Oklahoma governor thanks media for tornado coverage | Poynter.

Oklahoma governor thanks media for tornado coverage | Poynter.: The Vital Role of Online and Mobile

When I spoke with him Tuesday morning, an exhausted-sounding KFOR Interim News Director Steve Johnson was juggling the demands of coordinating another day of storm cleanup and what will likely be another afternoon of heavy storms. At the moment we spoke, he said 2,200 people “are looking at our live stream; 213 are looking at a video story from Moore.”

KWTV’s VP of Digital and Social Content Billy Hendrix said his station set a new record for online traffic, 2.5 million page views. “We have a big metro area and then we have very rural Oklahoma in our viewing area,” Hendrix told me. “The people out in the country tend to watch TV on satellite dishes and when storms come, they lose their signals fast. So during a storm we stream live video online, on mobile and on several apps. During the storm we use Twitter and Facebook to tell the public street by street were the storm is and where it is going.”