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OL Contributing Editor Reginald James wins one of six $20K AP-Google scholarships

OL Contributing Editor Reginald James wins one of six $20K AP-Google scholarships
OaklandLocal.com
April 8, 2012

Reginald James, an Oakland Local contributing editor and multimedia journalist, is one of six winners of the AP-Google Scholarship for his proposal for a mobile, hyper-local website for the Black community at the University of California, Berkeley.

James explains in his proposal how African-American students attending UC Berkeley lack a place to adequately get news to fit their needs.

James wrote:

“The fall of 2011 was a juicy semester for news at UC Berkeley: proposed fee increases of up to 81 percent, a controversial “racist bake sale,” and the Occupy Cal movement. Campus media covered each of these incidents, and two even got national print and TV press coverage.

Yet, most African American students didn’t learn about these events from the TV, print or news websites. Not just because they were on the ground, but because they feel the media coverage is neither fair, culturally relevant nor serving their needs.

This past fall, I conducted a survey on Media Consumption of Black students at UC Berkeley. Less than a quarter of Black students read the campus newspaper, and nearly 80 percent had never visited the paper’s website. Thus, with my classmates, I will launch a mobile-friendly, hyper-local style website, Onyx Express Digital, for the black community at UC Berkeley.

The website will include UC Berkeley news, feature stories about current students, faculty and staff, alumni and other issues that affect students of color disproportionately, such as student loans and health issues.”

James is currently an undergraduate at Cal, studying Political Science and African-American Studies in addition to producing an Internet radio show The Black Hour and being contributing editor for OaklandLocal.com. He is also a photojournalist for UC Berkeley’s Onyx Express Magazine and a blogger for Al-Bayan Magazine.

Find out more about the other winners at Online News Association.
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