The Digital Desk

I was about to close down a week here at OPUBCO when I decided to scroll through Darnell Mayberry’s live chat from earlier today. He started the chat at 11 a.m., answering question after question about the Oklahoma City Thunder’s draft choice and plans to sign the core unit of the team....

Each year, journalists in our newsroom volunteer their time to work with aspiring high school journalists and teach them the basics of the craft. It’s called Newsroom 101, and it’s one of the most acclaimed program of its kind in the country. And at the end of the seminars, discussions...

I had a pleasant email conversation with a customer last week. He was a fan of news. He wants to read the news every day. He generally accesses most of his news digitally, but he had previously been an avid reader of The Oklahoman and was happy with our recent coverage enhancements. As a...

The Oklahoman sports reporters have been writing some great stuff this week as they’ve been telling the stories of some of the people who are running in the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon on Sunday. The coverage began this past Sunday when Jenni Carlson wrote about the impact of the...

We’ve long wished for a good way to expose our collection of photos on NewsOK.com. We know that photo galleries of sporting events, weather events and other breaking news events drive reader interest. We know that because traffic patterns tell us that. So we make a point to get photo...

Monday was one of my favorite days as NewsOK’s Digital Managing Editor. Why? We didn’t win an award that day, and we didn’t have a record day for web traffic. No. Monday ranked so high because it was a great day for our audience. We launched a new website that is a drastic improvement...

Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic vs. iceberg showdown that ended with the loss of 1,514 lives. The Oklahoman, of course, covered the event. Here’s the newspaper front page from The Daily Oklahoman on April 16, 1912.     I’m always fascinated by looking at...

It’s still early April, and I took the opportunity this morning to review the pictures that were submitted to NewsOK via our user-submitted photo process in March– (essentially, just send the image to pics@newsok.com). The gallery for submitted photos in March is embedded below, but you...

Check out the new series that health reporter Jaclyn Cosgrove started a few weeks ago. It’s called, “What’s It Like,” and it details a medical procedure each week that you or someone you know might experience in a lifetime. On Sunday, Jaclyn explained what it’s like to have knee...

If you want to have a conversation to remember, just spark one up with The Oklahoman’s real estate editor Richard Mize. He’s been here 12 years, which qualifies his title to be ‘longtime real estate editor.’ And it’s easier to have that conversation now. Richard has decided to extend...

I wrote a story that appeared in The Oklahoman on Sunday. It’s fitting that it appeared in The Oklahoman, because it was about The Oklahoman. It’s new website, to be precise. Oklahoman.com officially launched about a week ago. It was promoted as a stand-alone product in the newspaper on...

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...

Seems like a good day to post a video or two, since we have some good ones that help cover President Obama’s appearance in Oklahoma today.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....