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The post Journalists want to hear your coronavirus story. Here’s how to reach the Houston Chronicle appeared first on John Tedesco.

If you read weather updates on Facebook from the San Antonio Express-News, then you’re keenly aware that it’s summer and the forecaster is not happy about it.

“There is no weather,” a typical forecast reads. “There is only this. Always this. Unchanging. Eternal. Forever. This.”

Then there was this gem:

“It’s mostly sunny and almost 100 degrees again, a forecast that’s not even fit for a country music song. Well, certainly not a good country music song that goes platinum and wins a bunch of awards as a crossover sensation that does particularly well with the 18-24 demographic while simultaneously sparking a resurgence in line dancing that leads to lots of bad paperback romance novels with taglines like, ‘She danced to remember. He danced to forget. They found one another — and love — on The Line.’

“The forecast would at least need some summer showers to pull that off. You can’t just openly profess your secret love outdoors when it’s 100 degrees. It’s simply not done.”

Don’t forget the update that called for readers to create their own forecasts, with a suggestion of “partly snuggly and 40 percent of kitten.”

The comedic genius behind these quirky Facebook posts is Chris Lykins, a recent hire by the Express-News team that oversees the newspaper’s premium site for subscribers.

Over the past few months, Chris has miraculously transformed boring weather forecasts into creative, amusing rituals that a growing number of readers look forward to.

I sat down with Chris to talk about his unique job, his inspiration, and his goals as the newspaper’s funny weather guy. Here are the highlights, lightly edited:

Question: First of all, where did you get the idea to write these clever weather updates?

Answer: I started when I first got on Facebook when I was at Seguin at the Gazette and was just trying to inject some levity. Because so much of what we do is really kind of depressing at times. You’re dealing with sad stories and tragic stories. And I was just trying to spice things up a little bit and make it clear that newspapers offer more than bad news. And it started to take off from there.

It ended up driving a lot of new Facebook fans. What was silence sort of got replaced by conversations. And not just on the weather posts but on the other stories that we posted.

People were getting more engaged?

Yeah, we sort of built this community to the point where I didn’t even have to really do a lot of moderation on some of the story posts because people took it upon themselves that this was their home on Facebook and they were going to treat it that way. So it was a pleasant sort of surprise.

You didn’t expect that.

I really didn’t know. I’ve always had an offbeat, quirky sense of humor. And there were a couple people at first who really didn’t like it. They expected the newspaper to be stoic. The thing I used to explain to people is, the newspaper has always been more than that. It’s always had comics. And puzzles. And opinions pages. It’s more than just headlines that you typically see. So we wanted to bring a little of that to Facebook and it paid off.

What time frame was this when you were at the Gazette?

Oh, gracious.

Because then you went to New Braunfels, right?

Yes, that was one of the things that I was asked to do when I came over to New Braunfels. And I probably did it for two years maybe in New Braunfels. And probably five or six before that in Seguin. But it got progressively more elaborate as I went on.

Probably the best known stuff was the three posts that I did in New Braunfels that ended up being a weather romance. It just happened one night. I was sitting at home and I was thinking, I gotta come up with a different way to do this because I’m running out of this one-liner material. And I said, what would it be like if I wrote it from the perspective of a Harlequin romance novel? And so I did that one time and it blew up huge and pulled in these crazy numbers. And so I did it a second time about a month later. And then that one actually got picked up by Chron.com and ended up on mySA here.

Is that how you got on our radar screen?

I’m not real sure but I”m sure that probably factored in a little bit. So that was a story that got picked up and that’s sort of when I was like, oh, it got noticed.

This is reminding me of a Reddit threat where a guy wrote fictional updates on what would happen if modern troops went back in time and fought the Roman empire and it went viral. Is this a weird, unexpected, creative thing that’s going on that people respond to?

Yeah, particularly with the romance stuff. What worked out so well was this was after the peak with E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey, and these erotic meteorological ramblings really did well. And I think it’s because people are sort of hungry for something a little different.

What’s great is a lot of people who are in San Antonio who have started picking up on this, they’re kind of taking ownership of this. Being in smaller community newspapers before I came here, I always thought of San Antonio as this sort of giant, metro establishment. But people in San Antonio consider the Express-News their hometown paper. It really struck me that it’s all the same, no matter the size of the city. People want to take ownership in the things that cover them.

So that’s really been kind of fun to watch that community and to watch people tag their friends and say, ‘Hey, have you read this?’ and watch those numbers climb on a daily basis. It’s been a lot of fun.

Coming up with something funny to say about the weather sounds incredibly daunting. You’re kind of like the astrologer for the Onion. Somehow, there’s always something different about the same thing. Where do you get your ideas?

Just absolutely random things that sort of pop into my head. Sometimes I’ll hear a song and I’ll think of a way I can segue into that or it’s just random crazy neurons. And summer is brutal. It is very difficult to come up with different things when it’s 103 degrees, partly cloudy, for days and days and days on end.

Well, it seems like that works because we’re all stuck in summer.

Yeah.

And so we’re all sharing in the joke of this suffering, right?

Right.

Does that create a receptive audience for these weather jokes?

I think it does because it’s the thing that impacts all of us.

Yeah. There’s no escaping it.

You’re not going to get away. What’s really kind of interesting is during the winter, you’ll see those winter Texans, they get in on that. Because it’s all part of that thing. They leave and come here to escape it. I’ve poked fun at them before when it’s 50 degrees outside and everybody who’s from here is wandering around in jackets and you see people out in shorts and tank tops and it’s like, ah, they’re from Minnesota. The weather is like death and taxes. It’s one of those constant things.

How do you measure the response from readers? Shares and likes?

Yeah, we look at that. I look at reach, too, to see how far it goes. A lot of times I will go back and I will look at the people who have public shares, I’ll read what they’re writing and what kind of comments they get on that. The best one was somebody saying, ‘If they keep doing this, I might have to resubscribe.’ And I’ve had several of those over the years. And I’ve had people message me, or call, and say, ‘I’ve resubscribed to the paper because of this.’ And it’s like, that’s great. That’s the high bar you want. If you can get some of those, now you’re rollin’.

The theory behind it at first was, OK, we need to bring in people and make people aware that we exist. And then be able to put other things in front of them. Because not everybody is going to have a story about (city) council or what they’re going to do at the Alamo show up in their news feed.

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But if you have something that people go to every day because they want to see what I’ve written, then they get all of that other stuff. It’s sort of my way of kind of gaming the system because Facebook has changed the algorithm that determines what they see in their feed. But if they go to our page directly because they don’t want to miss something, now you have them.

Then other stories pop up in the feed below that.

Yep. Right.

We should mention here your day job is social media ninja, right?

Yes. I basically decide what comes off of the premium site and goes on to social media. How to spin it, when to play it. Sometimes that involves bits and pieces of the story that I think will attract attention. And sometimes it’s shepherding conversations to make sure we don’t go too far afield.

What are some of your favorite comments from readers related to weather updates?

Uuum … I’ve had some people say I’m gonna marry that guy. Which is problematic because I’m already married. There was the one today, ‘I need to be BFFs with this person.’

I saw that.

I get that quite a bit. Sometimes people are like, are you — and then they’ll tag somebody — the one who writes these? And those are always really funny for me too because I think most of us have that person in our circle of friends who’s always got something funny to say, who’s always there. I’m that for a slightly larger and growing crowd.

There was one earlier this month where you said, ‘It’s Friday, all bets are off, the weather is whatever you want it to be.’ You had some good comments. I like this one guy, he was like, ‘Scattered Cracker Jacks throughout the day with 100 percent of bourbon in the evening.’

I love that sort of interaction because it’s what we really need. People need to feel invested and part of something.

Is that a problem newspapers face where readers don’t feel like that?

Yeah, I think that’s something that, as other media has come in and you’ve ended up with these really close communication and collaborative tools with people, I don’t know that newspapers were as quick to adopt them as some other folks have been. And particularly new media.

And there’s a notion with some people that newspapers are more solemn and not as approachable. And so opening that door and saying look, we’re people just like you, is important.

Yeah, I think some people view newspapers as stodgy and oldertimerish. But in our features section, for example, we’ve had writers who lead rock bands. They’re lead singers of rock bands. Hector Saldana. These guys are as hip as they come. But do people know that?

I don’t necessarily think that they do. I think that it’s one of those things where newspapers have tried as an institution to make delineations about, you know, these people may have political opinions, but they’re not reflected here. And we’ve had to do that. But everybody who has done this work, we all have cool, interesting parts of our lives and cool, interesting stories to share. I don’t think we really have a way to reveal that to the readers.

Would these weather updates work in a different medium? Could they work in the print side of things, or is it more suitable in a quirky online format?

I don’t know how well it would work in print because the audience is fundamentally different. Like the weather romance stuff. I would never in a million years put it inside the New Braunfels paper.

The thing I mainly try to focus on is making sure everybody is in on the joke. Not coming across as terribly patronizing.

I guess you get instant feedback, too, online.

Yes. In milliseconds.

Did you know that Jack Handey from SNL’s Deep Thoughts used to work here?

I did not.

He did.

Really?

Yeah. He’s a real guy. Used to work here. Apparently his position was eliminated because he wrote an unflattering story about auto dealers. Do you think newspapers offer an adequate outlet for clever, funny people?

Well, I know they have talked about what they want me to do, maybe a column on the premium site. So they clearly want me to do more than what I’m doing.

How have our likes grown?

We’re coming up on 26,000. And when I interviewed for the job, I think we were at 19,000. I’ve been here since the end of March, so we’ve grown quite a bit. But more importantly, we don’t have a lot of what I call dead stories. Stories that have no likes, no comments, no shares. We don’t have a lot of those anymore. Because there’s more of a community built up now that is participating.

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It’s been a lot of fun. And it is really flattering to see something that you wrote in the morning and you see how far it goes, how many people share it, and what people are saying about it.

All these people who say they want to be my best friend, how can you not feel great about that at the end of the day?

The post Meet Chris Lykins, the funny weather guy at the Express-News appeared first on John Tedesco.

No one knew what happened to her. And it’s likely no one ever would if it hadn’t been for a series of investigative articles written by San Antonio Express-News reporter John MacCormack, who realized it was a murder case before the police.

Director Tommy O’Haver said the reporter in the movie is a fictional composite of MacCormack named Jack Ferguson, played by Adam Scott.

“We had to compress so much of that story, and obviously the real investigation was far more complicated,” O’Haver told Express-News entertainment columnist Jeanne Jakle. “So we had to create a composite character for John. A lot of the stuff the reporter does in the movie, he didn’t actually do during the investigation. We also had to fit everything into an hour and a half.”

Without seeing the movie, I think it’s safe to say the truth about the reporting is going to be more interesting than fiction. Here’s a video and transcript of my Q&A interview with MacCormack as he looked back on the O’Hair story.

Who was Madalyn Murray O’Hair?

MacCormack: Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a formerly famous atheist who had achieved prominence in the early 60s when she filed a lawsuit alleging that school prayer and school bible reading was unconstitutional. It was one of three suits filed in a short time frame in the early ’60s. Hers was the third. They all three made the same legal claims. And the Supreme Court decided in favor of each one of them. However, O’Hair came out of all this identified as being the one who had filed the most important suit and she took advantage of it and basically became a professional atheist. And she appeared on talk shows, she established various atheist organizations, eventually settling in Austin. And she was quite prominent in the ’60s and ’70s. 

In 1995, O’Hair, her son and her granddaughter disappeared. How did you get involved in the story?

MacCormack: The assignment was a casual mention by my then-boss, Fred Bonavita, the state editor, that it had been a year since Madalyn Murray O’Hair had disappeared and why didn’t I check into things and see how the case was going? I, frankly, wasn’t even aware that she had disappeared because there was no commotion made, no police complaints filed, nothing when she disappeared. The organization just kept it very, very mum. So I didn’t know she was gone and I knew very little about her at that time. 

How many stories did you write?

MacCormack: Well, there were about 80 to 100 stories over three years and about five of them really mattered. The first one was just laying out that she was gone. And I met a few critical sources who would help me later. But it didn’t go very far. And no one had any idea whether she had fled to the South Seas with atheist money or whether she had been captured by the Christists or the CIA or the Vatican as various theories were floating around.

In November of 1996, I looked at the 990 (tax) forms filed by several of her atheist organizations. And they revealed that some $600,000 had disappeared at about the same time as the O’Hairs had disappeared. So when you add a lot of money into the plot of disappeared persons it gets more interesting.

What were the major breakthroughs?

MacCormack: The next big development was that I was approached by a private investigator named Tim Young who proposed that we collaborate because his specialty was finding people who didn’t want to be found. And he frankly thought it would be rather easy to find them. …

The most critical breakthrough for us came in June of 1998 when I got an anonymous call from someone who basically told me that the O’Hairs had been killed and that another party named Danny Fry had disappeared with them. By this time we were pretty much working the theory that they were dead because Tim Young hadn’t been able to find no sign of life anywhere on the globe. So with the introduction of Danny Fry — who was kind of an alcoholic low-life con man from Florida — into the plot, and the fact that he had disappeared, this really made things more interesting.

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It was in this phone call that we were told to pay attention to a guy named David Waters, who was an ex-con who had worked for the O’Hairs a few years earlier, had stolen about $50,000 from them, and O’Hair had pressed the case against Waters, and he had been convicted. And she had also devoted an entire issue of the American Atheist newsletter to David Waters and his horrific, shameful past. Because he had done some very, very bad things in his past. Including being convicted of murder.

So now we had a murderer, we had four disappeared people, we had $600,000 gone somewhere. So it was beginning to get much more serious for Tim Young and I.

In August of 1998, Tim Young and I had a split. He felt it was his duty as a private investigator to go to the police with the information we had. Because we had a pretty coherent theory now. And I had no confidence in the police. I’m speaking of the Austin police, who had pretty much ignored the case. They treated it as a voluntary disappearance by a person, which isn’t a crime. So Tim and I had a — not acrimonious — but it was an unfriendly split. I decided I was going to keep reporting. He went to the Austin police. They ignored him. And from then on I worked alone. 

How did you find out Danny Fry had been killed?

MacCormack: In October of ’98, I happened across a small story that was generated by AP in Dallas, based on a (Dallas) Morning News story about the third anniversary of the discovery of a nude, headless, handless body beside the Trinity River. It had been found in October of ’95. And I just, somehow, fortunately thought to myself, ‘That’s the same weekend that Danny Fry disappeared, and you know, why not?’

To make a long story short, I tried to exclude Danny Fry from being that person. … Nothing could exclude him. So I called the sheriff’s office in Dallas County and I said, ‘Look, I might know who your missing guy is.’ And they’d invested hundreds of hours and hundreds of missing person’s reports trying to find out who this was. So they were kind of cautious about talking to me but they wanted to do it. So I flew up there. We all sat in a little room. And I walked them through the O’Hair disappearance. And to them it was like science fiction. But eventually they came to see that there was a possibility that this headless, handless guy might be my Danny Fry who had disappeared in Texas after coming from Florida. So that was a big, big development. They didn’t laugh me off or anything, they took me seriously.

Danny Fry’s relatives weren’t the type who were comfortable with police. So I got three of his relatives to contribute blood samples, and the lab tested it all, and voila, in January of ’99, it turns out that the headless, handless body was Danny Fry. And that pretty much closed the door on the O’Hairs being alive anywhere.

So I wrote another story basically laying out the picture of them being taken to San Antonio, Danny Fry’s with the O’Hairs, he’s making calls from the same places that they’re known to be. And he’s dead. So, ergo, they’re likely dead. And this really inspired the FBI to get involved. So they threw a lot of manpower at it. And within a couple of months, they’d arrested David Waters, and they’d arrested a second ex-con named Gary Karr, who was a real cold-blooded snake. So the FBI got involved hardcore and then the story proceeded from there.

At this point, the only thing that was really missing, the critical component, was proof of their deaths. It’s hard to prosecute someone for murder when you don’t have a body. So that hung over the case for a long time. No one knew where the bodies were. 

How did authorities find out where the bodies were?

MacCormack: David Waters decided, basically, it was over. He was in state custody on a state offense. And he made a deal with the feds that if they put him in federal prison, which apparently is a lot nicer place than state prison, that he would cooperate. And that was the deal they cut. So Waters gave a very long statement describing everything, and eventually also walked them out there and said, ‘There’s the spot.’ And they dug and they found the bodies. … They kind of knew they found Madalyn Murray O’Hair when the turned up a titanium, artificial hip. And the DNA tests proved that these were the bodies of the three O’Hairs plus Danny Fry’s head and hands all buried in the same hole. And that kind of brought things to an end. 

What’s it like as a reporter solving a murder mystery?

 MacCormack: Well, as a newspaper reporter, most stories are short-lived and you never really figure everything out. And it ends up, you know, you’re just further into the murk. With this story, it went on for three years. I wrote 80 to 100 stories. And it kept getting better and better and better the longer we pushed and searched. Not every day. There were long periods of no progress. But at the end of the day we managed to take a complete mystery, everything was confused, and we pulled it all the way into the sunlight where you had a clear idea, a clear story of what happened. And it solved a very complex murder case, which doesn’t happen every day. So it was very satisfying.

But I don’t confuse it with more important reporting about social issues. This was just a whodunit that was just a hell of a lot of fun to report, a lot of work and at the end of the day, very satisfying.

The post Meet the real reporter in the new Netflix movie ‘The Most Hated Woman in America’ appeared first on John Tedesco.

But even with this new technology, transcribing interviews from digital files hasn’t changed from the days of my ancient tape recorder. Even if I use my phone or a computer, I still have to hit play, type a snippet of what I hear, hit stop, rewind a little bit to my best guess of where I left off, and repeat the painful process all over again.

A new, fee-based service called Trint is trying to drastically streamline transcribing. And if you have quality audio, it does a pretty slick job.

“Getting the content out of recorded talk is still stuck in the 1960s or ’70s,” said Jeff Kofman, Trint’s CEO and co-founder who sat down for an interview with me via WebEx at Trint’s office in London.

In his former life as an award-winning foreign correspondent, Kofman was intimately familiar with the archaic, time-consuming problem of transcription. Working in television, Kofman often needed to grab just a few key soundbites out of a long interview, but it took precious time tracking down those quotes in his audio.

“In my 30-plus year career, all the technology has changed,” Kofman told me. “The whole workflow has been transformed in ways that we could never have dreamed in the 1980s — except this one part of the journalists’ workflow, which is how do we get the content out of our interviews?”

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Trint tries to solve that problem by automatically generating a transcript of your recording. The transcript syncs with your audio. When you play the recording in your browser, you can follow the transcript “like karaoke,” Kofman says, and edit any transcription errors directly in the browser. No more ping-ponging between your audio player and Word document.

Here’s how it looks:

Proofreading an existing transcript can be a lot faster than transcribing from scratch. I used Trint to quickly find and snag key quotes from my interview with Kofman. I read the transcript and highlighted quotes that stood out for me. I listened to the recording to make sure the quotes were accurate. From there it was a simple matter of copying and pasting them into WordPress.

Trint — a combination of the words “transcription” and “interview” — offers various monthly plans but you can sign up for a free trial to test the techie waters. Plans start at $15 a month for an hour’s worth of recordings. If your files are longer you can continue to pay a quarter per minute as you go, and any unused minutes rollover to the next month. Kofman said this is a competitive price compared to professional transcription services.

“The whole point is to make it accessible,” Kofman said. “This is disruptive technology and it’s about making it easy to get a content and share.” 

Getting started with Trint

 For my interview with Kofman, I didn’t use the audio from the WebEx recording — it was terrible. Kofman recorded himself on his iPhone and uploaded the video file to Trint, which can work with all kinds of video and audio files. He then shared the file with me in a process that’s like sharing a Dropbox folder.

For Trint to work well, clear audio is crucial.

“If you’re holding your iPhone 10 feet from the person giving the news conference, it’s not going to work,” Kofman said. “I mean, it’s really important to set expectations. Garbage in, garbage out. Good audio equals really good transcripts.”

Kofman said the most frequent complaint about Trint is that it fails to provide an accurate transcript. But in many cases, he said, the problem can be traced back to a poor recording.

Depending on the length of your file size, Trint can take a few minutes to prepare a file after you upload it. I recently uploaded a 19 minute, 23 second interview to Trint, and its transcript was ready to go within seven minutes.

I didn’t find many errors in Kofman’s transcript. (Ironically, Trint often failed to transcribe the word “Trint.”) You’ll have to keep an eye out for punctuation — Trint does periods but not commas and other types of punctuation. You’ll have to add those yourself.

When you work on a transcript, the text is front and center. To the right are your play and pause buttons and the video feed, if you’re transcribing video. Running across the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar showing where you’re at in the recording. Click on the bar, and you can jump to that portion of the recording.

Trint offers several shortcuts:

• Hitting “Control” and the space bar plays or pauses the audio.
• “Control R” rewinds the recording five seconds.
• Outline some text and hit “Control H” to highlight a portion of your transcript. When you do that a yellow section appears on the bar at the bottom of the screen. Click on that yellow section and it will take you to that portion of the highlighted transcript. There’s also a “play highlights” button that will play audio only for those sections of the transcript.
• Outline some text and hit “Control S” to create a strikethrough and skip over a portion of the recording — if that’s your preference. The audio player will omit that section, and a grayed-out block appears on the recording bar.

You can set preferences in a menu in the bottom right corner of the screen:

In that same area is a “playback speed” option, which lets you slow down or speed up the recording.

In the upper right-hand corner are export options. These are handy. You can export your entire transcript in formats that include Microsoft Word or a zip file that combines an html file with the transcript of the audio recording. You can also email others to invite them to your Trint file.

Trint also gives you the option of exporting only your highlights, which I used to write this post. It created a Word document of everything I thought was potentially useful from my interview with Kofman, complete with time stamps. Nice. 

Observations about transcribing

Kofman said Trint takes security and privacy very seriously, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s a cloud service.

“We’re very sensitive to that,” Kofman said. “We are encrypted end to end. Our goal is to get the International Standards Organization data security certification. It’s a one to two-year project. You don’t do those kind of things overnight. It’s a really, really laborious and time consuming and resource sucking project and it’s very much a priority.

“So you know, I’m very honest,” Kofman added. “If you’ve got the next Edward Snowden, I would be cautious.”

When I first tried Trint last year I thought it was buggy. When I tried revising a transcript, Trint screwed up my typing and introduced errors. I initially wrote it off as a glitch in a beta product and assumed the company would work it out.

What I didn’t realize is that Trint works, but some Chrome plugins interfere with it. When I emailed Trint last month to ask what was causing the typing bug, Kofman himself replied and said deactivating plugins for Evernote or Adobe usually does the trick. And it did. I also found going to “incognito mode” in Chrome resolves the glitch.

It might have been my Internet connection but sometimes when I moved the cursor to a spot in the transcript and hit play, Trint lagged for a while before playing the audio. Hitting “Control R” to rewind the audio five seconds works but the shortcut itself is a little clumsy — I kept having to look down at the keyboard to make sure I was hitting the right keys.

I often use another transcription tool called oTranscribe, by Elliot Bentley, which uses the “escape” key to play audio and pause and rewind five seconds. Hitting escape is more intuitive. As I was working on the interview of Kofman’s transcript, I also craved an annotation feature to jot notes to myself.

Kofman said annotations and the rewind shortcut are things the development team will be looking at as they work on Trint 2.0, which he said will be offering new collaborative features that will make it easier to share content. 

Future plans for Trint

 “We’re developing what we call the Trint player, which will allow you to take an interview, a news conference, a lecture, clean it up and actually put it on your website so that it instantly becomes searchable,” Kofman said.

The Trint player is scheduled to be released sometime in mid-2017. It will allow readers to outline a soundbite and share that segment of transcript and audio to social media services such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Right now if you put a 20-minute interview on your website or in your archive, it’s dark data unless there’s a complete transcript,” Kofman said. “You don’t know what’s on it. What we do is shed light on that dark data because we actually allow you to find it and to access that content quickly and then put it on your website and make it SEO, search engine optimizable. Suddenly we can drive traffic to that news organization or a corporate Web site or education web site, which is really important.”

Other plans include one-click captioning, which will automatically bake the captions of your choice into a sharable video. This could be a huge time-saver as subtitles become so important in Facebook feeds.

“That’s a fundamental innovation of Trint,” Kofman said. “We allow you to highlight a moment and send that because we glue the audio to the text.”

What about a smartphone app? Kofman said he recognizes there’s demand for a mobile app but for now Trint will remain a browser-based tool as his team focuses on core features.

“A smartphone app is very much on our road map,” Kofman said. He’d like to see an app that would let people record an interview, then upload it directly to Trint from their device. 

Conclusions

 Critics might complain that Trint fails to provide transcripts that are 100 percent accurate. Trint appealed to me because no matter how accurate a transcription service claims to be, I still have to listen to it myself to make sure every quote is accurate before I use it in a news story or, in this case, a blog post. Trint simply makes that process easier.

And it really shines when you’re looking for something specific — that golden soundbite you vividly remember but can’t quite find in the recording. In Trint, it’s as simple as typing “Control F” in your Windows browser to find a keyword and quickly pinpoint it. This feature alone can be a real timesaver.

“I had a reporter with one of the NPR affiliates tell me she had six hours of interviews for a long feature she was doing,” Kofman recalled. “And she said normally that would be two days of transcription for her. She would just lock herself away and type away. She said she uploaded it to Trint and she got it back in less than an hour and she came in the next morning and she went through it. She knew her material. She was able to scan and search it and she said she had the entire story written before lunch.”

Not surprisingly, news organizations rank high among Trint’s major clients. Early corporate accounts included ESPN, Vice News, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Fast Company came to do an article on us. They’re now one of our biggest users,” Kofman said.

But Trint’s appeal goes beyond journalists. Kofman was surprised by its growing popularity in academic circles — researchers and students who have to conduct hours of interviews and make sense of them.

“I would say education in general is probably about a third of our market,” Kofman said. “And that’s with no marketing effort whatsoever.”

Trint is a small but growing company that’s expected to double by summer from 10 to 20 employees and open a new North American office. It’s received grants and investment money from the Google Digital News Initiative and the Knight Foundation’s Enterprise Fund. Cisco Systems, the company behind WebEx, sponsors Trint’s work space at IDEALondon, an innovation lab in Shoreditch in East London.

“We’re sponsored here in London, England by Cisco because Cisco sees huge application in the corporate world for corporate communications as the audio gets better,” Kofman said.

It’s no accident that Kofman, as a former journalist, immediately recognized how useful something like Trint could be when he met the original development team.

“The team teases me and calls me ‘Beta Tester No. 1,'” Kofman said. “And it’s true. I have lived the problem.”

After 30 years in the news business and learning how to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances in far-off places like Libya, Kofman is using those skills in the tech world as an entrepreneur, asking lots of questions, learning as he goes, working long hours — and having fun along the way.

After seeing what Trint, in its early form, could do, Kofman said he didn’t have much choice but seize a rare opportunity. In 2013, Kofman was still working for ABC News teaching a global journalism program for U.S. and Canadian students studying in London. A friend urged him attend Mozfest, a big media coding conference that happens in London each November.

“That’s where I met three brilliant developers who are the core of Trint’s tech team,” Kofman recalled. “They were demonstrating a transcription experiment that glued manual transcription to the original audio.”

Impressed with what he saw, Kofman asked Laurian Gridinoc, now Trint’s senior developer, if it could work with automated speech-to-text.

“Interesting idea,” Gridinoc replied. “We could try it.”

“I remember saying, ‘This is the future,'” Kofman said. “Either we team up and we make it happen or we’re going to be sitting in a coffee shop five or 10 years from now looking at someone doing something like that saying, ‘You know, I remember talking about that but we didn’t do it.’

“And I just thought, we’re going to do it.”

The post How to transcribe with Trint: An interview with CEO Jeff Kofman appeared first on John Tedesco.

What he found instead was a bizarre saga about a bankrupt company accused of fraud and its hidden ties to Texas state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio.

Danner’s tenacious digging offers a shining example of why traditional, shoe-leather reporting still matters in an age of Facebook feeds and Twitter handles. Thanks to the story, Express-News readers now know that the FBI is investigating the case, Uresti says he’s been interviewed as a witness, and the senator revised his state-mandated financial disclosure report.

Related: Why is state Sen. Carlos Uresti facing charges? This news story had the answers months ago

These are the kinds of details that can’t be found in a Google search — unless you Google Danner’s blockbuster article.

I sat down with Danner to talk about how he got the story and the challenges he faced in reporting it.

Q: I thought I’d first ask you to describe your beat, since that explains how you found the story.

A: Sure. I cover civil courts, interesting civil litigation. Bankruptcy court, which is where I came across this. And banking. And that’s pretty much it.

Is that a goldmine for stories? I mean, it seems like you find some pretty interesting things that get litigated.

Yeah, I’m just attracted to conflict. And so I’m always going through cases just to see if there’s something there to chew on. In this particular instance, it was a bankruptcy filing that caught my eye. Because I was hearing about, you know, with the decline in oil prices, that there would be a lot of bankruptcy filings from companies operating in the Eagle Ford Shale. So I was keeping an eye out for those.

Then, within the span of a week or so, it seemed like there were four (bankruptcies) that were filed. They weren’t big names. But I thought I could use that as a spring board to do a story on the wave of bankruptcies in the Eagle Ford.

It actually didn’t really pan out that way. A lot of them were filed in other cities. Houston for instance. So we haven’t really had a big uptick in bankruptcy filings. But in this particular instance, I reached out to the attorney for FourWinds Logistics, which is a frac sand company that would buy and sell frac sand, and the attorney referenced a claim that FourWinds had against Halliburton, which was buying sand from FourWinds, reneging on a $7.5 million contract. For such a small company, that’s a pretty big contract. And from there I just started following the case.

So at this point you don’t even know of Uresti’s involvement. How did you find out about it?

I found out about Uresti’s involvement when I went to a creditors hearing in FourWinds’ bankruptcy.

Can you quickly describe what that is?

Sure. A creditors hearing is conducted by a bankruptcy trustee. The trustee asks the debtor certain questions. Tax returns, things like that. It’s fairly mundane stuff. But the interesting part of the creditors meeting is the creditors have an opportunity to ask questions. So there were attorneys there for different parties. And there was also an attorney on the phone who represented a woman who was suing FourWinds. And I knew nothing about this lawsuit. It was filed down in Cameron County. And apparently she was suing for fraud and I didn’t know any of this. But during the hearing, the attorney asked Stan Bates, the CEO of FourWinds, about his response to the lawsuit, which designated Carlos Uresti as a responsible third party. I had no idea what that meant, whether it was the state senator himself.

It definitely perked your interest, though.

Yeah, yeah, it got me certainly curious. So from there, the next thing I did was try to get a hold of that lawsuit down in Cameron County. I had to look up, what does that mean, a responsible third party? In essence, what it means is that Stan Bates was blaming the problems that FourWinds had on conflicts of interest that he alleged Uresti had.

So what’d you do after that?

Well, I was curious what exactly were those conflicts of interest. Well, I found out he represented a woman who invested in FourWinds. Her name was Denise Cantu. She invested $900,000. And it turns out that Uresti was her legal counsel in a wrongful death case where two of Denise Cantu’s children died.

That’s basically summed up in the lede of your story, which is a bombshell. I’ve never really considered what happens when somebody wins a lawsuit, and what do they do with that money? And it raises all kinds of questions about conflicts of interest when their lawyer gets involved. And oh, by the way, he’s making a commission off this.

Right. In this particular case, lawyers have certain obligations, rules they’ve got to follow. Uresti makes the point he was no longer her lawyer at the time he suggested she go see Stan Bates. And Denise Cantu testified that he didn’t advise her to put her money in FourWinds — but he did get a commission from her investment in FourWinds.

So at some point you have to interview Uresti. How did that go and do you have any tips about interviews that can get confrontational or can be difficult?

This particular interview wasn’t confrontational. Clearly I had to ask some tough questions. What I had done was basically gone through and written all my questions down. I don’t usually do that. But in a case like this, I want to make sure that I didn’t overlook anything.

This is pretty technical stuff, too.

Yeah. The funny thing was I had to call him back because I forgot to ask him a simple question. He got a $40,000 loan from FourWinds. And I had been hearing rumblings about where the money went. Fortunately he called me back. The question I forgot to ask was, what did you do with the money you had gotten from the $40,000 loan from FourWinds? So he did call me back and he answered that question. But I was knocking myself for forgetting to ask.

Can you describe how (Bexar County District Attorney) Nico Lahood got wrapped into this saga?

Yeah, he represented a gentleman by the name of Gary Cain. And from that trial, back in 2014, Cain was charged with four felony counts in a land deal involving Rackspace Hosting. Rackspace claimed it was ripped off by Gary Cain. Cain was found not guilty by a jury in July of 2014. Within a couple of months, he was brought on as a sort of a financial consultant with FourWinds, where he said he was helping raise financing for FourWinds.

Cain’s business is called Trinity Global. A document was presented in one of the court hearings that mentioned Nico LaHood was co-chairman of the company. And I thought, well, that’s kind of odd that LaHood the DA is in business with a former client. You don’t see that every day.

So one of the investors, Richard Thum, who is president of SA Five Star Cleaners, he felt like he had been ripped off by FourWinds. He told me that it was Gary Cain that recommended that Richard go see Nico LaHood and tell them what was going on at FourWinds. And so Richard Thum went to the DA’s office and met with Nico LaHood and his head of the criminal division. And they basically, according to Richard, expressed interest in the case. But they said to me that they advised him to go to the FBI. Richard did go to the FBI but he said he did it on his own. So the FBI took interest in the case and they’re looking into all this.

So now we have a couple politicians who are revising their financial statements.

Yeah. Uresti did go back and correct his financial disclosure form. And LaHood went back and corrected his after (Express-News columnist) Brian Chasnoff called and asked him why didn’t he disclose his business with Gary Cain?

You mentioned you’re drawn to conflict, and conflict makes for interesting stories. But there’s also a lot of legalese, a lot of dry information in these lawsuits. It’s complicated. How do you go about writing this and making this understandable?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m drawn to the dry stuff. I seem to find a lot of complicated stories. I just try to keep it simple as possible — in this case, leading with the human element of a woman losing two of her kids, and using the proceeds from the court settlement from the loss of her two kids to invest in this company. So that was the advice of my editor to do it that way.

Really, other than the top of the story, which got rewritten a few times, the rest of the story just kind of took it in a chronological order.

That’s probably one of the more helpful ways to approach it, right? Just walk through everything that happened.

Yeah, although we did put up high the stuff about not disclosing certain things in his financial disclosure forms. We wanted to get that high in the story to make it clear, you know, here are the issues. Then get into what went on.

But as far as bankruptcies go, I thought this was one of the juicier ones. Because you had a CEO who’s accused of basically spending money, flying in women, Victoria’s Secret, exotic cars, things that you don’t normally run across. So to me, I just thought, we’ve got different elements here that you don’t normally run across. Politicians. CEO accused of living a wild lifestyle. Things you don’t come across every day.

What’s next for Denise Cantu?

That’s a really good question because she’s got her lawsuit down in Cameron County. I had set up an interview with her, and then, basically at the last minute, her lawyers put the kibosh on it. Because of the pending litigation they didn’t want her speaking with me. So I don’t know.

Well, it was a great story man. Anything I didn’t ask that would be good to know?

No, I don’t think so. I certainly appreciate it. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on things but as far as FourWinds goes that’s pretty much over and done with. There’s nothing left to pick over.

The post How shoe-leather reporting uncovered a bizarre bankruptcy tied to Senator Carlos Uresti appeared first on John Tedesco.

As the Uber Tech Lead at Google, Dan studies how people search the web. He started sharing little-known search techniques three years ago at the IRE conference in Boston. Since then he’s annually offered tips at IRE that can help everyone — not just reporters — find exactly what they’re searching for online.

Here are some of Dan’s new strategies and tools for 2014, and a recap of the most useful tips from his past presentations that I’ve used myself. You can check out posts about his other talks here and here.

Go back in time

One of the coolest new tools offered by Google this year allows you to jump in a time machine in Google Maps’ Street View.

Let’s say you’re walking around downtown San Antonio and you’re curious about the site of a historic building on Commerce Street across from Main Plaza. An inferno destroyed the building a few years ago and now there’s nothing but a vacant lot:

In Google Street View, click on the clock symbol in the corner of the screen to check out how that spot looked over the years. In this case, you can look at what the Wolfson Building looked like before the catastrophic fire:

The Wall Street Journal used this time-machine effect to illustrate dramatic growth in Brooklyn.

The cool thing about this is how you can pan around and get different perspectives of the sites you’re interested in.

Gallery of Google Map Mashups

The Google Maps Gallery allows organizations to mesh their data with Google maps. All these mashups are searchable, and Google links to the original sources if you want to download the information yourself.

Let’s say you’re curious about which counties in the United States are prone to tornado strikes. A search of “tornado” in the Google Maps Gallery shows a map based on federal data showing tornado strikes, total property damage, injuries and deaths by county:

Wildcards in Google Maps

(Update: Google dropped this map feature, which is a bummer. It was extremely useful and I hope they bring it back.)

Type an asterisk in the search bar of Google Maps and it will show you every business and significant, named place it knows about in the area you’re viewing.

If you plan on using any of this information in a news story, you’ll want to take steps to confirm what you’re seeing in the map. But this is a really quick way to get a sense of what’s in the area.

For example, if you’re writing about the Wolfson Building fire and want to get a quick idea of what businesses were nearby, in Google Maps, focus on the site on Commerce Street and try the wildcard search:

Force Google to search for certain words

By far the most common search function I use in Google is “intext,” which Russell discussed at his first presentation in Boston.

Sometimes Google tries to be too helpful. It changes your search terms and uses words it thinks you’re searching for– not the words you’re actually searching for.

And sometimes the websites in Google’s search results don’t include all your search terms because Google decided those pages might still be relevant.

That might be OK for general searches. But it’s not very helpful if you’re looking for pages with specific terms or words with unusual spellings. How do you make Google search for those exact words?

Typing intext:[keyword] (with no space on either side of the colon) might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Dan’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website.

If you’re researching the story of the Wolfson Building, for example, you’ll probably want to make sure that Google always includes that unique name in the search results. Typing intext:Wolfson San Antonio will force Google to include the term “Wolfson.”

Intext also works with phrases in quotes. So typing intext:”Wolfson Building” will strong-arm Google into showing you that exact phrase.

To learn more details about Google’s search operators, check out my post about his talk in Boston where he gave us a treasure-trove of advice.

Customized site searches

Google’s site search let’s you search for information on a particular website. Typing site:mysanantonio.com “Wolfson Building” would show pages with that phrase that were published by the San Antonio Express-News. But what if you wanted to regularly check what other local news outlets published in the San Antonio area?

Google can focus on multiple websites with its custom search engine. You tell Google which websites to search, save your settings and Google creates a link to the custom search page. Now you can search those specific websites any time.

This technique is handy for anyone interested in a particular beat or issue. I created this customized search of San Antonio media and blogs to quickly see how news organizations are covering a story. You can also sort the results by time or relevance, and conduct an image search with the terms you want on those websites.

Control F is your friend

Not everyone knows this so it’s worth repeating: Type “Control F” in Windows or “Command F” on a Mac to launch the “find” function in your browser to locate a specific word or phrase on any web page. It’s faster than reading the whole page if you’re looking for something in particular. “If you don’t know this, you’re roughly 12 percent slower in your searches,” Dan said at the IRE conference in Boston.

This year, Dan said useful Chrome extensions expand the usefulness of the “find” function. Let’s say you want to find more than one word. You could type an expression such as Wolfson|Building|Fire to highlight all those words. Handy.

Dan regularly blogs about search strategies by challenging readers with puzzles. It’s a good way to stay in practice. And practice, Dan says, is the best way to hone your search skills.

The post New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell appeared first on John Tedesco.

In February 2009, an 8-year-old girl from Schertz died, alone, of acute appendicitis — a disease that could have easily been treated if caught in time.

In the hours leading up to her death, people concerned about the girl — including officers from the Schertz Police Department — had warned the Texas Department of Child Protective Services that she was a victim of neglect.

CPS didn’t act. And on Feb. 5, 2009, authorities found the girl’s body in a soiled bed.

Her name was Sarah Brasse.

It wasn’t so long ago in Texas that you would have had a tough time learning any of those tragic details.

In fact, according to the state officials in charge of protecting children from abusive adults, you would have had no legal right to even know Brasse’s name.

And you certainly wouldn’t be able to know the agency missed opportunities to help Brasse.

But a decade of diligent reporting by three Express-News journalists shined a spotlight of transparency on tragedies involving Brasse and scores of other children in San Antonio, helping the public understand the unfathomable.

In Brasse’s case, a state watchdog is now investigating how CPS could have done a better job protecting her. But that investigation probably wouldn’t have happened without the work of Express-News Writer Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, who obtained internal CPS documents about the case that gave readers a rare look inside a troubled state agency that failed to act, despite repeated warnings about Brasse’s welfare.

“The lack of agency action just really stunned me,” Melissa told me.

Focusing on a hidden problem

Any longtime reader of the paper knows that Melissa’s stories were the latest in a series of articles that have unfolded in the pages of the Express-News over the years about the failures and challenges at CPS.

It’s worth revisiting these powerful stories, all of which took months of difficult work about a topic people don’t like to read. The projects that stand out were written by three journalists — Melissa, Cathy Frye and Nancy Martinez Preyor-Johnson. I sit next to Melissa in the newsroom, and I’m Facebook pals with Cathy and Nancy, who now work elsewhere, so I asked them how they wrote these outstanding pieces of journalism that grabbed readers and didn’t let go.

In 2004, the Express-News published a series of stories by reporter Cathy Frye about Unit 39, a group of overwhelmed CPS caseworkers in San Antonio.

The first story began this way:

Courtney Mayfield grabs two chunks of her ash-blond hair, lowers her head over her cluttered desk and groans.

This isn’t a good week. December is rapidly approaching, and she’s still searching for a crackhead mom on the run with a toddler.

Tracking a homeless woman who’s roaming the streets with two sick kids in tow. Listening to the pleas of a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want to go to a children’s shelter.

Then there’s the deadline, that impossible deadline. In two weeks, the Child Protective Services caseworker is supposed to have 70 percent of her investigations closed. She’ll never make it, not with 90 open cases stacked across her desk and the floor of her office.

And if she doesn’t? Banish the thought. The stakes are high, the pressure immense. In the next office, a young colleague of Courtney’s with 120 cases to work and a rising sense of futility phones her roommate and cries.

How did Cathy know all that? Because she was there. She spent months tagging along with CPS caseworkers, having been granted unusual access to the secretive agency.

“The way the system is set up, it’s very difficult to get in and make these people real to your readers,” said Cathy, who now works at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Shrouded in regulations protecting the confidentiality of child-abuse investigations, the agency usually didn’t welcome outsiders. But a spike in child deaths that year prompted a public outcry — and created a unique situation for Cathy to get an insider’s perspective at the agency.

“They were under a lot of heat,” recalled Cathy. “Basically, I was the least of their problems.”

Related: How to contact an investigative reporter

Cathy packed her stories with telling details that she witnessed firsthand. The only way to do that is spending lots of time with people until they eventually start acting like themselves:

Courtney waits outside a dingy white duplex with pale blue trim. A sour smell wafts from a front window, which is partially covered by a grimy sheet.

“Can I come inside yet?” she calls, just as a hugely pregnant woman walks out, holding a toddler’s hand. The woman nods, a wide, anxious smile creasing her round face.

“It’s not that clean,” she apologizes, opening the door. “I’m pregnant. I get really tired.”

The home boasts only a tiny kitchen, living area and a single bedroom. Furniture is scarce. The bedroom contains a bunk bed that sleeps three and a stained, twin-size mattress propped against a wall.

Courtney inspects the rest of the home. Refrigerator contains food. Lights work. Plumbing works. No apparent roach infestation. Then she asks the woman to demonstrate how her son’s asthma treatment machine works. As the frazzled mother tries to assemble the contraption, it becomes quite clear to Courtney that she’s winging it.

Courtney asks about the new baby, due to arrive in December. “Do you have a crib? Do you need things?”

Courtney heads back to her car. She can see that this woman functions at a lower mental level.

“Really, I need to get a better feel for what she’s understanding and not understanding, ” Courtney says. This may be a case of medical neglect. Or it may be the woman simply needs someone to help her manage her son’s condition.

Yes, the whole family sleeps in one bedroom, but that’s not neglectful, Courtney says. And yes, they are poor, but that’s not neglectful either. They appear to be doing what they can with what they have.

“It’s got to be really, really bad before I say they have to change,” Courtney says. “You have to pick your battles. Is it more important to fight with mom because there are a few roaches in the kitchen or is it more important to fight with her to keep her boyfriend away?”

“The little details are always the most telling things,” Cathy said about how she crafts an interesting narrative. “A lot of the time, that requires spending more time with people.”

As Cathy shadowed caseworkers, she went with them during their interviews with parents accused of abuse or neglect. They went to their houses. And to Cathy’s surprise, most parents didn’t object to her presence. That included a mother accused of beating her teen-age daughter with a meat tenderizer, leaving square-shaped wounds.

“There was a lot of shame,” Cathy said. “The meat-tenderizer mom, when she came in, it was almost like she felt like she deserved to be not only punished, but shamed for that in some weird way. She let me in for the entire interview. She was very candid.”

Rare access at Child Protective Services

That kind of access to the inner workings of CPS and the cases it handles is extremely rare, as Nancy’s stories a few years later in 2007 demonstrated. At the time, CPS was refusing to release anything beyond bare-bone statistics about the children who died in Bexar County. The agency refused to even release the names of victims.

“I really want to tell the stories behind the numbers,” Nancy said, echoing the same goals Cathy had for her stories about Unit 39. Nancy spent six months tracking down sources — police reports, autopsy reports, tipsters — to flesh out the details behind each child death.

“It was very, very difficult,” said Nancy, who is now a teacher. “It was begging sources to help out with information.”

On July 15, 2007, the Express-News published the first article of Nancy’s project. The series was called Four Feet Under … the usual depth of a child’s grave.

It began this way:

The state of Texas doesn’t want you to know about Ruben Reyna.

You should not know he was beaten to death with blows to the head or who is suspected of killing him.

You should not know that Child Protective Services had investigated his family on two earlier allegations of abuse involving Ruben.

You should not know if Ruben lived or died next door to you.

You should not even know the boy’s name. State law says so. That information is confidential.

One CPS official says the law is necessary. “It’s an important law, not meant to protect the reputation of our agency, rather to protect the citizens of Texas, ” said Sherry Gomez, CPS San Antonio region director. But critics say the lack of transparency prevents the sort of public scrutiny that has helped bring about meaningful reform elsewhere.

“The way you protect children’s rights is by exposing the system to scrutiny so it can be made better, said Richard Wexler, executive director for the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Virginia. “The child is dead, so there is no issue of invasion of privacy. There won’t be real accountability until the system is completely open to scrutiny so that we can see all the mistakes they make and when they get it right or when a tragedy is not their fault.”

The series revealed shortcomings in state law that state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, had been trying to change.

“He was personally motivated by the article and even had it framed,” Uresti’s former communications director, Mark Langford, wrote in an email after I asked him about the impact of the stories.

In 2009, Uresti’s Senate Bill 1050 required CPS to release basic details about children who died from abuse or neglect. Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed the bill into law. Melissa told me that CPS officials describe it as “The Express-News law.”

“It’s impossible to say how widely read the series was outside of San Antonio, but he definitely believes it influenced the Bexar delegation and local child advocates who supported the effort, came to Austin to testify for SB 1050 and other legislation, and lobby each day on behalf of children,” Langford wrote. “So … job well done Express-News.”

But even after passage of the bill, it’s still difficult for outsiders to learn about mistakes at CPS and whether officials are being held accountable. The fatality reports don’t go into that kind of detail.

“The average person can’t read that and say, ‘Oh, OK, this is what they should have done and they didn’t,'” Melissa said.

Few details released in child deaths

That’s what her stories about Brasse accomplished. Melissa obtained internal documents that showed, for example, how CPS took no action when Brasse’s parents didn’t provide medical care and health insurance for their children, despite being told to do so by CPS.

The records described an agency that seemed cowed by Brasse’s father, who threatened to sue. The day before Brasse died, people warned CPS that the mistreatment was escalating. Yet CPS failed to send a caseworker who could have seen she was in “imminent danger.”

“When later pushed to explain what happened to Sarah, CPS decided to police itself. Three employees conducted an in-house review, thus avoiding outside scrutiny,” Melissa wrote in her story.

Many of these problems sound familiar — Cathy and Nancy’s past stories struck the same troubling chords. As powerful as these stories are, did they make a difference?

For the reporters who wrote these articles, the impact on government bureaucracies and intractable societal problems is hard to measure. But that doesn’t mean these stories about children dying at the hands of adults aren’t worth telling. And it doesn’t mean readers don’t care, especially if the stories are written with telling details.

“I don’t think you can give up on them,” Cathy said of the victims. “At some point I still believe there are lot of people in the background — defense attorneys, caseworkers — who know that being more transparent is beneficial.”

“A miracle is not going to happen,” said Nancy, who suffered nightmares after reading document after document about dead children. “I don’t think it will ever change.” But newspapers can’t ignore child abuse, and Nancy said she was overwhelmed by the reader response to her stories.

“I saw readers were really, really responding,” she said. “They were responding with letters, emails, phone calls.”

It’s good to hear this kind of talk in the Buzzfeed age of cat GIFs and viral videos. Dark but important topics don’t usually attract page views. So reporters have to figure out a way to make these stories matter to people.

“I will never forget that story,” Nancy said.

Hopefully, neither will the people who read it.

The post Telling stories about the unthinkable: How three journalists shined a spotlight on child abuse appeared first on John Tedesco.

So I’ve read more than my fair share of reviews about stabilizers, Glidecams and Steadicams. They rely on gimbals and counterweights to produce smooth, dream-like shots. But they’re often expensive, and some customers complain it takes forever to balance these contraptions.

About 15 years ago, Rene Kropf and his colleagues were experiencing the same frustration as they worked in his garage trying to design a tool that could help stabilize shaky film footage for light cameras.

“We went down the same route of counterweights and all that,” Kropf told me. “And we saw that as a nightmare. It’s like, the sun went down and we still haven’t balanced it, so forget that.”

Kropf, the owner of Cobra Crane, a camera gear company in California, abandoned the gimbal system altogether. Instead, he helped devised something called the SteadyTracker Ultralite, a crowbar-like device with two adjustable weighted ends and a balancing pad in the middle that rests on top of your hand.

I recently bought the SteadyTracker UltraLite on Amazon. The SteadyTracker is touted as a simpler, inexpensive option compared to other stabilizers. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and produced some sample shots in this video review. When I called Cobra Crane with a few questions about the SteadyTracker, I was surprised to get a call back from Kropf, the company’s owner. He offered insights and tips that aren’t in the instruction manual.

Related: Why my trusty Sigma 17-70mm lens is always on my camera

“It’s relatively inexpensive,” Kropf said. “It’s pretty easy to use. And the biggest thing, the number one thing that people comment on, is it’s a super-quick set up, so you don’t miss shots.”

With the SteadyTracker, you attach your camera to a base plate on top. The plate can be adjusted back and forth and side to side. This YouTube video walks you through the process. It takes about five to ten minutes. If you plan to always use the same camera, you never have to tinker with it again. You’re all set.

The SteadyTracker’s simplicity is both a benefit and a drawback. Without gimbals or counterweights to worry about, it’s quick to set up. But so far I haven’t been able to consistently achieve silky smooth shots. My videos were certainly smoother than what I’d be able to achieve going handheld. But side-to-side wobbling occasionally cropped up in my video clips.

So as a stabilizer, the SteadyTracker is OK. But as a versatile piece of equipment, it really shines.

I took it to the birthday party of a friend’s daughter and was pleasantly surprised when I discovered I could use the SteadyTracker for a variety of shots. Its base is stable, so you can use it as a mini-tripod. Or you can hold it against your hip to steady your camera, like a monopod. Or use it for relatively smooth panning shots. Or hoist it on your shoulders to get overhead shots.

This means you can bring your camera and your SteadyTracker to something like a party, a wedding or a news event and you pretty much have all your shots covered. The real benefit of the SteadyTracker is that it’s more than a stabilizer.

Another cool thing about the SteadyTracker is that you can buy a “low-mode” attachment that hangs from the bottom to give you low-angle shots. Not many stabilizers offer this feature. Your camera skims across the ground. It’s great for getting down to the level of kids or pets. This is one of the main selling points of the SteadyTracker in my book.

One question I had was whether to use my camera’s image stabilization system. I had assumed that turning it on would help create smoother shots. But some manufacturers of other Steadicam-like products recommend deactivating it. Kropf said that in most cases, leaving it on will improve the SteadyTracker’s performance.

“In general, when you’re walking with it, I would put the stabilizer on,” Kropf said. Try to use a wide-angle lens to get a panoramic effect and smoother shots.

Instructions for the SteadyTracker UltraLite say it can handle cameras weighing up to three pounds. Cobra Crane also sells a SteadyTracker Xtreme that can handle cameras weighing up to eight pounds. But the UltraLite is a solid piece of gear — like I said, it feels like a crowbar. I asked Kropf if the three-pound limit was a hard-and-fast rule. He said it’s more of a rough guideline. If you’re over the limit by a bit but can still balance the SteadyTracker, you’ll be OK.

That said, the lighter the camera, the better. I used this with a Canon T3i, a wide-angle Sigma lens and an H1 Zoom external microphone set up that weighed 3.5 pounds. It didn’t take long for my arm to feel the strain. Using it with the lighter Panasonic FZ-150 was much easier and more enjoyable.

“The number’s there as a guide,” Kropf said of the three-pound limit. “It’s not a super-hard number. But at the same time, if you’re at six pounds, maybe you’re not going to be as balanced as you could be.”

What about the grip? Should you hold it loosely, tightly, or what?

“It varies,” Kropf said. “Most of the time, you wrap your hand around the fuselage. You wrap your fingers around it, but you don’t hold a tight grip. It’s sort of floating on the top of your hand. It’s a gentle touch, because this is all about that. It’s about gentle moves and smooth starts and stops. Gradual stuff.” The exception is when you’re tilting the SteadyTracker for shots such as Dutch angles.

The trick is reducing vibration produced by your hand, arm and body as you walk. Take small steps. The instructions suggest walking like Groucho Marx.

The SteadyTracker does not come with a quick-release plate, which is a bummer. You have to screw the camera directly into the base plate. For about $45 I bought a Manfrotto monopod head with its own quick-release plate and screwed it to the SteadyTracker’s base plate so I could quickly attach and remove my camera. The nice thing about this particular model is I can adjust its angle and tilt the camera up and down. It would have been nice if the SteadyTracker came with this option.

Overall, I liked the SteadyTracker’s versatility and I see its potential to help people like multimedia journalists who show up at a scene without knowing what to expect. Maybe a situation will call for following somebody through a crowd. Or filming the subject of a video from an overhead angle. Or a low-angle view. The SteadyTracker can handle all those situations. “It’s versatile,” Kropf said.

So the SteadyTracker is a useful tool for on-the-go videographers who film events — and chase their rambunctious kids around with a camera when they get home.

Update: This post was revised to reflect the fact that there are two versions of the SteadyTracker. The larger version was invented before Kropf helped develop the SteadyTracker Ultralite.

Sometimes I blog about stuff that helps journalists. I pay for all the products I review on my blog. To help defray those costs, I use Google ads and Amazon’s affiliate advertising program, which provides a way for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com. There’s no extra cost to you, and I’ll never link to stuff I don’t like or try to make you buy something that sucks. These reviews are my honest opinions. Thanks for reading.

The post Review of the SteadyTracker UltraLite and tips from company owner Rene Kropf appeared first on John Tedesco.

Last year Daniel Russell spoke at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Boston. Dan showed us search techniques that can make anyone a better researcher. Some tips I already knew. Others I thought I understood but didn’t. And some I had no idea existed.

I thought Dan’s talk was eye-opening — and others had the same reaction. My post about his presentation last year was widely shared, so there’s enormous interest to learn more about how Google works and how to use it effectively.

Since that conference a year ago, Dan began offering online classes. I’ve had a year to practice many of these techniques. And about a week ago, Dan spoke again at the IRE conference in San Antonio with even more advice.

“You gotta know a little bit about how to make Google dance,” Dan said at his panel, Digging in with Google. “This is all mother’s milk for investigative reporters.”

I thought it’d be a good idea to compile some of the interesting new techniques, and revisit tips Dan discussed last year with some real-world examples of how journalists used them in actual news stories. Many of these methods also work on other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing.

These tips are for journalists, researchers, librarians and anyone else who wants to learn new ways to find information. Google will never replace the importance of shoe-leather reporting — knocking on doors and talking to real people. But Google can help reporters find the right doors to knock on and reveal surprising details about the people you’re talking to. Knowing how to find obscure information on the Internet is a vital skill for any journalist.

Create custom Google search engines

Google can focus on multiple websites with its custom search page. You tell Google which websites to search, save your settings and Google creates a link to the custom search page. Now you can search those specific websites any time.

This technique is handy for anyone interested in a particular beat or issue. I created this customized search of San Antonio media and blogs. So when breaking news hits, such as the torrential rains that drenched the region recently, you can type the relevant key words, such as flood OR flooding OR floods, and quickly see how news organizations are covering the story. You can also sort the results by time or relevance, and conduct an image search with the terms you want on those websites.

Upload a picture to search for it

Sometimes, you don’t even need to type words to search Google. Upload a picture of a person, place or thing, and Google can search for similar images. Google might find a match and it offers relevant search terms for that image.

Dan said he was showing a photographer friend how the search worked, and plugged one of his picturesque images into the search box. They were both surprised to discover that the picture was being used without permission on other websites — by wedding photographers who should have known better.

This method of finding pictures on the Internet has become a key way to avoid getting catfished, which I quickly learned is a thing when Deadspin revealed that the girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o was not actually his friend, or even a girl. She didn’t exist. Te’o had never met her, and her photographs were actually of a 22-year-old California woman who wasn’t part of the bizarre hoax.

Deadspin’s scoop noted that it’s possible to foil the reverse-image search by slightly altering a picture. But it’s still an amazingly useful tool. If you’re searching a popular image and get swamped by the results, you can type contextual terms in the search box to help give Google a nudge in the right direction and narrow the results.

Force Google to search exact words

Last year Dan showed us how the search operator intext: works and I now use it all the time.

Sometimes Google tries to be too helpful. It changes your search terms and uses words it thinks you’re searching for — not the words you’re actually searching for. And sometimes the websites in Google’s search results don’t include all your search terms because Google decided those pages might still be relevant.

That might be OK for general searches. But it’s not very helpful if you’re looking for pages with specific terms or words with unusual spellings. How do you make Google search for those exact words?

Typing intext:[keyword] (with no space on either side of the colon) might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Dan’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website.

When the San Antonio Independent School District announced it had chosen a finalist for superintendent, it turned out the job candidate carried some baggage. As I was researching Manuel Isquierdo’s background, Google annoyingly suggested changes to the word “Isquierdo,” when in fact that was the exact word I wanted to use. And I wanted to make sure that word was in all the websites in my search results. So I used intext:Isquierdo in my searches to force Google to include that name.

This works for phrases — type double quotes around the words you want Google to look for in the exact order they appear. And you can use intext: multiple times in the same search. Typing intext:”Manuel Isquierdo” intext:”grand jury” forces Google to include those exact phrases in all the websites in the results.

You can also type allintext: at the beginning of your query to apply the command to all words and phrases. But you can’t combine it with other search operators.

I noticed that on rare occasions when I use intext:, the keyword is still missing on a page. In such cases, the website has been updated since Google last crawled it.

In addition to intext:, Google offers a confusingly similar feature called “verbatim” search. You can type double quotes around a word and Google will not change it. You can also click on a drop down menu under search tools and select “verbatim.”

What’s the different between verbatim and intext: searches? With verbatim, it’s still possible Google will remove those words from the pages that show up in your search results in an effort to be helpful. So I prefer intext:.

Use boilerplate language

Many people know that Google ignores the word AND as a search operator. But typing OR in all caps actually works.

OR is great for finding synonyms and boilerplate language. Dan said typing “Smith denied” OR “Smith claimed” OR “Smith argued” will find more pertinent websites about the controversy involving Smith.

This technique can help you perform background checks. Start thinking of terms such as indictment OR indicted OR charged OR lawsuit or any other type of term you’d want to know about in relation to the person or thing you’re checking out.

When I was working on the Manuel Isquierdo story, I was trying to track down hardcopies of tax liens the IRS filed against him to recover $150,000 in back taxes, interest and penalties. My query “Manuel Isquierdo” lien OR liens led to an interesting report by a private investigator in California.

Control F saves you time

The fact that many people don’t know they can easily search for words on web pages is a national tragedy. Even those who know about the “find” function often take the long way by using the mouse to click on the menu option, which drives me nuts.

For the love of all that is holy in this world, hit “Control F” on a PC or “Command F” on a Mac and type the words you want to find on the page.

“It improves your search speed by 12 percent,” Dan said.

Learn the structure of websites

Type site:[domain] [keywords] if you’re looking for a specific topic on a particular website. This is a time-saver if you know what you’re looking for, especially if a website doesn’t offer its own search box.

I used this method several years ago when I worked on a story about racehorse accidents. I visited the Texas Racing Commission’s website and typed injuries site:txrc.state.tx.us. It led me to an annual report that had some statistics, which led me to a little-known state database of horse-racing accidents that showed how, in a five-year period, 300 horses had died on Texas racetracks.

The site: operator also works on directories and sub-domains. So if you know how a website is structured, you can focus on a specific area of interest. For example, San Antonio’s Development Services Department approves new real estate projects. Its web address is sanantonio.gov/dsd. This is the city department that dealt with the collapse of the towering retaining wall at the Rivermist subdivision in San Antonio developed by Centex Homes. So typing site:sanantonio.gov/dsd “retaining wall” shows you a bunch of results showing how the department handled the disaster.

The search operator inurl: is another way to use a website’s structure in your search strategy. On the surface, inurl: and intitle: appear to serve similar roles — both methods help you find websites that focus on a particular term. Typing inurl:[keyword] will show you results with that word in the url of the web page. Typing intitle:[keyword] will show you results with that word in the title of the web page written by the site’s author.

But since the url’s of web pages often reflect the title of the page, what’s the difference?

Using inurl: might help you find more relevant websites because Google changes the titles of web pages in search results in an effort to be helpful. So the url of the web page could be a more accurate reflection of what the author is actually focusing on. I asked Dan about this after his panel and he said he usually uses inurl:.

Find specific files

Typing filetype:[extension] is useful for limiting your search to particular types of files, such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, pdf’s, Word documents and just about any other file type you can imagine. Typing filetype:xls [keywords] in a search, for example, will show spreadsheets that pertain to that issue, which is nice for finding public data. Typing filetype:kml [keywords] shows you relevant Google mapping files. Check this list for file extensions you can search.

Finding more public data and statistics

Google’s data table explorer page offers another way to find public data. Type some keywords and Google will search publicly available Fusion Tables or tables posted on web pages. You can then import that data into your own Fusion Table.

Search for campaign contributions San Antonio and you get a lot of hits. The first result is a table of campaign-finance data posted by the Texas Tribune. Notice the “import data” option:

Click on that link and Google walks you through the steps to import the data table on the page into your Fusion Tables account:

Now you can do your own analysis and create your own visualizations.

Google also offers a public data directory with interactive visualizations. When I was working on some stories about delays in the federal stimulus program in San Antonio, the public data directory offered a quick way to compare unemployment rates. Google shows you the source of the information so you can verify it.

Knowing what you don’t know

One of the themes in Dan’s talk was the importance of knowing the right keywords. That means a successful search isn’t so much about typing the words you know, it’s about typing the words that would likely be used by the writer of the information you’re seeking.

“It’s not about your language,” Dan said. “It’s about someone else’s.”

So be on the lookout for industry terms or phrases you don’t recognize. Don’t gloss over them; find out what those words mean. Think about synonyms. Typing define:[keyword or phrase] in Google can quickly give you a definition of a word or phrase. Dan said it’s a powerful tool that lets you learn words that aren’t even in the dictionary.

If you know how to describe something but don’t know the exact word for it, reverse dictionaries can help. Type descriptions of the mystery word, and the reverse dictionary shows you results that match that definition. Here’s a riddle from Dan’s presentation:

Someone told me that in the mid-1800’s, people often would carry around a special kind of notebook. They would use the notebook to write quotations that they heard, or copy passages from books they’d read. The notebook was an important part of their education, and it had a particular name.

What was this kind of notebook called? Looking up one of the many online reverse dictionaries available and typing “notebook” and “quotations” leads to the answer: a commonplace book.

“Reverse dictionary is your friend as a writer,” Dan said.

Exclude words and dates

When you don’t want to see a particular word or phrase in your search results, type the minus sign in front of it with no space. One way this is useful is if you’re covering breaking news and want to weed out all the media reports in an effort to see what’s been written before the big thing happened.

After the West Fertilizer facility exploded, I wanted to see if the company had a website and read what others had to say about the company before the tragic accident. But breaking news stories and blog posts were flooding my search results. Typing “West Fertilizer” -explosion helped cut through the noise.

You can also tell Google to search for older results by filtering by date: Type a query, hit return, and click on “search tools.” The date filter is to the left:

Know your way around

When you want to find words or phrases near each other, the AROUND operator can help. I mostly use this when Googling people and need to make sure I find relevant web sites about them, even if they use their middle name or initial, or the page cites their last name first, then their first name.

So typing Manuel AROUND(2) Isquierdo shows all pages that have the name “Manuel” within two words of “Isquierdo.” The results show some pages with Isquierdo’s middle initial. You can use any number you want — typing “5” would show you everything within five words.

Stay up to date

All these search terms work with Google Alerts, your own personal Web-monitoring service. Google will email you whenever it crawls new websites containing terms you’re interested in.

“This is a very good thing because you can now follow a topical area,” Russell said at his presentation last year.

Combine methods to make awesome sauce

You can use all these search operators together. So let’s say you’re curious about what kind of forms and documents the city of San Antonio has posted online. And you want to see references to the term “injuries.” Type site:sanantonio.gov filetype:doc injuries.

This is a cool way to find interesting story ideas.

Keep learning

To learn more, check out Dan’s 200-slide presentation and his notes for the IRE panel at his blog, SearchReSearch. Dan also offers online classes with video lessons.

It’s easy to forget these tricks and strategies. And Google is constantly working on new products. To retain these skills, you have to keep in practice. This is one reason why journalism is so rewarding — and challenging.

“Your job of learning will never, ever stop,” Dan said.

The post More awesome search tips from Google expert Daniel Russell, with real-world examples appeared first on John Tedesco.

Russell posed a riddle:

What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?

Let that sink in. He wasn’t asking for a phone number for the skyscraper in the picture, which sounds hard enough. He wanted the phone number of the precise office where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken.

Nothing in that office was even in the photo. Yet in a few minutes, Russell, a research scientist at Google, revealed the answer by paying attention to small details and walking us through a series of smart Google searches.

“Once you know these tricks, you can solve problems that look impossible,” Russell said.

There are plenty of Google search cheat sheets floating around. But it’s not often you get to hear advice directly from someone at Google who offers you his favorite search tools, methods and perspectives to help you find the impossible.

Here are some of my favorite tips shared by Russell at the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. Some of these techniques are powerful but obscure; others are well-known but not fully understood by everyone.

Most of what you know about Boolean is wrong

Don’t bother typing AND in your search queries – Google treats it like any other word.

But OR in all caps actually works. OR is great for finding synonyms and boilerplate language. Typing “Smith denied” OR “Smith claimed” OR “Smith argued” will find more pertinent websites about the controversy involving Smith.

Avoid using NOT if you want to exclude a search term. Instead, type a minus sign in front of the word. So if you’re visiting San Antonio but don’t want to visit the Alamo, type:

“San Antonio” -Alamo

That will search for the phrase “San Antonio” on web pages that don’t have the word “Alamo.” There’s no space between Alamo and the hyphen.

Think about how somebody else would write about the topic

Search is all about someone else’s language. Think about synonyms and use OR operators. Google’s “related search” feature on the search page also offers suggestions.

“Part of the skill here is being fascinated about language,” Russell said. “You’ve got to think about equivalent terms.”

Use language tools

Knowing which words to search for means understanding their meaning. Typing define [space] [search term] in Google search will offer dictionary definitions. “‘Define’ ‘space’ ‘word’ is your friend as a writer,” Russell said. “Trust me on this.”

You even get a definition if you type define pwned and other lingo. “That means we have words that aren’t in the dictionary,” Russell said.

What if you know descriptions but not the actual word? Find one of the many reverse dictionaries online. Type the descriptions you know and you’ll get the matching words.

Use quotes to search for phrases

Typing “San Antonio Spurs” will show you the websites with the phrase “San Antonio Spurs.” If you don’t use the quotes, Google will search for the terms “San,” “Antonio,” and “Spurs” individually and you might miss pages related to the basketball team.

Force Google to include search terms

Sometimes Google tries to be helpful and it uses the word it thinks you’re searching for — not the word you’re actually searching for. And sometimes a website in the search results does not include all your search terms.

How do you fix this?

Typing intext:[keyword] might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Russell’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website. So if you type:

intext:”San Antonio” intext:Alamo

It forces Google to show results with the phrase “San Antonio” and the word Alamo. You won’t get results that are missing either search term.

Minus does not equal plus with Google

Russell didn’t talk much about this but it’s worth noting. Since putting a minus sign in front of a word removes it from a search, many people, including me, incorrectly assumed that adding a plus sign in front of the word forced Google to include it.

Actually, that search operator simply stops Google from changing the word into a synonym or correcting the spelling. It’s still possible that Google will drop the word from some search results, so it’s different from intext:.

(After Google Plus was unveiled, Google dropped the plus sign operator and replaced it with double quotes. Typing “Alamo” is now the same as +Alamo.)

That’s not to say the plus sign — now double quotes — is not a useful search operator. But note how it’s different from intext: If you want to force Google to include an exact word or phrase in all your search results, use intext:.

“Control F” is your friend

Use this keyboard shortcut to find a word or phrase on any web page. It’s faster than reading the whole page for a specific word or phrase. “If you don’t know this, you’re roughly 12 percent slower in your searches,” Russell said.

Limit the time frame

If you only want search results for web pages published in the past week, past month, or some other time frame, you can click on that option on the left-hand side of the search results page under “Show search tools.”

Search by region

If you only want web pages for a particular area, you can search by region on Google’s advanced search page.

Find relational search terms

What if you’re curious about search terms that are near each other on a website? [keyword] AROUND(n) [keyword] is incredibly handy for finding related terms such as “Jerry Brown” near “Tea Party.” (“n” is the number of words near the search terms.) Typing “Jerry Brown” AROUND(3) “Tea Party” will show you all the websites where the phrase “Jerry Brown” was mentioned within three words of “Tea Party.”

Google maps as a search tool

(Update: Google dropped this map feature, which is a bummer. It was extremely useful and I hope they bring it back.) Let’s say you’re searching Google Maps for hotels in San Antonio for next year’s IRE conference and check out the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel:

This screen shows the “hotel” search in Google maps. But what if you want to know what’s near the Marriott?

In the Google Maps search bar, type an asterisk. The results will show you every single place Google knows about in that map view. So you can see nearby businesses, stores, and whatever else is around:

Now you know where to find — or avoid — the Denny’s across the street.

Restrict your search to a specific website

The search operator site:[url] restricts your search to that particular website. It’s one of the most useful searches out there. I used this when I worked on a story about racehorse accidents and wanted to search the Texas Racing Commission’s website for any mention of injuries. Typing injuries site:txrc.state.tx.us led me to a little-known state database of accidents that showed how, in a five-year period, 300 horses had died on Texas racetracks.

Find a particular type of file

Typing filetype:[extension] is useful for limiting your search to particular types of files, such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, pdf’s, Word documents and just about any other file type you can imagine. Typing filetype:xls in a search will show only spreadsheets. It’s incredibly useful for finding public data. Check this list for file extensions you can search for.

Think like a reporter

When Russell teaches his students search skills, he tells them: “Think like a reporter.” What do you know, and how can that information help you find what you need to know?

A big part of a journalist’s job is knowing where to find information. Which state agency regulates the issue you’re interested in? How might that information be documented? Who would know more about the issue?

“You have to have a concept about what’s possible,” Russell said.

Time travel technique

Typing cache:[url] or clicking on the cache function in the search results will show you an older version of the website. Handy if the site owner takes something down or edits it because of a brewing controversy.

Mashup search

Computer-savvy journalists create interactive maps of public data. Searching for the term “mashup” and the issue you’re interested in will show you what’s already been published and might give you some good ideas.

Stay up to date

All these search terms work with Google Alerts. Google will email you whenever it crawls new websites containing terms you’re interested in.

“This is a very good thing because you can now follow a topical area,” Russell said.

Search your own browsing history

Visit Google.com/history to search your past searches. Handy if you vaguely remember a search but forgot the details.

See what the world is searching for

Google Trends shows queries people are doing over time and how they compare.

Beyond YouTube

As popular as it is, YouTube is a subset of all the video services indexed by Google. Searching video.google.com searches every service, not just YouTube.

Google Public Data Explorer

Search and analyze public data in interactive charts that you can share online:

Try a Google diagram search

If you’re looking for a part of a machine or gadget but don’t know the name of it, try including the term “diagram” in your search. A search for “bicycle diagram” gives you tons of images with parts:

Combine these Google methods to make awesome sauce

You can use all these search operators together. So let’s say you’re curious about what kind of forms and documents the city of San Antonio has posted online. You can type:

site:sanantonio.gov filetype:doc

This is a cool way to find interesting story ideas.

Epic image search

Sometimes, you don’t even need to type words to search Google. Upload a picture of an object, place or other type of photograph you want to learn more about, and Google can search for similar images. Google might find a match and it offers relevant search terms for that image. This video walks you though it:

Use what you’ve got

So how exactly did Russell figure out the riddle of the office phone number?

The first step is using the available information in the picture, as scant as it might be. Scrutinize the image and see if you can pinpoint any telling details. There might be a clue.

Still stuck? Check out the answer at Russell’s blog, where he regularly quizzes people about riddles that aren’t so impossible after all.

Updates with more Google search tips from Daniel Russell:

• More awesome search tips from Google expert Daniel Russell, with real-world examples
• New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell

The post How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques appeared first on John Tedesco.