Twenty years into its run on Telegraph Avenue in Koreatown Northgate, Oakland's First Fridays festival is fighting for survival — not because of what happens there, but because of what gets attributed to it.

The festival is in Koreatown Northgate. The nightclub is downtown. The shootings in April happened in East Oakland, miles from the event. The ones in September happened blocks away, between 2:15 and 3:45 a.m. — hours after First Fridays had ended. These are the distinctions that matter, and the ones that keep getting erased.

Oakland's First Fridays, which has transformed a stretch of Telegraph Avenue into a street festival for 20 years, is facing a financial crisis that its organizers trace directly to how media outlets have covered violence in the city on first Fridays of the month. In March, multiple news organizations linked a mass shooting at a downtown nightclub — two people killed — to the festival, according to organizers. They did the same in May, when a fistfight broke out at Telegraph and 24th Street and, hours later, a car jumped a curb and injured seven people. Both incidents occurred after the event had ended and outside its footprint. In a statement the following day, festival directors wrote: "It feels as though our name is being used to capture attention and draw audiences, rather than accurately report the facts — and that is both misleading and harmful to the work we do."

The confusion has a geography. First Fridays runs in Koreatown Northgate — not Uptown, not downtown. It ends around 9 p.m. What happens on Broadway at 2 a.m. is the city's Friday-night nightlife economy, which draws its own crowd to bars and clubs that are legally open until that hour. Councilmember Carroll Fife, whose District 3 includes the festival location, put it plainly at a June 3 town hall near the Fox Theater: "We have to also acknowledge that what is happening is not just on first Fridays, but evenings in Oakland."

The conflation is being actively promoted in some quarters. In the hours before the June edition of the festival, Oakland police union spokesperson Sam Singer posted on social media that at least six deaths had occurred "after First Fridays" in 2025 and 2026 — a figure that, as The Oaklandside reported, appears to bundle the East Oakland killings, the 2–3 a.m. Uptown shootings, and the downtown nightclub attack into a single narrative about the festival. None of those incidents took place at First Fridays.

The financial consequences are real. Sponsors have pulled out, draining what director Venessa McGhee described to The Oaklandside as already shaky finances. Vendors have reported lost sales. McGhee, who has led First Fridays since 2024, said the event "is at risk of shutting down for good."

At the June 3 town hall, Mayor Barbara Lee, Councilmember Fife, and Interim Police Chief James Beere pledged to increase OPD and code-enforcement presence and block traffic from 15th to 20th streets along Broadway and Telegraph. Staff from MACRO, the city's civilian non-emergency response program, would also deploy.

The Oaklandside attended First Fridays on June 5 and stayed into the early morning hours. The scene was jerk chicken and chocolate beignets, double Dutch ropes and line dancing, hyphy music and families. No violence. By 2 a.m., five hours after the festival had closed, a dozen OPD cars and motorcycle officers were running sirens along Telegraph — managing not a festival, but a city's Friday night.