Welcome to Bakersfield Express, a website dedicated to advancing local arts and culture, promoting civic involvement and eco-friendly lifestyles, and carrying on a tradition of watchdog journalism to hold local leaders accountable.

That’s a tall order for a start-up staff of just two. But we have fast-growing support from community members who want to see an alternative source of local news and information. Bakersfield Express is in the process of becoming a nonprofit, and as such will be a site both for and by the community. Many of our readers are also our writers and photographers, our eyes and our ears for what is happening around town.

When I started thinking about launching a community website about four months ago, I looked around at all of the sources of information in Bakersfield. Even though the economy has caused a lot of cutbacks, I still saw strong areas of content being produced by local media – such as breaking news and sports. But I also saw a void of information in certain areas. These included green living, nonprofit news and volunteering opportunities, and arts and culture coverage. I’ve also witnessed as media cutbacks mean less watchdog journalists investigating local government.

So I wrote up a plan for Bakersfield Express and started shopping it around to community members who represented those key topics of interest for the site. As I had hoped, everyone I talked to said Bakersfield needed a site like this and they were fully supportive to help make it a reality.

Bakersfield Express is not alone. Many community websites – some for-profit and some nonprofit – have been popping up around the country as unemployed journalists look to fill niche needs in their communities. Some examples include VoiceofSanDiego.org and Noozhawk.com, out of Santa Barbara. There is a lesson to be learned from these sites: It is possible to create a financially sustainable website to meet the demand from community members for independent, alternative news.

Furthermore, the power of the web means sites aren’t stuck just offering information, but they can also offer interactive community building and social networking. That is our goal for Bakersfield Express. If it was 15 years ago, we would be starting an alternative weekly newspaper. But this is the digital age and we can do so much more online.

I am one of those unemployed journalists with a passion and a dream to serve my community by launching a much-needed website. I moved to Bakersfield six years ago from the Bay Area to work for The Bakersfield Californian. I bought a house. I started a family. I made Bakersfield my home. So after joining the ranks of the unemployed, and realizing the only jobs available in my field were out of the area, I decided to put my experience and talents to use at home and launch Bakersfield Express.

The site you see today is a clean, easy-to-read website built by me using the free, open source content management system WordPress. While WordPress offers a lot of great add-ons for interactivity and community building, it doesn’t provide all of the features we want to offer on the site. For example, you’ll see at launch that the community calendar is in a hard-to-search list format, and that the site administrator is the only person who can submit events. Once Bakersfield Express receives enough funding through donations and sponsorships, our goal is to expand the site through custom development to meet the needs of our online community. This includes a categorized, fully searchable calendar to which registered users will be able to directly add your events yourselves. We will be surveying our registered users in the coming months about features you’d like to see in the site upgrade.

Until then, please join the Bakersfield Express community by registering as a member, commenting on posts, and contributing your own stories, photos and events to the site. (Learn more about how to contribute on our About Us page.) And also, please consider making a donation or becoming a site sponsor to help us grow and serve the community the best we can.