Political junkies, rejoice. C-Span has posted nearly its entire video archive online for the public to search and view. This is awesome.

Lets say you’re researching the roots of the economic crisis, and you want to explore whether the deregulation of the banking industry played a role. The C-Span archive offers the full video of the 1999 bipartisan signing ceremony of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. And nearly a decade later, after the housing bubble burst, there’s a video on C-Span of former Sen. Phil Gramm defended his role in the legislation.

A New York Times article about the archives says:

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host.

If you think C-Span is boring, did I mention that Chris Farley appeared in Congress in 1995 to impersonate Newt Gingrich? Watch the video in all its glory on C-Span.

In the process of blogging about WOAI’s open-records battle with the Texas Department of Transportation, I had a chance to revisit the Web site set up by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. The foundation has completely revamped its old, sleepy site — check out how it looked as recently as 2008 in the Internet Archive.

The foundation erased that static page and replaced it with social media offerings. The home page is a WordPress blog, and the foundation now has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

The new site makes it easier for people to see the foundation’s good work, and it offers tips for people interested in open government. For example, Executive Director Keith Elkins gives advice on YouTube about how to effectively use the Texas Public Information Act to obtain government records.

Social media still gets a bad rap in some circles, especially in the media. But look at the before and after shots of the foundation’s Web site. It’s not hard to tell which one is more engaging, and which one does a better job explaining to people why open government matters.

Photo courtesy of Ernest Ruiz

After a tall retaining wall buckled in a San Antonio neighborhood, threatening dozens of homes, rancher Ernest Ruiz called us with a tip about another faulty retaining wall.

Ruiz’s story had an interesting twist: The collapsed wall near his rural property hadn’t been constructed by Centex Homes or other homebuilders. This wall was owned by the city:

From a mostly quiet tract of land surrounded by the hubbub of urban life, Ernest Ruiz has waged a nearly three-year fight against the city of San Antonio over the failure of a retaining wall.

In the summer of the epically wet 2007, a city-owned retaining wall that sits between Pearsall Park and Ruiz’s South Side ranch collapsed during a rainstorm, sending dirt and debris onto his property and into Leon Creek.

“There were rocks all over the place,” said Ruiz, a 72-year-old rancher who has been buying property in the area since the 1980s and now has about 265 acres that he calls Leon Creek Ranch. “When that rain came, it tore everything right down the middle.”

While San Antonio rebuilt the damaged portions of the retaining wall and cleaned up its property, Ruiz said the city has done nothing to clean up his property, and he’s still trying to recover.

Ruiz found it ironic that the city criticized Centex Homes for not pulling a permit for the wall at the Hills of Rivermist, while the city suffered its own wall failure.

Jen’s story about the legal dispute featured some colorful details about the ranch — how Ruiz’s family likes to play cards on poker nights and fish for perch, and how the rumble of jets at Lackland AFB drowns out the country tunes from the AM radio in Ruiz’s Toyota pickup.

I like articles that paint a scene for the reader. One way to do that is to write descriptions that engage all the senses — not just how something looks, but how it sounds and smells and feels. Jen’s story makes you feel like you’re sitting in the truck cab with the old rancher, going along for the ride.

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.

WOAI Reporter Brian Collister of Trouble Shooter fame asked for the accident data on Jan. 5, 2008. Collister told me he wanted to analyze it for patterns, like the main factors that cause accidents in Texas, and where dangerous roadways are located. The database is called CRIS — Crash Records Information System.

In response to Collister’s request, TxDOT asked the Texas Attorney General’s office whether it was required to release the data. TxDOT argued that Texas has a law on the books intended to prevent ambulance chasing lawyers from getting easy access to hardcopy accident reports. Anyone asking for an accident report in Texas has to provide some identifying information, such as the location and date of the crash.

But in a March 31, 2008 letter, the attorney general determined the database didn’t fall under the anti-ambulance chaser law, so most of the database was open to the public.

TxDOT turned to the courts in an attempt to withhold the data — the agency sued the attorney general. Collister said WOAI joined the suit to get the database from TxDOT.

“We got into a big fight with them,” Collister told me. He said WOAI and TxDOT began negotiating a way to resolve the lawsuit. According to Collister, WOAI wasn’t really interested in the personal information about the drivers — their names and dates of birth, for example. The television station wanted the data that detailed what caused the accident and other factors. Collister said WOAI had agreed to allow TxDOT to release the data with the personal information removed.

Then lawmakers got involved.

By chance, Collister learned that TxDOT had asked state Sen. John Carona to write a bill that, in its original form, stated that TxDOT’s entire database fell under the anti-ambulance chaser law. The move would have essentially kept the database private, because there’d be no way for someone like Collister to provide all the identifying information of every single accident in the data. Carona’s bill said TxDOT would be allowed to provide statistical information to the public.

Collister learned about Carona’s Senate Bill 375 on a Friday, and found out TxDOT had requested the bill. “It was so freagin’ infuriating, I couldn’t relax that whole weekend,” Collister said.

Carona is chairman of the Senate Committee on Transportation & Homeland Security, and a legislative hearing for the bill was scheduled for March 18, 2009. Media organizations such as the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas opposed Carona’s bill, and Collister also drove to Austin to testify against it. (Video of the hearing is online here; testimony for SB 375 starts at about the hour mark).

At the hearing, state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, a member of the committee and an open-records advocate, said he wasn’t quite sure why Carona’s bill was necessary. Carona explained he was concerned that the media was “overreaching” by asking for the accident data.

“To me, the mere notion that the broadcast community would come and request an entire database of that type of information is overreaching,” Carona said.

Wentworth asked to hear from TxDOT on the issue. He said taxpayers paid for the data, so why shouldn’t they get access to it?

“It’s the public’s information,” Wentworth said. “They paid for it.”

TxDOT’s Carol Rawson, deputy director of traffic operations at the time, testified that the agency was concerned about personal information being released.

“That’s why we came to Senator Carona to try to help us a little bit,” she said.

After Rawson testified, it was Collister’s turn. Introducing himself as “a nosy investigative reporter,” he told the senators: “I’m the reason this bill was filed. I filed the open records request.” He pointed out that WOAI had already agreed with TxDOT to take the personal information out of the data.

“No one wants to open the door to ambulance chasers,” Collister said. By making the rest of the database public, the records could be analyzed to show where the most dangerous highways are in a community, for example, or where the most drunk driving incidents occur.

“That’s what folks like me use this data for,” Collister said.

Carona told Collister: “We think you’ve got very legitimate points,” and the bill’s language was later changed to withhold a laundry list of personal information like names of drivers. The legislation made the rest of the data public. The bill became law on June 19, 2009.

I talked to Rawson this morning to get her perspective on the open-records dispute. She insisted that TxDOT wasn’t trying to be sneaky and win its lawsuit with the attorney general and WOAI by asking for Carona’s help. She said Carona’s bill was very helpful in making clear what information in the accident database was public, and it addressed the agency’s concerns about personal information.

I pointed out that Carona’s original bill would have blocked the release of the entire database. “The bill did start off a little stronger,” Rawson said. But she said she understood where Collister was coming from. And she agreed that the data could be a very useful tool in making roads safer for the public.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to be stingy and withhold the data,” she said, adding: “I could see Brian’s point, and I think he could see my point.”

She laughed when I asked what it was like to deal with Collister. “He was like a bulldog.”

I also spoke with Angie Cervantes, a policy analyst for Carona who worked on the legislation. Cervantes said the original draft of the bill that withheld the entire database was too strongly worded.

“It was really about protecting the personal information and figuring out how we can do it,” she said. Even though WOAI had been negotiating with TxDOT to weed out the personal info, the legislation was still needed to deal with ambulance chasers who might demand the entire data, Cervantes said.

Collister told me he received the data in November. It includes contributing factors for accidents such as cell phone usage, road rage, and drunk driving. WOAI crunched the numbers, and also asked TxDOT to conduct its own analysis to make sure the agency didn’t dispute WOAI’s research. The station plans follow-up stories.

This case shows why an economic model is vitally needed to support in-depth journalism. It would be very difficult for a part-time blogger to pursue this kind of story. It costs time and money.

Anyone who does this kind of work, whether they’re bloggers, newspaper reporters, or nosy broadcast journalists, deserves a pat on that back — and financial support.

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.

God, I love the Onion.

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.

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.