The Digital Desk

Everything you ever wanted to know about NewsOK.com

A visit with Henry Bellmon March 02, 2009 | Comment on this article

It’s amazing the cool things you can find on NewsOK.com – especially if your looking deep into the site, especially on a Monday morning. Take our story on former Gov. Henry Bellmon, for example. It was on Page 6-A of The Oklahoman on Sunday. It was on the home page of NewsOK.com Sunday morning. But the... Read More

Jim Chastain series reaches Chapter Two status

February 27, 2009 Chapter Two of the Jim Chastain series published in The Oklahoman on Sunday. In case you missed it, check out the Jim Chastain page on NewsOK. It has a great design (creative director Scott Horton), great videos (photographer John Clanton), great writing (reporter Ken Raymond), great blog and — most of all —... Read More

Oscar night showcases entertainment depth on NewsOK

February 24, 2009 Sunday night was a big night for NewsOK. It was the Super Bowl for the motion picture industry — The Oscars. I watched it. I also read the live chat with George Lang and Matt Price during the show. Sure, I was curious if “Milk” or “Slumdog Millionaire” would win the Best Picture. But I really wanted... Read More

Unusual Thursday on NewsOK.com February 20, 2009 NewsOK.com gets really good traffic on a daily basis. But we got an extra boost on Thursday. It started when we posted our article about Chip Harrison and his unfortunate run in with an Oklahoma City police officer. It was an interesting read, that’s for sure. And it went viral – first on the Drudge... Read More

New videos added to sports pages February 17, 2009 NewsOK.com added more beef to its basketball coverage this week. We partnered with AthletixNation, allowing us to embed their video content – namely Big 12, Pac 10 and SEC basketball and football highlights — on our Web site. What does that mean for you? It’s simple math …. you now get a lot more... Read More

Tornado coverage goes live on NewsOK

February 13, 2009 We planned for possible severe weather coverage on Tuesday morning. We transitioned from possible severe weather coverage to big time severe weather coverage Tuesday afternoon. We took shelter as the storm approached our building (but we worked to inform you in our makeshift basement offices). We chased the... Read More

Grammys are gone; Oscars coverage on alert February 09, 2009 The Grammys were last night. I didn’t see a second of the show. I missed the whole thing. Didn’t matter, though. I got the full recap on NewsOK.com, thanks to George Lang’s StaticBlog. Good stuff there — great images, great commentary and lots of comments from our visitors. Now that the Grammy’s... Read More

Missing links on Signing Day coverage February 05, 2009 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... Read More

YOU! page on NewsOK provides break from busy news

February 03, 2009 I’m taking a moment in this slow February news day (slow, that is, if you’re not Tom Daschle or any other Obama nominee) to show off the page we recently revamped in our Life section. by The Oklahoman’s Features department every Thursday. It began a few years back after some brainstorming, some prototyping... Read More

Golf page beefed up after visitor’s question January 29, 2009 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,... Read More

Comments from our live winter weather chat January 28, 2009 I could write a long time about NewsOK.com’s coverage of the ice storm (which is finally melting away as we speak). But plenty has been written already by Poynter Online, by the Newspaper Association of America and by our own David Morris. I can only add one note to what they’ve already said …. We... Read More

Learning more about Jim Chastain

January 26, 2009 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... Read More

Visitors missing comments on stories today January 21, 2009 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... Read More

Inauguration coverage update January 20, 2009 I wrote yesterday afternoon about our planned Inauguration coverage. We planned to use the live feed from C-Span, which was working well until the traffic grew to about 20,000 viewers for that feed. Thanks to OPUBCO Communications Group’s director of video David Morris and his team, we quickly switched to... Read More

Videos today on NewsOK January 20, 2009 Read More

Inauguration ’09 to be covered thoroughly on NewsOK

January 19, 2009 We’ve already started blogging. We’ve already begun feeding live video – thanks to our friends at C-Span. And we have tons of content to read, watch and discuss. You don’t want to miss our Inauguration ’09 page, where we will be publishing updates from people at the scene (our own Carrie... Read More

Photo galleries page provides outlet for thousands of images January 16, 2009 On any given day, I can prove that the NewsOK site is much deeper than you thought. Today, I bring you the Photos page, a subsection of our Multimedia Page. We have hundreds of galleries, categorized and archived by section. But when we re-launched this page along with our re-vamped Multimedia page a couple... Read More

Watchdog page live on NewsOK

January 14, 2009 We launched a new page last week. We’re telling you about it this week. And you’ll see much more from it in future weeks. The Watchdog page is officially live on NewsOK.com. What is the watchdog team? Nothing says it better than the page itself: The Oklahoman Watchdog team is a dedicated group of... Read More

Chapter One of Jim Chastain’s ‘Life is Real’ released

January 12, 2009 The much-anticipated Chapter One of the ‘Life is Real’ site was released on Sunday in The Oklahoman and on NewsOK.com. The narrative was powerfully descrptive and to the point. The design was effectively simple. And the photography brilliantly sets the mood. It yet another great example of... Read More

NewsOK speedy again after BCS hangover January 09, 2009 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... Read More