The Colony OK was founded in 2026 to do the kind of long-form, accountability journalism that legacy press in Oklahoma had stopped doing — not for ideological reasons, but because the business model no longer supported it. Our answer: make the reader the customer. Charge a fair price, keep advertising out of the newsroom's decisions, and hire reporters who can actually report.
Our Mission
Oklahoma doesn’t need someone to cover it. It needs someone to connect it to itself. Reporting, live programming, events and education are four mechanisms for the same job: helping Oklahomans find one another, build trust, and work together.
How The Colony works →
Our Standards
Every story names its sources; desk stories say they were drafted with AI assistance. Every public-records request, agency release, agenda, donor disclosure, or court filing we cite is linked at the foot of the story. We correct errors prominently, never quietly — the log is at /corrections.
Every rule we hold ourselves to →
Our Funding
Membership is designed to cover the newsroom; founding seats and donations fund the work. We do not accept gifts, junkets, or undisclosed retainers.
Our Beat
Oklahoma politics, culture, the economy, and the institutions — state, local, and federal — that shape life here. We cover statewide elections like they matter, because they do.
The Team
Our journalists: Marven Goodman, Katy Smith, Everett Piper, and Jake Merrick. Founding publisher: Jake Merrick. Operations: JAM Media.
Why this exists.
Oklahoma's newspapers didn't die. They were bought.
Chains bought them, cut the reporters, kept the mastheads, and ran them from a thousand miles away. What's left prints wire copy and press releases. The Capitol has fewer reporters watching it than it did twenty years ago, and the people who noticed are the people it is easiest to take advantage of.
We're not trying to replace what was lost. We're building what should have been there instead: a newsroom whose only customer is its reader.
For Oklahomans who stopped trusting the paper.
You read to the end.
Full documents, named sources, and the parts that complicate the story — not a headline with the complications trimmed off.
You're tired of national noise.
A school board vote in Tulsa changes your week. A cable panel in New York does not.
You want to know how yours voted.
The Report Card grades each legislator's attendance and participation from the public roll-call record, and prints the figures behind every grade so you can check our work.
You've wanted to fund this kind of work.
Not a tip jar. A founding seat, with your name on the record of who paid for it.
The Contributors
The people who make it.
Reporters, hosts, and producers — named, pictured, and answerable for what they file. Your founding seat is what puts them in the field and keeps them there.
The Colony Desk — The standing byline for stories researched and drafted with AI assistance and edited by The Colony newsroom. Stories under it report verified facts from public records, agency releases, meeting agendas and attributed published reporting; they carry no opinion or endorsement, and every source is listed at the foot of the story.
Meet the whole newsroom →
Building in public — what's live and what's next →
Found it — claim a charter seat →
Partner with us →
Contact us →
