The birth of the NewsOK Storywall
Web editor Nick Tankersley had an idea a few weeks back. He thought it would be nifty if we told a story in a completely non-linear way — allowing users to click on a number of different elements and get a different experience each time.
They might get a photo if they click on one block of content.
They might get a video if they click on another block of content.
They might get a bit of text if they choose yet another block.
And moments after that idea, the ‘NewsOK Storywall‘ was born.
Nick began working on the database that would feed our first storywall, learning more about the Django framework to feed the application. Multimedia reporters John Estus and Ken Raymond began developing content that would go into the wall, and photographer John Clanton began getting a variety of photos to feed the page.
After some hard work and unforseen obstacles, we launched the first ‘NewsOK Storywall’ this weekend as the Oklahoma State Fair came to a close.
Check it out. Let me know what you think.
Personally, I kind of like it. I think it would be interesting to add wall for OU and OSU football games, perhaps the OU-Texas game or the Bedlam battle later this year.
But I’d like to see if our users think it’s as nifty as I think it is. Just comment below, send me an e-mail or post a message on Twitter. I’ll listen any way I can.
Burning through money: A multimedia experiment
Local Editor Michael Baker and a few members of his reporting team – John Estus and Bryan Dean – pulled off a nice multimedia package last week.
They enlisted the help of web editor Nick Tankersley, art director Todd Pendleton and graphic artist Brian Mays to effectively tell the story about the battle between the Oklahoma City firefighters and city officials.
We have three articles, a video interview and four informational graphics to help tell help describe the details of this story — which range from arguments about excessive overtime pay, contract negotiations and incident rates.
It was an experiment for us. Can we tell an hard news, ongoing coverage piece in a way different than we normally do.
We think it worked this time. And we’ll do something to take it a step further next time.
Searching on NewsOK just got a lot better
Search for something on NewsOK.
No … really. We really want you to search for something on NewsOK.
OK. I’ll try it. I searched “Landry Jones.” You know – he’s the quarterback at OU now that Sam Bradford is injured early in the season.
Anyway, take a look at what I saw when I searched “Landry Jones.”
I ended up spending a couple minutes watching a highlights video of Landry Jones as a high school star in Artesia, N.M. We posted that video on Feb. 3, 2008 when he signed to play at OU. I would have watched the entire video, but the music was hurting my ears.
Try your own search on NewsOK. You’ll find that we …. (prepare for the understatement of the year) …. have improved the search process on NewsOK.
A core group of developers and programmers in our Audience Development department spent a lot of time this summer working with other search experts to finally get the types of results our audience has always wanted on NewsOK. Simply put, when you execute a search on NewsOK, you will now get comprehensive and relevant results — every time. And quite frankly, we couldn’t always say that.
We can now.
After executing a search, you can refine the search by type of content, dates, author, topics and more. If you’re looking for a video on NewsOK from 2008, it’s not hard to find (even if it’s an obscure highlights video from New Mexico).
We’re still working out some of the kinks. The launch of our new search is actually a soft launch this week. But we’re pretty proud of the results so far. That’s why I’m singing about it from The Digital Desk.
Let me know what you think about it? Just go to NewsOK and search.
Celebrity Watch page grows in content and popularity
I was in a meeting the other day with an OPUBCO Communications Group executive and a couple of others. We were discussing a few items about the way we treat and present content on a variety of our pages.
The Celebrity Watch page on NewsOK came up as an example.
Katherine Heigl is seen in this image taken from a daily photo gallery on NewsOK.com's Celebrity Watch page.
‘That’s my favorite page on NewsOK,” said the executive. He was referring to the layout of the page and the content within.
I can’t disagree much, either. The truth is, for a sub-section page deep inside NewsOK.com, The Celebrity watch page is loaded with great content.
We have articles from NewsOK and from content partners at the Associated Press, Entertainment Tonight and Parade. We have many new stories every day from those providers.
We also have our our Celebrity blogger, focusing on bringing new information every day to our local audience. That blog consistently ranks among the top 5 is daily traffic among those in the NewsOK blog network.
We’ve just recently added a daily slideshow through our partnership with Parade. It’s a new photo gallery every day full of celebrity fashion or sightings.
New photos, new articles, new slideshows, new blogs and new videos every day …. it’s no wonder it’s a favorite destination for many NewsOK users.
Plus, no where else can you see headlines like this:
Quentin Tarantino: Brad Pitt Is My Robert Redford
or this:
Rachel McAdams: Nudity Shouldn’t Be A Big Deal
You just can’t get these headlines on the Technology page in the Business section.
Today’s Paper page is improved and ready for more
We’ve had a link to “Today’s Paper” on our home page since we redesigned last October.
I thought today would be a good day to bring more attention to that page because we’ve recently focused on improving the experience once you are there and the experience of actually getting there.
If you are a daily newspaper reader, you’ve likely seen more notes in the newspaper driving our readers to the Today’s Paper page. Those notes have begun appearing more frequently because we’ve done some development work behind the scenes to make sure the experience on the Today’s Paper page is a good one.
Basically, the Today’s Paper page is designed to showcase articles from that day’s newspaper in a simple way. It’s also designed to showcase the multimedia elements (related links, videos, podcasts, slideshows, documents, etc) related to the articles in that day’s newspaper.
We want this page to be a destination for users wanting a simple experience to see what was in the newspaper. And we also know that many people look for articles on NewsOK.com after getting word that it was in yesterday’s newspaper. Those stories can sometimes be hard to locate on NewsOK, but they are pretty easy to find on the Today’s Paper page. The headlines all appear just as they did in the newspaper, and the stories are organized based on the sections and in order of the pages where they appeared.
If you know there is a document or a video that went with an article in the newspaper, we can now confidently guarantee that you can find it on Today’s Paper, a link that it always found in the sub-navigation of our home page.
High school huddle warms up the NewsOK high school coverage
It’s almost high school football season. And our sports staff is gearing up for the most in-depth and consistent coverage of high school football that we’ve ever seen online.
Watch below, and stay tuned next week for our new high school coverage page. Just remember this – NewsOK.com is where you can see the inside information from a staff of full-tme reporters delivering daily information about high school football in Oklahoma.
Pharmacy Shooting story continues on NewsOK
The Pharmacy Shooting story gets more and more interesting.
In case you missed it this weekend in The Oklahoman or on NewsOK, the story took another turn with a copyrighted story from The Oklahoman on Sunday.
Reporter Nolan Clay details the three different accounts of the events that Jerome Ersland has told since the day of the shooting. You can see links to key documents, including excerpts from his police interview.
There’s not much I can add to this story, other than to say that it’s easy to identify an important story and quality reporting when you see it.
Another man dies on the Internet
Tulsan Beau Taylor began false report about death of fighter
We had an article today about a Tulsa man making up news about another athlete.
The news? That one of the atheletes was dead.
The news made it to TMZ.com.
Oh … the irony. I wrote a couple weeks ago about traditional media outlets and the way it’s difficult decisions about the breaking news about Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ beat everyone that day, no doubt. But they also beat everyone on this story.
I’m sure they aren’t thrilled about that. Nobody wants to get anything wrong, least of all our own Bout Blogger – the Boneman.
But the moral of this chapter in the story is in the prankster’s defense. It pretty much says it all about the age we live in.
Taylor, 31, said he was surprised because he posts “nonsense all the time. I’m always joking around.”
Nonsense makes headlines. That’s why traditional media outlets sometimes move carefully.
Live from Florida: NewsOK presents breaking news
This week, I’m learning and sharing.
I’m at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. , where 29 news industry professionals are gathered to share tidbits about what they are trying and what is working in their market.
We have a lot to be proud about what we’ve done at NewsOK.com, so I submitted an idea about a month ago about the way we integrated tools to interact with our audience during breaking news events. You might remember the event as Ice Storm 2009:
A lot of smart people at OPUBCO Communications Group helped invent this method of covering the ice storm, but I intend to take credit for the entire thing.
(OK, just kidding, David Jones, David Morris, Mike Koehler, Tim Money and more).
I do know this. I’m excited about sharing what we’ve done with NewsOK. But I’m even more excited to see the presentations from the 28 other participants, including our own Yvette Walker, who is facilitating the event as a visiting faculty member.
The bottom line is this — we want to succeed in our mission:
To be Oklahoma’s marketplace for information in a manner superior to anyone else in the world.
In order to do that, I’ll spend a week in south Florida … if that’s what it takes.
If you want to follow the Big Ideas, see the live blog from the facilitators.
A quick look at Fourth of July fun
I didn’t get a chance to go to the parade in downtown Edmond on Saturday.
I had planned on it, but reality of the company that was arriving at our home later that day settled in, and I found that the time was better spent preparing for the cookout.
A Fourth of July parade is a key part of the festivities, in my mind. Next year, I’ll be scheduling all other activities around a parade.
But this year, thankfully, photographer/videographer Bryan Terry was in Edmond and helped me out. Thanks to his video, I was able to watch the Edmond parade in about 2 1/2 minutes.
If the parade had been this fast, I’d have gone for sure on Saturday.
You can see coverage of the Fourth of July, including many of the photo submitted by the public on our special coverage page. Give it one more look today, then prepare fore next year’s festivities.
