Oklahoma City Barons reach the NewsOK navigation
We made a quick change to our NewsOK sub-navigation for Sports last week.
It happened on the same day that the Oklahoma City Barons made the official announcement about their name, ending months of speculation about the name of the new AHL hockey team in Oklahoma City.
Look for our Barons coverage to expand in the coming months. We’ll be adding a blog from reporter Ryan Aber as our coverage picks up.
The page will expand as our coverage expands.
But for now, we have a page and we have a spot in our permanent navigation. That’s how we welcome the Barons.
Hot Ink launches 2010 edition
Every year, members of the news and information center for OPUBCO Communications Group work with a group of high school students to share wisdom and experience with young people who have an interest in journalism.
It’s called Newsroom 101, and the public-facing result is Hot Ink, and annual publication and web page created by and for high school students in central Oklahoma.
The latest installment of Hot Ink has been unveiled. You can see how the students of 2010 cover their community about what they think about the future of newspapers and the future of journalism.
Check it out at Hot Ink.
See a snapshot of Oklahoma in 2010 with the Outlook page
The biggest newspaper of the year came out on Sunday. It was our annual ‘Outlook’ section that takes a strong look at where we are as a community and where we are going as a state.
It’s always a fun read and a terrific snapshot of Oklahoma City and the surrounding state.
We always have a page that houses the entire ‘Outlook’ section. This year is no different, and Outlook 2010 is better than ever.
One reason the online outlook section so good this year is the virtual scavenger hunt quiz, where you look at a close up of a photo and identify the location of those images. I chose correctly on 10 of the 12 images. That’s almost an A-m but I’m pretty happy with my B.
Check out all the stories and the fun interactive elements in our annual Outlook 2010 section. And if you want, you can even click back to the 2009 section to see a snapshot of exactly one year ago.
Take a tour of the state capitol building
I blogged about the new page for Political coverage earlier this week. It’s called NewsOK Politics: Your News for Your Governement.
But I failed to mentioned the most fun piece of the project – An interactive map of the Oklahoma State Capitol.
It was produced by Todd Pendleton and Brian Mays with the support of the political coverage team in gathering photos and panoramic images.
Check it out below:
MLK page, video worth seeing on NewsOK
Photographer Sarah Phipps spent some time last week getting content organized for a special presentation on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
The holiday was yesterday, and we unveiled the project for our typically high audience on Monday morning.
The centerpiece of the project is Sarah’s video of students at Millwood Arts Academy reciting King’s historic speech. That video is worth a click, if nothing else. I’ll guarantee this – it’s impossible to watch that video and not feel happier when it’s over than when it began. Impossible.
Sarah has also put together two slideshows about businesses and people that she found an featured along Martin Luther King Ave. in Oklahoma City. The first slideshow is from Lincoln Senior Center at 4712 N. MLK Ave. The second slideshow is from Carican Flavors at 4701 N. MLK Ave.
She also produced a photo gallery to go along with a series of articles covering the holiday in Oklahoma. You can see it all in one place on our MLK holiday page.
Review 2009 before January is over
It’s not too late to take a close look at the news that shaped our coverage in 2009.
At NewsOK, we took a close look at the stories that our audience read and the news that we think made an impact. We voted within our newsroom and we tallied the votes (via page views) from our audience. We ended with 40 stories of 2009 in a variety of categories.
It’s fun to cycle through all the stories. And as far as pages with 40 pieces of content go, this one is pretty easy to sift through.
Enjoy the 2009 page. We’re starting to shift our focus to how we’ll handle the 2010 page now.
Additions to multimedia navigation
We’ve added a few more items to the sub-navigation under the Multimedia page on NewsOK.
The reason is very simple: We have some cool pages we’ve built in past few months, and we needed a place to call home. Since they are all ‘multimedia’ projects, the Multimedia tab seems like a nice place to park them.
The projects in question?
- Places – investigating some of our state’s most intriguing places
- People – exploring the world through someone else’s eyes.
- Story Wall – showing what it was to “be” somewhere through an ever changing kaleidoscope of pictures, videos, audio and text.
We’ve also added a couple of pages to the sub-navigation, but they aren’t so new. I think it’s worth mentioning them anyway.
- nDepth — a deeper look at the stories that shape our world
- ‘know it’ — helping Oklahomans navigate a given topic from beginning to end
- Ongoing coverage — following stories and events that have broken the mold of normal news activity
These pages are added to our already expansive Multimedia offerings.
Please, spend your down time during the holidays enjoying some of our new story-telling experiments. And let me know what you like the best.
Life page looks alive with quick face lift
We updated our outlook on Life this week.
You can check it out on our main Life page – a main navigation item on NewsOK.
What problem were we trying to solve? Actually, we were trying to solve the same basic problem we’re always trying to solve — how can we properly showcase the depth of content that we have in an organized and aesthetically pleasing way.
In our “Life” channel, that problem has become apparent in recent months with the growth of our ‘know it‘ series and the digital direction of our OKC N Style brand.
- The ‘know it’ series is our way of defining an important topic as it relates to Oklahoma. We’ve built more than 30 ‘know it’ topics in the past 18 months, and we have a big 2010 planned.
- The OKC N Style brand has been a slick magazine devoted to stylish living. We’ve been publishing it monthly within OPUBCO Communications Group in the past few years. I spent a year as the managing editor on that magazine, so I’ve long been a big fan. We are now moving that brand into a stronger digital space, and Dillard’s is serving as the presenting sponsor.
These two content brands strengthen our Life channel on NewsOK. We will continually update it and you can expect greater variety each day on that section.
Come and visit often and get a new perspective on NewsOK Life.
An outstanding series: A close look at the state of the adult day health services
We began an important series over the long Thansksgiving weekend, shedding light on the state of adult care services in Oklahoma.
It appeared in The Oklahoman and on NewsOK in three parts from Friday through Sunday. And while we know The Oklahoman is widely used on long holiday weekends, the traffic on NewsOK .com is about half as much as normal.
That’s why we want you to take the time today to take a closer look at this series.
I know what you’re thinking. “It sounds like a heavy subject,” you say. “Do you have anything about Tiger Woods missing a tooth or Bob Stoops changing jobs?”
(I know you’re saying that, because I said something similar in the weeks leading up to this series as we discussed how we would showcase this content on NewsOK.com … I was merely playing the role of the skeptic.)
I promise one thing: You won’t regret the time investment to educate yourself on this topic. Reporter Ron Jackson and photographer/videographer John Clanton practiced some serious journalism in telling the stories that make up this complex topic.
As quality journalists often do, Ron and John told the stories in a way that made me become quickly engaged and infinitely interested in the plight of the caregivers, the patients, the lawmakers, the lobbyists and the entire adult-care industry.
And if you need any more reason to click on the page and digest every word, just take two minutes to watch the slideshow below:
Now …. on to the series: The state of adult day health services in Oklahoma.
Places – exploring interesting spots in Oklahoma
Last week, we launched a project on NewsOK that has a simple name.
It’s called “Places.”
We launched with nine entries on the Places Web site. We’re going to add more each week. The goal is stated on the Places home page: “Accompany The Oklahoman’s writers and photographers as they investigate some of our state’s most intriguing places — seeing what they see, hearing what they hear and feeling what they feel.”
We think it’s pretty cool right now. But we think it will be a really cool site to visit and come back to as we add dozens and dozens of more entries into the site. We’ve already added one more this week - The Architectural Antiques and Dead People’s Stuff.
We’ve had some excellent feedback on the project, as well. Most of it is aimed at the lead writer for the project – Ken Raymond.
How enjoyable it was to read such creative writing being used to tell such a compelling story. Senior staff writer Ken Raymond did an excellent job of pulling a sad and dirty story together into a very intense word picture which read so well that I felt as though I was looking through a camera lens.
And there’s this thought from a very appreciative reader:
Your writing is appreciated. Thank you!! Your style reminds me of Rick Braggs “All over but the shoutin”—one of my favorites.
And this one – another person who read some of the entries in the newspaper:
I enjoyed your piece in yesterday’s paper, “Folks of all stations ride the bus.” It was well-written and interesting. I’ll watch for your by-line again.
We also had one who found us on NewsOK.
I am very excited about this new series, Explore at Places.NewsOK.com. There is so much to see and learn about in Oklahoma. I applaud your efforts to make it easier.
The last person said it perfectly … “Explore.”
That’s exactly what we are aiming for with this series and this site. We want to explore Oklahoma, and we want to take you with us. We’re not going to write traditional articles on the places we visit. We’re going to channel the story-teller in us. We’re going to use our imagination and tell you what it feels like to be in that place at that time — what we see, what we smell, what we think.
We’ll add audio, slideshows and panoramic images as available to help capture the essence of that place.
So even if you’ve never been locked up at the county jail, you can say you’ve been there – thanks to Places.
