On Wednesday night, a group of former journalists, Cal doctorates and book publishers held sweating glasses of IPAs on the porch of the Oakland bar Portal. The sky, at least on this side of the bay, was fogless. Lake Merritt glittered behind them.
It was not the vision of the city that anyone who had read about Oakland online in recent years might have imagined. Media skewed negative, painting the city as dysfunctional, its leaders as incompetent, crime as rampant. But that wasn’t the Oakland that any of the people in this room saw.
So a year ago, they’d sought to create a new media outlet that would reflect their Oakland — one that would not just describe Oakland by its struggles, but define what it meant to “think” from Oakland, through cultural criticism and news analysis. They called it the Oakland Review of Books — or ORB, for short…