Small staff. Long attention span.
Four beats across 77 counties. We take fewer stories than we could and stay on them longer than anyone expects us to, which is the only real advantage a small newsroom has over a wire desk. Here is who covers what, and what to send them.
The Desk
Where the paper stops.
Founded The Oklahoma Post in 2022 and has read every word that has run on it since. Files the records requests, pays the certified copy fees, drives to the counties, and decides what publishes and what waits for another document.
Also the byline on most of the courts and agency work, which is a consequence of arithmetic rather than ambition.
Send them: Anything involving a court, an agency, a records denial or a process that failed. Also anything you are not sure who to send to.
The Beats
Who covers what.
Covers the rooms where decisions get made and the dockets where they get contested. Council votes, county commissions, campaign filings, and the long slow procedural fights that never make television.
Send them: Agenda packets, filings, campaign finance reports, and anything approved late on a Tuesday when nobody was watching.
High school and small college across the state. The programs nobody sends a photographer to, the coaching changes that matter locally, and the Friday nights that decide a season in a town of eleven hundred.
Send them: Scores, schedules, a photo, or a program worth writing about. Names spelled the way the family spells them.
Music, food, festivals, rodeos, film, and whatever does not belong to anybody else, which turns out to be most of what actually happens in Oklahoma on a given weekend.
Send them: Anything worth the drive, anything opening, and any story that three other people already told you was too small to matter.
Reach the newsroom
Pick a name from the list and your message gets to them. If you are not sure whose beat it is, leave it on the newsroom and we will point it the right direction.
Pull up a chair.
There are 77 counties and four beats, which means most of the state goes uncovered most of the time. If you live somewhere we get wrong or skip entirely, or you sit through hearings for reasons of your own, that is a conversation worth having. Local knowledge and the patience to read a filing count for more here than a journalism degree.