Welcome to 'Oklahoma Memo' on Substack
Subscribe for Oklahoma news, sports, weather... and community!
This is Oklahoma Memo.
If you visit oklahomamemo.com, you can subscribe to the daily 7 a.m. newsletter and be done with all this. That version of the newsletter is hosted on Beehiiv—and part of this grand content experiment is to compare Beehiiv to Substack.
Because why not? We are truly in our Wild West digital era.
I’ll presume that you don’t know me. There’s no reason you should unless you’ve worked inside Oklahoma media the past few years, and even then, you may ask, “Who?”
My name is Ryan.
When I was 6 years old, I sat in front of a TV and watched the news. Seriously.
When I was 8, I would read my dad’s Tulsa Tribune before folding it up perfectly before he got home, lest he find out I was reading his paper before he did. I can even recall how those newspapers smelled.
When I was 10, I spent days watching CNN non-stop. It turns out, that 40+ years later, I’m friends with one of the pioneers of the network!
I went to the University of Oklahoma, got a journalism degree, and immediately worked in newspaper (shout out Hugo Daily News), covering City Hall, school board meetings, police beat, local sports, you name it.
Fast-forward to 2005, and I talked KOCO’s news director into letting me work as a digital editor at the station. I REALLY, REALLY wanted that job.
It took me a half year to get even pretty good at it.
But once it clicked, it clicked.
And so after 7.5 years at Griffin Media (News 9 and News On 6), leading their digital teams, I decided to put my digital skills to work in hopes of finding innovations in the content space—and to support Oklahoma journalism.
A lot of what this Substack will be is a curation of the content from other great journalists. I hope that I’ll introduce you to newsrooms you didn’t even know existed.
But I plan to bring you original content and analysis.
Be forewarned, sports fans: I’m a Sooner, not a Cowboy. However, I’ll try for equal time and fairness! Mostly, I mention this because I have a much bigger repository of OU knowledge than OSU.
Also be forewarned: Like many other Oklahomans, I’m a weather nut.
And a breaking news junkie.
Hope you’ll subscribe. Hope you’ll help me grow a community.
This is going to be a fun ride!