Kelly Fry, vice president of news and information at OPUBCO Communications Group, presents NewsOK's video operation at the APME convention in St. Louis on Oct. 30. See more photos on Flickr: APME 2009

We were a finalist in the prestigious category of “Innovator of the Year.”

As our awards czar (unofficial title) Joe Hight pointed out before and after the award was given – the APME innovator award is one of the most prestigious awards in journalism and probably the most difficult to win. As he says, the hardest part is convincing a room full of top-notch journalists that you deserve the award.

Joe should know. We’ve won quite a few awards in the past year. I’ve blogged about them before. It’s fun to win. It validates the hard work.

I was lucky enough to attend the APME conference in St. Louis last week. The key person from our operation that wasn’t able to attend is our video superhero (unofficial title) David Morris.

The Innovator award goes back almost three years. It began with a vision from OPUBCO Communications Group leadership. It went through phases of implementation, training, construction and trial and error. It culminated with the execution of a plan to change the culture of our news and information operation and grow our audience.

It was good for the newsroom to win the Innovator.

Now – back to work.

Kelly Fry, vice president of news and information at OPUBCO Communications Group, accepts the award. That's me (Alan Herzberger) in the background.

]]> http://blog.newsok.com/newsok/2009/11/06/newsok-innovator-of-the-year/feed/ 0 http://blog.newsok.com/newsok/2009/08/18/video-initiatives-bring-innovator-results-for-newsok/ http://blog.newsok.com/newsok/2009/08/18/video-initiatives-bring-innovator-results-for-newsok/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:28:21 +0000 alan herzberger http://blog.newsok.com/newsok/?p=525 At NewsOK.com, we know that we do a lot of things well. We produce a lot of news and information content that a lot of people use as a part of their daily lives, whether it’s breaking news, features, investigative pieces or sports columns.

Yes, we do a lot of things well, and we do most of them at a pretty high level.

But there’s one thing that we do more intensely than just about any other media company that has its tradition based in newspapers …

Video.

Here’s proof: The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com have been selected as one of three finalists for the Associated Press Managing Editors’ Innovator of the Year award for its “total approach” in video. It’s an award that is considered the most prestigious of the APME awards, and the ultimate winner will be announced Oct. 30.

From the APME annoucement:

Three finalists were selected for APME’s third annual Innovator of the Year Award: The Oklahoman of Oklahoma City, for a staffwide commitment to video; The News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., for audience engagement efforts including packages that brought experts and readers together with in-depth reporting, photo and video to tackle issues; and The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., for environmental coverage called AllGreenToMe that brings print and online together and provides an international look at environmental challenges facing Delaware.

In its entry, it was noted that The Oklahoman’s commitment to video ranged from breaking news coverage to social networking to training to live feeds to Video Department productions to interaction with our special Web pages and “know it” communities to nDepth’s “Stories of the Ages.”

It’s one of many honors NewsOK and The Oklahoman have received in the last two years . You can see many of our recent honors on our Awards Page that lists the achievements.

We consider these honors validation that we are moving in the right direction journalistically.

And we consider our steady growth in traffic and visits validation that we are moving in the right direction for our audience.

The goal? To use the power and resources of our journalists to gather all the information we could on a topic that greatly affects us — essentially, to define that topic as it relates to Oklahomans. We found personal stories, showcased videos and organized a massive list of resources for visitors that wanted to find everything in one simple spot.

Thirteen months later, we have 28 ‘know it’ topics and plans for many more. We have won a handful of journalistic awards for the project, including the prestigious SPJ Sigma Delta Chi winner for Public Service in Online Journalism.

I can guarantee that we will continue to grow this ‘know it’ plan and continue with our mission of providing a resource for Oklahomans who need targeted information on specific subjects.

And part of that planned growth is a community conversation — a place where Oklahomans can go to share thoughts, ask questions or provide solutions. We want our audience to have a voice in defining these topics. We want Oklahomans to have a safe place to connect with other Oklahomans.

We want the interactive message boards on the ‘know it’ topics to be a place where Oklahomans help Oklahomans.

As of this week, we now have all 28 message boards active and open for our visitors to participate. You can have conversations on any of our wide variety of ‘know it’ topics, ranging from Addiction to Pets, from Mental Health to Youth Sports, from Parenting to Gardening, from Religion and Spirituality to Giving and Volunteering, or from Retirement to Travel.

Read the articles. Browse the blogs. Watch the videos. Use the resources. Take advantage of the pages that affect your life as much  as you can.

Then, we encourage you to join conversation – where Oklahomans help Oklahomans.

On Monday, we got word that we had won a national awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for our ‘know it’ series and our Your Right to Know page, which has since evolved into a larger Watchdog page.

To quote our story:

The Sigma Delta Chi Awards honor outstanding journalism from across the country. The Oklahoman’s staff was recognized for “Public Service in Online Journalism” for its “know it” and “Your Right to Know” projects.

That was good news. The national SPJ awards are generally considered second only to the Pulitzer in terms of journalistic prestige. It’s also good news, because we were honored for the type of quality journalism and public service that we push ourselves toward every day.

We love weird news, crime news, sports news and breaking news — we do that very well on NewsOK and always see a big spike in traffic when those types of stories take center stage.

But we think there’s a place for in-depth news and information-gathering, as well. And we still think the public has a right to know about records that we are, by law, authorized to see.

Yes … that was good news on Monday. But we got even better news today, when the Webby Award nominations were released. NewsOK.com was officially honored as one of the top 12 newspaper Web sites in the world.

NewsOK was in some elite company:

• New York Daily News
• The USA Today
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Jewish Daily Forward
• The Washington Times
• The Telegraph Media Group
• The New York Observer
• The Times of London
• The Guardian
• New York Times
• The Independent

According to the story on NewsOK:

The New York Times has called the award the “Internet’s highest honor,” and The Wall Street Journal has said the awards “celebrate sites that pave important paths to the Internet’s next phase.”

So yeah … we’re a proud of that.

I won’t apologize for the shameless plugs, but I will thank our growing audience for engaging with us as we’ve tried new things and entered new arenas.