Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
A look at enterprising journalism at the San Antonio Express-News and how it’s done.
After retired state Sen. Frank Madla and members of his family died in a fire in November 2006, the tragedy raised an obvious question: Are San Antonio firefighters doing a good job arriving to fires quickly and keeping residents safe? Express-News Projects Editor David Sheppard asked us to find out. At this point, what would …
Body Solutions CEO Harry Siskind cried and apologized in a San Antonio courtroom yesterday. His claims that a fruity drink could burn fat “while you sleep” had been debunked. He no longer pays radio disc jockeys to tout Body Solutions on the air. He’s not sitting in the front row at San Antonio Spurs games …
An article about false claims of military service is today’s most viewed, e-mailed, and commented-upon story on the San Antonio Express-News’ Web site. But it’s a story that very easily could have gone untold. There were no press conferences announcing it. There were no photo ops for television crews to get their images and soundbites. …
Day 2 of “Texas’ Deadliest Export” is out. The series shows how easy it is for Mexican drug cartels to buy guns in Texas. Sunday’s story by Reporter Guillermo Contreras focuses on the straw buyers — the people with clean criminal histories who buy guns that wind up being used in cop killings and gun …
Meet Stumpy. This pale zombie was the subject of a video I shot during a daylong class at the San Antonio Express-News offered by Angela Grant, our online media producer. Angela gave us tips about how to shoot video. Then she sent us out to film whatever we wanted for a few hours. After that, …
Anton Caputo, the environmental reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, won this year’s Risser prize for his series about the impact of climate change in Texas. The $3,000 prize is named after James Risser, a Pulitzer-prize winning journlist who wrote about environmental problems that are unique to the Western United States. Anton wrote about shrinking …
Our paper’s web guru, Fernando Ortiz, designed this new web page to showcase some of the best journalism at the San Antonio Express-News. The page offers a list of links to online forums where readers can talk about the stories, and it highlights the most recent project by Todd Bensman about gunrunning in Mexico. At …
Express-News Reporter Todd Bensman wrote an outstanding article in Sunday’s paper about Mexican drug cartels buying assault weapons in Texas to battle rivals and Mexican police. Bensman’s story showed how cartels hire people with clean criminal histories to buy firearms at Texas gun shows and gun shops. Bensman traced the path of several guns found …