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.
It’s all about you
I enter July 4 weekend with a story about YOU!
Frankly, I should talk more about YOU! And I think I will be talking more about YOU! in the coming months. I’m proud of this Web page, where we showcase the content from the Thursday YOU! printed publication in The Oklahoman.
It’s filled with interesting stories that are always entertaining, enlightening, interesting or educational. It’s has a different tone than our normal Lifestyle section.
We need to find ways to showcase YOU! more often. But in the meantime, in case you run across this post, please take time out of your busy July 4 weekend to visit YOU!
Trust me. You won’t regret it.
Neither will YOU!
Update: Jeff Goldblum is still not dead
On Friday, I posted about how NewsOK treated the breaking news story about the death of Michael Jackson.
The larger discussion in question wasn’t really about NewsOK. It was about traditional media being upstaged — or at least scooped — by non-traditional media like blogs and social media sites.
I relayed the story about the Jeff Goldblum rumor spreading on Twitter. Then, today, I see Mashable’s take on Goldblum’s appearance on the Colbert Report.
Just thought I’d share. Thanks to NewsOK web editor Dane Beavers for sending me this link via (prepare for irony) Twitter.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed | ||||
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Share it Live on the Fourth of July
During this past weekend’s Club H.O.G. rally in Bricktown, we launched our partnership with Share it Live, a photo-sharing application developed by visionaries working the OPUBCO Communications Group Audience Development department.
It’s an iPhone application with a unique slogan – “a new era in citizen journalism.”
The partnership last week was a success. Developers who focus on NewsOK built used the Share it Live API to build a customized area on the NewsOK hog rally coverage page. We received dozens of photos from the event.
Now we’re going to try the same thing on a wider scale – the Fourth of July.
Here’s our thinking. The Club H.O.G. rally was in specific locations in Oklahoma City. But the Fourth of July happens everywhere.
It doesn’t matter how you are celebrating.
A cookout at home? Share it Live.
A parade? Share it Live.
Going to a fireworks show? Share it Live.
If it’s happening on July 4 (or July 3, for that matter …. oh, heck, we’ll take photos from July 1 and 2, as well), please share it on NewsOK. You can upload through the iPhone application or you can simply upload through NewsOK’s Fourth of July page.
I wasn’t at the Club H.O.G. rally, so I couldn’t Share it live. But come Saturday, I have no excuse. I will be Sharing it Live – I promise.
Covering Michael Jackson’s death: Inside the mind of a NewsOK editor
The news of Michael Jackson’s death broke up a meeting I was in Thursday afternoon.
“Michael Jackson … dead!” said sports editor Mike Sherman (though it didn’t sound as undignified as it does when I typed it on this blog). “TMZ is reporting it.”
I walked back to my office and called our digital news editor, Robb Hibbard.
“You have this Jackson story?”
“It’s not on AP yet,” he said. “I’d hate to put it up if one of our sources doesn’t have it confirmed.”
And with that statement, Robb summed up an issue that is constantly discussed in our News and Information Center (and throughout the social media landscape).
I logged on to Twitter. Everyone was talking about Jackson’s death. It was by far the No. 1 trending topic on the social media Web site. As a matter of fact, topics about him were dominating the top 10 trending topics.
There were plenty of comments on Twitter, as well, about how non-traditional media (like TMZ) and social media (Twitter and Facebook) were spreading the breaking news faster than any of the “old-school media” (like CNN, the L.A. Times and the Associated Press).
Here are a few:
Gossipers (TMZ, Perez) say he’s dead. CNN, LA Times haven’t confirmed. Old media slowness rides again!
— from @mkokc (our former multimedia editor Mike Koehler and current New Media Director for Schnake Turnbo Frank public relations firm)
Half hour or so after Twitter told me Michael Jackson died, Washington Post email alert caught up. Still waiting for NY Times “alert.”
— From @stevebuttry (Steve Buttry, a news executive at the gazetteonline.com in Cedar Rapids, IA)
And those are just a couple of the many similar posts I saw from the 163 users I happen to follow.
The discussion was clear. Online users are often discovering breaking information faster through their Twitter stream than through traditional online media sources. Which, in the case of yesterday, there’s no disputing.
Some defenders of traditional media companies responded by saying something to the effect of “they’d rather have it correct than have it fast.” That’s a quality argument, but not one that plays well with the non-journalist crowd. But it’s a dilemma that we at OPUBCO Communications Group and other like companies face every day.
What did we do? Instincts told us that TMZ was likely correct. But the sources that we partner with to provide trusted information (AP and other wire services) had not yet felt comfortable with their verification process. We don’t have a reporter stationed in Southern California, so we have to rely on our partnerships. So, within about 10 minutes, we re-positioned the story we had about Jackson being taken to the hospital while adding a separate link to the TMZ report. We wanted to inform our users that another media outlet was reporting his death, and we wanted to be very clear about who was reporting that information.
The L.A. Times eventually reported that he had died, and other outlets followed. What remained was the criticism of such media sources, especially through Twitter posts. But the criticism would have been much worse had traditional outlets reported something that turned out to be untrue.
The fact remains – the traditional media companies are held to a higher standard and sometimes in a bind. If they don’t publish “the buzz,” then they are seen as old-fashioned and slow to react. But if they do publish “the buzz,” then they are seen as journalists spreading rumors.
At NewsOK, We have used our blogs to join the conversation on some of our beats. We’ve been open about publishing “buzz-worthy” information on some of our blogs, while trying to be very transparent about the source of the links.
But at this point, we continue to have a stronger standard of confirmation before information reaches NewsOK articles or ink on the pages of The Oklahoman.
It’s not a new dilemma, really. The same discussions about verification were had when newspapers started to roll off the presses in the U.S. And the same discussions were had when online message boards we a major source of rumors (some of which were very true).
It pre-dates the Internet, and it pre-dates Twitter. It’s just that now, things move at an entirely faster pace.
Take last night, for example. This post on my Twitter stream:
Now Jeff goldblum is supposedly dead?!?! NO!!!!!!!
– @lhodgesanderson (Lindsay Hodges Anderson, a former NewsOK web editor)
She wasn’t alone. Jeff Goldblum was a trending topic on Twitter. Sitting in my living room, I repeated that post out loud. My wife couldn’t place the Jeff Goldblum name, so I looked up his photo and showed it to her. Then I proceeded to search more about the story. Within a matter of 10 minutes, I concluded that the Goldblum death story appeared to be a hoax. But that didn’t stop others from going through the same discovery process throughout the night, usually beginning with posts on Twitter that were almost identical to Lindsay’s.
That proves how fast false information can be spread. And even if I learned within a few minutes that it probably was a hoax, I apparently didn’t adequately share that information. Hence, the phone call this morning from my wife, who was discussing with her co-workers the death of “some actor from ‘Jurassic Park.’ ” She wanted me to remind her what his name was.
“Um, honey …. that was a hoax.”
She had incorrect information. That wasn’t her fault. She’s simply one person mildly interested in celebrity deaths.
Posts on Twitter had incorrect information. It wasn’t Twitter’s fault. It’s simply a communication and aggregation tool.
But if NewsOK had that same incorrect information, it most-definitely and most-deservedly would have been our fault.
Shotgun approach – browse new things on NewsOK
I used to write a weekly column that appeared in The Oklahoman. I would communicate with my readers (dozens and dozens of them) about things that were happening on NewsOK.com.
But there were some days when I just didn’t have something new and innovative to write about. On those days, I wrote about just about everything.
I called it the “shotgun approach.”
So … in honor of my former column, which is now a blog (welcome dozens of readers), here is the blog version of the shotgun column:
- Check out our Ongoing Coverage page. We launched it last week when we realized we had some great ongoing coverage pages that get lost in the shuffle.
- Check out our new Trooper-Paramedic scuffle page. We have all the stories, videos, documents and more to follow this story. We can’t seem to get enough of it.
- Bryan Painter’s weather blog is great stuff for people who want to know something unique about the weather every single day.
- Perhaps you missed our Scholar-Athletes page that we launched last Saturday. Jenni Carlson led the coverage, and we packaged all the nominees together in one spot.
- We also started a news quiz each Monday for the news consumers who love to test their knowledge. I get a perfect score every week.
Now, I’m off to vacation in Des Moines, IA. I will return to active posting for my dozens of readers on Monday.
Today is a day to learn new things on Twitter
Sometimes Twitter comes in real handy. Take today for example.
About one hour ago, our newest employee, Dane Beavers, posted a message on Twitter that I found very interesting. It was a link to a blog from STLToday.com reporting that Tony La Rusa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, was suing Twitter. Fascinating story … and good blogging from the experts at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I had to ‘reTweet.’
Then, just moments ago, Shaquille O’Neal (the one NBA player I’ve followed since his high school phenom days), posted a message on Twitter announcing to the world that he was rooting for his former teammate Kobe Bryant to win the championship this season. Bryant and the Lakers are in the NBA Finals against the Orlando Magic.
Since I’ve always rooted for Shaq, and his teams have always become my favorite teams, I found this equally fascinating – especially since the two players’ falling out probably cost each of them an opportunity for a couple more championships.
Equally interesting, was his, um, conversational tone
thats right i am saying it today and today only, i want kobe bryant to get number 4, spread da word
So there … I did it. I “spread da word.”
(To those who don’t follow the NBA or speak ‘Shaq’, “number 4″ refers to the championships Kobe will have if he wins another. He won three while playing with THE_REAL_SHAQ).
So those are two of the things I learned today on Twitter. But I learned much more. NewsOK, for example, has posted eight things today — everything from breaking news about Miley Cyrus to Berry Tramel’s latest blog post.
I might have missed any of those eight things without the stream of people I trust (namely, NewsOK) letting me know when something interesting comes across our desk.
So feel free and follow us on Twitter, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Comments now available on pharmacy shooting story
Our policy on comments on our articles is very clear.
It is not our intent to offer comments on crime or fatality stories.
It’s so clear that our users who regularly comment remind us of the policy if an article slips through the cracks. They know the policy as well as we do.
But sometimes, stories become bigger than a policy. Sometimes, the need to have a conversation exceeds the well-intentioned rule.
The Pharmacy Shooting story is the perfect example.
We were discussing the option of opening up the comments on this story yesterday. In the end, we launched a poll to allow users to weigh in on the subject.
Today, after seeing the interest continue to grow and the debate turning into a discussion about issues deeper than this one case, we knew we had to open a forum to let the voices of our audience be heard on this issue.
So we opened comments on this story on a separate page and embedded those comments on our ongoing coverage page of the story.
We want you to share your thoughts on this story. We know you have an opinion. It’s impossible not to have a unique viewpoint on this story.
But keep in mind the words of our Digital News Editor, Robb Hibbard, who wrote the intro to our commenting page for the pharmacy shooting:
Please note that commenters are expected to stay on topic and forward the conversation.
Simply put, we want this to be a place of intelligent discussion – not a place of threats and name-calling.
Wayman Tisdale topic page shows archived coverage
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.
