The sources of information that Cupertino Matters uses
Local News
Cupertino Matters was founded because local news is hard to find these days, with the decline of our local newspapers. Local news sources include the following:
The Cupertino Courier, published on Fridays, still exists in print form, but has a 7 to 10 lag time in printing any news. It still remains the newspaper of record for legal notices, but contains few articles directly related to Cupertino. Significant happenings in Cupertino are covered in the parent newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, and are available online.
Cupertinotoday.com is a recent addition providing timely online news about many activities in Cupertino, with a weekly alert for subscribers.
Social Media
Nextdoor is a social networking service for neighborhoods. Residents have to signup, and can only see postings in their neighborhood plus immediately adjacent neighborhoods. Though Cupertino is a small city, neighbors near Los Altos can’t see postings by neighbors near Lawrence Expressway, but can see southern Sunnyvale postings. The City of Cupertino pays for agency status, and uses Nextdoor as a channel to distribute announcements.
City Publications and Livestreams
Cupertino Scene is a monthly publication by the city of Cupertino, with articles about the city. The print version is distributed city-wide, plus it’s available online.
City of Cupertino web sites:
Cupertino.org is the official city website with departmental sections, calendar of upcoming events, press releases and a wealth of information – though you may need use the search box to locate documents you are interested in. A Google search may be more effective by putting into the search box site: Cupertino.org your topic.
Cupertino.legistar.com is a separate linked database which contains meeting schedules and official public materials for those meetings. This database is best navigated by selecting the council or commission, from the calendar plus date of the meeting.
Livestream and recorded videos (watch in the comfort of your home on Comcast channel 26 or via the city website!) are available for all city council meetings, as well as planning commission meetings, and selected other commission meetings. Community Hall is essentially a recording studio so the recordings are high quality. Meetings at other locations may also be recorded but are typically lower quality.
Archive City videos can be found by following this link to the different platforms: https://www.cupertino.org/our-city/videos-on-demand. Council meetings can be found on both YouTube and the city’s own servers. YouTube videos have captioning and searchable transcripts available if the meeting is less than 4 hours long. Long meetings (i.e. 9 hours) may be broken into several parts. YouTube uses Google Translate, so the text is not perfect, but the combination of text on the screen and audio is can improve understanding.
City’s site recordings show the agenda, and have an index to jump to the relevant agenda items.
