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.
NewsOK receives ‘Best Website’ honor from SNPA
You might have missed some news over the weekend with all the football fun in Texas and in Stillwater.
NewsOK was named the “Best Website” in its category by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.
I don’t blame you for overlooking this news on NewsOK. After all, it’s routine information — what with all the awards we’ve received in recent years. Plus, it’s the second consecutive year NewsOK was given this particular honor.
Here’s a note from one of the judges:
NewsOK ‘really stood out — due to the great thought and effort to present a good user experience. Articles had tons of links, photos and a lot had videos. The design is well-thought out and intuitive. This is a site that readers will love to visit.’
NewsOK and The Oklahoman were also honored in three other categories for the SNPA contest:
- Print Quality — placing second.
- Best Use of Multimedia for Static — placing third.
- Best Use of Multimedia for Places — honorable mention.
This week on NewsOK: New apps, updated apps and everything from Bennie Owen to Kendrick Perkins
Serving another iPad experience
We launched our custom iPad application for The Oklahoman last October. I wrote about it plenty, and we received quite a bit of national notoriety for this application. Since the launch in Oct. 2010, we opened the subscriptions up for all subscribers to The Oklahoman, as well as offering a la carte subscriptions for $9.99 per month. But we also launched a different iPad app with a completely different experience in the past month or so. This one gives readers a page-by-page experience on their iPad. In other words, it acts as an interactive PDF of the newspaper edition. Since we launched it, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback. The one review we have in the App store says this: “This is exactly what reading the paper electronically SHOULD be like.” That user is a true believer, but others prefer the customized tablet experience we had already built. Us? We honestly don’t care which application you use. We are simply trying to provide the best digital experiences possible for our users who continue to move their reading habits to new devices. The Oklahoma Print Replica app is just another option for you. And it’s free to all subscribers of The Oklahoman.
A weekend of rowing
Last weekend was a big weekend for the Oklahoma River with the USRowing Master’s National Championships in town. We had the event covered with a series of stories, photo galleries and videos. Dave Morris did a stellar job with a video recap of the event on Sunday. And the blog post from photographer John Clanton was top notch. Of course, the photos galleries were probably the most popular element of the weekend (NewsOK readers absolutely love photos).
Growing Oklahoma Watch coverage
We launched a third Oklahoma Watch page recently. Oklahoma Watch, you might remember, is a “non-profit, investigative and in-depth reporting team that collaborates with other news organizations and higher education to produce journalism that makes a difference in the lives of Oklahomans.” We launched a page on NewsOK late in 2010 as we began our combined Women in Prison series with Oklahoma Watch. And recently, we started Oklahoma Watch pages on Tax Credits and on Immigration. It’s all found on our Oklahoma Watch page. But more than anything, it’s proof of what we think our role is here … the continued focus on serious issues is something that we at The Oklahoman and NewsOK are committed to.
The Kendrick Perkins saga
The Kendrick Perkins saga has been pretty interesting this week. It began on Saturday, when news from Beaumont, Texas, came out with information about Kendrick Perkins being arrested early that morning. It was a misdemeanor, but it didn’t look good. Jenni Carlson wrote a column about it, pointing out exactly how it didn’t look so good. “But to be an NBA player in your hometown doing a youth camp and raising money for life-skills and drug-awareness training for kids, to be arrested less than 24 hours after going to the hospital and being told to cool it, to blow off a charity game and a camp banquet to then go out to a club and get arrested, that is plain dumb.” Darnell Mayberry followed up with reports from the Perkins camp saying that he’s innocent and he wants to clear his name: “‘He was not drinking alcohol, nor was he intoxicated,’ said White, CEO and founder of EAG Sports Management. ‘Not one drop of alcohol Friday night. We’re not sure why they said Kendrick was intoxicated.‘ ” It’s interesting, and NewsOK will have it all covered. What else are we going to do … cover NBA games during a lockout?
This just in — I have a favorite app
I’ve had my iPad for about six months now. I love it. This week, I finally decided on my absolute favorite app. It’s one I downloaded months ago but never really used on a regular basis. This week, I opened the MLS MatchDay 2011 app and realized how much information it gave to soccer fans of the top U.S. league. Granted, I don’t follow the league that closely, but I casually follow what’s happening in Major League Soccer. And if central Oklahoma would have joined the league with a team in 2004 (check the NewsOK archives for history on that), I would have been following the league very closely. As it is, I just felt I should share that for its functionality and content, the MLS Match Day app is my favorite.
NewsOK TV video worth seeing each day
NewsOK TV is a show that Dave Morris and Angi Bruss have been doing for the past month or so. It’s always a great recap on what people are talking about every day.
Download our videos on NewsOK.tv app
Speaking of NewsOK TV, I highly recommend finding and downloading our NewsOK TV app for your iPhone. We updated the app with new functionality on Aug. 10, and it’s definitely worth a look. Check out the iTunes app store for the latest upgrade. It’s all you need to see every video that we produce at NewsOK.
A trip through The Oklahoman archives
Bennie Owen
I received this question from a NewsOK user this week: “I’m looking for an article … that was printed in 1969. Do you know if the online paid subscription archive would go back that far. Thank you for your time.” My answer: “I would recommend using our archives for The Oklahoman. We should have everything you are looking for dating back to 1901. The link is available on the NewsOK home page sub-navigation.” The Oklahoman’s archives are a real treasure that are sometimes overlooked. Just for fun, I did a quick search for Bennie Owen (I wanted to be sure I could find some I ended up with a long list of stories. After all, Bennie Owen is a legendary football coach at OU and the namesake of the field at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Here is just one item I found – a notes column from Charles J. Brill that included a passionate plea to make Owen the athletic director at the school. I love reading old columns from our archives. You’d enjoy it, too.
‘Know it’ all about the state quarterbacks
We launched two new know it pages this week in preparation for the football season. You can now read everything you need to know about OU quarterback Landry Jones and OSU quarterback Brandon Weeden. We can only hope there’s no know it curse, though. Two years ago, we launched pages for Sam Bradford and Zach Robinson. Bradford was injured in the first game. Robinson’s numbers fell short of legendary ‘know it’ status. We wish better ‘know it’ luck to Jones and Weeden.
Most-viewed video
Get ready for a steady diet of Berry Tramel and college football. We start with the most-viewed video this week:
Most-viewed article
The most-viewed article this week was Berry Tramel’s column about the Sooners and their future conference affiliation: OU wants no part of the SEC.
Most-viewed blog
Berry led the blog charge this week. This was also about college football: Big 12 football: Houston is no solution.
Most-viewed photo gallery
The gallery is more than a week old, but it still was popular this week. It was the photo gallery we created to go with our obituary of legendary OU quarterback Jimmy Harris. It should be noted, of course, that the primary column that the gallery was linked to was Berry Tramel’s column: The quarterback who never lost.
Facebook commenting enabled on LOOKatOKC articles
We’re trying something different with our comments on the new LOOKatOKC website. Instead of using the traditional NewsOK commenting functionality, we’re going to try Facebook’s commenting.
That means users must log in with a Facebook profile to be able to comments on an article within the LOOKatOKC template.
We’re interested to hear feedback on this move. It’s a experiment, plain and simple.
- Will it increase the functionality for people commenting on LOOKatOKC articles?
- Will it help keep users engaged? Once a user submits a comment, they will receive an Facebook alert when someone replies to that comment.
- Will it increase traffic? Users will be able to post their comment directly to their Facebook feed if they choose to.
- Will it improve the tone of our comments? The theory is that comments will be attached to an online profile rather than a NewsOK profile that is often anonymous. It’s no secret what we’ve learned through the years — anonymity can create irresponsibility in online comments.
We launched this functionality on June 28. We expect to experiment with this for a few weeks and then determine its success. It might become a permanent feature. We might expand its use to other areas of NewsOK. We might just remove it.
Let us know what you think. And in the meantime, read all the other posts in recent years I’ve had about our comments.
See downloadable PDF edition for LOOKatOKC swimsuit special
The LOOKatOKC Swimsuit edition has been a pretty big hit.
It should come as no surprise that the annual swimsuit page is traditionally the most popular LOOKatOKC page each year.
I blogged about it when it launched, and I blogged about how the individual articles were leading the charge in our most-viewed articles.
But I have not yet blogged about the special iPad edition PDF that we created for users to download and take with them.
We have done some special PDF editions of special editions in the past — the 2011 Outlook edition and the special nDepth presentation for “A Thousand Hail Marys to Florida.”
This one has not been featured with our iPad edition of The Oklahoman, mostly because it’s not a product of The Oklahoman. To download this special PDF edition, just visit our 2011 LOOKatOKC Swimsuit Edition page and scroll to the bottom to see the special PDF promotion.
I recommend using your iPad to download it and saving it to your iBooks application. But you can use your desktop computer to download it, as well.
LOOKatOKC swimsuit issue has arrived
The LOOKatOKC swimsuit edition is here.
And we have a special web page devoted to the interviews, galleries and poll. You can vote for the 2011 model of the year after browsing all the photo galleries of all 14 girls that are featured this year.
What else are you going to do on slow news days in June?
Go ahead and click. You know you’re going to eventually, anyway.
Nolan Clay shares latest info on Jerome Ersland verdict and the jurors
Nolan Clay has been covering the Jerome Ersland and the Pharmacy Shooting saga since it began in May 2009.
This weekend, he had a great piece about the jurors on the case who have spoken out. Here’s one excerpt about one of the jurors:
She said she has been around conversations criticizing the verdict. “I never said I was on the jury. I would just sit there, keep my mouth closed and feel like I was turning red in the face. It was like, ‘Oh, my gosh! Here they are talking bad about me and they don’t even know it.’ It was very odd,” she said.
We took the opportunity with this story to link the uncut police interrogation of Jerome Ersland the night of the shooting. That video is almost 30 minutes long, but it’s quite interesting.
We have a lot of content on this story, and we’ll continue to add everything on our Ongoing Coverage page on this subject. Nolan will be sure to let the world know when he has more information to share in the aftermath of the verdict and Ersland’s incarceration.
‘Passages’ information found on NewsOK
A couple of weeks ago, we launched our “Passages” page to cover the biblical exhibit that’s running at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art through Oct. 16.
The page has all the stories we’ve written about the planning and opening of the exhibit, plus a good video with Angi Bruss as she previewed the exhibit with Hobby Lobby President Steve Green.
The photo gallery is another nice element that gives a good preview of what you can expect when you visit.
Wildfires, Bob Stoops, Justin Bieber and the OKC skyline
Oklahoma wildfires
I must start this week’s review with our intense coverage on Friday of all the grass fires in Oklahoma. Reporters, photographers and editors did what they love on Friday — they delivered important information that the community needed and wanted. We saw a huge spike in traffic Friday afternoon, which is normal for big news like 30 wildfires in the state.
Serving up education news
We have had quite a year in education news this year — from a combustible state Board of Education to a controversy in the Mid-Del district. On Sunday, we shared a story and a database that really added to our already deep year in education coverage. Megan Rolland and Tricia Pemberton reported on the combined salaries of superintendents in Oklahoma school districts. Database editor Paul Monies helped produce a database of all superintendents in Oklahoma and their salaries. You can see all the Education coverage with our special education news page on NewsOK.
Football appetizer
It’s March. It’s not football season. But when OU coach Bob Stoops takes a jab at Oklahoma State, it’s news. And that’s why we had this story on Tuesday afternoon. Stoops just said a few words … “You see we got another championship banner up? It’s not a South Division one, either.” … but it’s all the fans need to keep them busy until August.
A vote for letters to the editor
We don’t give our Letters to the Editor enough credit. They are often a good read — well worth the time it takes to browse through them once a day. If you read this each week, you know that I’ve written plenty about our comments on our articles. I like our comments; I support their continued use by the customers who use them each day. But there’s something to be said about the requirements behind the letters to the editor we run on NewsOK (via The Oklahoman’s Opinion page). Authors are putting their verified identification behind every statement they make in this public forum. Frankly, I support users to participate in the conversation in any way they are most comfortable. But the letters are an interesting read when we post them. You can find them daily on our home page just below our top stories along the left side of the page.
You can’t make this stuff up
Each week, we always have some interesting stories with some odd twists. This week was no different, especially on Wednesday. That day, the crime reporting team had stories of two homicide victims. Both appeared to have been killed under unusual circumstances — so unusual, in fact, that you absolutely know that we would never make this stuff up! See the stories here … Police identify Oklahoma City homicide victim … and here … Woman ordered to trial in death of Oklahoma City man.
Oklahoma City skyline history
We featured an old gallery in our Multimedia Showcase this week. It’s old because it was created more than three years ago. But it’s also old because it contains photos from decades ago. Our users appeared to enjoy it, if web traffic is any indication. You should check out the gallery of historic photos of the Oklahoma City skyline for yourself.
State basketball fun
Our sports staff covered the Oklahoma state high school basketball tournaments from beginning to end for two straight weeks. It finally ends on Saturday (March 12), when the final stories, galleries, videos and scoreboards are updated. You can find it all on our high school basketball tournament coverage page. I’ve updated every story on this page in year’s past; I know exactly how difficult it is to get so much information on one page, so we created separate pages for the boys tournaments, the girls tournaments and the full scoreboards for boys and girls.
A blog for the arts audience
Two weeks ago, I mentioned our new blogger, Elizabeth Hurd, and her new blog — Scene & Hurd. Elizabeth was kind enough to leave a comment on that post. Here’s what it said: “Alan, thanks for promoting scene & hurd. I am hoping this blog becomes more than just a place where I post reviews of what I have seen, but a blog that artists and audienc can exchange ideas. thanks!”
Commenting experiment
We’re experimenting a little bit with Jenni Carlson’s blog. Jenni’s an outstanding reporter, she’s terrific on our videos and she’s a standout blogger in our network. We wanted to see how her readers would react to using Facebook profiles to post comments to her blog posts. So, for now, the only way to comment on her blog is to log in through your Facebook account. Check it out. Let me know what you think. Email me here: aherzberger@newsok.com.
Most-viewed article
Remember that football appetizer I mentioned earlier in this post? Yeah, that was the most-viewed article of the week. It wasn’t close this week
Most-viewed blog
Brandy McDonnell took the award again this week. This time, she got some help from Justin Bieber, so it wasn’t really fair. Her post on Tuesday was titled, “Rascal Flatts’ Joe Don Rooney: Justin Bieber’s ‘got a huge future ahead of him’.” Rascal Flatts worked with Bieber and gained a lot of respect for him. Justin Bieber liked it, too. It was posted on his Facebook Fan page for all his fans to see, including the 22,936 fans who ‘liked’ it.
Most-watched video
And now … back to Oklahoma football:
A week well spent on NewsOK
See below for another week of news and notes as NewsOK navigated another week in 2011.
Darnell just a little off his prediction
Thunder beat writer Darnell Mayberry held his weekly live chat on NewsOK on Monday. Shortly after the chat, we posted an article with the highlights from the chat. The headline? Darnell Mayberry: 99.9 percent chance Kendrick Perkins signs long term with OKC Thunder. It became the most-viewed article on the site that afternoon. Then, take a guess what happened the next day? This headline happened: Thunder signs Kendrick Perkins to extension. Yep. Darnell missed it. We had an uncomfortable meeting with him late Tuesday afternoon. He needs to be more accurate. Obviously, he should have said it was a 100-percent chance. (That’s a joke.) But here’s the take-away. Darnell knows what he’s talking about. Here’s the other take-away. Participate in Darnell’s live chat every Monday to find out what will happen on Tuesday.
Ed Godfrey joins our personalities
We added another personality to our list this week. Welcome outdoors expert Ed Godfrey to our family of personality pages on NewsOK.com. You can find his blog posts, his columns, his articles, his Twitter posts and even like him on Facebook. And check him out each month (the first Friday of each month) for a live chat that he does on NewsOK, hosted by and sponsored by H&H Gun Range.
Another complaint about comments
I received a message this week from a user who was not happy about our commenting policy on NewsOK. “What’s with all the commenting disabled crap? No wonder you people are going out of business.” I explained it to him (but I did not address the false claim that a changing business model is the same as ‘going out of business’) … “We routinely disable comments on articles about fatalities and on local crime stories. That’s a decision we made years ago in an effort to maintain a constructive and civil dialogue. And we’ve disabled comments on articles where the discourse has become increasingly destructive. We are unable to moderate every comments on every article, so we rely on user moderation. At times, even that becomes unmanageable. Is there a particular article you were referring to?” This did not please him, and he brought up another news outlet in our state (one that we share content with, but not every business decision with) : “Then why does Tulsa World not have this problem. I have noticed it on more than just fatality stories. Just forget it. I see why newspapers are going under.” I share this interchange just to prove that I can’t please every unhappy customer. If you want to see what I’ve written about our comments in the past, just go here.
OKC Skyline cam angle
We received a couple of messages from customers on our site that want to see a better view from our camera that keeps an eye on the Devon tower. One didn’t like the view we showed of the sky or the one that pointed down. Another didn’t like the view of the completed middle section. Frankly, that tower keeps growing on us, and moving the camera to get a perfect angle is difficult. We rotate among several angles, and depending on when you are looking and what they’ve completed, the view you see might not be your favorite. All that said, we will work to improve that experience.
Best OK Tweeter!
I was forwarded this link this week: Political analyst Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post apparently named our own NewsOK Politics twitter feed as the best political tweeter in Oklahoma. My response? Actually, I’m quite happy that we’re providing good analysis for those around the country. My other response? When I graduated from journalism school in 1997, I never expected that 14 years later I would be honored to receive an email with the subject line, “best ok tweeter.”
Bombing site worth another look
We had a story this week about former President George W. Bush being honored with the 2011 Reflections of Hope Award by the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. That gave us an opportunity to drive readers to our Oklahoma City Bombing archive website, something we probably don’t do enough of. I don’t really know what to say about this site, other than that I recommend everyone visiting it. I’m humbled to have been able to work on that site a few years back. It’s a site I expect we will always have room for on our servers.
Live-blogging the Oscars
Brandy McDonnell and George Lang covered the Academy Awards last Sunday night about as well as any duo of entertainment experts in Oklahoma can cover it. Their blogs were entertaining and informative. And the best thing about them? If you didn’t get a chance to follow them on Sunday night, they still make a good read a week later. Check out Brandy’s here. See George’s here.
New sponsor for BAM
We’d like to welcome the Oklahoma City Museum of Art as a presenting sponsor of Brandy McDonnell’s blog. The OKCMOA picked a good one … Brandy’s BAM blog has been the most-popular blog on NewsOK for about three years now. You can also find the museum’s sponsorship on Brandy’s columns in the Weekend Look every Friday.
Shooting video
We had a tough judgment call this week when we received the dash-cam video of the police officers in Perry shooting a motorist who exited his car and moved toward the officers in a threatening manner. We had the article on the site, but the video really told the story. It showed the man acting as if he was holding a gun and acting as though he was about to fire. The video also shows the man going down after officers opened fire. We chose the show the entire video because it documents the chase, the man’s actions and the speed with which the entire event went down. Showing the entire video allows the user to see and evaluate everything about the public servants’ actions. It shows our users Exactly how quickly officers have to make a decision. It also shows how deadly those split-second decisions are. We received a few complaints that I’m aware of. That’s understandable. These kinds of decisions are always hard to make.
Something extra for iPad readers
We offered our iPad edition subscribers something a little extra this week — downloadable PDF documents of the state basketball tournament brackets. It was a test as we enter basketball tournament season for both college and high school basketball. You can expect more documents like that in the future. And you can expect that experience to improve. But the bottom line is that we aim to continue to improve the experience for our iPad edition subscribers.
Election night in OKC
Tuesday night was a big night for followers of local politics. The Oklahoma City Council members were chosen, as well as many other important decisions around the metro area. All the results can be found on our NewsOK Politics election results page. That’s a good thing. What was even better is that these results could be found on NewsOK on Tuesday night shortly after the polls closed. As soon as we knew the results, so did our readers. No one covers elections and local politics like we do. Just look at our NewsOK Politics page. We think it’s important.
Most-viewed article
The most-viewed article this week was a little different that what we normally expect, but that’s a very good thing. We had a story about holiday offers at Walmart that were excluded in Oklahoma. Reporter Jennifer Palmer did a nice job explaining the issue. Yahoo! picked up the story and linked to it from their home page, which gave Jennifer’s report a nice lift and pushed it to be our move-viewed article on NewsOK this week.
Most-viewed video
The most-viewed video this week was a sports video. The new players for the Oklahoma City Thunder were interviewed on Saturday morning about their feelings about their trade. It was our first introduction to Kendrick Perkins, Nate Robinson and Nazr Mohammed. Thunder fans were interested.
Most-viewed blog post
Darnell’s post about Kendrick Perkins signing a new deal with the Thunder came close this week, but it was no match for Brandy McDonnell’s post about Mila Kunis and Amy Adams. I don’t really know much about Mila Kunis and Amy Adams, but they are both prettier than Kendrick Perkins. Maybe next week, Kendrick.
