WOAI featured a unique, data-driven story last week about the high number of accidents caused by inattentive drivers talking on their cell phones. Journalists at the television station analyzed an accident database kept by the Texas Department of Transportation that tracks contributing factors for all vehicle crashes in Texas.
To get the story, WOAI had to fight a lengthy open-records battle with TxDOT. During their legal dispute, TxDOT took the unusual step of asking a state senator to write a bill that, in its original form, would have kept the entire database private.
The dispute between WOAI and TxDOT is a telling example of how difficult it can be to get important information out to the public. In some cases, it’s a long, expensive slog — it took nearly two years for WOAI to get its hands on the data. Read the rest of this entry »
The friendly folks at the Consumerist linked to my post about Caribbean Cruise Line, the telemarketing firm that offers “free” cruises on behalf of Celebration Cruise Line. As usual, the comments at the Consumerist were interesting. The blog looks out for consumers, and over the years it has fostered a savvy online community that discusses scams and corporate shenanigans.
The comments about the cruise line included one from someone claiming to be a former employee at Celebration:
I used to work reservations for Celebration Cruise Line, the company which owns the ship, the Bahamas Celebration, and this is pretty much par for the course for Carribean Cruise Line, who occupied the downstairs office.
They, us, and somehow Ramada Plaza Resorts were involved together (I’m still not sure who owns whom). The offer is legit-ish: this is their MO, and you will eventually (often months later) get a free cruise after a time share presentation (forgive me, vacation club presentation). In an interior, 140 square foot cabin. On a two night cruise leaving on a Monday or a Wednesday. Plus, the ship itself is not all that exciting; it is a converted Norwegian ferry. Just… save your money.
Other commenters debated whether it was worth taking a cheap cruise in exchange for enduring a time-share presentation. Some people thought it wasn’t that bad:
My gut says the woman who called Tedesco never took the job intending to defraud people.
And the $118 fee for the free cruise certainly sounds scammy, it could even be a scam. But I think what it amounts to is that the telemarketing company gets paid to book people who are qualified (ie, can get a loan to pay for a timeshare.) If they book a bunch of people who never show up or don’t qualify, they’d be out of business pretty fast. By charging these “lucky” people $118 it pretty much insures they’ll show up, and if they don’t then the telemarketers get the money they’d have gotten from the cruise/timeshare people.
I still wouldn’t do it myself, but like others have commented, I have also gotten some nice freebies for sitting through a timeshare presentation.
If you’ve received a call from this company, feel free to weigh in and share your experience.
We sat down with Terry Gildea of Texas Public Radio for this week’s episode of The Source, Terry’s show about journalists who cover complicated issues in San Antonio.
Terry is an oddity in the soundbite-world of broadcast media — he’s a radio reporter who values in-depth reporting. So we had an interesting talk about the weeks or months of legwork it can take to write an investigative story. Terry talked to Karisa King, Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje and me about nursing homes in San Antonio that provide poor care with little state oversight.
It took about three months of work to write this story. We read 3,000 pages of regulatory reports, stacks of lawsuits, and interviewed dozens of people.
You might ask, why bother doing all this work? The alternative is shallow journalism — make a few phone calls, interview some talking heads, and slap together a shoddy story. That’s the last thing we need in an age of shrinking newsrooms and a skeptical readership.
Terry understands that. And he’s giving journalists a forum to explain how exactly they do their jobs. Tune in on Mondays at 12:30 p.m. if you’re interested in hearing the story behind a good story. You can listen to past shows here.
If you’ve ever had to deal with a government agency that tried to withhold public documents from you, check out Steve Myers’ interview with one of the authors of a new book and blog, The Art of Access.
Instead of focusing on the intricacies of open-records laws, David Cuillier and Charles Davis write about the social dynamics between people who ask for records, and the gatekeepers who decide whether to release them. Cuillier says:
It’s crucial to understand the constraints agencies work under to be more effective in getting what you need. Those folks don’t come to work with horns and cloven hooves. There is a whole bureaucratic world that thinks differently than requesters. Understand that world, and you’ll navigate around it much better.
One technique the pair discuss on their blog is checking the job postings at government agencies to understand the agency’s attitude towards open government.
By coincidence, the same week I learned about this open-records blog, there was local news about BexarMet’s ousted gatekeeper T.J. Connolly, who pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations. We had written many stories about Connolly, one of which detailed his efforts to delay an open-records request at BexarMet. “I want to be as uncooperative as possible … without being obvious,” Connolly wrote to BexarMet officials.
How did we learn about these stonewalling tactics? After Connolly and his supporters left the agency, we asked for their e-mails under the Texas Public Information Act. Under the new leadership at BexarMet, the agency was eager to appear more open, and handed over thousands of e-mails.
So the authors of The Art of Access are making a very important point: The culture of an agency plays a huge part in determining how much access you get.
I got a telemarketing call last week from a friendly woman offering me a “free” cruise. All I needed to do was give her my credit card number to pay $118 in port taxes up front.
I’ve always been fascinated by these kind of sales tactics, so I took notes while she made her pitch. Here’s how the phone call went.
Somehow my unofficial beat during every election in San Antonio is to roam around and write about the problems and low-voter turnout that afflict our messy Democracy. While on “election snafu” patrol, I was relying on a list of voting sites put out by the Bexar County Elections Department. But the list of locations was in the dreaded pdf form — not a very useful way to see at a glance which sites were in the neighborhoods I was interested in.
There are a lot of online mapping tools out there. Today I tried out ZeeMaps, a free service. You upload a spreadsheet with addresses, ZeeMaps geocodes the locations for you, and generates an interactive Google map.
It was all relatively painless. I ended up relying on this map quite a bit today as I drove around checking voting sites.
A map like this is useful if you want to see the voting locations in your area. It also helps to show the sheer scale of Bexar County’s network of polling sites.
True/Slant: Matt Stroud interviews investigative journalist Steve Weinberg about his decision to work with journalists paid by the Church of Scientology to investigate the St. Petersburg Times. “Is it OK for veteran investigative reporters to write for the Scientologists? Or is working for an organization ’so hostile to outside journalists’ just not right?”
Nieman Journalism Lab: Conservative nonprofit groups are hiring investigative reporters, which could muddle the landscape for other nonprofits that try to hew closely to news operations.
Here’s a well-articulated explanation of why it’s important for journalists to seek out documents and data. Brant Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.
It’s great to see IRE set up a YouTube channel where hopefully we’ll see videos with more tips and advice for journalists and bloggers who want to learn how to dig for information.
We sat down with Terry Gildea of Texas Public Radio for this week’s episode of 
