Sports, nDepths and Halliburton executives dominate last full week of August on NewsOK
A blank blog post for about 15 hours
Thank goodness for moms. At a family gathering last weekend, the No. 1 reader of this blog reported that last week’s blog post was blank — as in empty …. nothing to read at all except for a catchy headline. I called up the blog post on the computer and saw that her report was accurate. I’m not sure how that happened. I do know that I made some changes (fixing typos) Friday night on my iPad. I must have pushed the wrong button. Luckily, WordPress has a nice version history of all posts, and I was able to retrieve what was there on Friday night. Whew!
NewsOK.com is hiring
I’m hiring a web editor position. We recently lost a good hand. It’s a shame. But we understand that not everyone spends their entire career here. There are plenty of opportunities for career growth for good people, even when times are tough in the news publishing business. But with every loss comes great opportunity, so we’re looking for a web editor that can do a wide variety of things to help us grow: “NewsOK.com is looking for a web editor to work closely with our online sports initiatives and our sports department. We need a journalist skilled in social media, blogging, content curation, industry technology and trends and solid news judgment to connect with our audience and continue our aggressive digital media efforts. Contact aherzberger@opubco.com.”
OHP sex scandal page
We launched a new Ongoing Coverage page last week amid the series of stories covering the case of Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Patrick Venable. Venable is charged with second-degree rape after being accused of taking a woman into custody in the early morning hours of June 20 and then driving her to her house in Guthrie to have sex. Venable’s next court appearance is set for Sept. 22. On our ongoing coverage page, you can see all the previous stories on this case and read the court and read the affidavit that led to the charges.
Fighting Back – a new nDepth
We launched a new nDepth special presentation this week that is intended to be the first in a series of nDepth specials titled “Fighting Back.” The first one was a story about Reggie Whitten, who has started several non-profit organizations during the past few years after the death of his son Brandon. In this nDepth piece, Jenni Carlson shares Whitten’s story about Brandon’s addiction and eventual death – and how he turned that tragedy into a life spent trying to help others in the world. It’s a powerful story.
Berry’s take on Perkins
Berry Tramel had a Berry-like take on the recent Kendrick Perkins controversy that we reported on last week (and I blogged about in my previous post). From Berry: “What a crock. Hey, Gran Torino, let me tell you what Clint Eastwood would not do in this kind of situation. He wouldn’t hide behind some shill. If he felt he was wronged, he would say so. Or at least, keep quiet and not let anyone else do his talking for him.” We’ve really had all sides of this story covered. Now we’re just waiting on the truth to come out.
Happy iPad customer No. 1
I received an email this week from a longtime newspaper subscriber who now gets the edition every day on his iPad. This customer is a perfect example of a traditional newspaper reader who has transitioned to a digital device as his lifestyle has changed. He was patient and pleasant, but he couldn’t get an edition to download on Tuesday morning. After a quick email exchange (I handed him off to our customer service specialist for digital products), the problem was fixed. We don’t have many problems with customers trying to get an edition or get connected, when we do, we’re happy to help as quickly as we can.
Happy iPad customer No. 2
I spoke with my brother-in-law last weekend. He lives in Springdale, Ark., and reported that he is a new subscriber to The Oklahoman on his iPad device. This customer is a perfect example of a non-traditional newspaper reader who has connected with us because of his new device. He didn’t read the newspaper daily when he lived in town, but he’s always been a digital news consumer. The Oklahoman’s iPad app is a great way to stay informed, especially as it relates to Oklahoma. He’s interested in staying informed about his former state. So because of technology and our development, he’s a new customer. That makes us happy.
Community blogs
We recently launched a community blogs page that has links to a lot of Oklahoma bloggers (45 of them, to be exact). Some of the bloggers are hosted within the NewsOK blogging community, but others are doing their own thing. We link to them as well. I’ve always known the blogging community is Oklahoma is strong, but having dozens of them in one place really helps get around the community quickly. If you’re a blogger, but don”t see yours on here, let me know. I expect that we will add many more in the next week or so.
Travis Haney is on campus
Our new OU football reporter Travis Haney started this week. And judging by his first two blog posts about his tour of the OU campus and his memories of the great Pat Summit, we’re in for a treat on his daily reports and musings about the OU football program. Check them out. Send him a note. And look for much more from Travis.
All-Access from ESPN
Speaking of the OU blog, Mike Baldwin is also covering the Sooners every day. This week, he had the rough assignment of watching television — something many OU fans surely watched as well. His breakdown — ESPN’s ‘All-Access, training Days With the Oklahoma Sooners’ is must-see TV — was helpful to me, especially since I’ve yet to see the program. Mike offered a series of notes about the show, and then said this: “The only negative for a reporter like myself is the media used to get this type of access years ago before college football coaches shut down watching practices. I miss those days. Not only did you get to see which backup players were close to being ready to contribute you saw more of the players’ personalties.”
Gina Mizell starts her gig with us
Staying with the sports theme this week (we are almost ready for football season, you know), check out the blog posts from the new OSU football reporter Gina Mizell. She opened up with an interesting comparison between the OSU football program and the Arizona State football program. She also talked about how she saw her first OSU practice. But her big introduction to us is this video with Berry Tramel from the OPUBCO Studios …
Most-viewed article
A Halliburton executive sipped from a cup of fracking fluid at an industry conference. We had an AP story on it, and Fark.com linked to it, driving the Halliburton executive takes a swig of fracking fluid article to the top of the list for articles this week on NewsOK.
Most-viewed blog post
Travis Haney’s aforementioned blog post about his experience with legendary Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summit was our most-viewed blog post this week.
Most-viewed photo gallery
For the second consecutive week, the gallery of the former OU quarterback Jimmy Harris has been the most-viewed photo gallery in our photo section. Jimmy keeps on winning.
Most-viewed video
An OU practice report from Tuesday was our most-viewed video this week:
This week on NewsOK: New apps, updated apps and everything from Bennie Owen to Kendrick Perkins
Serving another iPad experience
We launched our custom iPad application for The Oklahoman last October. I wrote about it plenty, and we received quite a bit of national notoriety for this application. Since the launch in Oct. 2010, we opened the subscriptions up for all subscribers to The Oklahoman, as well as offering a la carte subscriptions for $9.99 per month. But we also launched a different iPad app with a completely different experience in the past month or so. This one gives readers a page-by-page experience on their iPad. In other words, it acts as an interactive PDF of the newspaper edition. Since we launched it, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback. The one review we have in the App store says this: “This is exactly what reading the paper electronically SHOULD be like.” That user is a true believer, but others prefer the customized tablet experience we had already built. Us? We honestly don’t care which application you use. We are simply trying to provide the best digital experiences possible for our users who continue to move their reading habits to new devices. The Oklahoma Print Replica app is just another option for you. And it’s free to all subscribers of The Oklahoman.
A weekend of rowing
Last weekend was a big weekend for the Oklahoma River with the USRowing Master’s National Championships in town. We had the event covered with a series of stories, photo galleries and videos. Dave Morris did a stellar job with a video recap of the event on Sunday. And the blog post from photographer John Clanton was top notch. Of course, the photos galleries were probably the most popular element of the weekend (NewsOK readers absolutely love photos).
Growing Oklahoma Watch coverage
We launched a third Oklahoma Watch page recently. Oklahoma Watch, you might remember, is a “non-profit, investigative and in-depth reporting team that collaborates with other news organizations and higher education to produce journalism that makes a difference in the lives of Oklahomans.” We launched a page on NewsOK late in 2010 as we began our combined Women in Prison series with Oklahoma Watch. And recently, we started Oklahoma Watch pages on Tax Credits and on Immigration. It’s all found on our Oklahoma Watch page. But more than anything, it’s proof of what we think our role is here … the continued focus on serious issues is something that we at The Oklahoman and NewsOK are committed to.
The Kendrick Perkins saga
The Kendrick Perkins saga has been pretty interesting this week. It began on Saturday, when news from Beaumont, Texas, came out with information about Kendrick Perkins being arrested early that morning. It was a misdemeanor, but it didn’t look good. Jenni Carlson wrote a column about it, pointing out exactly how it didn’t look so good. “But to be an NBA player in your hometown doing a youth camp and raising money for life-skills and drug-awareness training for kids, to be arrested less than 24 hours after going to the hospital and being told to cool it, to blow off a charity game and a camp banquet to then go out to a club and get arrested, that is plain dumb.” Darnell Mayberry followed up with reports from the Perkins camp saying that he’s innocent and he wants to clear his name: “‘He was not drinking alcohol, nor was he intoxicated,’ said White, CEO and founder of EAG Sports Management. ‘Not one drop of alcohol Friday night. We’re not sure why they said Kendrick was intoxicated.‘ ” It’s interesting, and NewsOK will have it all covered. What else are we going to do … cover NBA games during a lockout?
This just in — I have a favorite app
I’ve had my iPad for about six months now. I love it. This week, I finally decided on my absolute favorite app. It’s one I downloaded months ago but never really used on a regular basis. This week, I opened the MLS MatchDay 2011 app and realized how much information it gave to soccer fans of the top U.S. league. Granted, I don’t follow the league that closely, but I casually follow what’s happening in Major League Soccer. And if central Oklahoma would have joined the league with a team in 2004 (check the NewsOK archives for history on that), I would have been following the league very closely. As it is, I just felt I should share that for its functionality and content, the MLS Match Day app is my favorite.
NewsOK TV video worth seeing each day
NewsOK TV is a show that Dave Morris and Angi Bruss have been doing for the past month or so. It’s always a great recap on what people are talking about every day.
Download our videos on NewsOK.tv app
Speaking of NewsOK TV, I highly recommend finding and downloading our NewsOK TV app for your iPhone. We updated the app with new functionality on Aug. 10, and it’s definitely worth a look. Check out the iTunes app store for the latest upgrade. It’s all you need to see every video that we produce at NewsOK.
A trip through The Oklahoman archives
Bennie Owen
I received this question from a NewsOK user this week: “I’m looking for an article … that was printed in 1969. Do you know if the online paid subscription archive would go back that far. Thank you for your time.” My answer: “I would recommend using our archives for The Oklahoman. We should have everything you are looking for dating back to 1901. The link is available on the NewsOK home page sub-navigation.” The Oklahoman’s archives are a real treasure that are sometimes overlooked. Just for fun, I did a quick search for Bennie Owen (I wanted to be sure I could find some I ended up with a long list of stories. After all, Bennie Owen is a legendary football coach at OU and the namesake of the field at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Here is just one item I found – a notes column from Charles J. Brill that included a passionate plea to make Owen the athletic director at the school. I love reading old columns from our archives. You’d enjoy it, too.
‘Know it’ all about the state quarterbacks
We launched two new know it pages this week in preparation for the football season. You can now read everything you need to know about OU quarterback Landry Jones and OSU quarterback Brandon Weeden. We can only hope there’s no know it curse, though. Two years ago, we launched pages for Sam Bradford and Zach Robinson. Bradford was injured in the first game. Robinson’s numbers fell short of legendary ‘know it’ status. We wish better ‘know it’ luck to Jones and Weeden.
Most-viewed video
Get ready for a steady diet of Berry Tramel and college football. We start with the most-viewed video this week:
Most-viewed article
The most-viewed article this week was Berry Tramel’s column about the Sooners and their future conference affiliation: OU wants no part of the SEC.
Most-viewed blog
Berry led the blog charge this week. This was also about college football: Big 12 football: Houston is no solution.
Most-viewed photo gallery
The gallery is more than a week old, but it still was popular this week. It was the photo gallery we created to go with our obituary of legendary OU quarterback Jimmy Harris. It should be noted, of course, that the primary column that the gallery was linked to was Berry Tramel’s column: The quarterback who never lost.
A week in review on NewsOK – August 12 edition
I decided this week to revert to a weekly blog format with a series of notes about what’s cool on NewsOK. If you like this better than random posts, let me know.
If you prefer shorter posts, let me know.
If you don’t really care, stay silent and roll your eyes.
Super 30
Barry J. Sanders topped the list. It’s fitting, since it seems like anybody slightly interested in high school or college football is talking about him. What’s the list I’m referring to? It’s the Super 30 list that The Oklahoman’s high school coverage team put together this summer. It profiles the top 30 players in the state, beginning with Norman’s George Kittle and finishing with offensive stars like Heritage Hall’s Sterling Shepard, Jenks’ Alex Ross and Sanders, who is also from Heritage Hall. Um … I’m not expert, but I think Heritage Hall will be pretty good this year.
The Boys of Summer
We put together two special presentations on NewsOK in recent weeks. The first was from our sports department — a story about a group of softball players who are all over the age of 75. It’s a great team. And the best part … they don’t replace you when you’re not effective on the field. According to the story, you’re on the team until you decide you can’t play anymore or you die (or both, I guess). Reading this story left me with a goal — I hope to one day play for the Royals.
Thrills Gone By
The other special presentation we had in recent weeks was a “Stories of the Ages” project that reflected on the deep history and memories of Oklahoma’s amusement parks. The story included all the memories of Springlake, Wedgewood Park and Frontier City. It even features earlier parks, like Belle Isle Park, Delmar Gardens and Wheeler Park. It’s a fun Stories of the Ages, especially if you grew up in Oklahoma City and have early childhood memories of these parks. I highly recommend spending some time with this story and reading all the ‘thrilling memories’ section of what our readers think about these spots.
A historic blackboard
Reporter Jane Glenn Cannon put together an interesting story this week about a blackboard with instructions from 1935 found behind a wall at Longfellow Middle School in Norman as workers were renovating the room. From the story: “Chalk writing on the board indicates a zoology teacher was instructing students on the requirements for an upcoming paper.” Zoology? Yuck. A college freshman-level zoology class was difficult for me in 1994. I’m certain I would have flunked the middle-school class back in 1935.
Gene Triplett honored
The Oklahoman’s Entertainment Editor is a soon-to-be Hall of Famer. NewsOK posted a story on Tuesday afternoon about Gene Triplett: “Raised in Oklahoma City, Triplett is a respected expert on live and recorded music, having interviewed such music industry stars as Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, and such homegrown talent as Wanda Jackson and Hoyt Axton in his nearly four-decade career.” Gene know his stuff. And he takes his craft and his coverage as seriously as anyone in our news operation. Congratulations to him.
How did we ever live without it?
I lost power Monday night as the first of a few storms swept through the Oklahoma City metro this week. The power went out at about 7:45 p.m. As I gathered the flashlights and candles in preparation for sunset, it dawned on me that I was just about to lose all the battery power in both my iPhone and iPad for the day. So … brilliant mind that I am, I used some of that juice to post that revelation to Twitter. But after that, I started to be more careful about how I used the phone. I needed to be able to make a phone call to my wife who was driving in the storm at the time. I was fully prepared to take my car charger into the garage (after manually lifting open my garage door, of course) and setting up office in the car. But thankfully, normalcy return when the lights came on at about 9:30 p.m.. Whew! Then, my 10-year-old asks the question as he headed to his night-lit room: “What did people do before there was electricity?” All I could muster for an answer was, “Read.” I had no better answer. I had the same question, but it wasn’t about electricity. My question … “What did people do before smart phones and tablets?” I can’t remember.
New faces in the sports section
Sports Editor Mike Sherman has brought on three new faces in our sports department in the past week or so. We had already announced that Jason Kersey would moving to cover the help high school scene along with Ryan Aber. Replacing him on the sports desk is Jacob Unruh, who comes to us from Lawton. The new reporter that will be covering OU football is Travis Haney, who comes to us from South Carolina. Gina Mizell is moving from Beumont, Texas, to join the OSU football coverage team. Sherman was careful to find the best fits for our audience, and we’re very confident that these additions will help us continue as the undisputed leader in OU, OSU and high school football coverage.
LOOKatOKC navigation change
We launched the new LOOKatOKC website a few months ago, and we’re happy with our we’ve managed to merge all our entertainment content in one nice and well-presented online brand. We even started experimenting with Facebook commenting on LOOKatOKC, and we’ve been pretty happy with what we’ve seen from our audience there. Our latest addition to the site is our Photo Gallery page, where you can see all the LOOKatOKC photos in one place. We’ve added that page to he main LOOKatOKC navigation. It’s there in the nav before the Swimsuit page, where we have three years worth of LOOKatOKC swimsuit edition photos.
The Oklahoman on your Kindle app
Since I bought my iPad a few months ago, I stopped using the Kindle in my possession. The Kindle app on my iPad actually served me very well, and I began reading and buying more books than I had before. But Amazon had previously decided to not allow periodicals to be available on the app. Those periodicals were only available to those with the Kindle hardware. So, I was disappointed that I couldn’t read The Oklahoman’s Kindle edition on my iPad. But about two weeks ago, that changed. Amazon, as part of their strategy to not allow in-app purchases, is now allowing periodicals to be downloaded through the app. It’s hard to follow, I know. It’s all part of a war between two digital giants — Amazon and Apple (and many others). But the bottom line is that it’s just one more way for readers to read and subscribe to our product.
User photos
The photos we have on our user-submitted gallery for August show the wide variety of weather we’ve had in recent weeks. We have photos of droughts, photos of storm damage, photos of lightning strikes, photos or happy people swimming and photos of extreme temperatures. Our process for automatically adding photos from NewsOK users is starting to work better with each month, and it’s always fun to take a look at a month’s worth of photos as a snapshot of life in Oklahoma. Add your photo for August by attaching an image in an email to pics@newsok.com.
Kevin Wilson and the radio rant
Jenni Carlson had my favorite blog post of the week when she detailed the exchange between Indiana head football coach Kevin Wilson and a couple or sports radio talk show hosts. Wilson, was the offensive coordinator for OU in recent years, was angry at how the hosts poked fun at his struggling program. Jenni’s take: “…when Zack and Jack decided to hang up on him, then tear him down, it turned them from unknowing buffoons to shady bullies.” Great stuff. And it was a great example of Jenni Carlson knowing what the NewsOK audience will be interested in.
Most-viewed article
We published an article from Carrie Coppernoll last Friday, but it really took off over the weekend and early this week, eventually leading the charge for all NewsOK articles in the past week. It was the story about the naked woman and the charity golf tournament at a city-owned course in Woodward. The story was picked up and linked to on fark.com, which gave the story more views than a normal top story on NewsOK. But the help from fark.com didn’t matter in the end. Let’s face it … a story that combines nudity, sports and politics is a guaranteed top story in any given week.
Most-viewed video
Most-viewed blog post
Jenni Carlson’s post on Wednesday about Texas A&M possibly leaving for the SEC led the blog charge this week. From Jenni: “I have just one question for Texas A&M: do you like winning or losing?” It’s been a good week for Jenni and her blog.
Most viewed photo gallery
We created a gallery of all the Oklahomans we know in the NFL, and it became the most-viewed gallery. Our users like to look at photos.
Enjoy the weekend. And thanks for reading.
A nice time to look at the top stories in July
NewsOK had an interesting cross-section of articles that topped the list in July. Today, I’ll take a look at the top 5 most-viewed articles from last month.
Oklahoma City man who wore diapers sentenced to three years in prison
The most-viewed story of July was a about the sentencing of a 21-year-old man who pretended to be autistic and have the mind of a young child. Yeah … it’s kind of hard to explain, but you probably already read all about it. The article was viewed a lot by our local traffic, but it was also linked from the Drudge Report website, so the page views soared with national interest.
Oklahoma City outlet mall set to open on tax-free weekend
The No. 2 story of the month was about the outlet mall that’s soon to open on the west side of the metro. This mall must be really popular to have it rank so high in our article views. It’s not crime-related. It’s not breaking news. It’s not a sports story. It’s just a straight news story with broad appeal. Nice.
OSU unveils new football uniforms
This story was a bit of a surprise. I knew it would be a popular story, but I didn’t realize it would give us the traffic spike it did last week. The article and the photo gallery helped lift our monthly traffic. People love uniforms. And if you haven’t visited the interactive element that allows you to outfit your own OSU Cowboy, it’s worth a visit.
OU’s Landry Jones, Whitney Hand team up for life
This story has it all for traffic gold. It combines an OU quarterback with Heisman Trophy potential and a three-point specialist on a NCAA Tournament basketball team. It also combines a pretty girl with an infectious smile and a social media storm that went viral. Yes, we covered the engagement of Landry Jones and Whitney Hand.
Oklahoma City parents complain police wrongly rounded up teenagers in Bricktown
And finally, in at No. 5 was this report about teenagers being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though they were in an acceptable place at an acceptable time. The parents were mad. The police admitted being wrong. The public had its say in our comments — 329 of them, to be exact.
Open Flame series and the art of barbecue
The Open Flame events and series of videos that The Oklahoman’s Food Dude puts together are always entertaining.
The most recent event was a couple of weeks ago at American Propane. In the end, the NewsOK video crew and Dave Cathey (he’s the Food Dude) put together five great videos and a series of receipes that came from the July 21 event with some of Oklahoma City’s top chefs.
Check out all the information here, or watch the main video below.
