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.
‘Oklahoma Idol’ series amuses, entertains, informs
I clicked on the video above from the NewsOK home page this morning.
Classic stuff. Quality entertainment.
Now I see what sports editor Mike Sherman has been talking about. This stuff is a bit different. You can’t help but be part amused, part shocked, part horrified — but completely entertained and informed.
Yes … in this one three-minute clip, we see Gerald McCoy profess his love for Sam Bradford (see ’shocked’) and Adrian Taylor sing country music (see ‘horrified’).
You can see the entire series this season on the College Football Preview page on NewsOK. It’s a page based on the theme of “Oklahoma Idol” and it has all the preview stories and videos for the college football season. We’ll be adding more amusing, shocking and horrifying videos from the players and our Idol hosts throughout the season.
Maybe we’ll eventually get to hear Mike Sherman sing. I’ve heard it before … all previously used adjectives can properly describe that experience.
Interest increases in Anadarko church killing coverage on NewsOK
Monday was a big day for NewsOK.com in terms of page views.
The program for the funeral of Carol Daniels is pictured in Oklahoma City on Aug. 31, 2009. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
We had a story that simply went off the charts on our Top Ten Most-Viewed Articles page. The story was written by reporter Nolan Clay, and it first appeared in The Oklahoman on Sunday. It contained details about the death of Oklahoma City pastor in the Anadarko church. the details are chilling, indeed – which is precisely why the traffic was so high on the story.
The Drudge Report picked up the story and linked to it from its Web site, bringing hundreds of thousands of intrigued internet browsers to NewsOK.com. The Drudge Report links to us fairly often (once a month or so) – and that’s a compliment, I’m sure. It means we often have stories that have a wide interest. And it means we often have reporters that will not stop until they can give readers the information they want.
We built an Ongoing Coverage page to The Anadarko Church Killing so we can properly allow interested visitors to browser the history of the story. We are also allowing comments to be shared on this story – a step we’ve taken in the past for stories in which we feel the public demand for conversation outweighs our stated intentions on our commenting policy.
Perhaps most importantly, you can share your condolences with friends and family of Carol Daniels in her online guestbook on NewsOK.
Take time to see all the articles, graphics, videos and comments about this ongoing story. Nobody has been arrested yet, but I can guarantee that we will cover this story thoroughly until we know the resolution
NewsOK launches new high school sports coverage page — Varsity
High school football practices started last week.
It was Tuesday, to be exact. That was also the same day we launched our new initiative in covering high school sports better than anyone else.
It’s called Varsity, and the main idea is this – we are putting sports reporters on specific coverage areas and blogging about those schools every day. We aren’t structuring our high school sports coverage around events and sports anymore. Instead, we are focusing our coverage in the same ways the fans focus their interests – the schools.
The new coverage solution comes directly from the mind of sports editor Mike Sherman, who hatched his plan early this summer. From there, NewsOK web editors Nick Tankersley and Dane Beavers thought about how to leverage our existing blogs to best accomplish our goals. Add some designers, some marketing professionals and some strong developers, and poof — Varsity is born.
You’ll see that Sherman has thought a lot about how to organize his team of reporters. There are specific pages and specific blogs for all the largest areas of interest around Oklahoma City, plus pages that coverage private schools, Oklahoma City schools (including Douglass, Star Spencer and Millwood) and all the rest (including powerhouse programs like Guthrie to the north, Washington to the south, Clinton to the west and Jenks and Union to the east).
And we’re not done. We will be adding more functionality in the coming weeks. You’ll see the ability to upload your photos, the ability to post to eh page using Twitter and the most updated team and player stats in the state.
In the meantime, become a fan of Varsity on Facebook or follow our blogging network on Twitter.
New Viva Oklahoma! releases this week
The latest edition of Viva Oklahoma! was released on Sunday.
You can see the Web site at all times from the link on the NewsOK sub-navigation under Home. Or you can simply bookmark http://www.vivaoklahoma.com.
I used to work on this publication each month, while I was the Director of Custom Publishing here at OPUBCO Communications Groups. I understand how hard the passionate people who write, organize and design the product work to make it happen.
And I’ve seen it steadily improve since I changed roles in October of 2008. I know the team that focuses on Viva Oklahoma! works diligently to build partnerships in the Latino community in Oklahoma City so that it can make a positive impact and offer important information and advertising that is useful to people within the community.
The Guide to a Strong and Healthy Oklahoma book is a fine example of that. The book has been printed in Spanish and is currently available at newsstands where you can find Viva Oklahoma! The book full of health information for Oklahomans is featured on this month’s cover of Viva Oklahoma!
You can see the entire publication in PDF form on the Viva Oklahoma! home page, or you can simply browse our articles, photos and videos.
‘Life is Real – Writing the Final Chapters’ series continues with blogs from Jim Chastain and Charlotte Lankard
A couple of weeks ago, The Oklahoman ran its final chapters of the “Jim Chastain: Life is Real” series.
The good news is that the series ends with Jim continuing the fight and living with cancer. And our page on NewsOK, complete with Jim’s blog will continue on.
Reporter Ken Raymond shared his thoughts with a story that ran in The Oklahoman and on NewsOK:
After the last chapter that I wrote, the Chastains decided they didn’t want to subject themselves to that scrutiny anymore. The last story talked about displaced anger. When people are upset about something they can’t control, such as a dying spouse or father, they tend to direct their anger and helplessness at other targets, ones that are easier to hit. It happened in my family twice: first when my Dad died of pancreatic cancer and second when my Mom died, years later, of breast and lung cancer. It didn’t do any good to yell at the cancer, so we yelled at each other.
It’s true stuff. It’s real. But it’s not very pretty.
Our columnist Charlotte Lankard, who is also a close friend of Jim’s, shared her thoughts in our final chapter as well:
None of us should be surprised then that Jim’s family has found living in a fish bowl for the entire world to see uncomfortable, unsettling and invasive. They have made a significant contribution to this dialogue, but now they have asked to pull back a bit from the spotlight – and we will honor that.
Charlotte will also continue blogging as the series goes on.
You can read the blogs and share your thoughts with each of them. Ken’s blog will continue to be archived on the page, as will the previous chapters and the videos from videographer/photgrapher John Clanton.
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.
Share your hog rally experience live with the world on NewsOK
You might not know about it right now, but I have a funny feeling you’re going to become very aware of it before the weekend is over.
The Bricktown H.O.G. Rally (Harley Owners Group) is this weekend (Friday and Saturday) in various areas of Oklahoma City. We built a special page to cover the event on NewsOK.com. There’s also plenty of details about the event on wimgo.
But the primary purpose of this blog post is to have you send us your photos of the event as you snap them over the weekend. We’ve partnered with Share it Live – an iPhone application which was developed and is managed by our own development professionals at OPUBCO Communications Group. We’ve used the API for the application to build embedded functionality on NewsOK.com.
Now, you can post photos on our Hog Rally page or you can upload them through the Share it Live iPhone application. We hope you do a little of both. But we really encourage you to download the application to your iPhone so you can get used to sharing your images in that way.
We want to see how uploaded photos can help us tell the story of an event like this. We know Share it live is a simple way to share photos. It makes sense for us to use that functionality on NewsOK.com.
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.
The interns are in the building (and out covering the news)
It’s early summer, and the interns – the future of journalism – are in the building.
Check out all of their work on our Interns page on NewsOK, where you can see the bios of the young people that are working for us this summer. You can also see a map from where they are coming to us from, plus links to their blogs and their Twitter accounts.
I had a chance to speak with these young journalists last week, and they are truly a sharp bunch. They have lots of ideas about NewsOK — how to make it better and how to make our social media efforts better.
We’re all ears. I’ll be keeping an eye on this page to see what they are covering,, and how they are covering it.
