My friend and fellow citizen-journalism thinker Amy Gahran once asked, "Was Zapruder a journalist?" Zapruder's home-movie camera captured the famous footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX.
If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle.
The videos these onlookers took show the chilling final interaction between Grant and Mehserle, which left Grant dead, and Oakland in a state of high alert as protesters took to the streets. Clashes with the police have resulted in over 100 arrests.
Oakland is a city exceptionally well-served by placeblogs, but as I scanned them today, many either remain on a particularly poorly timed holiday hiatus, taking advantage of the traffic lull many such sites endure over the Christmas-New Year holiday.
There is at least one Oakland blog that's resolutely on the case, however, not only staying on top of and linking to stories and video about the unfolding events but going out on the streets to do original reporting, and that's Oakland Focus.
We're going to keep watching the Oakland blogosphere as this unfolds, and we welcome any pointers to independent local news sources in Oakland. In the meantime, you can take a look yourself by looking at our Oakland page, which will give you links to all the local news sources we know about.
UPDATE: If you're tracking this, also take a look at California Beat.
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