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.
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:
Weather preparation, sports page success and Huey Lewis highlight a week on NewsOK
I haven’t blogged recently. I’ve been saving it up for posts like this. Frankly, I’ve been so inspired by Darnell Mayberry’s thoughts about each Thunder game he covers (or even watches when he’s off duty) that I thought I’d try a similar approach with NewsOK.com.
Enjoy.
- Our sports section received high praise over the holidays. NewsOK’s sports coverage was ranked among the 10 best in the nation. It’s the second straight year for this honor. Want to know how great this honor is? We’re in the same company as The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe. Said sports editor Mike Sherman: “Whether it’s a story in The Oklahoman or a blog or video on NewsOK, we know we’re serving one of the nation’s most energized sports audiences. We’re honored that the APSE judges have liked what we’ve done for two straight years.”
- Bryan Painter has been all over the weather this week. Of course, he’s always all over the weather. His blog — aptly titled the “Oklahoma Weather Blog” — always ranks among our most popular blogs. He was the first to tell me this week that I better get my kids bundled up for the bus stop next week. Or maybe I’ll just drive them to the bus stop? We’ll see how it goes. But I’ll rely on Bryan’s blog to keep me up-to-date. Bryan blogs this stuff all while keeping up with all his other assignments. He’s a busy guy. We’re not sure when Bryan sleeps, but we’re smart enough not to ask.
- I was on the NewsOK Travel page earlier in the week. Yes, we have lots of great stories. But the blogs we keep on that page are really good. That’s why I re-built the page to showcase our two most worldly bloggers and give their content better treatment. Steve Barrymore writes “The Wanderer” blog. Steve used to work as an advertising manager at OPUBCO Communications Group. Now he seems to spend most of his time in various spots in Central and South America. Katya Kruglak writes “The Dusty Globe” blog. Their visits around the world are amazing. I don’t travel a whole lot and don’t really feel a great pull to travel a whole lot. But I’m certainly impressed by those who do.
- Steve Lackmeyer had an entertaining OKC Central blog post about Effie, The Skirvin and ESPN’s Bill Simmons. It’s worth a read, especially since Steve calls out Bill and openly questions his report. Said Steve: “Mr. Simmons, I’m calling you out. You’re dabbling in fiction writing with your latest BS report.”
- The political corruption story of the year got more interesting this week when Randy Terrill and Debbe Leftwich turned themselves in and appeared in court. It was all reported by Nolan Clay, who is great at covering these things — asking the right questions and getting the answers you want to know. The good news is that NewsOK has an ongoing coverage page that details this entire story. It’s a fascinating tale, and it will be even more interesting as it goes to trial. You just can’t make this stuff up.
- We’ve really improved our e-mail newsletters, and we’re adding some new ones very soon. If you organize your life with e-mail, I suggest signing up for our e-mail newsletters. We send out general news e-mails twice every day, but we also send e-mails for sports, business, entertainment and more. We’ll soon be adding daily obituary e-mails and weekly MOOD e-mails. Check out the options on our settings page — but remember you have to be logged in to sign up for these e-mails. And your registration e-mail address is the address these e-mails will go to.
- One hidden gem on NewsOK this week was Carrie Coppernoll’s column about her experience of being scammed in a store parking lot around the holidays. She asks: “How can we be compassionate to those who need help while stopping those who take advantage of kindness?” But she doesn’t just ask. She answers: “By asking the experts.” You might ask why you didn’t see this column on the home page. Well … it’s admittedly one of our biggest challenges with our website. We have so much great content that it’s hard to play everything up at the top of the home page. In our defense however, it’s only been a problem for about 15 years for about every news website that’s ever been invented.
- I read a great blog by Jenni Carlson on Thursday. It was a tale about Nebraska coach Bo Pelini and his recent public relations fiasco. I love the insight of our bloggers. The content on our sports blogs continues to impress me as a digital managing editor. But that’s nothing, really. The thing that’s really awesome is that it informs and entertains me as a sports news consumer.
- On Thursday and early Friday, we were playing up another odd turn in the Pharmacy Shooting ongoing coverage. The latest story from Nolan Clay expands on the claims that the judge on the case has made numerous disparaging and racist remarks about Hispanics. Should he be removed from the case? The defense thinks so. The judge doesn’t think so. Of course, the defense attorney’s wife is one of those who has testified against the judge. That’s an interesting twist. But the judge even admits to having said some things he shouldn’t have said. It’s like I said earlier — you just can’t make this stuff up.
- Our entertainment staff put together their annual top 10 movies of the year this week. They have a wide variety of opinions, so it’s always fun to see how each of them rank the movies. Gene Triplett, Brandy McDonnell, Matt Price, George Lang and Dennis King all pick a top 10 of the year. None of them had “True Grit” as No. 1. I would have. But I pretty much only saw three movies this year (that’s why I didn’t have a top 10 list). I can say this: When I do have a chance to go see a movie, I make sure to read our reviews of the films. I’m not going to waste my rare movie-going opportunities on something the experts don’t like.
- Here is George’s video with NewsOK TV’s Angi Bruss. It’s good stuff:
- Yes — I would, if given the chance, go see “Country Strong,” even though Brandy obviously doesn’t recommend it. It’s a shame. But I’ll give Gwyneth Paltrow the benefit of the doubt. After all, she did a duet with the great Huey Lewis that put him back in the spotlight for a month or so a few years back. That was awesome. (You read that right … I wrote the “great” Huey Lewis.)
Until next week, enjoy browsing NewsOK.com.
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.
It’s Christmas time on NewsOK
Every year, we have one.
Christmas. It’s on Dec. 25. I memorized that.
So every year, NewsOK has one.
The NewsOK Christmas page. It on our list of things to do around Thanksgiving.
On the NewsOK Christmas page we have every:
- Article about Christmas
- News video related to Christmas
- Shopping video for holiday gifts.
- wimgo event related to the holidays
- Gift Guide that we’ve printed
- Interactive graphics from the Associated Press
Basically, we have everything you need to know about Christmas in Oklahoma. We’ll be placing the link to the page at the top of NewsOK often over the course of the next several weeks. But you can always find it by simply going to NewsOK.com/Christmas.
Enjoy.
A look back at election night 2010
We covered the 2010 Elections on Tuesday night.
It was a full newsroom, hopping with reporters, editors, copy editors, etc. The phones were ringing off the hook, colleagues were yelling instructions to each other across the room, and the constant tapping of keyboards provided a settling background.
There was a buzz in the air. And there was pizza in the break room. (Generally, when there’s a palpable buzz and an aroma or pepperoni in the air, you can bank on it — journalism is being practiced in the vicinity.)
And the good news for NewsOK is that our web traffic peaked between the hours of 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on election night.Usually, our traffic dips in the evening hours, but that wasn’t the case on Tuesday. Sure, we could have predicted that, but it’s always good to see that news consumers know where to go to find our what they want to find out.
In the case of Tuesday night, it was the live election results, which we had as they were released.
For both Tuesday’s live coverage and Wednesday’s aftermath coverage, NewsOK’s traffic was about double that of a normal weekday.
You can check out all the results, all the stories, all the videos, all the photos and all the analysis on our 2010 Elections page.
It’s still getting pretty good traffic, even two days later.
Enjoy browsing with a slice of cold pizza.
Static site takes a step up as we enter Season 3
I pause on this election evening (check out our 2010 Election coverage, by the way) to tell you about the cool new site we launched last week.
I’ve written about this before. It’s called Static. It’s worth another look today because we’ve redesigned and now have the site ready for another run of new interviews and studio performances.
Static is full of one-of-a-kind video interviews with local and notable musicians by our own George Lang (hence the name, Static). Pretty much everything George does is centered on the Static brand. And he is truly a one-of-a-kind entertainment journalist.
George has been doing Static for more than two years. Now that we have so many, we knew we had to redesign the site to showcase the three seasons of great content.
The site is growing, and it’s only going to get better. Check it out.
(This is just one of the videos. You really must see the site.)
Inspiring Couples series on NewsOK a good example of great story-telling
I came across the most recent article in our “Inspiring Couples” series last week.
Jim and Robin Riley
It was a piece about Jim and Robin Riley of Edmond. Jim is a former University of Oklahoma and NFL football player who had lived a hard life during and after his playing career.
But, the morning of July 16, 1985, the Rileys began a new life, in which they would discover true love and their purpose in life. That morning, Jim awoke to find a dozen close friends, along with family, in the living room of the couple’s Edmond home.
I often write about hidden gems found deep within the NewsOK family of pages. The “Inspiring Couples” is one of those gems. The series is linked by the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative’s “Forever. For Real.” project and its calendar featuring the same couples we’re featuring.
It’s all great stuff and a good cause. But here is what I like most about this series:
It’s the great story-telling — the articles and videos. Through our interviews, reporting and writing, I as a news consumer get to know these every-day Oklahomans and understand their stories.
That’s what we do best.
