William Crum, who has always done a very good job of covering city council and general city issues, hasn't written for the Oklahoman in over 6 months.
I wonder if he was let go?
His Twitter account lists him as being on the Freedom of Information Oklahoma board but has no mention of the Oklahoman.
Crum used to do a weekly civic wrap-up that summarized all the major council and civic happenings. Doesn't look like anyone is doing that anymore.
Also, to the extent the Oklahoman is still employing local reporters, they seem to be using lots of still-in-school college kids.
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And in general, FreePressOKC does a good job covering civic matters.
I’ve always thought it would be cool to see OKC Free Press and OKCTalk join up and open a physical location with an OKCTalk Cafe and offices.
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I know the owner well and he's a good man who works very hard and really does want the best for OKC.
OKC is very lucky to have people like you and the owner of Free Press. I think the person involved in the OKCSpan Twitter account also reports for Free Press but I could be wrong.
It’s a far cry from the other news stations. Within the last week alone within days after seeing Rose Creek Plaza and OKANA Resort here it was on almost every other station with zero credit given.
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To be fair, the Rose Creek Plaza info was from a press release, it's not something I sourced.
It’s still funny how they all took more than a day to put anything out and still gave no credit. It’s like they didn’t care until they say social media posts and then ran the story. That’s what it looked to me at least.
Looks like the digital access is shut down this morning for "upgrade to system" Be nice to maybe put that on your website or on the sign-in page denying access instead of spending 12 minutes on hold to be told that.
We started getting the "upgraded" version of The Oklahoman on Saturday. The Sunday paper had similar changes. I've cut out and worked the Sunday crossword for years but now it's even too big to fit my clipboard. (Tells you my age, right? I don't like doing puzzles on a computer.) I know it's because of the USA Today network takeover, so I can't fully blame the locals. I just had to whine a little.
I'm old, so this is meant as a zero-snark, innocent observation. You made it here, so you are able to get the Oklahoman online. When I am in your situation, I get one of my younger relatives to "sigh" and print off the crossword for me. Then I get them to "double-sigh (possibly breathing through their nose heavily)" and walk me through doing it several times until I can do it myself.
The Oklahoman had a front page story today about a contract between Swadley's and OK state parks that has cost taxpayers over $13 million over the past few years. Great investigative journalism uncovering corruption and/or ineptitude, right? Wrong. They basically ripped off an article by The Frontier from 2 weeks ago with no attribution.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.
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It seems like they are 'getting away with it' but they are hemorrhaging subscribers and advertisers and that trend does not seem to be slowing down. In just a few years they went from an 11-story building with a huge printing facility to a downtown office with a tv studio, and now consolidated to part of one floor with only about 100 employees in small cubicles and they send their edition so early to Tulsa to be printed that they can't cover anything that happens after 5PM the previous day. They have also completely stopped printing on Saturdays.
Many of us are used to reading them one way or another, but I can tell you the large percentage of OKCTalk's followers on social media (and we have close to 150,000 now) never look at them or local TV news.
They remind me so much of Blockbuster, which abused their monopoly for decades then when Netflix came along and did everything better and treated people well, they desperately tried to adapt and it was far too late, mainly due to the mountain of badwill they had piled upon themselves.
Here's the original article if anyone is interested. The dateline is March 17th.
https://www.readfrontier.org/stories...urant-venture/
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The extreme irony is that the Oklahoman is always pleading with people to subscribe and "support local journalism".
First of all, they are as local as an Applebee's; owned by a huge out-of-state corporation where the large majority of their product is not created by people here.
Secondly, I will continue to argue they are actually very bad for local journalism due to their wildly unethical tactics and their continued theft of work from people and organizations that actually *are* local journalists. Effectively, they are working against good, honest local journalism every single day.
The lack of content is embarrassing. Three or four decent articles would be a good day. They leave stale stories on the front page of the website for weeks beyond their shelf life.
I thought Ray Rivera would make it better but it continues to atrophy. I remain a subscriber but I have had repeated interruptions to my digital access over the last two months.
It is a dying enterprise. The solution is to provide more and better content, but they don’t appear committed to that standard.
Not sure if this has been posted, but they discontinued delivery service on Saturdays. So you're forced to use digital.
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