There’s no end of subjects we’d like to cover: schools, local politics, culture, the university, nature, sports and more. Writers get the same benefits as those involved on InBerkeley now — no pay, but the enjoyment of people in our community finding information and getting involved in debates on issues large and small.

If you think you can write for InBerkeley, email me with an idea or two for things you could post, and either a sample post or a pointer to your writing.

Photo from Flickr by Valeriana Solaris

Alan Mutter (above) reports that journalists didn’t kvetch at Googleplex. Personally I don’t believe it, but he was there and I wasn’t:

They said a conference about the future of journalism couldn’t take place without the usual qvetching [sic] about the golden, olden days of journalism, with publishers grieving shriveled margins and editors caviling about the bloggers challenging their previously unassailable wisdom.

But we did it. The two-day Media Technology Summit sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley adjourned today without sliding into the Bermuda Triangle of denial, anger and depression that ordinarily characterizes such shindigs.

Read more about the summit on Mutter’s blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

[Photo: MediaBistro.com]

I hesitate to suggest you go to hear Michael Pollan speak tonight in Berkeley, not because he isn’t smart and entertaining, but because last time I went up to the campus to hear him hold forth, the place was so packed many of us were relegated to an ante-room and had to settle for watching him on small screens.

Still, that was a free shindig and tonight’s event requires one to buy a ticket, so Pollan’s enormous fan-base may not come out in such full force — even if he is on home turf.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” author and J-School prof will be talking about his philosophy—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” — in Cal Performances’ Strickly Speaking Series, tonight at 8pm at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. Tickets cost $16–$30, (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org.

[Photo: Ken Light.]

Robert Gammon in The East Bay Express probably came out most strongly against the initiative, saying it represented a threat to Bay Area journalism as well as to the long-term fortunes of journalism students in the area.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his position as an adjunct professor at the J-School, Silicon Valley new-media consultant Alan Mutter passed no comment on the development and merely reported it on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Susan Mernit, who is about to launch hyperlocal blog called Oakland Local, was ambivalent on her own blog, but concluded that, “As much as I worry that Hellman’s project will suck $$  from my own little project and other wonderful smaller sites I see emerging, the Hellman project feels  more like a replacement for something we’ve lost — the big (bloated?) newsrooms of the corporate papers — not the local sites that are close to their community.”

All the major news media have reported the initiative whose website can be found here and its Facebook page, launched just today, has already attracted about 240, mostly encouraging, followers.