The Oklahoman’s energy coverage team expands — meet the reporters
OPUBCO energy writers Jay Marks, Adam Wilmoth, and Paul Monies Monday, March 12, 2012. Photo by Doug Hoke, The Oklahoman
The Energy coverage team is in place at The Oklahoman.
Kelly Dyer Fry, editor of The Oklahoman and vice president of news for OPUBCO Communications Group, has been working with Managing Editor Mike Shannon and Business Editor Clytie Bunyan in recent weeks to put together our full team to expand the coverage of energy for The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com.
That effort culminated Sunday with a story that introduced energy editor Adam Wilmoth and reporter Paul Monies as part of the group with Jay F. Marks.
The expanded energy team will be able to cover the industry in a way that hasn’t been possible before. Reporters will dig deeper into the industry players and issues that affect so much of the state’s economy, history and future. They’ll cover the issues and trends that affect the industry, the state and the country and do more in-depth features and profiles on companies.
You can see full bios of the three reporters on NewsOK’s new Energy page. The truth is that we’ve long had a page that contained all our stories about the energy industry in Oklahoma. But now we have a page that is fully enhanced with a blog, a Twitter feed, drilling reports, a full list of stories that can be filtered by topic and more.
Here’s a full list of what you can find:
- Power Play blog, updated daily
- NewsOK Energy on Twitter
- A Twitter list with information from all the players in the region
- NewsOK Energy on Facebook
- A page devoted to coverage of specific Oklahoma energy companies
- A place to share your story tip or idea with the team
- Updated stock prices for Oklahoma’s energy companies
- Daily drilling reports
And really, there’s probably more, but you get the idea. The pages for our energy coverage will be updated daily and should be your first stop for energy coverage as it relates to Oklahoma.
NewsOK videos featured more prominently on mornings and weekends
You might have noticed that at some points during the day, we’ve started promoting some of our more popular stand-alone videos to the top of the NewsOK home page.
It looks something like this …
… and it generally appears at the top of the website above our top stories.
Why are we doing this?
We’re doing this to give more visibility to our videos that aren’t necessarily attached to our most popular articles. We’re doing it because it helps showcase the wide variety of content. We’re doing this because it’s hard to get everything we want our users to see at the top of the website, but this is an easy way to get four good items at the top.
When are we doing this?
We put this video widget (yeah, that’s what we really call it) in place during the early- and mid-morning hours on Monday through Friday. We’re also posting this widget during the morning and early afternoon hours on the weekends.
Why are we posting it for a longer period of time on the weekends?
We see our traffic pattern to be more consistent on Saturdays and Sundays, meaning that we don’t have spikes in traffic at specific time periods. Rather, the amount of traffic is pretty consistent throughout the entire day. It’s logical, therefore, to infer that users have more time on the weekend days to browse some of our stand-alone or longer-form videos.
Why should I watch these videos?
Watch them because they are informative, entertaining, easy… and sometimes, you just don’t feel like reading.
That’s probably much more than you ever anticipated learning about one simple video presentation on our site, but it should help you rest assured that those videos that started appearing at the top of the page didn’t get there by accident.
‘Accidents’ generally happen much lower on the page.
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.
21 videos lined up in one place on Static SXSW page
NewsOK.tv’s Dave Morris and The Oklahoman’s George Lang were working pretty hard the last couple of days in Austin for the annual SXSW Festival.
In two days, they produced 21 videos that are showcased on our Static SXSW page, which is sponsored by CNGNow.com.
The videos included interviews with and performances by a bunch of bands from Oklahoma that were in Austin to perform at the Buffalo Lounge in Austin.
Twenty-one videos. That’s a lot of editing and interviewing in a short time frame. It was all done so you can spend this afternoon and the weekend catching up to see how Oklahoma was represented at one of the world’s most famous festival.
Click once, and you can watch them all on our Static SXSW page.
New byline presentation now showing on NewsOK
So, it’s been a busy start to March. I’ve neglected new posts to this blog the last couple weeks, mostly because we’re really setting up some cool things to launch in the next handful of weeks with our digital strategies. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, one of the cool features we launched in the last week is our reporter byline presentations. Our new bylines on staff-written stories include the reporter’s photo, their bio, their email address, their social media profiles and links to past stories they have written.
It’s really a pretty cool feature that won’t ring any bells and win any big journalistic awards, but it will help our readers get to know the face behind the work that’s being done.
It really isn’t an ego thing. Most of these reporters will tell you they’d rather not have their image displayed so prominently. It’s about the information in the story, not about them.
And they are right — the important stuff are the facts in the story. But we think these byline presentations help the reader know and trust the people that work hard to gather these facts every day.
They are the ones that sit outside and office building all day to get the quote that helps explain the other side of the story.
They are the ones that sweat over every word to make sure they are being clear, fair and accurate with their report.
They are the ones that take the call at 10 p.m., when an editor catches an inconsistency in the text that slipped through as the story was being re-written in the afternoon. It was being re-written for The Oklahoman, of course, after reporting in breaking news format during the day for NewsOK.
Whew. It’s hard work.
So now you see their face. And you know a little more about them when you read their stories.
Get Appy column showcases apps for kids of all ages
Lillie-Beth Brinkman came by my office a couple weeks ago to discuss something very important.
Lillie-Beth is our Assistant Features Editor and writes the ‘Get Appy‘ for The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com.
She opened the conversation in hushed tones, so nobody could overhear her.
“Do you play Temple Run?”
I responded as professionally as I could:
“Uh … yeah. Who doesn’t?”
The result of that conversation and others that Lillie-Beth had about the iOS game led her to write this column about Temple Run and the nature of that game and many others like it on the market.
If you’re already playing the game, there’s a good chance you are in school or heard about it from the child who lives at your house and goes to school. A group of sixth graders I recently talked to from different schools are all big fans.
Lillie-Beth and I both have children that are in the same age range, so it should be no surprise that we’ve both been introduced to the simplistic, yet addictive game.
So I write this blog today only to point two things:
- I’m awesome at Temple Run … with a high score of 5,325,540
- That Lillie-Beth’s weekly Get Appy columns are fun to read and something worth finding each Tuesday.
Stepping into the Pinterest world
I’ve gone through a few of the unofficial phases of social media acceptance with Pinterest.
It’s the rite of passage for many individuals in the social media space. Sure, the steps are a little different if you are an over-achieving early adopter. I know lots of those people. But for us normal every-day mid-level early adopters, the steps below fit.
- Step 1: You ignore it and scoff at the fact that another site is trying to enter the social media space.
- Step 2: You poke fun at your friends and family members that are participating in the space.
- Step 3: You see more people engaging with the site. Some of them are even a lot like you. And you begin to feel ashamed that you haven’t tried it yet.
- Step 4: You sign up. But you don’t get it. You must be missing something. Maybe it’s all just passed you by.
- Step 5: Somebody engages with something you posted. It’s all starting to make sense.
- Step 6: Once it makes a little sense, you dive in a little deeper and see real value and possibility. Now you get it.
- Step 7: Find your comfort level and just be yourself.
There are some steps following these first seven steps. But you don’t always have to follow them. Actually, I recommend stopping when you reach Step 8 (below). Step 10 ends with addiction and perhaps swearing to never use the Internet again. Let’s hope none of us go that far.
I’m still in the middle of Step 6. But thanks to the help of sports web editor Lindsay Houts and technology superstar Jay Spear, we’re finally off the ground with some boards on Pinterest for NewsOK.
We’ve launched 12 boards. Some are growing faster than other. And we might launch more.
The bottom line is that I like the opportunity we have to showcase our great photography and our Features, Entertainment and Sports content that doesn’t often reach the top-viewed items on our NewsOK site that is driven by the breaking-news-what-is-happening-right-now-world.
So, I’ll continue to experiment with Pinterest. It seems like it’s here to stay.
I’ll eagerly await the day that my parents log in and Re-Pin something I posted (that’s Step 8).
And then I’ll start again with Step 1 of another social media platform.
NewsOK Sports honored for best multimedia coverage
In December, the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) announced its annual top 10 honorees for best website. NewsOK Sports was ranked among the nation’s best for the third consecutive year.
And then yesterday in Florida at the annual conference, The sports department was honored again. This time, it was for the efforts in the area of multimedia for NewsOK and The Oklahoman.
And once again, I point to the company we keep in these kinds of awards. Among the top 10 list in this group:
- Boston Globe
- Kansas City Star
- Los Angeles Times
- Minneapolis Star Tribune
- The New York Times
- Philadelphia Daily News
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- The Virginian-Pilot
Those are some of the largest news-gathering operations in the country. But ranking among the world’s best in the area of covering sports and covering sports with aggressive multimedia journalism is no surprise to us here in Oklahoma City. Though there was no ranking of the top 10 in the list, I would expect our work to be at the top in the fictional BCS of multimedia sports coverage.
We see the reporters analyzing games on video every night. We read reporters’ blogs on every subject we cover. We participate in their live chats each weekday. We follow them on Facebook, Twitter and more. We see the end result of the hard work of the people behind the scenes packaging it all together on NewsOK and on our mobile applications for The Oklahoman.
And we watch the group in our sports department pull this off every single day.
So here’s to another tip of the hat to the sports editor Mike Sherman and the sports department for their fine work.
‘Endangered Black History’ nDepth series comes highly recommended
We are in the middle of a six-part series titled, “Endangered Black History,” that I would highly recommend our users take a look at.
We’ve organized this coverage as part of our nDepth – Stories of the Ages presentations, where we tell a story in a long-form and high-design format. We’ve completed dozens of nDepth stories over the past few years, but this is perhaps our most ambitious project, because we’re linking six of them together over the course of a few weeks.
We’ve already released Part 1: The Overview, Part 2: Langston and Part 3: Boley. There are still three more to come.
Graphic artist Chris Schoelen is producing the designs, reporter Ken Raymond is writing the stories, video producer Paige Dillard is producing the videos and web editor Nick Tankersley is putting it all together on the web pages.
They all deserve high praise for the extra effort that benefits our readers, but the work goes far beyond them — videographers, photographers, editors and researchers have come together to make this a successful story-telling effort.
It easy to navigate. The stories are detailed and descriptive. The videos add more context to the words that surround them. And the photos — well I’m a sucker for historic photos.
But here’s my favorite part: We went with Facebook comments to keep the conversation going in this series, and it’s proved to be an interesting way for users to share the series with others and offer their own commentary and insight.
Take a look. But don’t worry, there’s no rush. We’re going to keep this package active on the site for years to come.
ScissorTales blog is back — check the NewsOK Opinion page
I love it when I get to write in my blog about another blog — especially when the blog I get to write about is returning to past prosperity.
ScissorTales is back.
The blog is featured on our Opinion page and showcases additional opinions and insights from the team of Editorial writers at The Oklahoman.
Recent posts include:
- Too Many Debates: “Nineteen, count them 19, debates have been staged so far, not including informal candidate forums. How many more of these Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney verbal showdowns can viewers stand?”
- No More Middle Man: “When managing a tight budget, cutting unnecessary expenses is a good place to start. House Bill 3111, filed by state Rep. Jeff Hickman, R-Fairview, would end the state government’s role in collecting dues for labor unions.”
- More Cheese Please: “Wendy’s ‘Old Fashioned Hamburgers’ might want to consider a motto change, seeing as how the fast-food chain no longer has plain hamburgers on its menu.”
- Dancing with the Snows: “When is the exercise of religion on public property not an invitation to an injunction? When Indian culture is involved. The latest example among many is a Utah tribe’s snow dance to benefit ski resorts in Colorado. “
ScissorTales is created to get more content delivered to readers who want it. It’s a quick read, and it’s easy to interact with.
It’s just one more way to our talented writers to get more information to their audience.
