Dying Too Young: Why are Oklahoma’s children dying?
We launched a project on Sunday that appears to have made in impact on our community.
And that’s a good thing, because making a difference in our community is something we strive for with our journalistic efforts in the News and Information Center at OPUBCO Communications Group.
We launched “Dying Too Young” on Sunday and have pushed more traffic to it throughout the week. The project documents the more than 2,100 deaths of children in Oklahoma over the past few years – an alarmingly high number for our state.
This project has a little bit of everything:
- It has great reporting, led by our top investigative reporter, Nolan Clay. This project took months to organize and put together. Nolan didn’t write this piece up in an afternoon. To cover something like this with fairness and proper effectiveness, it takes months of behind-the-scenes work.
- It has a deep database, put together painstakingly by our database editor Paul Monies.
- It has a comments board for discussion, reaching more than 125 comments already.
- It has gripping videos from our video team, showcasing some chilling interviews of those affected by some of the deaths.
- It has documentation, with hundred of autopsy reports in PDF formats and bios or almost 100 of the children.
Take the time to see the reports. Then you can join our discussion and share your thoughts.
Watchdog page live on NewsOK
We launched a new page last week.
We’re telling you about it this week.
And you’ll see much more from it in future weeks.
The Watchdog page is officially live on NewsOK.com.
What is the watchdog team? Nothing says it better than the page itself:
The Oklahoman Watchdog team is a dedicated group of journalists here to expose corruption in Oklahoma.
On the page, we have links to our data warehouse – the Your Right to Know page. Database Editor Paul Monies spends his days digging up data to serve the citizens of Oklahoma.
You can also find links to our ongoing DHS coverage and our CrimeWatch page, something I’ve written about in the past.
But the coolest thing about the page …. meeting the journalist who spend their days and nights serving our communities with their specialized talent.
Make no mistake – we know we’re in a changing world, and OPUBCO Communications Group is changing and adapting right along with it. But our bosses have made it very clear that this type of journalism is a staple of what we do here. We are indeed still watching out for the citizens of Oklahoma.
Now we have a page to showcase that journalism.
CrimeWatch page reappears on NewsOK.com
Question from a NewsOK visitor:
I’m sure you hear this over and over again. I was wondering what happened to crime tracker. It was the best tool available to use when purchasing a house. Is there another site that is comparable to Crime Tracker?
Answer from me:
We’ve heard it. We’ve heard other complaints, too. Usually what we hear about our CrimeWatch page is that it’s not updated quickly enough or that we don’t have enough local cities with enough data.
The CrimeWatch page hasn’t been operational since we launched our newest redesign a couple months ago — until today. Coincidentally, our programmers were able to address that page during the slow period here on Christmas week. We were finally able to get this page back up.
Unfortunately, we still need to get more updated information. We have some decent data for Midwest City and Oklahoma City, but we lack the data from other area municipalities. We will start making phone calls again soon to the individual police departments.
The fact is, there’s no central place to gather this information. And not all the local police departments jump at the chance to send us the information. I know because in the past I’ve called all of them about this very data. They aren’t rude about it – but delivering the data to us in a timely and efficient manner doesn’t rank high on their priority list.
But now that the page is back, we can put it back on our priority list.
