Places – exploring interesting spots in Oklahoma
Last week, we launched a project on NewsOK that has a simple name.
It’s called “Places.”
We launched with nine entries on the Places Web site. We’re going to add more each week. The goal is stated on the Places home page: “Accompany The Oklahoman’s writers and photographers as they investigate some of our state’s most intriguing places — seeing what they see, hearing what they hear and feeling what they feel.”
We think it’s pretty cool right now. But we think it will be a really cool site to visit and come back to as we add dozens and dozens of more entries into the site. We’ve already added one more this week - The Architectural Antiques and Dead People’s Stuff.
We’ve had some excellent feedback on the project, as well. Most of it is aimed at the lead writer for the project – Ken Raymond.
How enjoyable it was to read such creative writing being used to tell such a compelling story. Senior staff writer Ken Raymond did an excellent job of pulling a sad and dirty story together into a very intense word picture which read so well that I felt as though I was looking through a camera lens.
And there’s this thought from a very appreciative reader:
Your writing is appreciated. Thank you!! Your style reminds me of Rick Braggs “All over but the shoutin”—one of my favorites.
And this one – another person who read some of the entries in the newspaper:
I enjoyed your piece in yesterday’s paper, “Folks of all stations ride the bus.” It was well-written and interesting. I’ll watch for your by-line again.
We also had one who found us on NewsOK.
I am very excited about this new series, Explore at Places.NewsOK.com. There is so much to see and learn about in Oklahoma. I applaud your efforts to make it easier.
The last person said it perfectly … “Explore.”
That’s exactly what we are aiming for with this series and this site. We want to explore Oklahoma, and we want to take you with us. We’re not going to write traditional articles on the places we visit. We’re going to channel the story-teller in us. We’re going to use our imagination and tell you what it feels like to be in that place at that time — what we see, what we smell, what we think.
We’ll add audio, slideshows and panoramic images as available to help capture the essence of that place.
So even if you’ve never been locked up at the county jail, you can say you’ve been there – thanks to Places.
One happy NewsOK visitor
I received this message in my inbox this morning – a forward from sports editor Mike Sherman:
I just wanted to say that this website is looking amazing, and the functionality is great! I especially enjoy the sports team specific pages, as I look at the OSU page everyday, and it is set up great! Thank you for this service, it is greatly appreciated.
Unfortunately, in this business, the people that work hard on providing important information to the public rarely get to hear about the positive impact and the results of their efforts.
So I’ll blog about it as much as I can.
NewsOK.com struggled through Tuesday afternoon
If you were on NewsOK.com yesterday afternoon or evening, you noticed something unusual:
NewsOK simply wasn’t responding like it should.
We noticed the problem at about 3:20 p.m., and our programmers, developers and server administrators immediately began investigating. The site was up and down intermittently through the next six or seven hours, but the same loading problems persisted (I could try to explain in further detail, but I’m sure I’d mess up the terminology and end up sounding silly).
By about 9:30 p.m., the site was back up and functioning properly. It’s been loading fine since then.
We apologize for the inconvenience to our users yesterday, as stories about Jessica Alba, the private school-public school debate in high school sports and weather stories highlighted the traffic we should have received. We know that delivering news and information is important to you. So now we have a decent back-up plan in case we experience similar problems. We will be able to deliver news if it happens again today.
Frankly, I’ve been working with NewsOK for almost 10 years, and I’ve never seen the source of any site performance issues be so elusive to our engineers. I watched as they systematically identified, investigated, tested and ruled out dozens of possible problems. Sometimes, bad things happen. We can only learn, prepare ourselves and move on.
Or it could be what one of our users hypothesized last night in a comment on an article about the issues:
Liberal conspiracy
I don’t think that was it, but we’ll investigate. Thanks.
Are Readers’ Choice nominations available on the iPhone?
Chuck posted a question as a comment on a blog I had a couple of days ago about our Readers’ Choice nomination page on NewsOK.com.
Why can’t I vote using my iphone? Can you help?
Actually, I think I can help. Sorry it took me a day or so, but I had to thoroughly investigate the problem (OK … I had to ask someone smarter than me).
The page actually does work on an iPhone, but if you clicked to it from my blog or from an e-mail or another location, it likely redirected you to our iPhone site – http://iphone.newsok.com/readerschoice – because we recognize the device and try to take you to the proper location.
That failed. The page doesn’t work, but you already knew that.
I recommend going to our page on the iPhone and selecting the link on the bottom to “View Classic NewsOK.com.” From there, you can easily visit http://www.newsok.com/readerschoice and use the forms.
That’s not the best solution for iPhone users — we know that. We actually hope to improve special pages like this on our iPhone site in the coming months as a renewed focus is placed on our mobile products.
Thank you for pointing out the need for improved interaction on the mobile products on pages like that. I hope you can get on there and nominate your favorites.
Remembering May 3, 1999 tornadoes in Oklahoma
I heard the F5 tornado on May 3, 1999.
Yes, it really did sounds like a freight train. I’ve been lucky in my life not to have experienced many negative encounters with danger. That day was a close call. The possibility of death actually crossed my mind as I heard the ‘freight train’ loud and clear before hearing the carport roof rip off the house I was living in. I thought my pickup truck was in the living room – that’s what I was certain I had heard.
Alas, the damage wasn’t that bad, and devastation was about four blocks north of my location in Moore. I survived, and helped my friend repair his fence and carport in the following days. I ended up with an interesting story to tell when May 3, 1999 comes up for discussion.
But in the grand scheme of things, I was very lucky. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to tell my story of that day, when so many other stories need to be heard. Forty-four people lost their lives. And hundreds more were affected for the rest of their lives. Their stories are compelling, gripping — and way more real.
We tell lots of those stories with our special online presentation on the May 3, 1999 tornadoes.
- We tell the story of a lot of the survivors and how they’ve recovered over the last 10 years.
- We have dozens of awesome videos, letting people tell their own stories. And if it’s been awhile since you’ve seen the video of the Grady County police officer rescuing the muddy baby – you must go and see it now.
- We have amazing photo galleries from that day and the days just after.
- We have a very nice interactive map, showing then-and-now photos along the path of the destruction.
- We remember all of the people who died with profiles of life.
- We worked hard to present as much information as we could about the day. Anyone who was in Oklahoma at the time has a story to tell, whether they heard the freight train or not.
Remember your story while learning about all the other stories.
Missing links on Signing Day coverage
We covered college football signing day yesterday. It’s always a sizable traffic driver for NewsOK.com during what is traditionally one of our slower months of the year (we would prefer giving February another couple of days every year).
We’re proud of all the live coverage – the live chat, the press conferences from Norman and Stillwater. We did lots of video analysis from inside our studio, as well. Plus, we had text bios on all the players that signed with OU and OSU. It was good stuff, and the traffic showed that users liked it (check out all the videos, chats, articles and blogs here).
However, we had two questions from our users – both via e-mail to my colleagues.
Is the paper going to publish (online) a list of where all the Oklahoma students have chosen to sign a letter of intent? I believe this was the practice when I lived in Oklahoma and since I’m a Dallas resident I was hoping to see where the players in my home state chose to attend.
Yes. Here is the full list of Oklahoma high schoolers who signed on Wednesday.
Is there anywhere on newsok.com that I can find a list of high school football players who signed at any other universities besides OU and OSU?
Yes. It wasn’t listed in a prominent place on the Signing Day page, but it is now. Here’s the direct link to football players who signed with other state colleges.
Golf page beefed up after visitor’s question
We received this message this week from a longtime subscriber:
I was a long term subscriber of OPUBCO “over 50 years” until my subscribtion was cancelled because of where I live, so I now rely on our computer connection to obtain scores, articles, etc.
The newspaper always reported the players, scores, finish, and winnings ($) of the PGA Tournaments. I can not seem to figure our how to obtain it thru the Sports section of the computer program. It is not reported in the “golf” section. Can you give me instructions on how I can obtain this info each Monday morning?
Will appreciate it.
It was a good point. Here’s the response:
Thanks for your message. We needed to beef up that page on NewsOK.com.
We added more links along the right side of the golf page on NewsOK.com.
The links we added are for the updated leaderboard, tee times, money leaders, rankings, etc. I hope that helps you find information on that page.
You should be able to see the most recent information there any time you visit.
Learning more about Jim Chastain
A reader sent an e-mail last week with a question about our page about Jim Chastain – ‘Life is Real’: Writing the Final Chapters.
Is there any way possible to get word to Jim Chastain ??? I want to contact him about his news article and encourage him. If I mailed my message to you could you get it to him. ?? I sent it to a J. Chastain in Norman but it was returned to me undeliverable. I also am trying to contact John lanton and Ken Raymond. Please tell me what I should do. Thank you so very much
Here is a link to Jim’s personal Web site. It’s a link to his contact page, where you can type a message to him.
Of course, you are also able to post a message as a comment on his blog:
Here is the information for reporter Ken Raymond: (405) 475-3331, kraymond@opubco.com
Here is the information for photographer John Clanton: (405) 475-3321, jclanton@opubco.com
And in case you haven’t been there recently, the Life is Real page has a new video from John Clanton and new blog posts from all three contributors. The good news is that there is good news there right now – and that’s always good.
Visitors missing comments on stories today
We received this message at 8:37 a.m. today:
The comment engines on www.newsok.com appear to be out of order. None of the stories have comments and none of the comments are “sticking.” I find it rather strange that its now 8 AM and there are “0″ comments about the Obama inauguration front page story. It just has to be a server error of some kind.
This is odd. And we had already been looking at the problem. We noticed the issue early this morning when it seemed equally odd to us that no comments had been made on our top stories.
By 9:15 a.m., new comments were being seen on the site. By 10 a.m., all other under-the-covers problems with the comments were fixed.
We’re back to normal now. Our “Remaking America” story now has 88 comments.
The problem stemmed from our tweaks to the commenting system last night, after one of our users spent the day abusing our open commenting system. The user’s comments deteriorated the atmosphere on our comments and ruined the experience for the rest of the group on our site.
However, often when you make a series of programming additions to your site, something can go wrong. Early this morning, we saw the problem.
Sorry for the glitch. Comment away. Just keep them clean, so I don’t have to claw out my eyes as I read the comments.
NewsOK speedy again after BCS hangover
At 10:31 a.m. this morning, we received two questions from a NewsOK visitor. Here’s the first part:
do you realize your website is completely unusable today?
Yes – we realized that we were suffering from site performance problems for a significant part of the morning today. It was bad timing, since we were prepared for a massive traffic surge after the Sooners’ loss to Florida last night in the BCS National Championship game.
After a lot of research from our programming, development and server administration teams, we found the culprit … the massive amount of traffic on our main article, coupled with the massive amount of comments made on that article, led to unforeseen overload on our database servers.
Basically, the volume of traffic caused some of our users to experience issues trying to load our Web site. The “nuance” has been adjusted. And the extremely occasional unforeseen problem is a byproduct of being the largest Web site in Oklahoma that is growing at a remarkable rate.
(And when I write “occasional unforeseen problem,” I mean it. Our site-disruption rate would rank well with any site in the world.)
We don’t want it to happen again and are taking additional steps to find unforeseen issues.
And now for the trick question – the second part of our visitor’s question.
how can a news organization be this inept?
Um … nice try. I’ll have to re-phrase before I can answer.
Seriously, I don’t blame this person for being frustrated. I’m certain many other visitors were equally frustrated. And they had every right to be.
But trust me when I say that I doubt your frustration matched our own as we investigated the issue. We pride ourselves on delivering information to the world when you want it.
You demand it. We deliver it. That’s the deal.
That is our goal on a lazy July day, and it’s our goal on a busy post-national championship day. It will be our goal tomorrow.
Regardless, please try us again. I promise that all the content is still there now if you couldn’t get it before – as are the 600-plus reader comments on the primary OU-Florida article. Sorry you couldn’t get it when you demanded it.
