John Tedesco

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.

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.

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.

An example of a chart created on Swivel showing the total medals won by each country at the 2010 Winter Olympics

Matt Stiles, data guru at the Texas Tribune, wrote a great tipsheet with links to user-friendly Web tools for generating charts and maps. Stiles was one of the presenters at a Watchdog Workshop last weekend in Austin organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors.

These are handy tools if you’re analyzing public data and need to create a graphic or map that will help readers immediately grasp what your analysis shows.

I’m working on this tipsheet for a presentation tomorrow at a Watchdog Workshop in Austin organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors. My boss and I are going to talk about some methods we use to fact-check stories. Check out the tipsheet and feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment if you have more ideas about improving accuracy in news stories or blog posts.

Update: For more information about setting up your own notes template that’s mentioned in the tipshseet, here’s a past post with instructions.

There are all kinds of writers out there but most of us have something in common: We take notes. We talk to people and type up the interviews. We jot down ideas and observations. We write phone numbers, key dates, to-do lists and questions. And as we amass all this raw material, we can get lost in the chaos of our own notes if we’re not careful.

One solution is a handy feature in Microsoft Word, Google Docs and other software that allows you to insert bookmarks and hyperlinks within the document you’re working on. These tools are usually found in the “Insert” menu. With bookmarks and links, you can create a table of contents at the top of your document, and use it to jump to different sections of your notes.

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Express-News reader Rick Pratt wrote an interesting letter to the editor published today that discussed the consequences of our spending habits:

Dr. Carbonell suggests we shouldn’t travel to Cuba because we would only be lining the pockets of its dictatorial leaders, the Castro brothers. This is probably true, but where would he suggest we spend our hard-earned dollars?

We could get in our car and drive down to the gas station, where we have a choice of buying from companies like Citgo (Venezuelan oil), Chevron (Nigerian oil) or the many other stations that get their fuel oil from Saudi Arabia.

Or maybe we could just donate to China by shopping at retail outlets.

We don’t have to travel to a dictatorial regime in order to support them. We can do that in the good ol‘ freedom-loving US of A!

Pratt reminded me of a unique, compellingly written series of investigative stories by the Chicago Tribune’s Paul Salopek that traced the exact origins of gasoline shipped to a gas-hungry Chicago suburb. To tell this story, Salopek immersed himself in it. He volunteered as a gas station clerk, mopping floors and making change for customers, and he traveled to the war-torn regions that feed America’s insatiable appetite for oil.

Salopek had rare access to an oil company’s data and made the most of it, writing well-crafted sentences like this:

$73.81 worth of unleaded pumped one Saturday afternoon by a Little League mom was traced not simply back to Africa, but to a particular set of offshore fields in Nigeria through which Ibibio villagers canoed home to children dying of curable diseases.

The stories are a really good read, check them out if you get a chance.

Photo credit: ^riza^

WOAI’s Brian Collister, the investigative television reporter often seen shoving a fuzzy microphone in the faces of fleeing public officials, has a new blog at mySA. Brian is one of the few TV reporters in town who actually digs through records and analyzes public data.

One of my favorite stories by Brian features a skillful interview he conducted with Christine Torres, the disgraced executive director of the Bexar County Housing Authority. It’s a good example of how to handle a public official who is trying to hide the truth.

Brian found out the housing authority was giving mortgage assistance to only one person: Torres’ daughter-in-law. In this news video, Brian interviewed Torres.

Notice how Brian simply let Torres talk.

At first she denied the housing authority gave mortgage assistance to anyone. Then she acknowledged one person was receiving assistance, but refused to say who it was. Then Brian demonstrated he already knew who it was, and asked why Torres’ daughter-in-law deserved taxpayer help to own a house.

One of the best things journalists can do when confronted with someone who is lying or trying to hide something is to get the falsehood on the record. Don’t interrupt. Don’t get indignant. Let them dig their own hole.

Then go back and pick apart their story.

What happened to Torres? She resigned and later pleaded guilty to a felony.

Scott Huddleston covered the shootings at Fort Hood last week and helped write an amazing profile of Kimberly Munley, the police sergeant who, along with Sgt. Mark Todd, opened fire on Nidal Malik Hasan and stopped the rampage.

Scott talked to one of Munley’s neighbors and learned a revealing anecdote about Munley’s no-nonsense attitude:

As military wives on Munley’s street cared for families while their husbands were deployed, Munley would keep an eye out for them and let them know of any criminal activity, said Erin Houston, a neighbor.

One night, Munley shooed away a couple of men trying to break into her house, telling them, “If you try to come in, I’m going to shoot you,” Houston said. “After they went away, she walked the neighborhood — by herself — to make sure they were nowhere around.”

Interviewing neighbors is something reporters always do, and many times the effort doesn’t turn up gems like Scott found. We’ve all read about neighbors who have no clue they’ve been living next door to a serial killer. There’s always a neighbor who says, “He seemed like such a nice boy.” Even the Onion poked fun at these interviews with the classic article: “Neighbors remember serial killer as serial killer.”

But talking to neighbors can sometimes pay off. Last week Joey Estrada Jr., the young man accused of killing restaurateur Viola Barrios, was in the news because his trial is going to be held in Victoria instead of San Antonio.

Lomi Kriel and I profiled Estrada last year and the first thing we did was talk to neighbors. Most of the people we talked to didn’t know much about Estrada. But we found someone who had heard that Estrada used to work at Hollister Co., a clothing store at the Shops at La Cantera. Thanks to that tip, we were able to learn Estrada had been accused of rifling through employees’ purses and even stealing a car. It was part of a pattern of alleged thefts leading up to the burglary and arson of Barrios’ home.

So talk to the neighbors. Even if they don’t know much information, maybe they can lead you to people who do.

Reporter Karisa King wrote a story published Sunday that revealed state Rep. David Leibowitz, D-San Antonio, is accused of defaulting on $5.5 million in debt. Aside from being an interesting read (Leibowitz denies owing that much money), the story is a good example of the power of public documents. If you’re writing the same kind of story or blog post and need to check someone’s financial track record, a good place to start is your local courthouse. You can search online and even download scanned images of the actual documents, often for free.

For federal courts, which include bankruptcy cases, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts set up Pacer, where you can search for free and, in many cases, download court records for a small fee.

In San Antonio, the Bexar County District Clerk offers a “litigant inquiry” on its Web page, where you can type in someone’s name and see if they have ever been sued. The county’s law firm sues people and companies that fail to pay property taxes. If you find any cases that look interesting on the Web site, you have to go to the courthouse to the clerk’s office on the second floor to read the actual case file. The clerk’s office has recently started digitally scanning filings, so hopefully those documents will be posted online like Pacer.

To find tax liens, judgments and other records filed at the courthouse, you can use an amazing, free site set up by County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff. After registering, you can search and download a wide variety of records. A search for “Leibowitz” on the site found numerous hits for the Texas lawmaker, including three federal tax liens here and here and here. The most recent one was filed in 2007.

When I first started out as a reporter in 1997, you had to trek down to the courthouse, figure out the county’s antiquated computer system, and ask someone to pull the physical records. Today, parts of the county’s computer system are still antiquated, but you can still find and download many types of records on the Internet in minutes. Pretty amazing.

(Photo credit: Zereshk)