Longtime readers may recall my sadness at the demise of our local paper, the Berkeley Daily Planet. Well, when I was at the Digital Rights Management Conference at UC Berkeley last week, I saw a man wearing a Berkeley Daily Planet badge. I went up and introduced myself to him, and asked him what the story was with the badge. The man, who turned out to be Tom Hunt, the MIS guru and computer science teacher at Longfellow Middle School, and local Berkeley technical entrepreneur, told me that Becky and Mike O’Malley, who had retired after a successful career in the software business (i.e. they sold the company they had founded for a reasonable amount of money) had bought up the assets of the Berkeley Daily Planet and were going to try and restart it. I was delighted at the news, since I miss knowing what is happening in Berkeley, and I miss my daily ritual of picking up the paper and a pastry from the Cheeseboard and reading the paper on my one mile walk to the office. Today, while walking past the cheeseboard, I saw a sign in the otherwise empty BDP news-rack inviting people to check out the Berkeley Daily Planet website for the preview for the paper.
Well, the website is up and it looks good. The O'Malley's have hired at least one of the reporters back, they have more offers of help than they can use, and they hope to start publishing again in April.
Thank you, O'Malley's. Welcome back, Daily Planet. We've missed you.
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