A honey badger tattoo for NewsOK’s honey badger reporter
Bryan Dean was a fan of the honey badger before it was cool to be a fan of the honey badger.
Bryan Dean and his honey badger tattoo
Yeah, now we all like the honey badger. It’s easy to be a honey badger fan ever since the funny video went viral months ago. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen it, you should be ashamed that you don’t spend more time on Facebook or Twitter.
In any case, breaking news reporter Bryan Dean has had a passion for the honey badger for many years. Because of that passion, he decided to capitalize on the recent fame of the animal to launch his Facebook campaign to get a honey badger to the Oklahoma City Zoo. This is much like the ‘I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” story, but it’s fast-forwarded 58 years and it doesn’t have a catchy song.
But it does have a nifty video (produced by fellow breaking news reporter Tiffany Gibson). And it has a smart social media presence. You never know, we might be writing about this in six decades.
A look back at all the coverage of the OSU plane crash
It’s been a wild few days on NewsOK, beginning last Friday morning when news of the tragic plane crash in Arkansas that killed four members of the OSU Family.
Women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were on the plane, something confirmed by our reporters early Friday morning. From there, the reporting was fast and furious. The news team, led by local editor Rick Green and the sports team, led by sports editor Mike Sherman, combined for comprehensive coverage of all the angles of the story — the history, the reaction from university leaders, the effect on the players, the effect on the teams, the facts about those who died, etc.
All of the coverage can be found on NewsOK’s ongoing coverage page of the crash. You can see all the articles, of course, but you can also …
- view photo galleries we’ve built, including the one from the memorial on Monday afternoon.
- share your thoughts on the online Guest Books for Kurt Budke, Miranda Serna, Olin Branstetter and Paula Branstetter.
- read the blogs that came from our staff as they heard about the tragedy. They all share personal thoughts about Kurt and Miranda, since they were the ones we dealt with regularly.
- see some of the archived material we had on Kurt Budke. My favorite is the Collected Wisdom piece from earlier this year.
We hope this page is organized enough for our readers to dig through everything we have documented about the facts surrounding the crash. And we hope the galleries, Guest Books and retrospective blog posts effectively paint a picture of the victims’ lives for those that didn’t know them.
And we hope we don’t have to build another page like this for OSU ever again.
The Thirsty Beagle blog and the Beer Championship Series finals
Nick Trougakos is the Assistant Local Editor is charge of our Metro section/coverage.
That’s what he does during the day, anyway. After that, he becomes the Thirsty Beagle, offering news and commentary on all aspects of the world of beer.
In the past month or so, Nick — er — the “Thirsty Beagle” has been keeping watch over his annual 64-team Beer Championship Series tournament. It’s been sponsored by Tapwerks in Bricktown.
Tapwerks has been kind enough to over look the mixed analogy that the Thirsty Beagle came up with. I mean, “64 teams” sounds like March Madness — and it sounds like it should be in the Spring. But the “BCS” sounds like college football — and it sounds like it should be in the Fall. But I won’t argue with a man who requires all co-workers to address him as “The Beagle” as they encounter him in the OPUBCO hallways. It’s the least we can do in return for all his hard editing work.
Besides, today isn’t the day to quibble about the name. It’s a day to celebrate the two finalists — Redbud Pale Ale vs. COOP Native Amber — and place a vote (or 10 votes) for your favorite.
Voting for the finals continues until 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Gene Triplett enters the Hall of Fame
Gene Triplett and Kristin Chenoweth join hands as two of the newest inductees of the 2011 Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. Photo by Jay Spear
Our own Gene Triplett was honored Thursday night with his induction in to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.
Portraits of the 2011 Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductees painted by Roger Davis. Davis is the official portrait artist for the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. Photo by Jay Spear
He joined other Oklahoma greats like Wayman Tisdale, Nokie Edwards, Bob Bogle, Jesse Ed Davis, Ralph Blane, Cheevers Toppah and Kristin Chenoweth.
Yeah, we ran a story that led with the world-famous Chenoweth’s induction at the ceremony. Kristin is great representative of Oklahoma and supremely talented. But in this blog post, I’ll headline with Gene Triplett, because he has devoted his career to journalism — and that’s something worthy of honor in my book.
And anyone who knows Gene understands that it was likely difficult for him to be in the spotlight like he was on Thursday. So we get quite a chuckle from his on-stage appearance holding hands with Chenoweth and singing “Oklahoma.” That means we can collect on our pre-event wager that he would indeed be singing show tunes on stage with the great Kristin Chenoweth.
And we’re also somewhat surprised that he wore the same outfit he wears to the office every day. Gene is always dapper in his black-on-black tuxedo look at the Monday morning entertainment staff meeting.
But in all seriousness, it’s a great honor for Gene. The Digital Desk congratulates him.
To see a full photo gallery of the event, see Jay Spear’s collection of photos.
‘Get well’ page for Ryan Broyles captures attention of community
On Saturday, the OU football team lost to injury the most prolific receiver in the the school’s history.
Ryan Broyles suffered a season-ending injury to his knee. His disappointment was captured on live television as the news was broken to him and his teammates. His chance to play in a final Bedlam game was gone. His chance to play in another big bowl game was gone. His NFL aspirations were put in jeopardy (though a full recovery and an NFL future is still very likely for him).
Early this week, NewsOK launched its Get Well, Ryan Broyles page to allow users to share their positive thoughts to Broyles. We built a simple page, created a photo gallery of Ryan throughout his football career, dating from Norman High School to his final OU game. Than we embedded a Facebook commenting wall and launched the page.
It’s been a nice test of how Facebook commenting can help build a community on our site. Some of the posts are long. Some are short. But they’ve all generally been the type of comments we’ve been hoping for with this page. It’s a wall of positive energy.
And you can thank the sports department here for always thinking of ways to connect with our growing audience.
Let me know what you think of the page.
‘Finding a Forever Family’ — a special NewsOK nDepth story
In the midst of all the earthquake madness this weekend, you might have missed a special nDepth presentation we put together and launched on Saturday night on NewsOK.com.
So take the time to read “Finding a Forever Family” when you have a few spare minutes. It’s a story told by OPUBCO’s own Michelle Kelley as told to our Night News Director Yvette Walker. Michelle tells the her story of working with the system to adopt a child.
This isn’t the story of Michelle Kelley. It’s the story of a little boy and a little girl nicknamed Biggin’ and Darlin’. And it’s also the story of why some children have to wait so long to find families to take them in and love them forever — “forever families.”
We also created a special PDF presentation that is enhanced be flipped through on a user’s iPad. It’s best viewed in iBooks on the iPad, but it’s a good PDF to read in any way you want to.
I highly recommend reading it an whatever way you want. And for a nice preview, here’s a video to get you started.
Most-viewed items on NewsOK in October
It’s Halloween, which means it’s a fine time to review the most-viewed content on NewsOK.com in October 2011.
Before I go any further, though, I should point out that October was a great month for web traffic on NewsOK, but it didn’t quite break our all-time record. There are a few hours left, but it looks like we will fall just a few hundred thousand page views short of the all-time record-breaking month of September 2011. (It seems like so long ago).
In October, we can thank these fine pieces of content for our strong traffic.
Most-viewed article
Sonya Colberg
Sonya Colberg’s piece about a cancer patient who traded her life so her baby could survive led all our stories in October. The story went viral, mostly being shared through Facebook. It was linked on other national websites like Huffington Post and FoxNews and a multitude of blogs and niche sites, but the greatest traffic was from Facebook.
Frankly, that’s a little surprising. Generally, when a NewsOK story goes viral, it’s aided by national sites and most of the traffic generated for the article comes from that site. But in the case of Sonya’s story, Facebook drove the bulk of the traffic — twice as many referrals as Huffington Post.
It shows that this story really went viral. One person shared with their friends, who shared with their friends, and so on. It deserved the attention, too. Sonya did a great job telling this story.
Most-viewed video:
This one was easy.
Travis Haney
Second most-viewed story
OU reporter Travis Haney’s piece about Bob Stoops and the coach’s propensity for misleading media and, therefore, fans about the injury situation of the players on his team.
This story received quite a bit of feedback in our comments section and on social media.
Berry Tramel
Most-viewed blog post
Berry Tramel’s blog post about the Big 12 Conference realignment news last week led our blogs for the month. West Virginia was invited to the Big 12. Then it wasn’t invited. Then it was invited again.
It made for a good Berry blog.
Most-viewed photo gallery
This really seems like a long time ago. The photo gallery from the OU-Texas football game was our most-viewed photo gallery of the month.
There are 126 photos to look at, so take your time.
The Oklahoman iPad/iPhone app in Newsstand for iOS 5
The Oklahoman’s custom iPad application took another step with the release of Apple’s iOS 5 a couple weeks ago.
Our app became one of the first news applications in Apple’s Newsstand.
Your next question might be … “What is Newsstand?”
Well, if you have already upgraded your iPad or iPhone to iOS 5, you probably already know about Newsstand. If you haven’t, read this:
iOS 5 organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily. There’s also a new place on the App Store just for newspaper and magazine subscriptions.
Not every news media company that has a application on the iPad made their app available for Newsstand. But we did. Now, if you’re using our custom app on a daily basis and you’ve upgraded to iOS 5, then you get our daily editions through the Newsstand folder.
One of the big reasons we went this route was the automated download feature. Newsstand will download the daily edition of The Oklahoman as soon as it’s available. Now, our readers don’t have to wake up, open the app, download the latest edition and wait for it to be available. When they wake up, the edition will already be there (as long as they have a good wifi connection in the air while they sleep).
This is pretty cool feature that I’ve found useful since I upgraded. Sure, iOS 5 has lots of neat enhanced swiping features, a cool reminders app and the ability to airplay your device on big screens, but I really like the automated download of my daily newspaper through Newsstand.
That’s my favorite feature.
Web editor honored as next-gen star
Lindsay Houts works every day behind the scenes to organize our sports content and share it with our audience in a way that’s neatly packaged and digestible.
But our newest web editor was front and center last Thursday evening as she was honored at the 30/30 Next Gen Awards at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum. The event, hosted by ion Oklahoma online, honored 30 successful Oklahomans under the age of 30.
Lindsay has been in our state just a bit more than three years, and already seems to know everybody. I’ve been in the state more than 30 years, but I don’t get to say that ‘I have a friend that works there … ‘ or ‘I volunteered there …‘ for just about every conversation in my vicinity. But I was also never honored in any 30-under-30 award ceremony.
It’s real talent to make a strong impact in a foreign state in a short time period. This is a well-deserved honor for Lindsay.
Brave & Beautiful — watch the video
I post this blog today only to tell people that they should read Dave Morris’ blog post about the Brave and Beautiful video on NewsOK.
Dave is our video director here at OPUBCO Communications Group, but you probably know him best as a NewsOK.tv host. But he does plenty of work behind the camera, too.
From his blog post:
I sat each lady down in the OPUBCO Studios and asked them to tell me about their fight with cancer. Not an easy interview: “Please tell me about the worst moments of your life and how you dealt with it. And please look into the camera.”
Whatever he said, it worked. The women told their stories like pros. It was perfect.
In this case, Dave produced the video. Todd Frasure and David Jones did the video production. Assistant Photo Editor Chris Landsberger shot the still photos. And a host of others worked together to produce a stellar special printed section that appeared with The Oklahoman on Sunday (Matt Clayton, Steve Gorham, Suzanne Green, Melissa Howell, Kelly Lunsford, Todd Pendleton and Jerry Wagner). I highly recommend you take a look at that section.
In the end, the video was one of the most powerful pieced the video group has ever put together — and they’ve produced some awesome pieces.
