Oklahoma tuition

Comments on various Oklahoma news sites are already responding to a proposed tuition increase at one of Oklahoma's state public universities, the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

You can view these stories and these comments here:
Tulsa World (via Associated Press): OU tuition likely to rise by 9.9 percent

Oklahoma Daily (OU student newspaper): Tuition hike

Norman Transcript: Boren predicts nearly 10 percent raise in tuition

Oklahoman: Students warned of tuition increase

All of these sites offer the option to post your own opinion with other comments after the story. As you can no doubt see, people are reacting very negatively to the story that tuition will now cost more than $5,000 per year to attend a public school and the comments are just going to continue as more people become aware of this story.

From personal experience, I can say that tuition was once less than $2,000 a mere seven years ago when I was a freshman at OU. The very next semester was the large double-digit tuition increases that hit across the country. The colleagues from Texas that had said that out-of-state tuition to OU was lower than in-state tuition in Texas were now transferring back to their home states. Less and less students lived in the dorms, it seemed.

A few years later, OU President and former U.S. Senator and Oklahoma Governor David Boren had a new idea - scholarships to offset tuition increases. They're called "Sooner Heritage" and nearly everyone that applied for them received at something (and everyone that fulfilled all requirements, including applying for federal Financial Aid received something). The awards were about $500-$1,000 each, about the amount of the annual tuition increases.

Tuition will likely go up once again, pending regent approval... but it doesn't look that Heritage scholarship amounts are, which is what many online commenters are calling out OU on.

~AP

Making a statement

The Society of Professional Journalists - Oklahoma Professional Chapter board issued the following statement:

The Oklahoma Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists joins with Freedom of Information Oklahoma Inc. and the Oklahoma Press Association in denouncing the recent decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court to restrict information on court documents and access to the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network website. Oklahoma SPJ will be working with FOI Oklahoma and OPA to convince the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision before the new rule goes into effect on June 10, 2008. Signed,Oklahoma SPJ Board

Now that tax season is over, I will be posting more on this subject at OKSPJ.com in the near future. In the meantime, here is the exact court decision, straight off the OSCN court Web site here:
http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/deliverdocument.asp?cite=2008+OK+23

This is not for public release on anyplace except the state's site, so if you want it verbatim, you'll need to read it there, sorry.

If you want it in a nutshell, however, the Tulsa World paraphrases it as "The rules, which take ef fect June 10, require litigants to redact personal identifying information, such as birth dates, Social Security numbers and home addresses, from paper documents that are filed with the courts. The rules also take offline many court records that currently are available via the Internet."

You can read the entire article which I took this from here:

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20080321_1_a1_hrpfo10336

As stated above, FOI Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Press Association have also denounced the decision. Here are other stories on it for more information:
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The Oklahoman: "Putting Oklahoma Co. records online prompts disagreement:"

Quote from article: "A former county commissioner said he's "pretty hacked off” because he thinks Caudill made the county's Web site a possible resource for identity thieves."

Link to article: http://newsok.com/article/3218979/1206071863
---

In an effort to get out as much information as possible before the June 10 date of effect, I will be posting more on OKSPJ.com later this week. Stay tuned here for updates.

~AP

Award Winning Night

Just returned from Oklahoma City a few hours ago. I'd have stayed longer, but awards night is over and it's back to assignments here in Tulsa today.

In previous years, the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists - Professional Chapter simply had a list of winners - this journalist from this media organization won first, this journalist from this media organization won second, and so on.

However, the powers that be (view their officer profiles on the officer page, heh) wanted to do more this year and I am more than happy to comply.

For example, let's say you're Althea Peterson and you won first place in feature writing. In previous years, the award winners list would say this:

"1st place: Althea Peterson, Norman Transcript."

... not too much else. Your newspaper would then write the following in the next day's edition:

"Former Transcript education reporter Althea Peterson took first place in feature writing for her story, "Big crane on campus."
Judges said, "Great lede, tight writing, colorful quotes and fresh perspective combine to make this an award-winning feature story."

But, that would unfortunately be forgotten sometime between the award's night and next year's award's night. What story was it? When did it run? What was it even about?!

Thus, the powers that be (OKSPJ officers) would like to offer something more to the respective award winners. There's a story behind "this journalist that won and the media organization s/he works for." Thus, if you are one of our award winners this year - honorable mention, third, second, first, anything, I would love to give readers a chance to check out your award-winning work.

I would also love to give readers a chance to read what their respective media outlets are saying about it...

"She also won first place in education reporting for "Knowing Jack," about retired journalism professor Jack Willis.
Judges said, "Heartwarming, engaging tale of journalism prof's effect on his students. Judging from the writing, structure and sourcing in this story, Jack did a great job teaching his students well."

Ok, I'm going to knock off the self promoting. It's your turn to receive the promotion you deserve. Send me links, attachments, etc. of your award winning work and I will be sure to include a link to it here for other journalists and visitors to view. Send them to althea.peterson@gmail.com . Check back later in the week as more of these links are added to OKSPJ.com

~AP

PS: Because of ongoing format wars with the competing systems, please scroll down to view quick links to different sections of the site. Hopefully the Web will call a truce on my systems soon.

OKSPJ.com

OKSPJ.com has two stories behind it - the one for me and the one for the site itself.

Since I'm the one writing this, let's start with my story first, which leads into story No. 2.

It was early 2001. I had just been accepted into the University of Oklahoma - Norman and I was finishing my last semester of high school in Caroline, Wisc. My older brother, who is already a student at OU in meteorology informs me that all students have the ability to create their own student Web sites off of the student server, students.ou.edu.

In fact, he had already created one (although he has not been a student there for many years, nor have I, both of our pages are still up). I used his Web page's source code (you go to view under your File - Edit - View listings on the top of the screen, then go down to "Source") to create my own. My favorite part of this new site was a little GIF icon that continuously drank a foaming glass of Diet Coke.

Thus, I was introduced into the World Wide Web... which I don't think anyone really calls it anymore. I continued to update the site periodically throughout my college career as I saw fit. Terms like "IMG SRC" and "A HREF" became a second language to me, because I never really comprehended Spanish, despite four years of it in both high school and college... but I'm still trying.

My "second language" soon became known to my sorority, as I was elected secretary, overseeing the Web site for them. However, my shining professional moment of triumph came in my last semester in college, when I oversaw the OU Student Media's "online initiative" to overhaul Web operations. The first day this new site, "oudaily.com" came online, everything went wrong... or at least it should have. The company we went through to have our media site had somehow made it that it would only recognize HTML code, and not simple spaces (
br) or images (img src). I had to once again rely on my second language to keep our site launch from crashing down.

And now, is where story No. 1 leads to story No. 2, the creation of OKSPJ.com. I had met two professional colleagues through both my work in Norman, Carol Cole-Frowe and from my sorority and OU, Joy Jenkins. Carol expressed the need for SPJ to have an updated site to post info. Joy said they did not know how to access the current site. Despite the fact that I was not a member of SPJ, they asked for my assistance, knowing my past work with oudaily.com and normantranscript.com.

Not knowing where to start with previous sites (I found at least two old sites and another that couldn't be accessed any longer online), I just started a new one, with newly registered domain name off GoDaddy.com. Like I had once done with my brother's sites, I used old site source codes to move old sites onto a new location. Then, once the information was up and running, I created a new template to view this information.

Thus, OKSPJ.com became a reality. It has everything that the old site has, but more importantly, it will begin to have new content to reflect the new media atmosphere we journalists have grown into recently, like this blog here.

I look forward to the feedback for your new site. Just remember, there was a Diet Coke drinking GIF icon involved, but absolutely no Spanish fluency at all.

~AP

PS: Until I can get the formatting of this page sorted out, please scroll to the bottom to see the links that will lead you back to the main page. This is an outside sourced blog, so when you combine two competing pages together, things can sometimes turn ugly.