Opinionator offers a platform for your views. Photo: The Paradigm Shifter on Flickr

All Berkeleyans know that our city is not short of opinion on just about any subject under the sun. We’ve shied away from providing opinion on Berkeleyside, feeling that the core of what we do is news and we didn’t want to distract from that.

We still don’t want to distract from the news, but we do think it would be valuable for Berkeleyside to also offer a regular forum for opinion pieces (in addition to the many opinions expressed in our comments).

So Berkeleyside is today launching Opinionator (name stolen shamelessly from the excellent New York Times blog — see Picasso’s dictum). Our first op-ed contribution is from Mayor Tom Bates and Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Bill Huyett, writing about progress to date with Vision 2020.

We welcome submissions of op-ed articles of 500 to 600 words or less. Contributions should be about Berkeley issues (we know there are plenty of opinions on issues outside Berkeley, but that’s not our focus), and we prefer Berkeley writers. Email submissions to us. We’ll publish op-eds at our discretion.

Lance Knobel (Berkeleyside co-founder) has been a journalist for nearly 40 years. Much of his career was in business journalism. He was editor-in-chief of both Management Today, the leading business magazine...