This was the year Berkeleyside went beyond words in a concerted fashion and embraced other media including video, podcasts, film footage, as well as Storify reports comprising Twitter posts and photography.
We were helped in our endeavor by some wonderful contributors who are either professionals or seriously good amateurs.
Berkeley-based videographer Kim Aronson created a series of profiles of members of the Berkeley community, including the couple who run Mr Mopps’ toy store and local barber Harold Spiller. Aronson’s portrait of his neighbor, Gregory Kloehn, who built an ingenious, if minuscule, home from a dumpster, placed seventh in our end-of-year ranking.
Robert Mills, one of our summer interns, produced several polished videos for us, including one that made our top 10, perhaps, unsurprisingly, by focusing on an annual naked cyclist event.
And veteran broadcaster John Rieger made a welcome debut on Berkeleyside in the latter part of the year with his podcasts tackling quintessentially Berkeley subjects such as bumper stickers and the unwritten rules of the road for cyclists. This provocative report, enhanced by the lovely photographs of contributing photographer Nancy Rubin, ranked second in the Top 10 of the year, which we list in full below:
1. The rats of Telegraph Avenue [Video, Tracey Taylor, 01.28.11]
2. What exactly are rules of the road for cyclists? [Podcast, John Rieger and Nancy Rubin, 11.29.11]
3. Berkeley bicyclists go bare for World Naked Bike Ride [Video, Robert Mills, 06.20.11]
4. Police use force at Occupy Cal demonstration [Video, Miles Matthews via YouTube, 11.09.11]
5. Berkeley boy gets real in the Whole Foods parking lot [Video, DJ Dave, 06.16.11]
6. Should Starbucks buy Peet’s? Let’s ask the Peetniks [Video, Lance Knobel, 03.19.11]
7. Berkeley man makes a (really rather nice) dumpster home [Video, Kim Aronson, 08.30.11]
8. A “funeral” for a much-loved swimming pool [Video, L.A. Wood, 12.15.11]
9. A trolley trip in Berkeley in 1906 [Film, Unknown, 05.23.11]
10. The man who gives Shotgun its visual punch [Video, Tracey Taylor and Robert Mills, 06.13.11]
