The San Francisco Panorama: The newspaper that’s not a newspaper

I just got my copy of the San Francisco Panorama, the hefty, 320 page, one-time-only newspaper that feels as vast as the bridge pictured on its cover. The brainchild of David Eggers, the Panorama is intended to remind us what a newspaper can be — a skillfully written, stunningly designed product that grabs readers, surprises …

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Saying goodbye to Mac

Elaine Ayala wrote a touching obit today about Express-News photographer Robert Earl McLeroy Jr., who was known to everyone in the newsroom as “Mac.” At the age of 57, Mac died Tuesday from complications from a massive stroke he suffered in May: McLeroy worked at the newspaper for 29 years. He took a buyout in …

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Reporter’s notebook: What to do when someone tries to hide the truth from you

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

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Watchdog blog roundup for 12-21-09

What others are saying about watchdog journalism, and how to fund it: Related: Sign up for blog updates from John Tedesco The Nation: News flash: Investigative reporting costs money. Bad Idea magazine: David Cohn, the founder of the investigative journalism project Spot.Us, says “crowdfunding” can help pay for watchdog stories. “I think that this kind …

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Living Stories: Google’s new method of packaging news online

Paul Bradshaw wrote an interesting review of Living Stories, Google’s vision of how news should be read, shared and discussed online. Related: What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files Partnering with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google has created an experiment that tries to move …

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How journalists use social media

In this great post at Mashable, Leah Betancourt profiled five journalists, including yours truly, and asked why we use social media: There’s a lot of hype behind measuring social media ROI. But what about the payoff on an individual basis? Those who invest time into social media on a daily basis need to see a …

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Truth needed to be told about Tiger Woods’ car wreck

I hate celebrity news. So it should be refreshing to read the chorus of complaints about the media unfairly wallowing in the muck of Tiger Woods marital “transgressions.” Here’s what reader “w_sands” posted on an Associated Press story on our site: Woods says he let family down:” Is this really any or our business? If …

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Alamo custodians oust two members

Yesterday I mentioned the clash that occurred in 1908 between Adina De Zavala and Clara Driscoll, both members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the custodians of the Alamo. Zavala barricaded herself in the Long Barrack to ensure its preservation. Over the years, members of the nonprofit organization have at times disagreed about …

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CPS Energy’s Bartley resigns

More outstanding reporting by Tracy Idell Hamilton and Anton Caputo, who have been writing story after story about the secrecy at CPS Energy. The city-owned utility spent the summer touting a proposed $13 billion expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear plant. Problem is, the actual price could be as much as $4 billion higher …

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