Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Citizen journalist Spencer Mills, also known as OakFoSho, streams live from the Port of Oakland Dec. 12, 2011

Clad in shiny black athletic pants, black sneakers and a camouflage jacket and hat, with a water bottle hanging out of his right pocket, Spencer Mills moved fast.

A march from Frank Ogawa Plaza to the Port of Oakland was about to get under way at 4 p.m. on Monday, and Mills, also known by his Twitter handle, OakFoSho, was about to begin his live, one-man broadcast of the protest using Ustream, an Internet streaming service. 

He had dallied too long near the corner of 14th Street and Broadway, and was in danger of falling behind. But admiring protesters kept hindering his progress.

“Hey, how’s it going,” said a man who goes by the Twitter handle ImprovActor, looking the part in a white shirt, suspenders, top hat and huge, fake mustache, as he sidled up to a harried Mills.

“You’re a star!” a young woman said before bursting into tears as she described her commitment to the movement.

While Mills, 29, claims to hate being called an Occupy celebrity — “it gets in the way of my reporting” — in the space of little over a month, he has become a phenomenon, perhaps the most well known of a new class of citizen journalists rising to national attention through their coverage of the Occupy movement.

Using $2,500 worth of gear loaned to him by UStream, a San Francisco-based live streaming company, Mills has been broadcasting the Occupy movement to the world. His count of followers on Twitter, around 2,500 before he started live streaming, now approaches 10,000.

News outlets from The New York Times to BoingBoing have noted Mills' prominent role in covering the protests.

“You’re shitting all over the mainstream media. They can’t keep up," Michael Haley, a protester known for giving socks to Oakland activists under the name Sockupy, told Mills.

Here is a clip from Mills' stream Monday night:

Mills identifies himself as a citizen journalist and makes no bones about his lack of journalism training. The Oakland native (and devoted Raiders fan) graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2005 with plans to become a sustainability expert. After little luck finding a job, he went back to Loyola Marymount for a graduate degree in business, hoping to further his intended career. But when he graduated in 2008, the economy was tanking. Like many, he found himself “overeducated and underexperienced."

“I tried to start a small business,” he said, “But it was hard to get people to make the initial investment. Or get a loan.”

He passed the time working as a volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, leading get-out-the-vote efforts across several states. After the election, Mills faced unemployment again. He hit the road in his Corolla, traveling across the country and snowboarding. (Thanks to an insurance settlement, he now drives a BMW, which he calls his “1 percent” car.) When he got back to the Bay, he took a job raising money for a political advocacy organization. His most recent day job was at a 24 Hour Fitness gym.

But the seeds of a new career had been planted in 2008, when Mills joined the budding social network Twitter. The micro-blogging site became a hub for information after it was used to publicize graphic footage of the death of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot during a protest in response to the Iranian election in 2009. Mills, amazed by Twitter’s “speed and efficacy,” used it both to read news about the Iranian uprising and to put out information gathered from Iranian friends.

“It was all-consuming, addicting,” he said. “You got the news before it was reported. It was a revolution happening on your computer stream.”

As time passed, Mills broadened his focus, tweeting about politics (“I consider myself a progressive”), sports and protests relating to Oscar Grant, the passenger who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle. Mills says he was involved in the Occupy movement from the start, but it wasn’t until Nov. 2, when protesters first shut down the Port of Oakland, that he took a friend’s recommendation that he download a Ustream app and start broadcasting.

That night was pivotal for Mills.

In between bites of a microwave burrito, eaten while driving to cover a 5 p.m. march from the West Oakland BART station to the port on Monday, he reminisced about “running through clouds of tear gas” to pick up an extra battery from his car for the smartphone he was using to stream. Even on that first night, Mills had a distinctive style. Over blurry, dramatic and at times confusing images, he delivered clear narration — infused with humor and his informal East Bay vernacular.