Golf page beefed up after visitor’s question
We received this message this week from a longtime subscriber:
I was a long term subscriber of OPUBCO “over 50 years” until my subscribtion was cancelled because of where I live, so I now rely on our computer connection to obtain scores, articles, etc.
The newspaper always reported the players, scores, finish, and winnings ($) of the PGA Tournaments. I can not seem to figure our how to obtain it thru the Sports section of the computer program. It is not reported in the “golf” section. Can you give me instructions on how I can obtain this info each Monday morning?
Will appreciate it.
It was a good point. Here’s the response:
Thanks for your message. We needed to beef up that page on NewsOK.com.
We added more links along the right side of the golf page on NewsOK.com.
The links we added are for the updated leaderboard, tee times, money leaders, rankings, etc. I hope that helps you find information on that page.
You should be able to see the most recent information there any time you visit.
Comments from our live winter weather chat
I could write a long time about NewsOK.com’s coverage of the ice storm (which is finally melting away as we speak). But plenty has been written already by Poynter Online, by the Newspaper Association of America and by our own David Morris.
I can only add one note to what they’ve already said …. We broke a new one-day record for traffic on Monday, almost doubling the normal Monday traffic surge. It just shows again that we are needed every day, but we feel even more special when we are really needed on a specific day.
Beyond that, I thought it would be fun to share some excerpts from our live chat during the ice storm on Monday and Tuesday. The chat was moderated by multimedia editor Mike Koehler. He shared these tidbits with me …
[Comment From Josh]
you guys should get in the paper version of the paper for this… it’s pretty much the best coverage of the ice storm there is, timely, appropriate instant information… good stuff… someone should buy you a beer…
[Comment From Moby Donahue]
do you have a link to pictures of the driver and camera man … those brave men deserve some credit
David Morris posted the photos. Check there.
[Comment From daaph]
this is the coolest stuff … I’ve been watching for two days and have loved the tour of the city during the storm. You deserve an award for this kind of coverage. thanks
[Comment From Jim]
Seriously, this is an excellent way to stay entertained and updated on road conditions. Really ingenious. Stay safe guys!
[Comment From JimRat]
I hope you guys win all kinds of awards with this. I just discovered your Twitter stream at the bottom. Even cooler!
[Comment From @votemikejones]
This is really great. Amazing job NewsOK, this is making me proud of Oklahoma
[Comment From Jake]
This is quite possibly one of the coolest features I’ve ever seen on newsok. Excellent work!
[Comment From Dana]
NewsOk is numero uno!!!!!
Gracias!
[Comment From Guest]
I’ve enjoyed the ride!
[Comment From David]
Congrats guys….this is pretty awesome
[Comment From Eric]
This is cool but can you guys pull into an empty parking lot and do some donuts
You had to keep watching the live coverage nonstop! You might have missed the donuts. Stay tuned next time.
Learning more about Jim Chastain
A reader sent an e-mail last week with a question about our page about Jim Chastain – ‘Life is Real’: Writing the Final Chapters.
Is there any way possible to get word to Jim Chastain ??? I want to contact him about his news article and encourage him. If I mailed my message to you could you get it to him. ?? I sent it to a J. Chastain in Norman but it was returned to me undeliverable. I also am trying to contact John lanton and Ken Raymond. Please tell me what I should do. Thank you so very much
Here is a link to Jim’s personal Web site. It’s a link to his contact page, where you can type a message to him.
Of course, you are also able to post a message as a comment on his blog:
Here is the information for reporter Ken Raymond: (405) 475-3331, kraymond@opubco.com
Here is the information for photographer John Clanton: (405) 475-3321, jclanton@opubco.com
And in case you haven’t been there recently, the Life is Real page has a new video from John Clanton and new blog posts from all three contributors. The good news is that there is good news there right now – and that’s always good.
Visitors missing comments on stories today
We received this message at 8:37 a.m. today:
The comment engines on www.newsok.com appear to be out of order. None of the stories have comments and none of the comments are “sticking.” I find it rather strange that its now 8 AM and there are “0″ comments about the Obama inauguration front page story. It just has to be a server error of some kind.
This is odd. And we had already been looking at the problem. We noticed the issue early this morning when it seemed equally odd to us that no comments had been made on our top stories.
By 9:15 a.m., new comments were being seen on the site. By 10 a.m., all other under-the-covers problems with the comments were fixed.
We’re back to normal now. Our “Remaking America” story now has 88 comments.
The problem stemmed from our tweaks to the commenting system last night, after one of our users spent the day abusing our open commenting system. The user’s comments deteriorated the atmosphere on our comments and ruined the experience for the rest of the group on our site.
However, often when you make a series of programming additions to your site, something can go wrong. Early this morning, we saw the problem.
Sorry for the glitch. Comment away. Just keep them clean, so I don’t have to claw out my eyes as I read the comments.
Videos today on NewsOK
Inauguration coverage update
I wrote yesterday afternoon about our planned Inauguration coverage. We planned to use the live feed from C-Span, which was working well until the traffic grew to about 20,000 viewers for that feed.
Thanks to OPUBCO Communications Group’s director of video David Morris and his team, we quickly switched to AP’s interactive display about an hour ago. It turned out really well. So well, in fact I’m listening to Aretha Franklin as I type of this (I hope it’s part of the ceremony ….. I’m assured it is).
David explains the video well on his blog.
Inauguration ‘09 to be covered thoroughly on NewsOK
We’ve already started blogging.
We’ve already begun feeding live video – thanks to our friends at C-Span.
And we have tons of content to read, watch and discuss.
You don’t want to miss our Inauguration ‘09 page, where we will be publishing updates from people at the scene (our own Carrie Coppernoll will be compiling stories from sources in Washington D.C. and beyond) with our breaking news blog and showing the live video of the inauguration.
Plus, we’ll have all the stories, videos and analysis you will need to understand this historic even from an Oklahoman’s perspective.
And the bonus? This page will be archived for our users to return and relive the moment.
Photo galleries page provides outlet for thousands of images
On any given day, I can prove that the NewsOK site is much deeper than you thought.
Today, I bring you the Photos page, a subsection of our Multimedia Page.
We have hundreds of galleries, categorized and archived by section. But when we re-launched this page along with our re-vamped Multimedia page a couple weeks ago, we added some additional functionality:
- We added comments to our photos. Now you can make a comment on any individual photo as a you browse a gallery. Those comments are fed along the right side of the main photos page, so you can always see the most recent comments.
- We added an improved search capability on the page, so you can now search any word you want and pull up a dynamic gallery for that.
- We enhanced the Alternate Crop photo blog, where you can read about our photographers’ experiences and their favorite photos. (We learned a little secret with this latest addition ….. photographers can indeed write ….. but we’ll keep that quiet so they don’t get extra assignments) .This blog is awesome, though. We get insight on the life of a photojournalist that we rarely hear about.
(We also re-learned something we already ….. our photographers are phenomenal!)
Watchdog page live on NewsOK
We launched a new page last week.
We’re telling you about it this week.
And you’ll see much more from it in future weeks.
The Watchdog page is officially live on NewsOK.com.
What is the watchdog team? Nothing says it better than the page itself:
The Oklahoman Watchdog team is a dedicated group of journalists here to expose corruption in Oklahoma.
On the page, we have links to our data warehouse – the Your Right to Know page. Database Editor Paul Monies spends his days digging up data to serve the citizens of Oklahoma.
You can also find links to our ongoing DHS coverage and our CrimeWatch page, something I’ve written about in the past.
But the coolest thing about the page …. meeting the journalist who spend their days and nights serving our communities with their specialized talent.
Make no mistake – we know we’re in a changing world, and OPUBCO Communications Group is changing and adapting right along with it. But our bosses have made it very clear that this type of journalism is a staple of what we do here. We are indeed still watching out for the citizens of Oklahoma.
Now we have a page to showcase that journalism.
Chapter One of Jim Chastain’s ‘Life is Real’ released
The much-anticipated Chapter One of the ‘Life is Real’ site was released on Sunday in The Oklahoman and on NewsOK.com.
The narrative was powerfully descrptive and to the point. The design was effectively simple. And the photography brilliantly sets the mood.
It yet another great example of outstanding newspaper work.
It also shows how powerful the newspaper is ….With the piece in Sunday’s newspaper, Jim Chastain’s blog jumped to the No. 1 slot for our blogs on Sunday.
His blog remains in the top 5 again today. When you get a push from the largest newspaper in the state, it makes a difference.
We soft-launched the site more than a month ago with videos and blogs. The release of Chapter 1 is the official hard-launch.
There is much more to come.
