The day started out like any other, but it would end with lingering sorrow felt throughout the nation.

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The days of posting anonymous comments on NewsOK are no more. Digital Managing Editor Alan Herzberger announced Tuesday morning that the site will be switching to Facebook commenting.

“We care about the conversation. We care so much about the conversation that we are willing to give up quantity for quality. We expect this change to result in fewer comments on our site. But we also expect this change to encourage more users to participate. And we’re confident that we will see more constructive discourse about issues in Oklahoma.” – Herzberger

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Will buying concert tickets online soon get a little easier for Twitter users?

Mashable reports: Twitter users who own American Express cards can get their hands on concert tickets for rock band Soundgarden by syncing their cards and tweeting “#AmexSoundgardenTix.”

American Express’s handle, @AmexSync, will respond and give users an access code to purchase two pre-sale Soundgarden tickets. The deal is part of American Express’s discounts program that launched earlier this year.

According to the Mashable,

The program works like this: Cardholders go tosync.americanexpress.com/twitter to sync their card with their Twitter account. Then, when they tweet various “special offer” hashtags (like “#amexcoffee” for instance), couponless savings are loaded onto their cards.

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Do you ever pick out quotes in stories and copy them to share with friends? Well now you can also see what quotes other readers are highlighting and copying on Huffingtonpost.com.

The news website recently unveiled a new feature called “HuffPost Highlights,” which feeds quotes and passages readers have copied into a searchable web page. It is also the first project from HuffPost Labs.

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The sister of a man who led police on a vehicle pursuit in Phoenix, Arizona and fatally shot himself Friday afternoon said she is upset with FOX for airing his death on live TV.

His sister, Nature Romero, tells NBC affiliate KPNX in Phoenix, “That shouldn’t have been the way that any of us had to learn about my brother’s death.” – Poynter

FOX anchor Shepard Smith was providing commentary on the vehicle chase about 3 p.m. Friday when the man, identified as Jodon Romero, exited the vehicle, ran through a field, pulled out a gun and fatally shot himself.

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Despite a decline in newspaper and magazine readership, television news has been able to hold onto viewers. But a growing platform is now threatening TV’s audience.

The InterWebs. The World Wide Web. The digital space. The online sector. The…OK, I’m done.

Back to my point.

The Pew Research Center released a news consumption report Thursday, analyzing readership on various platforms. The report found that “the changing demographics in the TV news audience are particularly noticeable in the audiences for local and cable news.”

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If you were watching FOX News at about 2:30 p.m. today, you’re probably still in shock. The network was following a car chase when the driver exited the vehicle, ran through a field, pulled out a gun and fatally shot himself.

And Fox aired the entire thing.

“We really messed up.” – Shepard Smith said after the commercial break.

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Has verifying a reader’s photo ever stopped you from publishing it? If so, you might be in luck.

The website TinEye allows you to search for images, find out where they originated, how they are being used and if a modified version of the photo exists. It’s also a good way to check and make sure your own work hasn’t been altered or reused by another publication without credit.

You can start by uploading a photo or providing a url to the image. Either way, TinEye will crawl the Internet for duplicates.

According to its website, TinEye has already indexed 2, 180,913,080 images from the Web. It also has a Cool Search page that displays some of the interesting photos it has come across online.

Check out the site and let me know what you think. So far, I think it has the potential to be a great resource for journalists and publications, especially as we use more user-generated content.

In June, I wrote about how The Oklahoma Daily was planning to scale back its print edition and continue as a digital-only publication for the summer. The benefit of scaling back would allow the staff to tinker with work flows and kickoff the university’s year-long study to generate reader feedback.

OU officials reversed their decision about going online-only for the summer, but they moved forward with a reader study. The first discussion is scheduled for 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Governors Room in Oklahoma Memorial Union.

According to the study’s wordpress blog,  the goal of the first session is to learn how readers stay informed about what’s happening on campus. Is it through mobile? Blogs? Web? Print? All options need to be explored.

As someone interested in media and news consumption, I urge students to attend the discussion and help these journalists figure out the best platform to present their work and provide information.

Also, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the study. Comment below and let me know if you think it’s a step in the right direction for OU student media.

The Atlantic Media Company launched a digital-only business publication Monday that is dedicated to covering “core topics and knotty questions of seismic importance to business professionals, from the rise of digital payment systems to life in a world of extremely low interest rates to the growth and habits of the consumer class,” according to Editor Kevin Delaney.

The design of Quartz makes news consumption easy with one click of a headline or a quick scroll down the page. Delaney wrote in his welcome letter that the page is also designed to work just as well on mobile devices.

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