciate the congratulatory ads some of you took out last year. 

We thought about renting the Paramount for a big party, but frankly we’re just too busy for anything like that. Twice weekly publication, with our small staff, does keep us running. However, we will let down our hair a bit next Friday, April 1, at the office. We’d love to meet any of our readers or advertisers who’d like to drop by after 2 p.m. to say hello. This is a bit risky, since by some calculations more than 50,000 people might be reading these words, but if everyone keeps their visits brief we can probably handle them by spilling out into the driveway. (Unless it rains, and if it does, don’t come.) We’re looking forward to meeting you.  

—Becky O’Malley 

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