State of Addiction series has permanent home on NewsOK
If you picked up The Oklahoman or visited the NewsOK home page in the past week, you saw our weeklong series titled, “State of Addiction.”
It was a collaborative effort with the Tulsa World, Oklahoma Watch, State Impact Oklahoma, OETA, KWTV-9 and KGOU.
The series ended Sunday with three more stories, all of which can be found on our ‘State of Addiction’ page. We packaged all the coverage on NewsOK.com as part of our larger “Know It: Addiction” site that also contains the in-depth features we’ve written in recent years. The site also includes, among other things, a rich list of resources for those needing help for themselves or someone else.
On the State of Addiction page, we have 15 installments from the series, ranging from the March 12 piece about the extensive cost of addiction to our taxpayers to the March 17 piece about the number of court cases in Tulsa and Oklahoma counties that are related to drug or alcohol abuse.
Through the 15 installments, you’ll see links to the other news sources who produced the stories and all of the photos, videos and related links for the series.
Much of the collaborative effort can be found on each of the partners’ individual websites (linked in the second paragraph of this post), but all of it can also be found in order of the date they appeared in The Oklahoman on our State of Addiction page.
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.
Deaths, Trades and Oscars — a guaranteed week on NewsOK
It’s been a really busy week. But, really, they’re all busy these days.This week seemed especially long for me because we made a change that irked some of our users. But in the end, I had an opportunity to speak with dozens of customers who use our website every day. That makes for a busy, but very good week.
Women in Prison
Our series on Women in Prison took another big step this past weekend. One story in particular became very popular on the site, thanks to the viral nature of the Internet. It was actually a story by Ginnie Graham of the Tulsa World about “How $31 of pot gave mom a 10-year prison sentence.” You might ask why we published a full story by a Tulsa World reporter on our site (we often publish excerpts of daily articles and link to the World’s website for the full story). Well, the Women in Prison series is a journalistic endeavor from Oklahoma Watch, which is a non-profit, investigative and in-depth reporting team that collaborates with The Oklahoman, the Tulsa World and others. It’s a good series, and it underscores our goals here — to tell stories and share information that makes a difference in our community.
New Death Listings
And now to the fun part of the week. I’ve written in the past about changing the format of our daily death listings. It’s part of a project that has allowed our newsroom to gather statewide death listings in a more efficient manner. It’s all in a database, so we’re now displaying those listings that way on the website. What it means for the users, however, is that the listings don’t look like they’ve looked every day for years. Here was my message to our users. Here are some of their comments: (1) I don’t like your new death listing, IT STINKS!!! (2) Congratulations, the obit listing is now totally unusable! (3) the new method of listing deaths is not progress. It is now impossible to know who has passed on. There was much more, but you get the idea. I responded to everyone. I made a point to show people who don’t like a searchable, sortable listing with a deep archive that we still have a printable listing for today that looks like our old way of presenting the death listings. I received some positive feedback after that: (1) just wanted to tell you, i just tried, the print button, and saw all of the obits, towns, and arrangements. (2) Thank you Alan!!! I’ll give it a try. When you’re older you resist change to anything you’re comfortable with. I appreciation your response. (3) Thank you for your response. I used the print link and yes, it opened it up. I really appreciate your help. Here’s the bottom line. We still have some improvements to make. We need to make these listings more available to users on a mobile device. And we need to change some wording on the “print these listings” to make it more clear. But I’m happy that I was able to speak to some of the users that make our Obits page such a popular destination each day.
50 years ago today
I was sitting in a meeting on Monday morning. We were looking at our Today in History page when a conversation broke out about the main headline in the front page of the newspaper that we presented on Feb. 21, 1961. The headline we were discussing was, “84,000 Get Furlough From Struck Airlines.” We were all guessing what it was truly about. Here’s what I found out later by browsing The Oklahoman’s Archives: “Three of the nation’s biggest, businest airlines ordered a complete shutdown of operations Monday night as a result of a wildcat strike of flight engineers, the worst tieup in American aviation history.” The Archives are a fun resource.
Blake was back
Blake Griffin returned to Oklahoma City this week. Jenni Carlson wrote a great column about how we knew Blake before he was the fastest rising star in sports. And this video we had from a couple years ago with highlights of his collegiate greatness was a fun watch:
iPad pride
This is just a note to say how proud I am of The Oklahoman’s iPad edition. I read The Oklahoman every day on the iPad, and the information and experience we offer daily on that application is remarkable. Plus, we also have a Live Edition on the app that shows the stories we’re featuring on NewsOK at any given time. It’s worth checking out.
Don’t forget … we’re on the Kindle
We haven’t forgotten. We publish every day on the Amazon Kindle. One day this week, some of the characters in the edition were messed up, making some of the stories difficult to read. It was a problem we resolved quickly. But it did give me an opportunity to speak with another reader of our products. This time, it was subcrriber to our Kindle edition. She saw the problem Thursday morning and let me know about the issue. And then on Friday, she said this: “Friday’s edition of The Oklahoman on my kindle was fine. thank you for your prompt response and for notifying me.”
Thunder trade on text
I was having a conversation with some colleagues on another floor of our building on Thursday afternoon at about 2 p.m. I received a text on my phone that said, “OKC Thunder trades Jeff Green, Nenad Kristic to Boston Celtics….” Being a sports fan and Thunder supporter, I was shocked. I knew that we weren’t expecting a trade like this on the NBA trading deadline. But I was also thankful that I can count on NewsOK to let me know that it went down. All of it goes to show that being signed up for NewsOK’s text message alerts can come in handy. You learn things that are important to you when they happen.
Oscars coverage
The Academy Awards are this Sunday. And the NewsOK A&E group has been preparing all week with tons of articles, blogs and videos of our predictions, etc. And on Sunday night, we will be showing the live blogs of George Lang and Brandy McDonnell, just like we did for the Grammys. I can do without The Oscars show. The blogs? Those are entertaining. And it’s set up nicely with this video from Dave Morris and George Lang:
Scene & Hurd
I always like to introduce new blogs that join the NewsOK Blogging network. This week, I bring to you Scene & Hurd, from Elizabeth Hurd. Elizabeth brings you ‘News and reviews from the Oklahoma arts scene.” If you’re into the arts community in Oklahoma, please check out this new blog.
Live video
We don’t do a ton of live video, but when we do … our users like it. On Friday afternoon, we streamed the Oklahoma City Thunder news conference live on our NewsOK Thunder coverage page. It made for quite a page. As I listened to Thunder general manager Sam Presti describe the trades and answer questions about his team’s future, I read our own Darnell Mayberry’s live chat from earlier in the day. Darnell provided some amazing insight from his perspective.
Most-read article
The aforementioned article about “How $31 of pot gave mom a 10-year prison sentence” was the most-viewed article on the site this week. It wasn’t even close, really. But the second most-viewed article? That’s right … the aforementioned trade of Jeff Green and Nenad Kristic to the Boston Celtics for Kendrick Perkins and Nate Robinson.
Most-read blog post
I missed this blog post entirely this week. Berry Tramel takes the honor again for his post titled, “OU football: Don’t throw stones at Alabama.” Said Berry: “But this is a wink-wink deal. One of college football’s dirty little secrets. Players are expected to totally dedicate themselves in the offseason, when eight hours a week of supervised workouts are permitted, and in the summer, when no coaches are allowed and everything is supposed to be totally voluntary.” I don’t know how I missed this on Thursday, but it was worth my time today.
Most-watched video
Berry’s here again, this time with his and Jenni Carlson’s Press Row video analysis of the Thunder trades. They even had to use Studio C in our OPUBCO Studios, but they got it done — and they provided some great analysis.
NewsOK – the week of the winter storm
This has been a wild week on NewsOK. We braved the weather (many of us from our kitchen table or home offices). We covered another massive blizzard (by Oklahoma standards). And we informed hundreds of thousands interested customers (yes — we had a bunch of page views, too).
Time-lapse video
Web editor Dane Beavers got stuck in the snow outside the OPUBCO building on Britton and Broadway. It was 6:15 a.m. Tuesday. He called me to let me know he might be late in starting the live chat about the blizzard. It was a chat we were counting on him to moderate. “Drats!” I thought. “Now, I’ll have to launch the chat.” In the end, Dane booked it into the building and launched the chat as I fumbled through the admin console. I imagine his quarter-mile run into the building like he was a fugitive running from the law after a high-speed chase — you know, the car spins to a stop and he opens the door and bolts away. In truth, however, he probably didn’t have near that amount of spirit in his get-away. But he should be commended for his effort. He was one of six or seven people that were in our newsroom that morning.
So in honor of that effort, I will post his favorite video from our coverage. A time-lapse video of the snow. As he said: “This is the best!”
Photographers are the stars
The header here says it all. I was commending Dane on his efforts Tuesday morning (mostly because I turned back and went home a couple hours earlier after trying out the roads). But photo editor Doug Hoke was another brave journalist that got stuck outside the building as he tried to come to work. And members his photography staff — Nate Billings, Sarah Phipps and John Clanton — came up with the idea and produced the time-lapse video. Stars, I tell you. They’re all stars. John writes about it on the Alternate Crop blog.
Photos are the star
While professional photographers get the best images — the most striking images — of these events. The community at large paints an amazing picture. Check out the hundreds of photos we received to our email address — pics@newsok.com. You can also look at the hundreds of photos in The Oklahoman’s photo gallery from Tuesday and Wednesday. They take some incredible photos.
Traffic on NewsOK
We had a lot of page views this week. We basically doubled our normal page-view number each day Monday through Friday this week. The most popular pages (even more popular than our home page)? That’s right — the photo galleries that I linked above. People love snow photos.
Photo by David McDaniel, The Oklahoman
Class of 2011
If you follow college football, you probably turned your attention away from the bad weather on Wednesday to follow the national college football signing day. Yeah, we got lots of traffic for our winter weather coverage. But we got another big boost with college football signing day coverage on Wednesday. We had a special coverage page with details on all the players that signed to play at OU and Oklahoma State. We also had live chats with some of the players at scheduled times throughout the day. It was really stellar coverage, and the sports department should once-again be commended for such thorough coverage.
Berry’s post of the week
Berry Tramel had a great post this week, and it happened to be related to our college football signing day package. He asked the same question I’ve often asked out loud: “Who uses a fax machine anymore?” He even offered a link to a story the Wall Street Journal produced about the same topic. But the most interesting part was when he relayed sports editor Mike Sherman’s response to him in an email as they discussed the Wall Street Journal story: “Next time you say something brilliant, let’s do something brilliant with it.” Now that’s great insight on how stories are produced (or unfortunately, not produced, in this case) on a daily basis.
Making mobile work
I had the opportunity Friday to speak at the Oklahoma Press Association Mid-Winter Convention. I was part of a panel discussion about making news mobile. We discussed The Oklahoman’s iPad application, the series of iPhone apps we have and our general strategy and goals with mobile news delivery. But the real honor? We were the warm-up act for Gov. Mary Fallin, who spoke minutes after I left the stage. My colleague, Jay Spear, commented: “Funny how the room looks more full now than it did when we were up there.”
Fallin on the juvenile affairs
One of the things Mary Fallin was asked about after she spoke on Friday was the controversy at the Office of Juvenile Affairs. I don’t sit through many Q&As with the Governor, so I was quite interested in the exchange. Let’s face it, our coverage of the controversy is the kind of journalistic work that make me proud to be affiliated with NewsOK and The Oklahoman. The Governor said she hadn’t had a chance to meet with the agency director, yet, but that she was pleased that the bidding process was going through a thorough review.
Women in Prison
The Oklahoma Watch series on Women in Prison picked up speed this past weekend with three stories. The premise of the series: Oklahoma sends more women to prison than any other state on a per capita basis and has for 14 of the past 15 years. It begs the question “Why?” It should be a very interesting series, which is being led by the Oklahoma Watch non-profit group and worked on in conjunction with many of the state’s top media companies.
The week’s top article
The top article on NewsOK this week was the article from Tuesday about the woman who was killed in the sledding accident following the blizzard. That story contained most of the details regarding the storm that day, so it served as an overall weather story most of the day on Tuesday.
The week’s top video
This is well-deserved … it’s a video of Dave Morris interviewing weather blogger Bryan Painter who spent Monday night through Wednesday afternoon at the Emergency Operations Center. He did an incredible job of keeping Oklahomans up to date on NewsOK.com with his live blogging, his reporting for The Oklahoman and his live chatting on the site. Talk about coverage heroes — Bryan’s one of them:
Oklahoma Watch’s impact journalism launches with women in prison series
I will write much more about this in weeks to come, but I’d like to introduce it now …
What is this?
Well ….
Oklahoma Watch 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. Its mission is to provide an accurate, clear and insightful analysis of the facts on issues of public importance. Its multimedia and higher education partnerships will allow us to enhance its product and expand its reach to the greatest number of Oklahomans.
Oklahoma Watch is not directly affiliated with The Oklahoman and NewsOK. Nor is it directly affiliated with the Tulsa World or OETA or Griffin Communications or the Oklahoma Press Association.
But we are all partners in this first effort into non-profit journalism.
I will write more about this partnership as we begin publishing more in-depth stories about the first topic being covered by Oklahoma Watch — the Women in Prison series. Look for more on this topic in 2011.
