‘Endangered Black History’ nDepth series comes highly recommended
We are in the middle of a six-part series titled, “Endangered Black History,” that I would highly recommend our users take a look at.
We’ve organized this coverage as part of our nDepth – Stories of the Ages presentations, where we tell a story in a long-form and high-design format. We’ve completed dozens of nDepth stories over the past few years, but this is perhaps our most ambitious project, because we’re linking six of them together over the course of a few weeks.
We’ve already released Part 1: The Overview, Part 2: Langston and Part 3: Boley. There are still three more to come.
Graphic artist Chris Schoelen is producing the designs, reporter Ken Raymond is writing the stories, video producer Paige Dillard is producing the videos and web editor Nick Tankersley is putting it all together on the web pages.
They all deserve high praise for the extra effort that benefits our readers, but the work goes far beyond them — videographers, photographers, editors and researchers have come together to make this a successful story-telling effort.
It easy to navigate. The stories are detailed and descriptive. The videos add more context to the words that surround them. And the photos — well I’m a sucker for historic photos.
But here’s my favorite part: We went with Facebook comments to keep the conversation going in this series, and it’s proved to be an interesting way for users to share the series with others and offer their own commentary and insight.
Take a look. But don’t worry, there’s no rush. We’re going to keep this package active on the site for years to come.
Feature on NewsOK articles aims to offer another interesting read
We added a new feature last week to our articles.
Hopefully, you noticed — especially since the feature only makes an appearance when you reach the bottom of an article.
We added a ‘slideout’ feature that appears on the right side of your screen when you scroll to the bottom of an article. Technically, it slides in to your screen, but we’re still calling it a ‘slideout’ for now.
If you look at the photo on the right, you can see a screen shot of what of the slideout feature showing an additional OU sports article at the bottom of the article I was reading about Brent Venables.
The slideout offers a a popular headline in the same category of the story you are reading, so hopefully it’s a useful tool that will give you a suggested headline that you haven’t read before.
We’re not always looking to have stuff move around on the screen, but we’re always open to giving our readers something they might find useful. The early feedback has been positive, and the traffic numbers indicated a strong rate of clicks for those items. So I finally decided to introduce it on The Digital Desk blog.
I think it’s a keeper. Other individual might think otherwise. But ultimately, the way our users interact with the feature will determine its eventual fate.
Closing the book on 2011 end-of-year interactive projects
Opening the first full week of a new year, I thought it would be good to offer a shotgun approach to some of the items you might have missed in recent weeks. So here goes …
- The 2011 Year in Review page was released. We take a simple approach to this page. It’s simply the 25 most-viewed articles of the year. In 2011, our readers liked conference realignment articles a lot. It shows in our Top 25.
If you enjoy reviewing a year by looking a lot of photos, you could do a lot worse the our photographers’ end-of-year galleries for a variety of topics — Sports, News, Features and my personal favorite — Portraits. Seriously, the gallery of portraits is just really good photography.- Angi Bruss has a new A-List that was released this week. she does a great job as she explores local merchants each month and what they provide to improve the lifestyles of Oklahomans.
- George Lang’s Static unveiled another holiday special in late December. Static X-Mas was shot at Deep Deuce Grill in Oklahoma City. Stay in the holiday spirit — even if it’s January — by letting Static X-Mas play while you work.
At the end of the year in 2010, we revised and enhanced our Ongoing Coverage page for Oklahoma DHS. If you’ve read The Oklahoman or NewsOK, you know that reporters Nolan Clay and Randy Ellis have shine a bright light on DHS in recent years. The updated page now has a page devoted to Child Welfare, detailing the controversial cases in recent years. The timeline that’s on these pages is very deep and descriptive. Check it out.
We will have plenty more interactive elements in 2012. NewsOK will do its best to inform, entertain and enlighten with whatever tools we can find.
A detailed picture of DOC and prison escapees
Last week, we launched a pretty cool project that paints a detailed picture of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and prison escapees from Oklahoma.
Reporters Tiffany Gibson and Matt Patterson worked closely with web editor Nick Tankersley and Art Director Todd Pendleton to create an online presentation that has the combination of content depth and digestible presentation.
There are a lot of stories, a handful of videos, photo galleries and an interactive informational graphic that provide the overview of the coverage.
But it goes much deeper than that. The Oklahomans at Large page shows profiles of 96 inmates who remain at large. It even displays the eight that are the considered the most wanted.
The Prisons page maps and profile the medium- and maximum-security prisons, including my favorite part of the series — three panoramic views of a death-row cell, a maximum-security rotunda and the death chamber.
It’s chilling. It’s informational. It’s interactive.
The Department of Corrections online presentation is just good journalism.
The well-told story of Freckles Brown and Tornado
We put together another nDepth – Stories of the Ages piece for Sunday. It’s called, “The Ride,” and it focuses on the most famous “Eight Seconds in Rodeo History” when Freckles Brown stayed atop Tornado in 1967.
The story appeared on the front page of The Oklahoman on Sunday and was featured prominently on NewsOK.
I’m no rodeo aficionado, but I really enjoyed this piece by contributor Ron J. Jackson Jr.
I spoke on the phone this morning with a true rodeo fan who said he was there that night in 1967. He said that Jackson had “everything right” in his accounts and that it was a “great article.”
I agree. Reading the story of Freckles Brown and Tornado is worth the time. If you haven’t read it yet, do so today.
And make darn sure you take the handful of minutes to watch the great video, narrated by Bryan Painter and Doug Sauter.
NewsOK TV app worth a spot on your home screen
The NewsOK TV app in the iTunes store might be the coolest app we have that we don’t talk about enough.
We’ve had it for quite a while — well over a year, I know. But our latest update (released in the iTunes store on Nov. 29) really makes it a nice addition to your phone. We added push notifications to the app, allowing users to get a note when we add a new video.
The iPhone notifications are pretty handy. It sounds like a pain, I know … getting an alert every time something changes on your phone. But these notifications are subtle enough not to annoy you and useful enough to make it worth the effort. The cool thing is that when Dave Morris‘ NewsOK TV crew adds freshly edited video to the website, I know about it while I’m messing around with my phone. I’m now much more likely to be informed and entertained. And that’s useful to me as a news consumer.
The notifications are really nice, but the app is easy-to-use, too. It’s a different way to ingest your news and information on your mobile device, that’s for sure. Rather than a lot of pesky reading and scrolling, it’s a relaxing watch and listen. And trust me, we produce enough video, that you get a wide sample of information just from the NewsOK TV app.
And our final cool feature worth mentioning? It’s the upload your video process. We know it’s cool because we’ve used it a live testing to get a video we shot from the field into our system for editing.
It works for us, so it can work for you, too. Shoot some video with your phone, then upload it to use through the app. You can even slice the beginning or the end off the video with an easy edit process in the app.
Trust me, if you shoot some breaking news and share it with us, you’ll likely go worldwide within minutes.
Download the app and use it. Before long, it won’t be our best-kept secret.
Seeking Truth: nDepth piece shares Dr. R. Murali Krishna’s story
Kelly Dyer Fry wrote another heart-wrenching piece. This time, instead of sharing the gripping story of addiction within her own family, she shared an equally gripping account of an equally challenging affliction from the family of Dr. R. Murali Krishna.
The title is Seeking Truth: Where is my Amma? It shares Krishna’s accounts of his mother’s fight with mental illness while he was a young boy in India.
It’s part of our “nDepth: Fighting Back” series, where we tell inspirational stories of people making a difference in our community. Dr. Krishna definitely qualifies, and the only proof you need is Kelly’s story.
As he enters the backyard trimmed with rose bushes, he sees his mom. She is standing in the yard. Smoke is rising from her yellow sari with black trim. Flames. She is setting herself on fire.
Fry — who, for the record, runs our newsroom – transitions from Krishna’s flashbacks to Krishna’s present-day advice. As the audience, we learn not only what drove and inspired Krishna to become a community leader in the field of mental health.
We also get a bit more insight on how the world can change for a family dealing with mental illness.
A look back at all the coverage of the OSU plane crash
It’s been a wild few days on NewsOK, beginning last Friday morning when news of the tragic plane crash in Arkansas that killed four members of the OSU Family.
Women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were on the plane, something confirmed by our reporters early Friday morning. From there, the reporting was fast and furious. The news team, led by local editor Rick Green and the sports team, led by sports editor Mike Sherman, combined for comprehensive coverage of all the angles of the story — the history, the reaction from university leaders, the effect on the players, the effect on the teams, the facts about those who died, etc.
All of the coverage can be found on NewsOK’s ongoing coverage page of the crash. You can see all the articles, of course, but you can also …
- view photo galleries we’ve built, including the one from the memorial on Monday afternoon.
- share your thoughts on the online Guest Books for Kurt Budke, Miranda Serna, Olin Branstetter and Paula Branstetter.
- read the blogs that came from our staff as they heard about the tragedy. They all share personal thoughts about Kurt and Miranda, since they were the ones we dealt with regularly.
- see some of the archived material we had on Kurt Budke. My favorite is the Collected Wisdom piece from earlier this year.
We hope this page is organized enough for our readers to dig through everything we have documented about the facts surrounding the crash. And we hope the galleries, Guest Books and retrospective blog posts effectively paint a picture of the victims’ lives for those that didn’t know them.
And we hope we don’t have to build another page like this for OSU ever again.
‘Get well’ page for Ryan Broyles captures attention of community
On Saturday, the OU football team lost to injury the most prolific receiver in the the school’s history.
Ryan Broyles suffered a season-ending injury to his knee. His disappointment was captured on live television as the news was broken to him and his teammates. His chance to play in a final Bedlam game was gone. His chance to play in another big bowl game was gone. His NFL aspirations were put in jeopardy (though a full recovery and an NFL future is still very likely for him).
Early this week, NewsOK launched its Get Well, Ryan Broyles page to allow users to share their positive thoughts to Broyles. We built a simple page, created a photo gallery of Ryan throughout his football career, dating from Norman High School to his final OU game. Than we embedded a Facebook commenting wall and launched the page.
It’s been a nice test of how Facebook commenting can help build a community on our site. Some of the posts are long. Some are short. But they’ve all generally been the type of comments we’ve been hoping for with this page. It’s a wall of positive energy.
And you can thank the sports department here for always thinking of ways to connect with our growing audience.
Let me know what you think of the page.
‘Finding a Forever Family’ — a special NewsOK nDepth story
In the midst of all the earthquake madness this weekend, you might have missed a special nDepth presentation we put together and launched on Saturday night on NewsOK.com.
So take the time to read “Finding a Forever Family” when you have a few spare minutes. It’s a story told by OPUBCO’s own Michelle Kelley as told to our Night News Director Yvette Walker. Michelle tells the her story of working with the system to adopt a child.
This isn’t the story of Michelle Kelley. It’s the story of a little boy and a little girl nicknamed Biggin’ and Darlin’. And it’s also the story of why some children have to wait so long to find families to take them in and love them forever — “forever families.”
We also created a special PDF presentation that is enhanced be flipped through on a user’s iPad. It’s best viewed in iBooks on the iPad, but it’s a good PDF to read in any way you want to.
I highly recommend reading it an whatever way you want. And for a nice preview, here’s a video to get you started.
