Supreme Court ruling on public records not good news for journalists
The Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a ruling on June 28 that wasn’t what journalists in Oklahoma were hoping to here. Database Editor Paul Monies did a great job with his story in explaining the issue and offering some of the key background information.
The issue at hand is whether or not the dates of birth of state employees should be a matter of public record and subject to the Open Records Act.
At issue were requests under the Open Records Act by The Oklahoman — and later the Tulsa World — for state employee information. Among the records requested were birth dates, employee identification numbers, salary, tenure and job title.
The Oklahoman is in favor of open records and open government. Speak with any reporter in our newsroom, and they’ll share a story or two of the hoops they’ve had to jump through throughout their careers to get public information from government agencies. That public information, by the way, is the same information that should be available to all citizens.
Those reporters and editors feel they are standing up for all citizens in seeking government records that, by law, are available for all citizens to see. That information ranges from email records to travel expenses of public officials to government contracts to jail records to court records to a wide variety of information on ways the government is spending taxpayer money. In this case, dates of birth of state employees became a hot topic.
Here is Kelly Dyer Fry’s quote about the issue. Fry is the Editor of The Oklahoman and the Vice President of News for OPUBCO Communications Group. She also happens to be my boss.
It’s not just a question of using dates of birth for identification, but also for misidentification. If average citizens run their names through the sex offender registry, they might be surprised to find someone on the list with the same name. Birth dates can quickly sort out who’s who. I respectfully disagree with the court’s decision.
And here was Mark Thomas’ quote on the issue. Thomas is the executive vice president of the Oklahoma Press Association.
It’s ironic that private citizens are required to give our information to the government to vote or drive, but the same information about state employees is off limits.
To read more on the issue, dating back to our stories from last year, visit the Public Records Dispute ongoing coverage page on our site.
Facebook commenting enabled on LOOKatOKC articles
We’re trying something different with our comments on the new LOOKatOKC website. Instead of using the traditional NewsOK commenting functionality, we’re going to try Facebook’s commenting.
That means users must log in with a Facebook profile to be able to comments on an article within the LOOKatOKC template.
We’re interested to hear feedback on this move. It’s a experiment, plain and simple.
- Will it increase the functionality for people commenting on LOOKatOKC articles?
- Will it help keep users engaged? Once a user submits a comment, they will receive an Facebook alert when someone replies to that comment.
- Will it increase traffic? Users will be able to post their comment directly to their Facebook feed if they choose to.
- Will it improve the tone of our comments? The theory is that comments will be attached to an online profile rather than a NewsOK profile that is often anonymous. It’s no secret what we’ve learned through the years — anonymity can create irresponsibility in online comments.
We launched this functionality on June 28. We expect to experiment with this for a few weeks and then determine its success. It might become a permanent feature. We might expand its use to other areas of NewsOK. We might just remove it.
Let us know what you think. And in the meantime, read all the other posts in recent years I’ve had about our comments.
See downloadable PDF edition for LOOKatOKC swimsuit special
The LOOKatOKC Swimsuit edition has been a pretty big hit.
It should come as no surprise that the annual swimsuit page is traditionally the most popular LOOKatOKC page each year.
I blogged about it when it launched, and I blogged about how the individual articles were leading the charge in our most-viewed articles.
But I have not yet blogged about the special iPad edition PDF that we created for users to download and take with them.
We have done some special PDF editions of special editions in the past — the 2011 Outlook edition and the special nDepth presentation for “A Thousand Hail Marys to Florida.”
This one has not been featured with our iPad edition of The Oklahoman, mostly because it’s not a product of The Oklahoman. To download this special PDF edition, just visit our 2011 LOOKatOKC Swimsuit Edition page and scroll to the bottom to see the special PDF promotion.
I recommend using your iPad to download it and saving it to your iBooks application. But you can use your desktop computer to download it, as well.
Adding another tab to the Meebo bar on NewsOK
I wrote last week about adding the Most Viewed tab to our Meebo toolbar at the bottom of every page on NewsOK.
Click on image for larger view
Then, a couple days after posting that blog update, we added another tab to the Meebo toolbar — this one is the Most Recent tab that shows the most recently posted articles from our entire website.
It’s a pretty unique article list. We don’t have anything like it anywhere on the site. It just a straight list of the most recent articles that we’ve activated. It is not a list of the articles we feel are the most important (you can see that at the top of our home page).
If you click on the tab, you’ll often see some articles from The Associated Press, since we feed much of AP’s content on the deeper pages within our site.
I think it’s a pretty neat tool to see the latest, even if it’s not the most important. Let me know what you think.
Top-viewed stories tab appears on NewsOK Meebo bar
We added another tab to the Meebo bar that appears at the bottom of all our pages.
Click on image for larger view
(Just a reminder … the bar I’m referring to encourages users to connect with NewsOK and share with others via various social media tools. We implemented it a couple of weeks ago, and we will continue to refine the options in coming weeks.)
This week, we added a tab called “Most Viewed.” It displays the top viewed articles on NewsOK in the past four hours and past 24 hours. It basically duplicates the same information that’s displayed on our Top Ten Most Viewed Articles page, but it allows you to easily browse our popular stories at the bottom of your browser at any time.
Check it out. And look for more items in that bar in the near future.
LOOKatOKC swimsuit models attack NewsOK’s most-viewed articles page
I blogged yesterday about the launch of the annual LOOKatOKC swimsuit issue. We first posted the site Wednesday at about noon.
Below is a screen capture of our Top Ten Most Viewed Articles page at about 5 p.m. on Wednesday. Take note of the A&E section and the list of Top 10 articles.
Click the image for a larger view
It seems as if our users are took note of the new page rather quickly.
Amish, sexting and solid parenting
From the ‘We-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up’ department come this headline: “Amish man, 26, accused of sexting Indiana girl, 12”
From the story:
An Amish man who sent more than 600 text messages that included lewd images to a 12-year-old girl he randomly dialed was arrested when he arrived in his horse and buggy for what he thought was a meeting for sex.
That’s the lead. And it leads to many questions. Read the rest for some of the answers.
It’s a pretty unbelievable story, but it’s also scary as the parent of young people who use a cell phone. But the last line of the story is the best:
“It was good communication between the girl and her mother and the mother not being afraid to turn that directly over to the police department,” he (the police detective) said.
Kevin Durant still not doing anything
On Tuesday morning, we saw some posts on social media and some discussion on morning television about Kevin Durant saying something controversial about having nothing to do in Oklahoma City.
Then we found the YouTube video from the episode of TMZ where they played the clip of the TMZ reporter asking him questions about Oklahoma City. Durant’s response was clearly half-hearted and not sincere. He looked to be running from the cameras more than anything.
Then, Darnell Mayberry blogged about it by Tuesday afternoon, linking to the video (which has since been removed from YouTube). Darnell’s take?
It’s time for folks in Oklahoma to lose the inferiority complex. Some people already are making this into a big deal. It’s not. This is a great state with great people.
He writes much more. I recommend reading it.
Then Darnell had a full article for NewsOK and The Oklahoman. That’s worth a read, as well.
Then on Wednesday morning, Kevin Durant had this post on Twitter:
Currently doing Nothing in Washington,DC
That made me laugh.
And all of it made for some interesting reading on Tuesday. For more, check out NewsOK’s ‘know it’ page on Kevin Durant, where we have all this stuff, plus Durant’s own blog feed on the page.
But what’s even more fun is this YouTube video of Kevin Durant in a playground game recently:
LOOKatOKC swimsuit issue has arrived
The LOOKatOKC swimsuit edition is here.
And we have a special web page devoted to the interviews, galleries and poll. You can vote for the 2011 model of the year after browsing all the photo galleries of all 14 girls that are featured this year.
What else are you going to do on slow news days in June?
Go ahead and click. You know you’re going to eventually, anyway.
Get help with weather radios
I’m in the market for a storm shelter. The May 24 tornadoes finally pushed me over the edge. I will be purchasing a storm shelter before the mid-September.
But I might need to stop by Homeland this weekend, as well. This Saturday, I can visit three Homeland stores in the metro area and get free assistance with using or I can purchase one if I don’t have one yet.
I know this, of course, because I saw it on NewsOK this morning.
