Update: Jeff Goldblum is still not dead
On Friday, I posted about how NewsOK treated the breaking news story about the death of Michael Jackson.
The larger discussion in question wasn’t really about NewsOK. It was about traditional media being upstaged — or at least scooped — by non-traditional media like blogs and social media sites.
I relayed the story about the Jeff Goldblum rumor spreading on Twitter. Then, today, I see Mashable’s take on Goldblum’s appearance on the Colbert Report.
Just thought I’d share. Thanks to NewsOK web editor Dane Beavers for sending me this link via (prepare for irony) Twitter.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed | ||||
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Share it Live on the Fourth of July
During this past weekend’s Club H.O.G. rally in Bricktown, we launched our partnership with Share it Live, a photo-sharing application developed by visionaries working the OPUBCO Communications Group Audience Development department.
It’s an iPhone application with a unique slogan – “a new era in citizen journalism.”
The partnership last week was a success. Developers who focus on NewsOK built used the Share it Live API to build a customized area on the NewsOK hog rally coverage page. We received dozens of photos from the event.
Now we’re going to try the same thing on a wider scale – the Fourth of July.
Here’s our thinking. The Club H.O.G. rally was in specific locations in Oklahoma City. But the Fourth of July happens everywhere.
It doesn’t matter how you are celebrating.
A cookout at home? Share it Live.
A parade? Share it Live.
Going to a fireworks show? Share it Live.
If it’s happening on July 4 (or July 3, for that matter …. oh, heck, we’ll take photos from July 1 and 2, as well), please share it on NewsOK. You can upload through the iPhone application or you can simply upload through NewsOK’s Fourth of July page.
I wasn’t at the Club H.O.G. rally, so I couldn’t Share it live. But come Saturday, I have no excuse. I will be Sharing it Live – I promise.
Covering Michael Jackson’s death: Inside the mind of a NewsOK editor
The news of Michael Jackson’s death broke up a meeting I was in Thursday afternoon.
“Michael Jackson … dead!” said sports editor Mike Sherman (though it didn’t sound as undignified as it does when I typed it on this blog). “TMZ is reporting it.”
I walked back to my office and called our digital news editor, Robb Hibbard.
“You have this Jackson story?”
“It’s not on AP yet,” he said. “I’d hate to put it up if one of our sources doesn’t have it confirmed.”
And with that statement, Robb summed up an issue that is constantly discussed in our News and Information Center (and throughout the social media landscape).
I logged on to Twitter. Everyone was talking about Jackson’s death. It was by far the No. 1 trending topic on the social media Web site. As a matter of fact, topics about him were dominating the top 10 trending topics.
There were plenty of comments on Twitter, as well, about how non-traditional media (like TMZ) and social media (Twitter and Facebook) were spreading the breaking news faster than any of the “old-school media” (like CNN, the L.A. Times and the Associated Press).
Here are a few:
Gossipers (TMZ, Perez) say he’s dead. CNN, LA Times haven’t confirmed. Old media slowness rides again!
— from @mkokc (our former multimedia editor Mike Koehler and current New Media Director for Schnake Turnbo Frank public relations firm)
Half hour or so after Twitter told me Michael Jackson died, Washington Post email alert caught up. Still waiting for NY Times “alert.”
— From @stevebuttry (Steve Buttry, a news executive at the gazetteonline.com in Cedar Rapids, IA)
And those are just a couple of the many similar posts I saw from the 163 users I happen to follow.
The discussion was clear. Online users are often discovering breaking information faster through their Twitter stream than through traditional online media sources. Which, in the case of yesterday, there’s no disputing.
Some defenders of traditional media companies responded by saying something to the effect of “they’d rather have it correct than have it fast.” That’s a quality argument, but not one that plays well with the non-journalist crowd. But it’s a dilemma that we at OPUBCO Communications Group and other like companies face every day.
What did we do? Instincts told us that TMZ was likely correct. But the sources that we partner with to provide trusted information (AP and other wire services) had not yet felt comfortable with their verification process. We don’t have a reporter stationed in Southern California, so we have to rely on our partnerships. So, within about 10 minutes, we re-positioned the story we had about Jackson being taken to the hospital while adding a separate link to the TMZ report. We wanted to inform our users that another media outlet was reporting his death, and we wanted to be very clear about who was reporting that information.
The L.A. Times eventually reported that he had died, and other outlets followed. What remained was the criticism of such media sources, especially through Twitter posts. But the criticism would have been much worse had traditional outlets reported something that turned out to be untrue.
The fact remains – the traditional media companies are held to a higher standard and sometimes in a bind. If they don’t publish “the buzz,” then they are seen as old-fashioned and slow to react. But if they do publish “the buzz,” then they are seen as journalists spreading rumors.
At NewsOK, We have used our blogs to join the conversation on some of our beats. We’ve been open about publishing “buzz-worthy” information on some of our blogs, while trying to be very transparent about the source of the links.
But at this point, we continue to have a stronger standard of confirmation before information reaches NewsOK articles or ink on the pages of The Oklahoman.
It’s not a new dilemma, really. The same discussions about verification were had when newspapers started to roll off the presses in the U.S. And the same discussions were had when online message boards we a major source of rumors (some of which were very true).
It pre-dates the Internet, and it pre-dates Twitter. It’s just that now, things move at an entirely faster pace.
Take last night, for example. This post on my Twitter stream:
Now Jeff goldblum is supposedly dead?!?! NO!!!!!!!
– @lhodgesanderson (Lindsay Hodges Anderson, a former NewsOK web editor)
She wasn’t alone. Jeff Goldblum was a trending topic on Twitter. Sitting in my living room, I repeated that post out loud. My wife couldn’t place the Jeff Goldblum name, so I looked up his photo and showed it to her. Then I proceeded to search more about the story. Within a matter of 10 minutes, I concluded that the Goldblum death story appeared to be a hoax. But that didn’t stop others from going through the same discovery process throughout the night, usually beginning with posts on Twitter that were almost identical to Lindsay’s.
That proves how fast false information can be spread. And even if I learned within a few minutes that it probably was a hoax, I apparently didn’t adequately share that information. Hence, the phone call this morning from my wife, who was discussing with her co-workers the death of “some actor from ‘Jurassic Park.’ ” She wanted me to remind her what his name was.
“Um, honey …. that was a hoax.”
She had incorrect information. That wasn’t her fault. She’s simply one person mildly interested in celebrity deaths.
Posts on Twitter had incorrect information. It wasn’t Twitter’s fault. It’s simply a communication and aggregation tool.
But if NewsOK had that same incorrect information, it most-definitely and most-deservedly would have been our fault.
Share your hog rally experience live with the world on NewsOK
You might not know about it right now, but I have a funny feeling you’re going to become very aware of it before the weekend is over.
The Bricktown H.O.G. Rally (Harley Owners Group) is this weekend (Friday and Saturday) in various areas of Oklahoma City. We built a special page to cover the event on NewsOK.com. There’s also plenty of details about the event on wimgo.
But the primary purpose of this blog post is to have you send us your photos of the event as you snap them over the weekend. We’ve partnered with Share it Live – an iPhone application which was developed and is managed by our own development professionals at OPUBCO Communications Group. We’ve used the API for the application to build embedded functionality on NewsOK.com.
Now, you can post photos on our Hog Rally page or you can upload them through the Share it Live iPhone application. We hope you do a little of both. But we really encourage you to download the application to your iPhone so you can get used to sharing your images in that way.
We want to see how uploaded photos can help us tell the story of an event like this. We know Share it live is a simple way to share photos. It makes sense for us to use that functionality on NewsOK.com.
Watching, reading and learning about Wanda Jackson
We launched another nDepth piece this week. It’s on the famed Rock ‘n’ Roll star Wanda Jackson, who still lives right here in Oklahoma City.
OK … full disclosure time: I had never heard of Wanda Jackson until earlier this year when news came out about her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
OK … second moment of full disclosure: I wasn’t really all that fired up about the upcoming feature on Wanda Jackson. I was certain it would be a good story, but I didn’t think I would be all that interested.
Then I saw the full story, the long video and the accompanying text.
I was, all at once, interested, educated and informed about her impact and her legacy.
Interested … educationed … informed. That’s a great accomplishment for an nDepth feature. And it’s something you should check out when you have a chance to sit and learn about an Oklahoman who made a huge impact on the early stages of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Shotgun approach – browse new things on NewsOK
I used to write a weekly column that appeared in The Oklahoman. I would communicate with my readers (dozens and dozens of them) about things that were happening on NewsOK.com.
But there were some days when I just didn’t have something new and innovative to write about. On those days, I wrote about just about everything.
I called it the “shotgun approach.”
So … in honor of my former column, which is now a blog (welcome dozens of readers), here is the blog version of the shotgun column:
- Check out our Ongoing Coverage page. We launched it last week when we realized we had some great ongoing coverage pages that get lost in the shuffle.
- Check out our new Trooper-Paramedic scuffle page. We have all the stories, videos, documents and more to follow this story. We can’t seem to get enough of it.
- Bryan Painter’s weather blog is great stuff for people who want to know something unique about the weather every single day.
- Perhaps you missed our Scholar-Athletes page that we launched last Saturday. Jenni Carlson led the coverage, and we packaged all the nominees together in one spot.
- We also started a news quiz each Monday for the news consumers who love to test their knowledge. I get a perfect score every week.
Now, I’m off to vacation in Des Moines, IA. I will return to active posting for my dozens of readers on Monday.
NewsOK.com struggled through Tuesday afternoon
If you were on NewsOK.com yesterday afternoon or evening, you noticed something unusual:
NewsOK simply wasn’t responding like it should.
We noticed the problem at about 3:20 p.m., and our programmers, developers and server administrators immediately began investigating. The site was up and down intermittently through the next six or seven hours, but the same loading problems persisted (I could try to explain in further detail, but I’m sure I’d mess up the terminology and end up sounding silly).
By about 9:30 p.m., the site was back up and functioning properly. It’s been loading fine since then.
We apologize for the inconvenience to our users yesterday, as stories about Jessica Alba, the private school-public school debate in high school sports and weather stories highlighted the traffic we should have received. We know that delivering news and information is important to you. So now we have a decent back-up plan in case we experience similar problems. We will be able to deliver news if it happens again today.
Frankly, I’ve been working with NewsOK for almost 10 years, and I’ve never seen the source of any site performance issues be so elusive to our engineers. I watched as they systematically identified, investigated, tested and ruled out dozens of possible problems. Sometimes, bad things happen. We can only learn, prepare ourselves and move on.
Or it could be what one of our users hypothesized last night in a comment on an article about the issues:
Liberal conspiracy
I don’t think that was it, but we’ll investigate. Thanks.
Couchsurfing through Europe with Oklahoma angle
Blogs are launching all the time on NewsOK, so you always have to keep you eye on what’s going on on our blogs page.
One cool one that just started up is Casey Cornett’s (yes, that Casey Cornett) blog about his June adventure of couchsurfing through Europe.
There are daily updates and videos from the mayor’s son as he does what we all probably wish we could do or did in previous years.
Keep this blog as one of your favorites this month. Then I’ll tell you about plenty more blogs we have on NewsOK.
Another dose of reality from On the Line in Afghanistan
Nice weather this week, huh?
Just in case you are getting too comfortable on your nice Oklahoma patio during our nice spring evening in beautiful Oklahoma in early June, here’s a little dose of Afghan reality.
It’s on the “On the Line” blog on NewsOK.com – powered by Mike and Carlos Boettcher, who are embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan.
Mike has been posting on his Twitter account. Today, he posted another eye-opening bit of info:
Was interviewing a bronze star winner, a fellow Oklahoman, when we got small arms fire. He had to throw down the mike and shoot back.
I guess my day wasn’t so tough, after all.
Today is a day to learn new things on Twitter
Sometimes Twitter comes in real handy. Take today for example.
About one hour ago, our newest employee, Dane Beavers, posted a message on Twitter that I found very interesting. It was a link to a blog from STLToday.com reporting that Tony La Rusa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, was suing Twitter. Fascinating story … and good blogging from the experts at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I had to ‘reTweet.’
Then, just moments ago, Shaquille O’Neal (the one NBA player I’ve followed since his high school phenom days), posted a message on Twitter announcing to the world that he was rooting for his former teammate Kobe Bryant to win the championship this season. Bryant and the Lakers are in the NBA Finals against the Orlando Magic.
Since I’ve always rooted for Shaq, and his teams have always become my favorite teams, I found this equally fascinating – especially since the two players’ falling out probably cost each of them an opportunity for a couple more championships.
Equally interesting, was his, um, conversational tone
thats right i am saying it today and today only, i want kobe bryant to get number 4, spread da word
So there … I did it. I “spread da word.”
(To those who don’t follow the NBA or speak ‘Shaq’, “number 4″ refers to the championships Kobe will have if he wins another. He won three while playing with THE_REAL_SHAQ).
So those are two of the things I learned today on Twitter. But I learned much more. NewsOK, for example, has posted eight things today — everything from breaking news about Miley Cyrus to Berry Tramel’s latest blog post.
I might have missed any of those eight things without the stream of people I trust (namely, NewsOK) letting me know when something interesting comes across our desk.
So feel free and follow us on Twitter, if you’re into that kind of thing.
