Sam Bradford made his decision public yesterday, ending a week of speculation, debate, cancellations and breaking news turned breaking predictions.

(Yes, that last part is a friendly shot at ESPN and their coverage on Thursday and Friday.)

In the end, everybody reported the truth at about the same time. Sam Bradford was having surgery. It’s scheduled for Wednesday. We’ve blogged about it. We’ve shot videos about it. We sent SMS text alerts. We sent e-mails. We wrote stories.

We have it covered. Reporters Jake Trotter and David Ubben have had it covered from the beginning. On Wednesday, NewsOK correctly reported the facts and reasons behind the news that Bradford’s news conference was cancelled. On Thursday, NewsOK was hoping it didn’t have to report about something that wasn’t scheduled and wasn’t planned, but when talk about an impending news conference became widespread, a report was necessary. It was good work by our local reporters. Jake and David can be counted on for the most complete and most accurate information about OU sports — guaranteed.

And now more about knowing Sam ….

See our ‘know it’ on Sam Bradford. It has everything you need to know about Sam. You can see all the stories, all the blogs, all the videos, all the stats, all the links from around the Web. You can even join the message board about Sam Bradford and talk about everything Sam.

We launched ‘know it’ topic pages on OU quaterback Sam Bradford and OSU quarterback Zac Robinson shortly before the season began. After the first couple of weeks, we thought we had unknowingly unleashed a ‘know it’ curse.

Look at the early evidence:

• Bradford was hurt and the Sooners lost.  (See BYU)
• Robinson was looking a bit shaky early in the year. Was he secretly hurt? Did he gain too much weight? Was he just overrated?

Bradford’s luck continued down a unfortunate path, but Robinson has emerged as a strong All-Big 12 quarterback candidate. So I can rest easy — there is no ‘know it’ curse.

However, we also launched  ‘know it’ topic on Kevin Durant. If he goes down with injury, I’ll reopen the investigation.

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.

Wayman Tisdale poses for a photograph before an afternoon practice session in 1982. Photo by David Longstreath.

I was in a meeting Friday morning when I learned of the Wayman Tisdale’s death.

I generally don’t become startled, but after seeing the update on twitter, via @NewsOK, I sat up and interrupted the meeting to look up the story on NewsOK.com on the conference room computer.

Over the next few minutes, the NewsOK Web editors built an extensive photo gallery and an enhanced topics page on Wayman Tisdale, while the sports department worked on videos, columns and more retrospective articles.

It turned into pretty good coverage, which can all be found on the aforementioned topics page.

That topics page came in pretty handy, especially since we just re-launched that feature last week. We saw the great benefits for having the archived coverage at a moment’s notice.

Today is a good day to go back and sift through that information, including stories that date way back into the mid-1980s, when Tisdale was ruling over the court at Lloyd Noble Center.

Basically, we’ve always had links to topics in many of our articles, but now we’ve packaged thousands of topics on an easily browsable page – from A to Z.

It’s a cool feature. Where else could you run across the latest articles and archived articles from NewsOK and around the world on people like Keith Urban, companies like Philip Morris International, Inc., or industries like the Electronics Sector.

Those are just a few of the thousands of topics pages.

But there will be even more. We will be incorporating more functionality to our Topics pages that we’ve turned into ‘know its’. We currently have 26 ‘know it’ pages on which we’ve enhanced the dynamic topics with focused coverage and resource guides from our News and Information Center.  We will soon be showcasing new designs on those ‘know it’ topics and adding message board functionality for our users.

Stay tuned … and in the meantime, study our topics page on Sam Bradford. That should keep you busy for a while.

You can expect a lot more on our ‘know it’ in coming months. NewsOK will continue to research and build more information on topics that are important to Oklahomans. In time, you’ll be able to ‘know’ anything and everything as it relates to Oklahoma.