This is the one thing I’m most excited about this week. We’re making one huge improvement to our live college football game day coverage this year. We’re launching special game coverage pages for OU and OSU so users can easily see all our live content from their mobile device. Go ahead … log on with your iPhone while you’re sitting on the couch …. or while you’re sitting at the tailgate or inside the stadium …. or while you’re shopping with your girlfriend. This page will serve every need. We’ll have our live chat, a live photo gallery, a live boxscore, updated blog posts, update articles, a complete scoreboard and more — and it will be formatted specifically for your mobile device. It will truly be everything you need on your mobile device.
 

Full Access — Print + Digital

I could write a book about the great offerings we have for Full Access to all our products on multiple devices. But nothing says it better than this video commercial, so I’ll just stop typing ….

Ed Godfrey — the music man

Trace Adkins (not Ed Godfrey)

Outdoors editor Ed Godfrey had an excellent blog post late last week. After listening to Trace Adkins’ new song, “Just Fishin’,” Ed decided to rank the top 10 fishing songs of all time. Ed didn’t think Adkins’ latest would reach the top 10 of all time fishing songs. I disagree.

2011 Football preview — Digital Part 1

You still have time to read all the content in The Oklahoman’s 2011 Football Preview. NewsOK built a special page for the “Dynamic Duos’ coverage, including pages for OU, OSU, High School and Big 12/Nation. There really no better way to get fully prepared for the football season.

2011 football preview — Digital Part 2

The site mentioned above is great for NewsOK users, but what about our iPad users? Well, we also created special PDF editions for OU, OSU and high school football previews. The editions are built specifically to look great on your iPad. It’s high design and in-depth preview coverage built for you to store on iBooks on your device. You don’t have to have an iPad to download these special editions. Go ahead, read it on your laptop or even your iPhone. But if you have an iPad, you really have to give this a try. 1) OU edition. 2) OSU edition. 3) High school edition.

Stop-motion football fun

Speaking of getting ready for the football season, a couple of our video animation experts and one of our artists were busy making outstanding intro animations for our videos. Check out the “Making of NewsOK 2011 Stop Motion Intros” video, starring Kyle Roberts, Billy Davis, Steve Boaldin and Berry Tramel. (Berry did no work on this project, but we think it’s important that he appear in all videos this Fall). This video is really cool, because it shows the amazing talent we have working in our building every day. I’m impressed.

Steve Lackmeyer and the MidTown controversy

Steve Lackmeyer was in MidTown a week ago for an inaugural outdoor food market celebration. He previewed the event with a story. He was at the event as a reporter. He was there when the event was shut down by a number of local agencies. He blogged about it. He Tweeted about it. He wrote a couple of follow-up stories about it. He was so on top of this story that you might wonder if Steve orchestrated the entire thing just so he can report on it. Well, Steve’s a well-respected voice in our community, but he’s not that powerful. He is, however, a quality reporter that stays after stories once he starts to report on them. For that, all of our readers appreciate him.

I dare you not to read this story

We had a well-read story for our Oklahoma readers on Tuesday. It became a well-read story on an international level on Thursday when the Drudge Report linked to the story. The headline says it all: “4:30 a.m. mowing leads to Oklahoma City man’s arrest.” There’s really nothing more I can say to make you click on that story.

Alan Herzberger — star photographer

When we saw the first evidence of smoke to the southeast of our building on Tuesday afternoon, the breaking news reporters sprang into action. As our photographers and reporters raced to the scene and our editors raced to put the information we already had on the top of NewsOK, I took my iPhone a walked to our parking garage to snap a photo of the smoke from a distance. As I walked back to the building entry, I emailed the photo to pics@newsok.com. Before I reached the elevator, I saw the alert that my photo was live on our August User-Submitted Photos gallery. On the elevator, I emailed that to Robb Hibbard, our Digital News Editor. And when I returned to my desk, the photo I took moments earlier was at the top of NewsOK.com — 620 pixels wide. I was very proud.

Mr. Know It debuts

Look closely at that photo on the right. Is that Mr. Know It? Or is it a cardboard Mr. Know It? The debate in our newsroom rages on, but the important thing is that Mr. Know It is available to visit all areas of central Oklahoma. We just can’t know for sure if it’s a real-life Mr. Know It or a cardboard Mr. Know It. It doesn’t really matter, as Communities Editor Don Gammill (the real-life one) says: “He’s generally available to travel, and he’s easy to work with. You’ll never hear him complain, and he’s always smiling.”

A new web editor will join us

I hired a new web editor that serve a multitude of purposes for NewsOK. Her name is Lindsay Houts, and if you are in the social media circles in Oklahoma City, you are already know her. She’ll start soon, and you will see her involved quite heavily with our sports coverage in the digital space. I hope you connect with Lindsay and welcome her to our team.

Most-viewed article

Remember that story about the man who was arrested after he was mowing his lawn at 4:30 a.m.? It was our most-viewed article of the week. We even followed up the story to get more information for our readers. After all, the first story was so popular, we felt there was a little more to tell, so check out Friday’s story, as well.

Most-viewed blog post

Travis Haney was the author of our most-viewed blog post last week. Well, this makes two straight weeks for Travis. His post, “Here we go:  A&M gone, now what for OU?,” was the most-viewed post in the NewsOK blogging network. He was breaking down all the options for OU in the conference realignment mess facing the Big 12 Conference.

Most-viewed photo gallery

The wildfires in Oklahoma were our top news item this week. The stories, videos and photos dominated the NewsOK home page, and rightfully so. The gallery was highly trafficked. These photos were from the journalistic professionals that consistently serve up the best images about and around Oklahoma. (In other words, they aren’t the phone snapshots I take from the parking garage).

Most-viewed video

This week’s Press Row video with Jenni Carlson and Berry Tramel also covered conference realignment and the Big 12 Conference. It led all videos this week:

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.

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:

Today, I write about something I meant to write about two weeks ago:

Our health page has been upgraded. We’ve chosen to focus a bit more on our health page, which can be found under “Health” inside the News navigation or under “Health & Fitness” inside the Life navigation on NewsOK. On our new health page, you can see links to all of our health-related ‘know it’ topics pages, including Cancer, Addiction, Heart Disease, Mental Health, Fitness and Flu. The page also has a constantly updated feed of AP stories and national videos.

My favorite story and video of the week came from reporter Don Mecoy on Tuesday. He had a nice story about a mother and son in Cyril who are avid readers of The Oklahoman. The mother, 94-year-old DeLois Patterson, prefers the printed newspaper. The son, 77-year-old Bill Patterson, prefers the iPad edition. Reports Mecoy: “When Bill Patterson buys a new iPad, he hopes to give his current one to his mother, who immediately dismisses the idea with a wave of her hand.” Great stuff. But the words only tell half the story. Mecoy’s video helps paint the picture.

A page for ‘Mr. Know It’

Don Gammill is a ‘know it’ all. It says so on his new Personality Page set up just for all his content. He is ‘Mr. Know It.’ You can see everything Don writes, blogs, tweets or posts on our newest page devoted to our reporters — the ‘Mr. Know It’ personality page.

Berry’s blog of the week

I stumbled across another great Berry Tramel blog post this week. This time, he wasn’t even the storyteller. He merely re-told a story that was told to him by Chip Land, the former managing partner of the old Oklahoma City Cavalry CBA team. It was a story about Denver Nuggets coach George Karl and his experience in Oklahoma City 20 years ago as the coach of the CBA’s Albany Patroons. And to entice you to read it, I’ll share the last line of the post: “So there you have it. George Karl thinks he had trouble in Oklahoma City this week. It was nothing like 20 years ago.”

‘Open Flame’ series begins at American Propane

Dave Cathey is cooking again. Actually, Dave is always cooking — and I, for one, am grateful. I’ve been using his recipe for old-fashioned chicken wings for important football games since I first saw the recipe last September. Now, I have a bunch of other recipes to try, thanks to his “Open Flame” video series in partnership with American Propane. The first video was all about chicken, and it featured some heavy-hitters in the local culinary scene. I enjoyed it so much that I watched the entire 8-minute video on NewsOK.

‘Open Flame’ out-take

Video director Dave Morris was at the ‘Open Flame’ shoot at American Propane and posted his thoughts about the event on his blog. He even posted an an out-take that didn’t make the final cut. Check out the 5-second video at the bottom of Dave’s blog post and see the Food Dude scurry from an open flame. I’m pretty sure the Food Dude hasn’t moved that fast since his soccer-playing days in college when he was a finely-tuned athlete on the brink of greatness.

Outlook on NewsOK

The News and Information Center has been hustling the past few weeks, working hard to write, edit and produce the annual Outlook special section. The section is released on Sunday, and you can see all the stories on the Outlook website here (until Sunday, you’ll still see the 2010 edition). The 2011 edition will be ready for you to see on Sunday, and that’s the same time you can pick up the special newspaper edition in The Oklahoman in your driveway or at the newsstands.

Outlook on the iPad

But this year, we have a special edition of the Outlook section. It’s a special iPad magazine edition that features some of the best articles from the publication. It doesn’t have every story we wrote for the Outlook section, but it does have some specially-chosen stories presented and optimized for viewing on the iPad. If you are a subscriber to The Oklahoman’s iPad edition, you will see the download-able magazine in your Sunday edition. Looks for more features like this in the future as we continue to find ways to deliver content in new and exciting ways.

Thunder-mania!

It would be silly of me to post this week without mentioning the Oklahoma City Thunder and their big week with first-round playoff victories over the Denver Nuggets on Sunday and Wednesday. We have all the coverage of every game on our Oklahoma City Thunder coverage page, and during the games we have live chats so you can join the conversation with our reporters and editors while you watch the game. You can even join the conversation on your mobile device.  There’s really no better place to get all the information about the Thunder than the NewsOK page. That’s a guarantee.

Most-viewed article

NewsOK users were very interested in the story that broke Wednesday morning about the Piedmont officer who shot and killed the retired firefighter in Yukon.  We covered the story as it developed on Wednesday, and we followed it up with more details on Thursday. And the audio of the 911 call really helps tell the story. The video below almost became the most-viewed video of the week; it came in as a close second.

Most-viewed blog post

In case you weren’t aware that OU football is a big deal in this state, I bring you this blog post from Jake Trotter on Wednesday: “Sooners add another walk-on kicker.” That’s right … a kicker. Yes … a ‘walk-on’ kicker. That’s the most-viewed blog post of the week. No, you read that right … a kicker.

Most -viewed video

The highlights of OU’s annual spring Red-White game led the charge this week:

Surviving the Dust Bowl

I just want it to rain. I’m tired of drought conditions that are threatening Oklahomans’ livelihoods.  I’m tired of wildfires that are threatening Oklahomans’ homes, livelihoods and lives. I just want one of those three-day showers that we traditionally tend to get in the Oklahoma’s Aprils. We had a story this week about the drought conditions being the worst we’ve had since the Dust Bowl. It gave our NewsOK editors a nice opportunity to link up one of our best nDepth: Stories of the Ages packages we’ve built on “Surviving the Dust Bowl.” As you’re praying for rain this weekend, check out “Surviving the Dust Bowl.” You might need the tips.

OKC Thunder bandwagon

In a tradition we started last year, we launched our end-of-season Thunder Bandwagon page to detail the building of a contender in the NBA Playoffs. The page is sponsored by OKC Thunder Cycles, and it features a fun StoryWall from the 2010-11 season, a Loud and Proud Fan Photo contest, and photo gallery with the best photos from the season and some of our best feature stories about the players. The page is great for all Thunder fans.

Home & Garden sponsor

The NewsOK Home & Garden page has a new sponsor as of this week. Appropriately, it’s sponsored by Marcum’s Nursery. The Home & Garden page now features a new enhanced look and feel, plus tips from Marcum’s and videos from a series of producers, including The Associated Press and CBS News.

Blake Griffin: To boo or not to boo

Blake Griffin made some news this week. All he did was play winning basketball against the Oklahoma City Thunder, but the Thunder fans’ reaction to his play sparked a nice debate for sports fans in Oklahoma (and within our own newsroom). Darnell Mayberry noted the fans’ boos on one of his Twitter updates during Wednesday’s game. Then, he shared his opinion again on his blog after the game. Sports editor Mike Sherman wrote a blog post Thursday afternoon that sparked even more debate after we featured that post at the top of NewsOK’s home page. Berry Tramel followed all that up with his column that was released on NewsOK on Thursday night. To recap, Darnell didn’t like the boos, Mike hated the boos and Berry didn’t mind the boos. That sports department … they are never short on opinions.

Blake Griffin and Kevin Durant: Know It

With all the booing going on, it’s a good thing we launched our Know It page on Blake Griffin last week. And it’s a good thing we enhanced that page (and the page we have on the Thunder’s own Kevin Durant) with featured presentations of their blogs. So, follow our Know It pages on Blake Griffin and Kevin Durant, and follow their blogs on our pages.

Telling important stories

Our site is full of information that people just need to know about. That occurs to me every week, and I often write about that thought, but it just occurred to me again on Wednesday afternoon. The trial in the drowning death of 2-year-old Allie Croom began this week. The story, like so many we tell on NewsOK, is important for us to follow. We’ll follow them. We’ll cover this trial and tell you if a jury sees it as a tragic accident or murder. I think it’s important that we do that. I hope you think so, as well.

Anthony Shadid in the house

Speaking of telling important stories that need to be told … Oklahoma City native Anthony Shadid stopped by our newsroom on Friday to talk about his recent near-death experience in Libya and his thoughts on covering the Arab world throughout his Pulitzer-Prize winning career. Shadid is a great story-teller, which is part what makes him a great journalist. Shadid can honestly say that he survives his craft. That’s not something every journalist has to say. It’s honorable to be so passionate and continually risk your life to tell people’s stories. If you want to really understand what he and his colleagues went through in Libya while in captivity, you must read their piece in the New York Times after they returned.

NewsOK & The Oklahoman win awards

Shadid does great work in the Middle East. And the New York Times does great work in New York. And so does NewsOK.com and The Oklahoman. Want proof? Check out our awards at last weekend’s Associated Press/Oklahoma News Executives competition. The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com won 21 individual first-place honors and 48 individual awards. My boss, Kelly Dyer Fry, said this: “Being recognized by our industry peers is a proud moment for all of us. We work every day to bring quality news to our readers. These awards tell us job well done.”

Most-viewed article

Berry Tramel’s column about new men’s basketball coach Lon Kruger’s salary let the way this week for article traffic on NewsOK. I find it extremely interesting that this makes the third consecutive week that an article about the OU men’s basketball coaching job has led the way for articles on NewsOK. Berry’s take? “OU paying Lon Kruger $2.2 million is cents-less.”

Most-viewed blog post

More OU basketball. This story keeps getting traffic. This week, the most-viewed blog post is the Tuesday post about former OU coach Jeff Capel being hired as an assistant coach on the Missouri staff.

Most-viewed video

Strange. The most-viewed video this week was a video from last week. It was a video of Bob Stoops talking about building depth on his football team this spring. Watch it below:

Olivia Munn still loves us

We received a fun package in the mail this week. It came from actress and icon Olivia Munn, who we have written about a few times in the past month or so in The Oklahoman, NewsOK.com and LOOKatOKC. I even wrote about how she posted a link to our story on her Twitter account so all her fans could see what George Lang wrote. But this week, we received this (click the image to enlarge):

Blake Griffin know it launches

We launched a new ‘know it’ page this week on one of Oklahoma’s finest — Blake Griffin. It was an easy call, really. Our most popular ‘know it’ pages have centered on Oklahoma’s most famous people – Sam Bradford and Kevin Durant. And Blake Griffin is about to be named the NBA’s Rookie of the Year. He has a chance to become the most dominant player in the NBA at the rate he’s going. He’s already the most exciting player in the league. All those superlatives? That’s all it takes to become a ‘know it‘ page on NewsOK.

Know everything about severe weather

Speaking of our know it pages, this is a great weekend to browse around on our Severe Weather know it page. The page was updated with fresh information last week as Bryan Painter organized another set of tips — things like what to do when you’re on the road, how to prepare and tornado myths. This page has tips, historical information and tons of links. No kidding — the Severe Weather know it can help you be ready for this storm season.

Dave Morris on video

Dave Morris appears on many of of our videos. He is the Director of Video, after all. And he’s a top-notch host that we’re lucky to have fronting our stories. And this week, he became a top-notch BALD host. If you wonder what happened to his full head of short hair, just watch this.

Angi Bruss on video

Angi Bruss also appears on many of our videos. She is one of our video hosts, after all. She’s also a great story-teller and fine journalist. Check out this story below. It made me stop and appreciate how we can capture emotions and stories with a camera, a voice and worthy story to tell.

The Rosalin Reynolds story

The stories we’ve had in the past week on the 8-year-old Watonga girl haunt me. We’ve had daily coverage of Rosalin Reynold’s death — how she was found in the field behind her home … how the man who was arrested was related to her … how the mother ‘just can’t let her go‘ … how the accused was at the home passed out drunk …  how mother and father were arguing that night and staying in separate apartments … and how the victim might have been sexually assaulted.  You can read all the stories by searching “Rosalin Reynolds” using the NewsOK search window. It’s a sad story — one we have to tell, even if we’d rather not.

A question about the NOOK?

I received a question from one of my blog readers this week (yes … I did say that … I have a reader). Essentially, the question was about our Digital Oklahoman replica edition. Would the new NOOK that’s being released in April be supported? The problem in the past is that the Digital Oklahoman is a Flash-based experience, and Flash has not been supported by the NOOK. The answer? … “I’m not certain if the Nook Color upgrade will include Flash and allow for the flash-based Digital Oklahoman replica experience to be viewed on that device. Quick research leads me to believe that it will be available, but Nook is a closed Android device, so it might be configured in a way that would make the Digital Oklahoman unusable. I just don’t know for sure right now. I can tell you one thing you already know … we have an e-reader experience for the Nook through the eNewspaper store. That would be my first recommendation. But I understand if you prefer the page-by-page replica experience. Another option we will soon have is an optimized native Android application for smart phones with that OS. It’s a good question, and I hope to learn more soon. Thanks for your question. And thanks for attempting to find ways to use our product in the way that best fits your needs.” The reader replied, promising to find any way he can to read The Oklahoman … “Thanks for your reply!  We’ll hold out hope that  the rumored addition of Flash to the Nook this Spring will enable access to the  Digital Oklahoman we’ve grown so accustomed to.  One way or the other, with  whatever e-reader or tablet, we’ll find a good solution to keep our favorite  daily paper available!”

New video players

You can find some new videos available on our website. It’s through our partnership with NDN Videos, which publishes AP videos as well as many other news sources. You can see these video players sprinkled throughout the site, like our health page, our parenting know it, our technology page, our home and garden page and more.

Lock your car

Have you ever sat and watched to see how driver after driver locks his or her vehicle after parking and running inside the post office. Don Gammill has. It’s a fun column. My favorite part … “He stepped out, shut the door and pointed the remote at the car. He pressed it. Nothing happened. He moved closer and tried again. Nope. He moved all around the car, trying to get it to lock. Finally, after he had tried every angle he could think of, he just opened the door and pushed the lock, then closed it.”

Email us a photo

A reader sent us a photo via our new photo-submission process using the email address pics@newsok.com. The photo appeared on the cover of The Oklahoman’s Metro/State section on Thursday. It just proves how much fame you can get by sharing your photo on NewsOK.com. And just to prove it, I shared a photo on April 1 to launch our April user-submitted gallery.

Katya’s trip to Egypt

I’ve written about Katya Kruglak before. Her ‘Dusty Globe‘ blog is always a great read, but I just ran across her blog posts from a couple weeks ago where she detailed her trip to Egypt. That’s right … that Egypt. I wish I knew about these posts earlier. She posted some great firsthand accounts of visiting the post-revolution and post-Mubarak country. She actually had 10 posts from her week in Egypt, but it all started with this great lead on March 11: “Landed in Cairo about an hour ago. Before you start to wonder if I’ve lost my mind, I did check out all the various travel warnings before booking the flight and it seems with a little common sense travel in Egypt should be fairly safe now. Or at least I hope.” She was safe. And we’re thankful for her posts.

Most-viewed article

It was incredibly close this week. But Berry Tramel’s article on Thursday about “UCO’s Terry Evans meeting with OU regarding basketball coaching vacancy” led the way this week. On Friday, we reported that “OU is expected to name Lon Kruger as the next coach.” The Friday report might very well surpass the Terry Evans report (Actually, I’m quite certain it will). But since I compiled this list at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, the Terry Evans story get s the award. Regardless, we know this: the OU coaching search leads the way for article traffic on NewsOK this week. UPDATE: by 4:15 p.m. on Friday, the Lon Kruger story is the most-viewed story of the week on NewsOK. UPDATE NO. 2: Our sports coverage team is simply awesome. We had the scoop on this story this week, and we’re really proud of that.

Most-viewed blog post

The OU coaching search takes the award this week. Mike Baldwin’s blog post on how the “OU coaching job is not an easy sell” for big-time coaches across the country led the way for our blogs this year. This makes the second consecutive week that posts about the OU basketball job topped this list. And we thought nobody cared about OU basketball anymore?

Most-viewed video

You guessed it … OU basketball coaching job analysis … for the second consecutive week.

Static goes to Austin

George Lang and Kyle Roberts spent some of last week in Austin for the SXSW Festival. They took that opportunity to film some episodes of Static: Season 3. The first episode from that trip — Pretty Black Chains — was posted last Friday, and more came this week. Static has been a critical success, so we’re doing many more episodes this year, thanks to our sponsor — Fowler Volkswagon.

Anita Bryant: Sunny Side of Life

The nDepth: Stories of the Ages did its job again with its latest release on Sunday. Robert Medley did the reporting and wrote the story. Steve Boaldin did the design. Angi Bruss narrated the video. In the end, we told quite a story about the legendary and controversial Anita Bryant. And we learned what she’s doing now and what she thinks about her life in the 1970s, when she was a lightning rod in the middle of the gay rights debates. Some people knew a lot about Anita Bryant before reading this piece. After reading it, they know a lot more. Others didn’t know anything about her before reading this piece. After reading it, they are informed. Check out the latest Stories of the Ages on our nDepth page on NewsOK.

OU coaching search: Fans get the vote

Sports editor Mike Sherman and columnist Berry Tramel had an idea last week. Put 64 possible OU men’s basketball coaching candidates in a tournament bracket and let Berry pare down who he thinks will end up with the job. OK … it’s not a new idea. They did the same thing five years ago the last time the job was vacant. Berry had 64 potential candidates, and the eventual winner — Jeff Capel — wasn’t in his bracket. This year, we’re doing something a little different. We’re allowing the fans to cast their votes to help us determine the eventual winner. My choice? It’s Tubby Smith. I’m a big fan of Tubby Smith. I voted for him until he was eliminated in the quarterfinals. It was fun to play along.

My favorite video this week

I’ve been folowing the O’Connell’s saga for months. On Tuesday, we posted the video of the original O’Connell’s being torn down. To me, that video made the entire thing real. It was even more real than my real-life visit to O’Connell’s in December for my last meal in between those historic walls. Sometimes, video just tells a great story.

Travel Along blog update

Marcy Williams had another fine post on her Travel Along blog this week. Actually, she had three posts on her trip to Texas — NASA, Kemah Boardwalk and Galveston Beach. I went to Galveston last year with my family, as well. I’ll say this … Galveston is underrated. It’s an fairly easy drive, and the kids loved it. I’d go back.

Oklahomans in Turkey

This is a blog post about a blog post about another blog post. Check out Carla Hinton’s blog post on her Religion and Values blog. Her post is about Louisa McCune-Elmore’s trip to Turkey as a guest of the Institute of Interfaith Dialogue in Istanbul. Louisa is an important member of our community as editor-in-chief of Oklahoma Today magazine.  Carla will be posting some of Louisa’s posts on the religion and Values blog, but you can see all of Louisa’s posts on JenX67.com under the Oklahoma to Istanbul posts. So … a blog post about a blog post about another blog. That’s a blogging community at work.

New blog for all the ‘know it’ pages

Don Gamill has started a new blog for all of our ‘know it’ pages on NewsOK. There’s more to come on Don’s ‘know it’ mission. You can expect to see a personality page for him soon, where everything he know about the ‘know its’ will be hosted. As it is, this is what you can expect on the know it blog: “… guest posts from local and national experts on all “know it” topics, as well as regular updates from Communities Editor Don Gammill.”

In the MOOD for a show

Heather Warlick-Moore started a new show on the MOOD website last week. It’s called “This is Mood,” and the first episode is below. I like it. Well done. And … a big thank you to sponsor Eskridge Lexus of Oklahoma City to helping us make this happen for our growing MOOD audience.

Most-viewed article

On Tuesday night, a series of gunshots were heard in the middle of Oklahoma City. We reported that. But by Wednesday morning, we had been able to confirm more details about what happened. It wasn’t pretty. An Edmond attorney was killed by her ex-husband in a murder-suicide. The story took off on Wednesday and it quickly became a strong traffic driver for NewsOK. In the end, it’s the most-viewed article on the website this week by about 20,000 views over an article about OU freshman running back Brandon Williams, which came in at a strong second place.

Most-viewed blog

Remember that OU coaching bracket I mentioned earlier in this post? Well, the blog post we used to promote that fun game for the fans was our most-viewed blog post of the week.

Another word about Tubby Smith

Of course, I wanted Tubby Smith (and still do). I think he’d be a great choice for OU. But I’m not impartial. My father and I had season tickets for the Tulsa basketball team during Tubby Smith’s first season at Tulsa in 1991. And he was a top candidate for the OU job in 1994, according to this archived article from John Rohde. Nobody is really talking about him this time around — and that makes me think he’ll be named the next OU coach next week. I don’t know anything, but if it comes true, I’m taking credit for being a genius.

Most-viewed video

It’s (spring) football season again. OU football takes the lead in our video views with our first analysis of the week reaching the top of the list for most-viewed video this week.

Email us a photo

While the wildfires raged last Friday, we tried something a little new. We had been working on creating an automated way to collect photos that are emailed to us during breaking news events. The idea is simple, attach a photo in an email and send it to pics@newsok.com. From your mobile device, it’s as simple as snapping a photo and forwarding the image to that address. Those photos then automatically appear in our monthly user-submitted photo gallery. So, as the fires raged and we chased the news of the day, we asked you to send us your photos. We didn’t expect a ton of images, but it was worth a shot. The process worked very well. We received a handful of photos that helped us tell the story for our visitors that day. Thanks for sharing. … And now you know. If you have a good photo and want to share it with NewsOK, just send it pics@newsok.com. We are now accepting all photos.

NCAA Tournament has arrived!

Sunday night was a big night for college basketball fans. That’s when the NCAA tournament brackets were announced. Thursday morning was even bigger for college basketball fans. That’s when they all skipped work (or took a veeeerry looooooong lunch) and watched the action at Buffalo Wild Wings (presenting sponsor of our tournament coverage on NewsOK). We have all the coverage you need of the tournament this year. We have the printable brackets for the men’s tournament and the women’s tournament. We have the Hoops Madness picks contest and all the live scores. We even have tons of video analysis from our experts in the OPUBCO Studios.

Capel coverage

Jeff Capel was fired as the OU men’s basketball coach on Monday. I learned on Twitter. Then, moments later, I received a text message with the news from NewsOK. Then, I received a breaking news e-mail alert from NewsOK. Within about 10 minutes, NewsOK had a full story, a blog post with analysis from Berry Tramel, an online poll to take the pulse of OU fans, a photo gallery of Jeff Capel’s tenure at OU and a question to allow readers to share their opinions on who the next coach should be. The sports staff and the NewsOK editing staff worked fast to get the information you needed. It’s a good thing, too. The Capel news gave us a nice spike in traffic for what might normally be a slow spring break Monday.

Images from high school basketball

Web editor Dane Beavers focuses on enhancing a lot of sports content on NewsOK. You see his work every day throughout the site. This week, you can see a fine idea on our Varsity page, where Dane featured the photo galleries from each of the high school basketball tournaments from last weekend. Oklahoma crowned 10 champions from Classes 2A-6A for both boys and girls. That’s a ton of celebration photos and images of disappointment. The high school tournaments are unique — and if you haven’t been, I highly recommend going. It’s raw, passionate competition — and it means the world to the participants.

More photos on Alternate Crop blog

Photographer Sarah Phipps posted some large images of the high school basketball tournaments on the Photo department’s Alternate Crop blog. I always enjoy visiting this blog because photographers will always have some interesting insight on the images that they like the best. Sarah also linked to the galleries I mentioned above, but she picks some of her favorites to showcase in the blog post. I encourage you to see her choices.

Posting other coverage of Japan destruction

I posted an extra blog post this week — a bonus blog. We were in the office looking at the ABC News presentation of the before-and-after images of the Japan destruction. It was jaw-dropping, so we linked it up with my lead in. Shortly after that post, I realized the the New York Times and MSNBC had posted equally impressive presentations. It doesn’t matter what brand you went with. The important thing is that you saw it. It just makes you shake your head. And then there were videos like this …

… again, shaking my head.

Blog comments

About the blog I posted in the middle of the week. It sparked a couple of comments from readers who had a difficult time referring to the Japanese people as allies based on the history of our two countries during World War II. Some highlights: “My heart is moved enormously by the suffering of the innocents in this horrible national disaster and i will give generously to help them… but I will not be called an ally of their nation. Period.” and “…they didn’t generously offer to help rebuild Pearl Harbor and all the ships in the harbor on 12-7-1941.” Said the third commenter on that post: “What is wrong with you guys. You embarrass me.”

Sunshine Week

But here in the United States, it’s Sunshine Week. You’re probably wondering what Sunshine Week is? Here’s a quick explanation: “An annual nationwide initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information.” I know … this stuff isn’t the full of sizzle. It doesn’t have splashy headlines and sure-fire web-winners, like a story about a man who leads police in a chase before getting out of the car with two cats in his arms, but it’s stuff that is important for our community and our future. Heck, just forget for a moment about stories about dates of births or about government bids (just an exercise … you shouldn’t really forget about those). But here’s the point: If open records laws aren’t preserved for our citizens now, then we might never be able to bring you that story about the man, his two cats and the police chase. Now that’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

The next big thing

I watched “The Social Network” this weekend. I also saw “The Adjustment Bureau” in the theater. Before seeing the movies, I was more interested in “The Adjustment Bureau,” but I have to say that “The Social Network” was more entertaining. Since watching that story. I’m inspired to invent the next big thing. I’ll unveil this invention on NewsOK. Keep an eye out for it.

High praise from reader

We had an out-of-towner visit the city last weekend during the high school state basketball tournaments. He was impressed with the newspaper coverage of the tournaments: “I just want to say thanks for the excellent coverage of the 6A-2A state tournament games. That includes all editors, writers, and photographers. … I really enjoyed the layout, the stories, the photos. Just excellent work. … Yes, I enjoyed the online coverage of the A-B tourneys the previous week.” That’s a customer we’re proud of. He uses NewsOK.com when he’s out of the area and reads the The Oklahoman, as well. And he liked both of them. Congratulations to the sports staff, once again.

A real-life ‘stuck-in-the-well’ story

I was browsing the know it: Unusual Oklahoma on Tuesday and came across this article: Firefighters rescue Bartlesville boy, mom from 30-foot well. It’s a well-reported AP story from Bartlesville. The mother apparently slid down to wait with her 7-year-old son as the rescue team was called and assembled. Said fire chief Bob Hasbrook: “It was a general consensus out there that the mother was the general hero.” It’s a good story. I like good stories.

Homicide map upgrade

The Oklahoma City Homicides map and database was improved in a major way this week. Our designers and developers did exceptional work in making the data our News and Information Center is gathering more user-friendly to sort, search, filter and browse. You can now sort the data by gender, age, ethnicity and more. You can sort by years, dating back to 2008. You can search the homicides by your Oklahoma City address and then change the proximity of the returns near that address. It’s a great tool for our users. But it’s also a great example of teamwork at the OPUBCO building. Local Editor Rick Green’s team is responsible for reporting on these homicides and adding the information into the database. Web editor Nick Tankersley is responsible for building the data structure in the Django frameworks and delivering clean data for display. The Audience Development team of designers and developers is responsible for making the user-interface as slick as it now is.

Most-viewed article

Jeff Capel dominated our readership this week. I already mentioned above about our coverage the day he was fired. The big story that day was the big story of the week as well. So what was our second most-viewed article? It was this: Jenni Carlson’s chat recap from Tuesday.

Most-viewed blog

Jeff Capel coverage won this category, also. This time from the OU blog. The second most-viewed blog post? It was this (also from the OU blog): Non-conference football schedule set in stone.

Most-viewed video

Jeff Capel again.

I’d show you the second most-viewed video, but it would just be another video about Jeff Capel. I think you get the picture.

• We’re almost all the way to mid-January (and we might be all the way there, depending on when you read this), so this is my last opportunity to encourage you to visit our 2010 Year in Review page. This page is simple. It’s the top 25 articles that were viewed on NewsOK in 2010 — the good, the bad and the ugly. Don’t look at us. You guys clicked on them. Actually, it’s a a pretty good cross-section of what our readers tend to click on. And the commentary from web editor Nick Tankersley, who put together this page, is quite entertaining at times.
• Steve Lackmeyer, author of the much-read OKC Central blog, sent me this post from the OKC Talk message board he frequents. He found it interesting because they were talking about our partner - wimgo.com. The people in the discussion on the post are really just saying what we’ve know for quite some time — wimgo is an awesome resource for making decisions about your life. If you need to decide how to spend your time or your money, wimgo is a comprehensive resource for everything about events, movies, restaurants or businesses.
• Bob Przybylo’s blog post on Monday was interesting to me because he featured the progress of the Edmond North boys basketball team under new head coach Jeff Tanner after a tough loss to Norman. Said Tanner: “We have to get tired of having these results. Norman played like a team that was tired of losing. Our energy and our focus has to be there every game.” I took particular interest in this post because coach Tanner is new to my neighborhood in Edmond, and his family is a great addition to our block. We wish him and his team very well. But that’s my personal interest. You should take interest in this post because it highlights the depth of coverage the Bob and the rest of the NewsOK Varsity coverage team offers with its constant blog posts, Twitter streams and article updates on the site. Varsity is the absolute best and most comprehensive coverage of high school sports anywhere. It’s not even close. We’re very proud of our high school coverage.


Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman

• Our photography department put together three really interesting slideshows this week. The first was posted to NewsOK after Mary Fallin’s inauguration. The second was a photographic story about the Rocktown ice-climbing wall this winter (I’ll just look at the pictures and leave it to others to experience it firsthand). The third was a nice story about Julie Adams, who is juggling life as a young mother while finishing high school at Emerson High School.
• We have a whole page of slideshows, and we archive them going back to when we first started these. It’s just another example of great story-telling on NewsOK.
• The saga of the Bethany man who was arrested and charged in the stabbing death of his wife topped our article traffic this week. This is my cue to say again … you can’t make this stuff up.
• Oklahoma State football fans got some good news this week, when Justin Blackmon and Brandon Weeden both announced that they would play at OSU next season instead of declaring themselves eligible for the NFL Draft. The video of their announcement was our top video on the site this week:
• We launched a new ongoing coverage page this week to house all the content related to the 2010 U.S. Census. We have all of our stories that analyze the census data, plus a pretty cool map of Oklahoma’s foreign-born residents broken down by county. Another really cool item to digest if you have a free afternoon is the New York Times’ interactive map breaking down every city and every block in the United States. It is one impressive map. So impressive, in fact, that we insist you browse it. That’s why we’re linking to it from our Census page — because we love great journalism.
• Marcy Williams is a web editor on my staff who recently retired. She had been working with us for more than a decade, and her work online pre-dated most web experts you come across on Twitter — and all of those early online efforts came after she retired as an elementary school principal. She is already greatly missed in our newsroom, but her life in retirement can still be followed with her Travel Along blog. See her post this week about trying to go to an OU-Texas game without a ticket — and let that be a lesson to all as they prepare for the 2011 OU-Texas game.
• On Wednesday, I came across this story on our Know It page that covers Unusual Oklahoma. It was about a boy in Woodward who was rescued  after his tongue was stuck on a frozen metal pole. It was a story straight out of the famous  holiday movie, “A Christmas Story.” This wasn’t a story that inspired great journalism. And it wasn’t a story that became extremely popular on the website. But it does illustrate just the massive amount of content we can offer in a single day. And it’s probably the story that I’ll remember more than anything else this week. Especially the this line: “… the boy told officials he got stuck after his brother dared him to lick the pole.”
• You can now see everything produced by Helen Ford Wallace on Helen’s personality page. Helen is an icon at The Oklahoman and NewsOK. She’s has enough energy to fill the newsroom, which I’ve written about before. And now she joins our other prime personalities with a page devoted to all the work she produces — blogs, videos, articles, photo galleries, Twitter posts, etc.
• The new personality pages bring up another cool page we have on NewsOK. All the personalities we’ve pulled out to a separate page can be found on our NewsOK Blogs main page, where you can see all the personalities and all the blogs we have available on the site. I love to visit the page once a day, because I always see something I hadn’t seen on the site yet.
• Database editor Paul Monies doesn’t have a personality page, but he has the next best thing. He edits and controls a page completely devoted to one of his passions. His passion is right your right to know. He blogs on his Data Watch blog and posts tons of database information that empowers you as an American citizen with more information. He has city code complaints, pot hole complaints, gifts from stat lobbyists and much, much more. One thing that caught my eye this week was his map of the top neighborhoods in Oklahoma City with home vacancies.

Enjoy another week of NewsOK browsing.