Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
2009 was a brutal year for the Express-News. We lost a third of the newsroom in March from painful layoffs, and the exodus of talent was demoralizing, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Even after the layoffs, we’re still occasionally losing bright journalists who don’t see much of a future in mainstream news. They might … Read more
Elaine Ayala wrote a touching obit today about Express-News photographer Robert Earl McLeroy Jr., who was known to everyone in the newsroom as “Mac.” At the age of 57, Mac died Tuesday from complications from a massive stroke he suffered in May: McLeroy worked at the newspaper for 29 years. He took a buyout in … Read more
Google announced it added more news sources to its Fast Flip experiment, and the San Antonio Express-News is now flippable. Fast Flip is part of Google’s re-imagining of how readers find and consume news. Google takes snapshots of a publisher’s stories or blog posts. You can flip through pages like a magazine until something catches … Read more
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 … Read more
The San Antonio Express-News has been delving into many story angles about the proposed expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear plant near Bay City. CPS Energy wants to invest more than $5 billion for two new reactors, which has touched off a heated debate in San Antonio. For today’s story about nuclear safety, I … Read more
Randy Bear, one of the more thoughtful bloggers in the San Antonio area, lamented the slow decline of newspapers and cautioned his readers yesterday that blogs aren’t authoritative: Bloggers such as myself don’t have the time to invest in vetting stories to make sure the information is completely accurate. In many cases I rely on … Read more
The home page of the San Antonio Express-News looks different today: Here’s the old version: Eric Braun at mySA blogged about the tweaks. The main difference is the removal of the centerpiece where readers were supposed to click on tabs to pull up a new photo and links to stories and resources. In reality, few … Read more
Express-News Reporter Brian Chasnoff uncovered a serious paperwork problem at the San Antonio Police Department in his front-page story today: 2,300 police reports documenting a wide variety of crimes have gone missing. Read more about SAPD: Does risk of police chases outweigh benefits of capturing suspects? Brian wrote: The San Antonio Police Department has misplaced … Read more
As South Texas deals with a seemingly never-ending drought, San Antonio Express-News Environmental Reporter Anton Caputo teamed up with Austin American-Statesman Reporter Asher Price for a story about the water supply that cools nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project in Matagorda County. The utility companies of both cities own a stake in STP, which … Read more
Interesting letter-to-the-editor today in the San Antonio Express-News written by Linnea Schlobohm, who sums up one of the main themes of this blog better than I ever could: After reading Brian Chasnoff’s beautifully crafted story on the San Antonio River, “Paradise Lost to Progress” (Front Page, Sept. 6), I remembered a recent TV comment predicting … Read more