A vibe report is a chatty and casual ethnography of an event or place, that comes from and shows a distinct perspective, but can be (and maybe should be) unsigned. We publish a lot of them on our website.
They're fun! If you want to write one, the instructions are simple: Go to a thing, a thing in Oakland ideally, talk to a couple other people, and then write about what it was like. Give the writing space to breathe, but don’t take much time writing it. Just knock it out.
If that’s enough for you, you can stop reading now, if that’s enough to make you write one. This is our email.
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Do you want more? Here's some more:
Try to notice things that are interesting, ignore the boring stuff, and mainly just answer the question a friend might ask you: “Hey, you went to that thing the other night, didn’t you? What was it like?” Take the thing seriously on its own terms, but look for impertinent details, get distracted, and let your mind wander around the room. Write it as if you’re a writer, which you are, but be as ragged and self-indulgent as ChatGPT never could be. Write something that would make other people at the event say “Oh, I remember that part! I actually remember it a little differently, though, it’s interesting that you said that.”
Write something that would be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it.
Is that enough? That can be enough!
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But another answer to the question is that these are vibe reports. We’ve published a bunch of them, because a bunch of things have happened that we went to and wrote about. We started learning what they were by writing them, and reading them.
Here are some things we’ve learned so far:
- Vibe reports are indulgent and overwritten, but they should be short, fewer than a thousand words. Vibe reports are almost always longer than they should be, but hopefully not by too much.
- A vibe report is written by a person who has opinions and ideas and also things they don’t know about. A vibe report is gossipy, goes on tangents, and loses its train of thought. A vibe report is interested in what it can’t see (or what it can’t remember).
- A vibe report remembers to talk to other people, and what they said.
- The best vibe reports are dashed off, written while still hot. We might edit them a bit. We might not, and preserve the heat.
- A vibe report is written from Oakland, in Oakland, by Oakland, about Oakland, and to Oakland, or at least some combination.
- A vibe report isn’t really a place for making an argument. These are not essays you labor over, not careful and scrupulous reviews, and they are not “real” reporting you could send to Oaklandside. Sometimes a vibe report starts to become those things, if you’re not careful. (though vibe reports are often not careful). But if a vibe report wants to become one of those things, we let it. We just don't call it a vibe report any more.
- Because vibe reports are anonymous, they can be a little bit reckless. But a good vibe report cares, with interested attention and participation. A vibe report is only as good as the writer’s openness to being surprised, and it doesn’t set out to tear down the thing it’s reporting on, at least not at the start.
- A vibe report is written from within the crowd, and wants to participate, and to think generously about the thing it wants to join. A vibe report wants to discover something good (but is honest if it doesn’t).
- Vibe reports have soft eyes and punctums out the wazoo.
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OK, a little more. Every vibe report is a different kind of vibe report, and every vibe report should teach us a new way of being a vibe report.
For example, a vibe report can come from going to an event that’s a little out of your comfort zone, that makes you just a little bit nervous to be there (but where you try to keep an open heart, and maybe wonder if you succeeded). It can be about what you saw that you didn’t expect to find, and processing what part of you had to push through, and doing it in good faith. And then sometimes a vibe report is about a thing you already know a lot about, that you are interested in, but that still surprises you: that showed us that a vibe report is the defamiliarization of meeting a thing on its own turf, learning something new at an away game.
And a vibe report can also come from just, you know, eating in a restaurant, or playing a game. It’s a blip in time you might otherwise not think much about (and instead, thinking much about it). It can be what you did at work, that maybe everyone but you would see is interesting: from this, we learned that a vibe report is about cutting through the familiar and finding the fascination of a normality, or a routine.
Sometimes, too, a vibe report is when you go to a crowd and try to make sense of its animating spirit, from within (and when you go to another one the next day, and compare it); it can even be when you return to an ongoing protest that’s settled into deep grooves, and look at it with fresh eyes. From this, we learn that a vibe report is about taking a blip in time and space, that might otherwise go unremembered, and caring for it, enough to remember it.
Sometimes a vibe report is signed; sometimes the freedom of losing your name lets you say what you might otherwise be inhibited from saying. Sometimes vibe reports are written by multiple people, and ORB stitches them together after the fact; from this, we learn that the goal is to evoke the communal experience that can’t, quite, be fully experienced inside your own head, that you need to see through another’s eyes too.
A vibe report happens in Oakland, broadly defined. Sometimes it happens in the woods, or on a mountain.
It can come from taking a kid to a thing, and struggling to even see it because, my god, taking kids to a thing is so much work. From this, we learn that a vibe report can be about the texture of not experiencing a thing. And in that vein, a vibe report can be as much about getting to a thing as the thing itself, which reminds us that an event doesn’t just happen inside the event, but includes every road that takes you to it.
Maybe a vibe report is when you go to see a movie, but the most interesting things happen on this side of the fourth wall, which taught us that a vibe report is about the community that finds itself when culture is made and shown, and what it does when it regards itself. Or when you go to hear music, but find your gaze captured by the murals or the sound baffles on the ceiling: a vibe, sometimes, is the inanimate stillness in the midst of a crowd.
It can be about going to a thing that means something more to you than to others, and explaining why. A vibe report can be cleaning rot, or just touching poop, wanting to write to understand why the most humble experience matters.
Sometimes a vibe report happens, because you needed to know what was happening the moment after a things stopped, but didn’t stop. Or just going on a scheduled walk, or boat tour, or ribbon cutting, and saying what it’s like, what open air and contingency does to an event, when you add people to had previously just been a plan. And sometimes you don’t even go looking for a vibe report; sometimes, in the midst of solitude, it finds you, and you have to explain why. Sometimes the best and worst things in life are unsolicited.
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We started doing vibe reports because an event that doesn’t get written up and remembered just gets forgotten, and it feels like it didn’t happen at all. We don't pay vibe reporters, because we don't have enough money to pay for every time we want to ask "Hey, you went to that thing the other night, didn't you? What was it like?" That’s the problem with doing a weekly calendar: it’s not enough to know that a thing happened; you want to know what it was like. Join us!
(And even though vibe reports are unpaid, all the money we’re raising from memberships will go to pay writers to write things for us (after our minimal overhead costs), so become a member, if you can, and send us a small amount of money! Or buy a cup of delicious coffee, which costs the same and will help you write.)