dochoc's blog

A new Internet news and commentary site that challenges the corporate media model has been established here.

Oklahoma Citizen is an independent media operation that allows writers and citizen journalists to post material of interest to residents here. Here’s its mission statement:

Oklahoma Citizen is a free, open-access news portal and community action center that is dedicated to providing news, opinion, ideas and resources that are meaningful to independent-minded Oklahomans.

What makes this site different than some others is its community-orientated mission and its open access. Independent media sites, such as Oklahoma Citizen, push back against closed-access corporate media outlets, which have been in a financial decline for several years.

Oklahoma Citizen was founded by Serena Blaiz and David Glover, but I’m sure they want people to consider it a community effort not tied to one particular voice or view.

Through the years, I have argued on Okie Funk and Blue Oklahoma that the state needs more independent media sites and progressive blogs on the Internet. Local corporate media outlets, especially The Oklahoman, rarely present views that dissent from conservative talking points.

So why not include a lot of views and different angles and try to have discussion?

We should all wish Oklahoma Citizen the best. I encourage local writers and political activists to submit material there.

Oklahoma leads the nation in the per capita number of women serving prison sentences, a dubious national distinction. Many of the women in prison are serving time for nonviolent offenses. Some of these women are mothers, and their incarcerations often lead to family dysfunction, which creates even more problems.

Recognizing the problem, the Oklahoma House passed a bill last week that could eventually help lower the number of mothers serving prison sentences for nonviolent crimes. Let’s hope the bill gets signed into law. It’s a much-needed first step.

HB 2998, sponsored by state Rep. Kris Steele, a Shawnee Republican, would establish a pilot program that would help ease the reentry of incarcerated women with children. The program would identify women with children and develop a comprehensive plan for them, which might include diversionary sentencing rather than jail time.

Oklahoma incarcerates women at twice the national average. Almost 70 percent of all women incarcerated here are serving sentences for nonviolent offenses. I’ve written about this issue for several years. Read here, here and here. Here’s a section of a 2008 post that describes the philosophy driving the high incarceration rate:

Right now, the prevailing law enforcement and state corrections philosophy, supported by neoconservative ideology, is to incarcerate as many people as possible. The basic idea is that severe punishments, including long prison sentences, will deter crime. Yet the incarceration rates keep growing. Oklahoma, for example, has the highest percentage of incarcerated women in the nation, according to the Bureau of Justice. Ultimately, this distinction should be the state’s shame, not a point of honor in a numbers game often played by political leaders and by some people who work in our judicial systems and law enforcement agencies.

In a press release about the issue, Steele said:

This bill will give women convicted of nonviolent crimes access to community-based rehabilitative services that have proven effective. As policy-makers, we can be both tough and smart on crime. The average prison stay for nonviolent women is less than a year, but the impact on their children is lifelong and devastating. In-home rehabilitative services will keep these families together and allow Oklahoma women to receive the help they desperately need.

Again, this is a first step in a problem that needs even more serious solutions and initiatives. Keeping nonviolent women out of prison and ensuring they get treatment and counseling saves families and taxpayer dollars.

Keith Gaddie is publishing unsubstantiated, self-serving and silly articles criticizing the Oklahoma political blogosphere.

Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma, has published two articles recently in the Oklahoma Gazette that purport to give daily pageviews and backlinks to conservative and liberal blogs. The articles can be found here and here. The site he uses for his statistical information, Websiteoutlook, is obviously unreliable, if not completely bogus, and is countered by at least one other similar site, which shows remarkably different numbers than the ones he gives in his articles.

The article on liberal blogs also fails to mention Blue Oklahoma, which by the Websiteoutlook numbers, is the most popular politically liberal blog in the state. The site shows the blog, which I operate, has a daily average of 2,365 pageviews and 153,912 backlinks. This is an overestimation, I know, but why did Gaddie exclude it if he truly believes that Websiteoutlook is reliable or if he knows so much about the Oklahoma political blogosphere?

I emailed Gaddie, pictured right, at his university email address about my concerns after the first article was published, but I never heard back from him. In that email, I asked him if he thought the information he used was reliable, and I mentioned the pageviews and backlinks of Blue Oklahoma. I also discussed my internal counter for Okie Funk. I’m assuming Gaddie checks his university email account. If not, then he’s welcome to contact me privately or publicly if he reads this post.

A pageview is registered whenever someone clicks on a page on a site. Backlinks are simply links that go back to a site. It’s nothing complicated.

Websiteoutlook and similar sites, such as Cubestat, operate anonymously and use vague formulas to determine pageviews and backlinks and money value. Much of what they do is just predictions, which means it’s just an estimate. The numbers can fluctuate wildly. The sites are widely perceived as inaccurate and would never be used seriously by companies and individuals to determine the actual worth of a site or the actual hits it receives. It’s really just a bunch of nonsense, especially when it comes to smaller sites, such as Okie Funk and Blue Oklahoma.

Websiteoutlook, as of March 3, showed Okie Funk with 162 daily pageviews. This is the number Gaddie used in his article. But Cubestat, as of March 3, showed Okie Funk with 3,116 pageviews. That’s a huge difference. My internal counter, which I cannot change and is operated by my host server company, showed Okie Funk averaging 2,406 pageviews a day so far in March. The internal counter is the most accurate, though some of that number would come from robot hits. On the other side, Cubestat showed Blue Oklahoma with 368 pageviews on March 3, much less than Websiteoutlook.

By contrast, Gaddie uses Websiteoutlook, to show the Oklahoma Political News Service, a conservative blog, with 514 daily pageviews. As of March 3, though, Websiteoutlook showed it had only 255 views, a fairly steep drop. Cubestat showed 468 views.

Websiteoutlook also claims Okie Funk has daily ad revenues of $2.72, but I have never sold a single ad on the blog since its inception in May 2004. It’s just silly, nonsensical information.

Gaddie’s overall point in the articles is to disparage the Oklahoma political blogosphere and show how little impact it’s having here. This is arguable, and I’m not trying to argue Okie Funk and Blue Oklahoma are enormously popular or having some big impact. Given the current political climate in this state, I wouldn’t even want to try to make them popular because of the political compromises I would have to make.

But Gaddie’s articles are based on unreliable evidence contradicted elsewhere and presented by people who remain anonymous. Even a high school student couldn’t get away with using Websiteoutlook as a main source in a term paper.

In addition, Gaddie doesn’t account for cross-posting, blogs that automatically roll into Facebook, RSS feeds, and aggregators that publish an entire blog outside the blog’s url. He also doesn’t account for blogs that intentionally target smaller audiences. The articles exhibit a lack of knowledge about blogs in general.

The article about liberal blogs discusses one blog that ceased publishing new material months ago and isn’t really even liberal-leaning. Is it too much to ask that someone writing about blogs actually check out the blogs under discussion?

The articles miss a key point as well. The blogosphere here, and this goes for liberal and conservative blogs, often provides views and information not provided by corporate media outlets. Gaddie, it should be noted, often provides political analysis to corporate media outlets, which makes the articles self-serving as well as inaccurate. Let’s not forget it wasn’t long ago that Gaddie’s articles would go unchallenged outside the format and word-count restrictions of a letter to the editor. Even if hardly anyone reads this post, at least it offers a counterview to one of the state’s Serious and Important political commentators in the mainstream media here.

Gaddie needs to step up and take responsibility for the stats in his two articles, but I’m sure he won’t. If Gaddie thinks Websiteoutlook is reliable, then he should say why. Maybe he knows the owners of the site and can vouch for their credibility, but I doubt it. He should also say why he thinks Cubestat and internal counters are not just as reliable. He should explain why he excluded Blue Oklahoma from his article.

I contacted Websiteoutlook with my concerns about Gaddie’s article. I asked for the owner’s names and mailing address. I explained the wide disparities between their site, Cubestat and my internal counter on Okie Funk. The company never responded to my request.