In January, Express-News Reporter Jason Buch profiled Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a U.S. citizen from Laredo who had risen through the ranks of a Mexican drug cartel. In high school, Valdez Villarreal was a jock who got the nickname “Barbie” for his light-colored eyes and hair. Years later in Mexico, he was poised to become a ruthless drug boss.
This week, Valdez Villarreal was arrested in Mexico and NPR featured an interesting interview with Jason yesterday about Villarreal. You can hear a Mexican ballad that extols the virtues of the drug lord, and how he’s such an intelligent businessman. Great stuff.
Karisa did. And what she found out was published on the front page of last Sunday’s San Antonio Express-News:
After the development firm NRP Group LLC lost its second bid for tax credits to finance an affordable-housing project on the city’s West Side, an influential ally intervened in the company’s cause.
State Rep. Jose Menendez took the lectern at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs and urged board members to fund the San Juan Square II project, a 144-unit apartment complex that would replace blighted public housing. …
What Menendez did not tell the board at the meeting was that the development represented something else: a financial boon for the company he works for, Stewart Title, which had received $91,000 for issuing title insurance on the project’s first stage, and landed nearly all of NRP’s business on affordable-housing deals.
Payouts from the San Juan developments were among about $1.8 million paid to Stewart Title from NRP housing deals since 2003, records show.
Since joining the Legislature in 2000, Menendez has been one of the most outspoken supporters of NRP and other developers in the affordable-housing sector.
At the same time, the San Antonio Democrat has ascended the ranks of Stewart Title to become vice president for commercial development in the company’s national division.
Karisa said she spent six weeks working on the story about Menendez.
It was easy to confirm that he worked for Stewart Title. But his ties to the company raised a hard-to-answer question: How much money did Stewart Title make from the housing deals? That’s not something you can answer by Googling it.
Sometimes journalism is simply the act of quantifying something. You might know the broad outlines of a story very early in the reporting process, but you have to figure out how to fill in the gaps.
If you’ve ever bought a house, you know real-estate transactions churn out tons of paperwork. Normally most of those records are private. But because tax breaks were involved in the housing deals Karisa was looking at, the real estate records were considered public information, open to anyone who asked.
Karisa found the fees paid to Stewart Title by driving to Austin and reading the records for housing projects that receive tax breaks, which are filed at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs in Austin. “I spent two days just going through boxes and boxes of documents,” Karisa said.
As she read through the files, Karisa typed key information such as the title fees into a simple Excel spreadsheet. After days of work, she was able to add up the fees for each housing project: A grand total of $1.8 million in title fees were paid to Stewart Title.
What did Mendendez have to say about that? Check out the whole story, it’s a great read.
The biggest single stimulus project scheduled to be built in Bexar County is a new highway interchange between traffic-clogged Loop 1604 and U.S. 281 on San Antonio’s far North Side. The project is estimated to cost $130 million, with $80 million coming from federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2015.
But the site sits on the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, the primary source of San Antonio’s drinking supply — and the source of San Antonio’s fiercest debates about pollution from urban sprawl tainting the aquifer.
In a way, it’s history repeating itself. The highway intersection was the site of one of the very first controversies involving the aquifer, when developers in the 1970s wanted to build a “super mall” near the location that sparked a petition and referendum by concerned residents who tried to halt the development.
Painfully funny “journalism warning labels” created by British comedian Tom Scott are going viral. The stickers say things like, “Warning: This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.” Scott says he’s been posting the stickers on the free papers in London. And he’s making it possible for everyone to do this. You can download the stickers for free. Fans have translated them into 11 languages.
“It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar labeling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content,” Scott explained on his blog.
Scott’s making a salient point, but I don’t see why it should be limited to journalists. You can find rehashed press releases on blogs, too. That’s what a block quote is for. And contrary to what Scott claims, when I get an unverified tip, I don’t hang up the phone and start writing a story; I check it out. But some bloggers will simply run with it, then add the caveat that they’re waiting for confirmation. If it’s not true … oh well.
I’m not pointing this out to thump my chest and say the mainstream media should be trusted over everything else. But lately I’ve been noticing similarities between news organizations and many blogs claiming to be different from the media. For example, the Washington press corps is often accused of practicing pack journalism. Whenever some official announcement is made at the White House, everyone jumps on it and writes the same thing.
What’s so different about pack journalism in Washington and pack journalism in the blogosphere? Whenever an official announcement pops up from Google in my RSS reader, minutes later tech blogs are parroting it. Pick your niche; the same thing is happening.
The lesson here is that a blogger faces similar pressures and time constraints as a traditional reporter. It’s easy to make sloppy mistakes, to follow the pack, to rehash stale news.
The real challenge, for both blogs and the media, is doing something different, original, and enlightening for readers.
Some readers — and government officials — wonder why journalists are so nosy and make such a big deal about getting access to government records. Sure, transparency matters. But why make such a big fuss if an agency wants to withhold e-mails or something. Who cares?
Here are five shining examples of why this pesky-open government thing matters.
Last week, the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas held its annual conference in Austin and announced the winners of the Gavel Awards, which go to journalists who produced stories that shed light on the legal system. A common thread runs through all these stories: They relied extensively on public documents, and uncovered important, previously unknown problems and issues in the community.
So if you think public information isn’t really that big a deal, check out the winning stories:
Steve Thompson and Tanya Eiserer of The Dallas Morning News discovered the Dallas Police Department was under-counting serious crimes, creating the perception that the city was safer than it actually was. The reporters uncovered the story by examining piles of police reports.
Jeremy Roebuck and Jared Janes of the McAllen Monitor relied on public documents to tell the tale of how Hidalgo County was struggling to pay for millions of dollars in indigent defense costs. The reporters discovered the county’s system cost more per capita than any other urban county in Texas.
Leslie Wilber of the Victoria Advocate revealed how an innocent man was jailed for 62 days based on a questionable “scent identification lineup” overseen by a dog handler and his bloodhounds. The obscure law-enforcement technique answers to no laws or regulations and critics call it junk science. But the lineup is still admissible as evidence in court.
Cindy V. Culp of the Waco Tribune-Herald used court data to analyze the track record of a district attorney running for office. The news stories gave voters a clearer picture of a controversy surrounding how many criminal cases were dismissed.
David Schechter and Mark Smith of WFAA-TV uncovered how illegal immigrants who are accused of felonies in the United States — including murder — are routinely deported back to Mexico and set free.
Somebody explain to me again why public information doesn’t matter.
The tyranny of the daily 10 percent | The Evolving Newsroom
If money grew on trees and journalists could produce all the top-notch stories they wanted, would the audience read them all? Would it make a difference in society? Or would readers still scan the headlines and read roughly 10 percent of those stories?
Construction workers on the River Walk's Mission Reach
Our latest story about the stimulus is about how much federal money is flowing to Bexar County, what kind of projects are being funded, and what will the lasting impact be?
Stimulus money is fixing headstones at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, building new playgrounds, painting buildings at Lackland AFB, paying for 50 new police officers and reshaping the San Antonio River.
It’s funding high-profile projects that will benefit future generations — and paying for obscure work that hardly will be noticed.
Sometimes, it feels like the biggest beneficiaries of the Recovery Act are companies that make the outlandishly sized checks for ribbon-cuttings, where politicians frequently take credit for stimulus projects.
But behind the photo ops are a large number of companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations that were awarded 775 grants and contracts in Bexar County worth more than $850 million, according to spending reports released last week by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Another $60 million in stimulus money is being loaned to local businesses.
We’ve been spending a few months examining the local impact of the Recovery Act — past stories are here and here. I’ve also been bookmarking useful resources through Diigo — feel free to check out my real-time list of handy websites.
For the latest story, we mostly relied on data you can download directly from Recovery.gov, the website of the Recovery Board. The data doesn’t have a “county” category, but you can match the zip code of each award with the zip codes of your county. If you’re simply interested in seeing what kind of stimulus projects are being funded in your county or neighborhood, the Recovery Board offers an interactive map that lets you drill down to the street level. Each stimulus project shows up as a dot — click on it to learn more details.
Last week, Republican Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn released “Summertime Blues,” a report listing what they say are the top 100 wasteful stimulus projects across the United States.
There’s an interesting pattern buried in the 583 footnotes at the end of the report: More than 200 citations rely on stories published by news organizations. Many of the examples of questionable spending were first made public in news articles — including one by yours truly.
But if they’re right, why are journalists spending so much time uncovering examples of wasteful government spending, publicizing the details, and holding officials accountable?
Think about it. You can pick up a newspaper anywhere in the country and chances are, there’s a story about some taxpayer-financed boondoggle. And if you’re not reading it in a newspaper, you’re probably watching the story on TV, or reading it online in one of the countless investigative Internet sites that are sprouting up.
The journalists I work with are obsessed with this watchdog thing, and it gets annoying after awhile. They totally forget how we’re supposed to be liberal radicals. A reporter might be talking to me about the nuances of the Texas Public Information Act, and I’ll be like, “Dude, I’m just here for the free Che Guevara T-shirt.”
Memo to my bosses: I have yet to get my T-shirt, please get on that.
Some people might say the critics who get worked up about liberal media bias conveniently ignore all the investigative stories that poke a gaping hole in their claims.
I, for one, would never say that. It’s so much more fun to be part of a vast liberal media conspiracy.
A week ago, Jenny LaCoste-Caputo wrote a front-page story about Holy Cross High School, and how it withheld diplomas from students who owed thousands of dollars in tuition.
This week, Jenny is on her way to a new job in a new city. She’s leaving behind the news business and all its uncertainty.
“It was getting scary,” Jenny said, referring to round-after-round of lay offs in the turbulent media industry. “We got two little kids.”
When a journalist leaves journalism, it’s easy for the bean counters to figure out how much money is saved in pay and benefits. But it’s difficult to calculate the lost impact of all the great stories that will probably go untold by a single talented reporter.
Jenny covered the education beat. She first learned of the problems at Holy Cross in May through a tip. She began talking to “as many people as possible” to vet the complaints about Holy Cross, and she went back and interviewed families to make sure they didn’t change their stories. The didn’t. “It’s not like we took things at face value,” Jenny said.
Here’s the top of the long article Jenny wrote after weeks of work:
For Sylvia Flores, a private school voucher seemed like a winning lottery ticket.
Flores lives in Edgewood Independent School District but desperately wanted a Catholic education for her son, Luis Flores.
It was a dream that was out of reach until she heard about a voucher program funded by San Antonio businessman James Leininger, who spent 10 years and $50 million of his fortune bankrolling a political idea that never caught hold in Texas.
When the voucher program ended after her son’s sophomore year at Holy Cross of San Antonio, Flores was left with a gut-wrenching reality: She couldn’t afford the school Luis loved. But she said that when she opted for public school, Holy Cross’ principal urged her to stay, offering tuition assistance and opportunities to work off the $5,100 in annual tuition.
Ultimately, staying cost Luis his diploma and left Flores with a bill of nearly $10,000 she didn’t expect.
Four families whose children were scheduled to graduate from Holy Cross this year told the San Antonio Express-News that the school’s administration encouraged them and others to remain at the school despite mounting bills, promising help with tuition. But in the second half of the students’ senior year, school officials told the families they would have to pay their tuition bill in full if they wanted their children to graduate. The bills ranged from $6,300 to nearly $14,000.
A teaser for the story was posted online and it generated more than 100 comments before the full article was even published. One thing Jenny learned is that several of the students were athletes, and Holy Cross didn’t raise concerns about their tuition until the sports seasons were over.
“In almost every case, that was what happened,” Jenny said.
Caputo
Express-News Editor Bob Rivard mentioned the Holy Cross story in a newsroom meeting Thursday, where we all said farewell to Jenny and three other journalists who are moving on to other jobs or going back to school.
Reporter Elizabeth Allen also left the paper, and the conversation at the meeting turned to the memorable reporters like Elizabeth who came to the Express-News after covering news in the Rio Grande Valley. Maro Robbins, Jeanne Russell, Bonnie Pfister … they all wrote outstanding stories. And they’ve all left the news business. It’s sobering to think of all the great stories that are going untold in San Antonio. Not to sound like Donald Rumsfeld, but we don’t even know what we don’t know we’re missing.
Bob said as much during the meeting. While some news executives claim we can do less with more, Bob said he didn’t buy that.
“Make no mistake,” Bob told the departing journalists last week, “by losing you, we are diminished.”
In the age of Facebook and Twitter, you could argue that even though we’re losing some talented voices in the media, in the long run it’s OK because the Internet allows all of us to tell stories. But that argument doesn’t take into account the quality of the stories. Jenny’s article was rich with telling details, which she dug up during weeks of work. That kind of time is a luxury for most bloggers. And that kind of depth is a far cry from a rant on Facebook.
Jenny’s husband, Anton, had covered the environmental beat at the Express-News, and led our coverage of the controversy surrounding the proposed expansion of the nuclear power plant in Bay City, Texas. Anton got a job in Austin and left journalism — and Jenny’s doing the same, working for the Texas Association of School Administrators.
“I’m glad I’m going out on a high note with a story that made some impact,” Jenny said.
Last week, Republican Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn released “
