I’m here to help.

We can all come up with excuses to avoid riding a bike to work or school. I know, because I made those same excuses, too. But in January, I finally bought a snazzy Cannondale Contro and became a bike commuter.

It’s been quite the journey. I ride a few days a week, and so far I’ve gradually saved about $350 in gas and maintenance expenses for my car. On the days I rode my bike, I avoided burning fossil fuels while burning an estimated 55,800 calories over the course of 1,000 miles.

Along the way, I dragged myself out of the insulated bubble of the automobile and explored parts of the city I’ve never bothered to really see before.

I’m not saying cycling is for everyone or that we all should abandon our vehicles. I live less than 5 miles away from downtown (although my usual biking route is longer). I can avoid busy roads most of the way. There’s a shower at the office I can use in the summer. When I need to drive somewhere during work hours, I use Lyft.

If you’re in a similar situation, here are some answers to questions you might be asking about the pros and cons of commuting by bicycle and whether it’s worth it:

How strenuous is bicycle commuting?

That depends on you and your route. I live in the Woodlawn Lake area and typically ride 6 to 7 miles to and from work on a route with modest hills.

I was already an avid jogger and hiker, but cycling wore me out after the first few commutes. I was sore and tired.

I got used to it. You will, too.

According to my Sports Tracker smart phone app, I’ve ridden more than 1,000 miles since January 2017 and burned nearly 56,000 calories. The vast majority of those trips were to and from work. I didn’t always feel like doing it. But most of the time it was fun and challenging and it slowly became part of my routine.

Is cycling dangerous?

San Antonio has a bad reputation for bicycling, much of it deserved. There are, indeed, motorists who don’t like sharing the road with cyclists and some streets are an obstacle course of bumps, debris and potholes.

One of the best ways to stay safe on a bicycle is to make sure drivers can see you. Buy front and rear LED lights that are bright and blinky. I bought mine on Amazon and they work fine. Shop around and find something that works for you. So far I’ve rarely had a problem with a motorist pulling in front of me or failing to yield. I’m not saying it’s never happened. But it’s rare.

Related: Interactive map of road-rage incidents in San Antonio

When I was deciding whether to make the jump into bike commuting, I spent a lot of time looking at Google Maps figuring out how I was going to get to and from work and avoid busy roads. Why ride on Broadway, where some drivers act like they’re Mad Max extras, when there’s a peaceful, parallel bike path that runs past Brackenridge Golf Course, dips under U.S. 281, then takes you to the pleasant Museum Reach of the River Walk?

Find those quieter routes and side streets. Google offers a bike-route feature in its maps app that can help.

Don’t motorists have to share the road with cyclists?

Yes, but not every driver likes it. I had someone tailgate me on Fredericksburg Road one time when we were the only two people on the road. It was weird. Sometimes cars and trucks speed by a little too close for comfort.

But motorists don’t cause every problem. Cyclists also have to obey the rules of the road. And not just that — they need to be smart. Spend some time learning how to be an observant, safe cyclist. Check out this guide that helped me. The title says it all: “How to not get hit by cars.”

Among the lessons: Don’t ride against traffic — it’s actually riskier than riding with the flow of traffic. Look out for parked cars — someone might open a door in front of you. Don’t ride on sidewalks — it’s a bad idea, plus it’s illegal in San Antonio.

You don’t always have to move as far to the right as possible to let traffic go by. The Texas Department of Transportation publishes a guide that notes cyclists can use the full lane if the street is too narrow to safely accommodate cars and bicycles at the same time.

Remember, you’re riding a type of vehicle. You have to be comfortable cruising among other vehicles.

To avoid feeling vulnerable riding with the flow of traffic, you can buy a mirror that attaches to your left handlebar or your helmet that lets you check your blindspot and see what’s coming up behind you.

I also bought a waterproof GoPro I attach to my helmet in case I have any close calls (or see something cool on my ride). Let’s say somebody clips me and takes off. I figure it will probably happen so fast I won’t be able to get a license plate number. The GoPro gives me a chance to take some video of that number, or at least get a good description of the car.

You can buy an air horn that attaches to your bike. It works as advertised — it’s loud and lets drivers know you’re there. I’ve only had to use this once, when I was riding at the roundabout on Fulton and Blanco and a car failed to yield to me.

For a less obtrusive warning, don’t forget a bike bell. You’ll need this for pedestrians, especially if you ride on the River Walk or one of the many creek trails in San Antonio.

What’s the best bicycle to buy?

For me, buying the bike was more daunting than actually riding the thing. There are so many choices out there.

You’re faced with three types: Sturdy mountain bikes, fast road bikes or hybrids of the two. From there you can dive into countless brands and variations.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time researching bikes and reading reviews. I finally lucked out at REI, where I found a slightly used Cannondale Contro for sale. REI employees are amazingly helpful and they also offer a free tune up you can use later if you buy a bike there.

You’ll want to find something with fenders and a bike rack or buy those extras later. Even if it’s not raining, sometimes you have to ride through puddles and you don’t want mud staining your work clothes. The bike rack helps you carry the standard gear of a bike commuter — a change of clothes, patches and spare tires, a pump, a bike lock and a multitool.

The best advice I can give is don’t get too hung up on finding the perfect bike. Find a decent one and start riding.

Can you wear work clothes or do you get all sweaty?

Depending on the weather and the distance of your commute, you can totally wear work clothes. There’s a lot of breathable, stretchy, moisture-wicking clothing out there, even for office attire. Check out Ministry of Supply if you have money to burn. Their stuff is expensive but their office slacks feel like yoga pants.

In mild weather I work up a bit of a sweat but I cool off at the office. Either I don’t stink or my colleagues are really nice. In the oppressively hot San Antonio summer, I wore exercise clothes to work and brought a change of clothes for the office, which has a shower, which I most definitely used. The ride home in San Antonio is brutal in summer. When you’re moving, the wind helps cool you off, but bring a water bottle and use it.

For chilly weather, check out this helpful guide that offers some tips about bundling up. When you ride a bike there’s going to be a windchill factor. But you’re also going to get warmer as you ride.

What gear should you buy for bicycle commuting?

Cycling makes you spend a little time thinking about the logistics of what you need to get from Point A to Point B. A bike drags you out of your comfort zone.

Did you prepare for the chance of rain today? Do you have your patch kit and other tools? Do you know how to change a flat if you need to?

In the summer, you’ll probably have to shower at your workplace after your morning ride, which means you’ll have to pack your clothes and gear into a backpack, messenger bag or saddlebags. I attached a trunk bag to my biake rack, and put the rest of my stuff in a Timbuk2 messenger bag. Messenger bags are bit more uncomfortable than backpacks, but they do allow more air flow to cool off your back. If you use a messenger bag, buy a cross strap to prevent it from sliding around.

You’ll have to come up with a system to keep track of all your stuff. Use a checklist to make sure you bring everything … you don’t want to show up sweaty at the office and realize you forgot fresh socks.

In the summer, I leave all my toiletries in a duffel bag under my desk so I don’t have to carry them back and forth. It’s just extra weight and space you don’t need to worry about.

Is cycling worth the hassle?

What I learned in 1,000 miles of bicycle commuting is you really get to experience and explore the city in ways that just aren’t the same in a car.

I’ve driven down Mulberry Avenue a million times but never bothered to take a detour on Avenue A, a narrow side street that winds along the shady San Antonio River.

Well, things changed on my bike. One day I was riding by that bumpy little street and decided to find out where it goes.

It turns out, the street ends at a cool pedestrian crossing that spans the river. It was a tranquil setting — and I had no idea it existed until I bought a bike.

All kinds of things good things happen when the wind is in your face.

How much money do you save riding a bike?

When I drive my car to work, it’s 8.8 miles round trip. IRS guidelines say driving a car costs 54 cents a mile in fuel, insurance and maintenance costs. So I’m saving about $4.75 a day every time I ride my bike.

That might not sound like much but it adds up over time. I’ve ridden to and from work 75 times so far, which means I’ve saved about $350.

Keep in mind, I had to buy my $680 bike and the gear to go with it, so it will take several more months of commuting to break even. I also got extravagant with a $300 GoPro, although I use that for other things besides biking. It’s easy to get sucked into buying tons of gear and apparel that can quickly get expensive if you’re not careful.

But compare that to how much it costs to own a car. Even if you go a little crazy on a bike-gadget shopping spree, riding a bicycle even a few times a week saves money that will gradually add up over the years.

Plus, you don’t have to worry about those long Mary Poppins lines at the gas stations.

Every bicycle commute is a small victory. You got off your ass and did something to stay healthy. You did something to keep a car off the road and help the environment. And you did something to break out of your vehicular rut and challenge yourself.

Those small victories add up.

Did I overlook any good tips? Leave a comment or let me know and I’ll update this post.

Update No. 1: Abigail Rodriguez, San Antonio’s former bike coordinator who is now with VIA Metropolitan Transit, emailed me some useful tips I didn’t know.

The Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization offers a free, hourlong “Street Skills” class for anyone 14 years old and older who wants to brush up on their cycling skills. If you sign up in advance, you get a free helmet and set of bike lights. Nice.

VIA buses have bike racks. Abigail said she knows some cyclists who can’t shower at the office in the summer, so they’ll take the bus in the mornings, change at the end of the day and ride home from work.

“You only get half the workout, but the summer days can be brutal, even in the morning,” Abigail told me.

Update No. 2: The MPO publishes a bicycle map that shows “traffic stress” on local roads, giving you an idea of how comfortable cyclists might be riding on any given route.

Here’s an interactive version of the traffic stress map I downloaded from the MPO’s website. Click on a colored trail or road to view more information about it:

Check back here for new updates.

A note about affiliate links: 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 Is bike commuting the answer to the crazy gasoline crisis of 2017? appeared first on John Tedesco.

I know the name is a mouthful. Translated into the way normal people speak, it means this is a versatile lens capable of shooting wide-angle shots; decently zoomed-in shots; shots in dim light with a respectable f/stop of 2.8 at the widest angle; shots with image stabilization; and extreme close-ups.

Those were all the things I was looking for when I first reviewed this budget-friendly lens in 2013, and all these years later it’s still frequently on my Canon DSLR.

There are two versions of the Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4 DC Macro OS HSM. The first was announced in 2006, which is the one I bought and enjoy today. Sigma discontinued it but you can still find it on Amazon. Sigma also released a newer, more compact “contemporary” version. Both lenses only work on crop-sensor cameras, not full frames.

The Sigma is a handy walk-around lens that shoots great photos — we’ll get to that later. But the main reason I bought it was for its versatility shooting DSLR videos.

When you’re filming a news event or your unpredictable kids, you might not have time to switch lenses to get the shot you want. It’s really handy to have a lens on your camera that can handle just about any situation.

This is hardly the only versatile lens on the market. A great option is made by Canon, the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM. Awesome, awesome lens. But a little pricey. I was seriously considering buying it when I stumbled across the the more affordable Sigma.

The Sigma offers a slightly longer zoom range than the Canon, plus it offers the ability to take extreme close ups.

Being able to get really close to the subject of a photo or video is sweet. For a recent story about the safety record of the hot-air balloon industry, this was the lens I used when I visited a balloon festival in Helotes and shot clips for a mini-documentary style video. At one point (toward the end of the video) I was in the cramped basket of a balloon, in really close quarters. The macro feature of the Sigma helped me keep everything in focus.

The same features that make the Sigma so great for video also make it a great walk-around lens for photography. Here are some samples (click on the image to look at a larger version on Flickr):

The main downside of the Sigma is that the aperture gets smaller as you zoom in, meaning it collects less light. That’s not a problem with Canon’s EF-S 17-55mm.

Related: How to shoot better video of anything

And the focus ring on the Sigma isn’t as silky smooth as a good Canon lens. The auto focus is a little noisier and you can’t manually focus while in the auto-focus setting. These are problems the Canon lens doesn’t have.

But if you can live with those downsides, the Sigma might serve you well and help you tell your own stories, just like it has for me.

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

Related: Go back in time with Cogi to capture fleeting moments

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.

Everyone’s needs are different. But for me, Evernote really shines as a vast, searchable archive that allows you to comb the full-text of every web page, document, photo or note you’ve saved, and find what you need in seconds.

Here’s how it works. When you type some words in Evernote’s search box, you’re not just searching the titles of your files. You’re not just searching the tags of your photos. You’re searching the entire contents of everything you saved in Evernote. This even applies to anything you take a picture of that has words, such as business cards, thanks to Evernote’s sweet optical character recognition capability.

For people like journalists who work on deadline, this can be incredibly useful for quickly finding a needle in a haystack.

Related: Go back in time with Cogi to record fleeting moments

Evernote isn’t perfect — its desktop app can get sluggish and I get frustrated with it sometimes. But I realized how powerful this tool could be when I worked on a story about the family history of Johnny Manziel several years ago. I used Evernote to save every article, court record and web page I came across during the course of my reporting. Then, when I was writing the story and had to look up something, I could use Evernote to instantly search the entire text of those files.

An example: I came across several old news stories about the friendship between Manziel’s great-grandfather, a wildcatter and boxer named Bobby Joe Manziel, and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.

Manziel retired from boxing and moved to East Texas in the 1930s to try his luck in the oil fields as a wildcatter. Almost broke, Manziel asked Dempsey for some money to drill for oil in Gladewater.

The well was a gusher. Dempsey later said that gamble was the smartest investment he ever made.

But there were discrepancies in the stories I found about how much Dempsey invested. Some said $400. Others said $700. Well, which was it?

Enter Evernote. I searched for “Dempsey” and the varying dollar amounts in my Evernote files and all the relevant articles popped up. It didn’t take long to determine that the older, more contemporaneous stories claimed Dempsey invested $400. One article quoted Dempsey directly. Problem solved.

Related: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists in 2017

Now imagine life without Evernote. I would have had to reread a pile of photocopied articles looking for any mention of that investment.

Is it possible? Sure.

Was Evernote a useful tool that totally sped up the process?

Absolutely.

I wouldn’t upload sensitive files to a cloud-based app like Evernote. But for the vast majority of information you rely upon in your day-to-day life, Evernote can transform those records into a vast archive that’s instantly searchable — and instantly more useful.

The post What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files appeared first on John Tedesco.

“Wow, they’re doing a good job, right?” said the little Tedesco munchkin.

It was one of those cute family moments when I wished I could go back in time and hit the record button.

So I did.

I tapped the screen of my smartphone and the Cogi Android app captured the last 15 seconds of our conversation. Cogi kept on recording until I tapped the screen again. And I repeated the process through the whole speech, capturing only the highlights of what our kids said.

This is the genius behind Cogi — you only record what you want. And Cogi lets you jump back in time to capture that fleeting moment. Because by the time you realize you want to record something, it’s usually too late.

“I don’t want to record everything,” said Mark Cromack, president and chief technology officer of Santa Barbara-based Cogi Inc. “But by the time I realize I do want to record something, I do need to back up a bit. That’s the cool part.”

The app’s name is about capturing the “cogent idea” and it’s like a DVR for your life. Cogi could help anyone who attends long meetings, school lectures or court hearings. You can also get creative with it. I’ve started to use Cogi during car rides with the kids when they’re being funny. Cromack said bird watchers use it to record bird calls. Lifehacker called it one of the best recording apps for Android.

I interviewed Cromack last week to ask how the company came up with the clever idea for Cogi, discuss a couple things I see as limitations, and learn what new features are on the horizon. Cromack is an avid Cogi evangelist who said he, his co-founder and his son thought of the idea years ago before anyone knew how useful smartphones would become.

“Imagine a world where you got, let’s say, a lapel pin,” Cromack said. “You could just tap it that moment when something interesting happens. Or better yet, it just magically knew that something was cogent to you.

“Well, that’s an interesting dream. Roll that back to some degree of reality. What could we achieve nowadays?”

Then smartphones became a thing. Today, the Cogi app is available on iTunes and Google Play. Here’s how the app works:

You open Cogi and a button on the screen says “start session.”

Tap on that and start a new session. A session is when Cogi is listening but not actively recording. The button now says “tap to highlight.”

When you hear something you want to keep, tap the highlight button. Cogi then starts to actively record, and it goes back in time to record the previous audio it was listening to before you hit the button. You have the option to go back five, 15, 30 or 45 seconds in time.

You can repeat this process as often as you like. When you’re done with the session, hold down the button. Cogi lets you add notes, tags and photos to each session. You can upload sessions or audio clips to services such as Evernote.

That’s all free. Cogi makes money by offering a monthly membership service that allows you to record phone calls and receive transcripts of recordings for a fee.

While you could use it to record an entire interview and soak up every word, Cogi really shines when you only want to capture the highlights of long conversations or events.

One problem with Cogi is that it only records in Windows .wav files. The quality is great but the large files hog memory. Cromack said Cogi will soon add options to record in other formats.

“That’s coming out within probably the next public release,” he said. “It has to.” Cromack said the company knows users want that option but it’s one item on a long list of improvements the company is working on.

“We’ve known about it,” he said. “The issue was just one of, ‘Let’s get something out there that works and it’s solid and has that cool experience.’”

Related: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists in 2017

Another quibble: When the screen is off or when you’re using other apps, Cogi no longer passively listens during a session. (If you’re actively recording, Cogi will still capture audio.) The screen dims after awhile to save battery life. But if I’m taking notes or something I don’t want to accidentally brush the screen and screw something up. Or maybe I’ll need to use another app during a session.

Cromack sounded receptive to that critique but declined to discuss details about whether it will be addressed in upcoming updates, or whether Cogi will branch out beyond audio into the world of video. He later sent me an email saying the company is developing a version of the app that lets users record sessions even when the screen is off.

“Based on your input and questions, we already have implemented a private version of the app that continues to record/monitor when the screen is off,” he wrote. “Control is passed to the volume keys and feedback to the LEDs (on Android). This not only provides a more subtle way of triggering Cogi, but it dramatically improves power savings achieved as compared to the current dim screen feature. As such, we’ll be delivering this ‘power user feature,’ no pun intended, in a future release (soon). We still have some things to work out with this feature, as this proof of concept version was to just see how it *might* work.”

Cromack said that later this year Cogi will offer cloud services to members. This would enable users to share highlights, notes and photos with others who could view that material in a web browser.

“All of that is part of Cogi cloud services,” Cromack said. “It’s not available today but it’s going to be out.”

If demand increases for Cogi’s transcription services for members, Cromack said the company plans to include other languages and translation services. Cogi is also going to be updated to support enhancements for larger devices, such as tablets and iPads. “There’s a long laundry list of really exciting capabilities,” he said.

For me, Cogi offers a way to capture fleeting moments not only for news stories, but for the times with my kids when they say something funny or insightful. Parents think they’ll remember every moment of their children growing up. Cogi can help make that happen — even for the moments we miss. Just hit that highlight button, upload your session, and make a family journal.

Now you’ll never forget that time your daughter watched the State of the Union address

The post Review: Go back in time with Cogi to record fleeting moments 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.

Smartphone apps have radically changed the ways journalists do their jobs. With the right tools, your phone can become a photocopier, audio recorder, high-quality video camera and police radio scanner all rolled into one.

Here’s a running list of Android apps that have helped me over the years. I’m continually updating this list as old apps die and new apps come to life. Contact me if you’ve found something amazing and I’ll be sure to add it. Many of these tools will also help iPhone users find, organize and share information, and some are designed to keep your data private.

Recording interviews with Android apps

The best Android recording apps I’ve found are Simple Voice Recorder and Cogi. The audio quality on both apps is crystal clear, and you can adjust the size and bit rate of the files.

Cogi brings a unique angle to the recording field by letting you cherry pick what you want to keep.

Let’s say you’re writing about a long, boring City Council meeting. You don’t want to record the whole thing. But you don’t want to miss anything juicy, either.

Open Cogi and start a recording session. When you hear something interesting, tap “highlight.” Cogi starts actively recording and magically goes back in time to record what was said up to 45 seconds earlier so you don’t miss anything. When the interesting part ends, tap the screen again to stop actively recording. You can repeat this as many times as you like.

Related: How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

Hi-Q MP3 Recorder offers outstanding audio quality and allows you to automatically upload your files to Dropbox or Google Drive. It has a widget button you can put on your home screen to quickly start and stop recording. For some Android phones, it can record phone calls. I use this app for most of my interviews.

Taking notes and organizing files

I view Evernote as a vast, searchable, personal archive — a place for primary documents, images and web pages that can be tagged and retrieved in moments.

When you save a file to Evernote, all the text in that file is searchable — even in jpg images. So if you’re on deadline and desperately need to find a picture of a business card you uploaded to Evernote months ago and vaguely remember the person worked for the city of San Antonio, search your Evernote files for “city of San Antonio” to call up all those business cards to find the right match.

You can organize your files into notebooks and tag them to further refine your searches. Your files are synced with Evernote and can be accessed from other devices.

While Evernote is great for saving and searching documents, I found it to be a bit glitchy for taking actual notes. For no-frills note taking that puts the focus on writing, try SimpleNote, offered by the makers of WordPress. I’ve been using it for a few months and it really is dead simple, which is a good thing. If you want more features, Google Drive is for you.

But the problem with services such as Evernote and Google is that they can access your notes, files and messages and hand them over to authorities without even telling you.

To beef up your security, avoid creating files in the cloud if you’re working on a sensitive story and use apps that protect your notes with end-to-end encryption, which means no one can make sense of those files except you.

Evernote offers a way to encrypt text within each note. Standard Notes is an open-source app that pledges to securely encrypt your notes and sync those files across multiple devices. Sync.com is a file-sharing app that touts itself as an encrypted, secure version of Dropbox.

Communicating securely

To protect your email messages from prying eyes, check out ProtonMail, a service based in Switzerland that’s obsessed with privacy. The app uses end-to-end encryption to keep the contents of your inbox safe. No one, not even ProtonMail, can read your messages. ProtonMail works best when both the sender and recipient use it. Keep in mind that metadata, such as the subject line of the email and the sender and recipient’s email address, isn’t encrypted.

For text messages, Signal Private Messenger offers end-to-end encryption if both users are on Signal. Users can also make encrypted phone calls to each other. Signal says it collects very little metadata.

For routine, work-related phone calls and texts, check out Google Voice. Google provides a free phone number that can be assigned to multiple phones — even a land line. Your original phone numbers will still work. In the Google Voice app for Android, when someone leaves you a voice mail, Google transcribes (somewhat accurately) the message, so you can quickly read it and get the gist of what the person wants without even listening to it. When someone calls your Google number, you can press 4 to record the call — another handy tool if you’re caught without a recorder. You get an e-mail of each voice mail and audio recording, and you can embed them on Web pages. Lifehacker examined the pros and cons of Google Voice after it was unveiled.

If you’re concerned about your online activities being tracked by advertisers, one option is Firefox Focus, a free browser that lets you block or erase tracking cookies, your browsing history and unwanted advertisements. You can also surf the web anonymously via the Tor network with Orfox, which is based on the open-source code for the Firefox browser but with tweaks to make it compatible with Android.

Scanning documents

A big part of a reporter’s job is making copies of records, analyzing them and sharing them. Our smartphones have become personal photocopy machines.

To take pictures of multiple pages of documents and combine those images into a single pdf file, I use Clear Scan. After photographing a page, you can crop the image and adjust brightness levels. The final result is a high-quality document that you can publish online with a news story or upload to your favorite file-sharing app.

Gathering and sharing news

Nuzzle is a handy addition to your social media arsenal. Sync the Android app to your Twitter account and it alerts you whenever a big story is blowing up on Twitter. It’s a useful way to stay informed about the stories people are sharing online.

Andmade Share is a cool little utility app that lets you customize sharing options in Android. It solves the frustration of encountering different layouts every time you try sharing content in Facebook, YouTube, and other apps.

Monitor radio traffic of police officers, firefighters and paramedics using a radio scanner app such as Broadcastify. The free version has annoying ads, but signing up for an annual membership removes the ads and grants you access to radio archives.

For political junkies, the Sunlight Foundation made the Congress Android app. You can look up profiles of U.S. senators and representatives, track the bills they file and receive notifications on your phone when the status of a bill changes. ProPublica took over the foundation’s online tools and the Congress app still runs smoothly.

The best weather app I’ve found is AccuWeather Platinum. It’s not perfect but it does offer timely precipitation maps and decent predictions of when it will rain at your exact location and for how long.

There’s no shortage of photo-editing apps for Android but I find myself using the reliable features of the default Google Photos app. You can fine-tune brightness, saturation and other aspects of each photo, and Google recently introduced a feature that stabilizes shaky video. Google Photos also automatically saves photos and videos in the cloud, if you want it to.

Beyond Android apps

One of the unique things about Android is you can customize your phone’s home screen with app launchers and widgets. You’re not stuck with the default home screen on your device.

Evie Launcher offers a polished interface and a wide array of customization options. The developers promise to take your privacy seriously.

Tapping on Evie’s search box on the home screen lets you search the web with your choice of three search engines, not just Google. For privacy advocates, you can select DuckDuckGo as your default search engine. Evie also displays recently used apps in the search interface.

Evie’s privacy policy says it collects some user data to personalize search results, but it doesn’t share identifying information with third parties. You can adjust your permission settings to prevent Evie from accessing your location and contacts list.

Android widgets are snazzy tools that can be huge time savers. Google Calendar’s widget lets you scroll through all your upcoming events on your home screen without having to open the actual calendar app. Widgets for Google Maps let you save directions to specific locations. Save a Google Maps widget for “work,” for example, and save yourself some time every morning navigating the chaos of rush hour.

To find widgets, hold your finger on a blank area of your home screen and the option to add one will appear.

Read more: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

You can also add bookmarks to your home screen to quickly check web pages with one tap. This feature is handy for emergency calls. Whenever I hear sirens nearby and I want to find out what’s going on, I tap on my bookmark for the San Antonio Fire Department’s “active fires” dispatch page. Up pops a list of active emergencies and their locations in San Antonio. Use this technique for any website you routinely check on your phone.

Did I miss any Android goodies? Let me know, I’m updating this post from time to time.

The post Updated: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists appeared first on John Tedesco.

When City Hall reporter Josh Baugh and I worked on this story about fired city official Fernando De León, Josh found a nice online tool to help us connect the dots.

LucidChart lets you create flow charts and organizational trees that you can share with your colleagues and publish when you’re done. Here’s the chart we made for our most recent story.

Related: Could a blog win a Pulitzer prize?

It’s a quick and easy tool featured on Lifehacker. Our chart helped me explain to graphic artist Mike Fisher what our story was about visually, which resulted in a simplified version that ran in the paper.

Thankfully, our chart wasn’t as complicated as this bad boy.

The post Using LucidChart to connect the dots between people and organizations appeared first on John Tedesco.

Instead of focusing on the intricacies of open-records laws, David Cuillier and Charles Davis write about the social dynamics between people who ask for records, and the gatekeepers who decide whether to release them. Cuillier says:

It’s crucial to understand the constraints agencies work under to be more effective in getting what you need. Those folks don’t come to work with horns and cloven hooves. There is a whole bureaucratic world that thinks differently than requesters. Understand that world, and you’ll navigate around it much better.

One technique the pair discuss on their blog is checking the job postings at government agencies to understand the agency’s attitude towards open government.

Related: Sign up for blog updates from John Tedesco

By coincidence, the same week I learned about this open-records blog, there was local news about BexarMet’s ousted gatekeeper T.J. Connolly, who pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations. We had written many stories about Connolly, one of which detailed his efforts to delay an open-records request at BexarMet. “I want to be as uncooperative as possible … without being obvious,” Connolly wrote to BexarMet officials.

How did we learn about these stonewalling tactics? After Connolly and his supporters left the agency, we asked for their e-mails under the Texas Public Information Act. Under the new leadership at BexarMet, the agency was eager to appear more open, and handed over thousands of e-mails.

So the authors of The Art of Access are making a very important point: The culture of an agency plays a huge part in determining how much access you get.

The post New book and blog: The Art of Access appeared first on John Tedesco.

I did. And in the process, I got to to know a wonderfully clever woman named Caroline, who went all “Glengarry Glen Ross” on me as she tried to get my credit card number to reserve my spot for a “free” cruise getaway.

I’ve always been fascinated by the tactics of people in sales who make hard-sell pitches. To make the sale, they need an answer for every objection, and Caroline’s performance with me was brilliant. Here’s how it went down …

The cruise offer

In an automated phone call I received last week, a jovial man asked me to take a phone survey, and in return I would receive a free cruise getaway. After I took the survey and registered for the promotion, a woman called me a few days later. She identified herself as “Caroline,” a senior cruise line specialist with Caribbean Cruise Line. The number on my caller ID was 561-424-0845, which is in Palm Beach County.

Caroline sounded like a pleasant woman in her 50s. She assured me I was one of the lucky few who qualified for this promotion.

“We have a lot of people who register but the computer doesn’t pull everybody up,” she said.

She asked if I’ve ever been on a cruise and I told her no.

Related: Home sellers could pay hidden fee to real estate developers for generations

“You’re in for a treat. Because cruising is definitely the best way to vacation, especially with us.”

Before she gave me the “exciting details,” she asked if I was over the age of 18, and told me a minimum of two people could go on the free cruise. She then addressed the proverbial elephant in the room — why would a cruise line give away a free cruise?

“I know everybody wonders why,” she said. The answer was that it’s a “win-win situation.” The customer gets “the best food, the best service, and the best amenities.” And in return, the company receives precious word-of-mouth advertising. The customer might come back for more trips, or persuade friends and family to take the cruise. “We want you to go home and tell everyone you had a great time,” she said.

The hard sell

She described the ship as “a floating resort full of non-stop fun.” I’d get to eat three gourmet meals a day, watch Las Vegas style shows, gamble, relax in a glass swimming pool, go down a 180-foot water slide, and visit the spa and fitness center.

Caroline said there were a limited number of cabins and here’s where I finally got to hear the catch: I had to give Caroline my credit card number to pony up $118 in port taxes for me and my guest. By paying that fee now, it entitled me to a 75 percent discount off their “extended stay packages.” To me, it sounded like the cruise line wanted to give me yet another sales pitch to upgrade my free trip and spend more money, once I committed to the trip.

“The only thing we need is a major credit card,” Caroline said. “Which one would you be using?”

At that point the game was up. I said I wasn’t ready to make a decision yet, and asked if I could call back.

“Usually we don’t have any call backs,” she replied. “We appreciate that you want some time to think about it. But you have to understand this is a promotion. It’s not going to last long.”

There were people waiting in line for this deal, she assured me. “It’s a one-time opportunity.”

I said I simply wasn’t comfortable giving out my credit information.

“I appreciate your concern about credit cards,” she said. “We should all be concerned.” She said the cruise line couldn’t stay in business if it defrauded people. Paying the port tax saved my spot on the cruise ship, she said. “We’re going to hold your cabin for you.”

I wasn’t budging.

“Is there anything I could do or say?” she asked. “We’ve been in business a long time. We’re with the Better Business Bureau.”

A friendly grandma

Caroline took it to a warm, cozy, personal level. “I’m a grandmom,” she said. “I wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t proper.”

She said the cruise line was a “certified company” with the credit card companies.

“We’re not going to jeopardize our reputation or have any problem with $118. Trust me.”

Related: How to contact an investigative reporter in Texas

I said I really ought to talk this over with my girlfriend. Caroline pointed out I had 16 months to take the cruise, so we could travel just about any time we wanted.

“That’s why we give you a year and a half,” she said. “We know you’re going to sit down with your family or whoever’s coming with you and discuss your travel plans. We understand your concerns.”

Again I declined.

“There’s nothing that’s going to hurt you,” she assured me. “It’s only $118. It’s not a whole bunch of money. So let’s just get you signed up.”

I declined yet again. Caroline finally tired of the chase and gave up.

“Sorry I have to let it go,” she said.

The real Caribbean Cruise Line

So is this a scam or did I pass up a fantastic cruise vacation?

There is a company called Caribbean Cruise Line, and it hired Carmen Electra as a sexy travel guide in a Web video promoting a cruise ship, the Bahamas Celebration.

But wait. If you Google “Bahamas Celebration,” a different company comes up as the owner: Celebration Cruise Line, which has similar logos and a similar promotional video starring Daisy Fuentes. The cruise line’s flagship — and only ship — is the Bahamas Celebration, which was originally a Norwegian cruise ferry. You can read reviews of the ship, many of which are unflattering, at Cruise Critic.

So who actually owns the ship?

Glenn Ryerson, vice president of marketing for Celebration Cruise Line, said his company owns and operates the Bahamas Celebration. Caribbean Cruise Line is an entirely different firm that markets vacation packages. It’s not actually a cruise line.

“It’s really an outside company that puts together packages that they sell,” Ryerson said.

That makes sense. The incorporation papers of Celebration and Caribbean list different addresses in Florida, and different company officers. Robert Mitchell is named as Caribbean’s corporate director.

And while Celebration only filed papers to do business in Florida, Caribbean Cruise Line filed incorporation papers in Florida and many other states, including Texas, which suggests Caribbean conducts a broad marketing effort across the country. In addition to telemarketing, Caribbean Cruise Line also mass-mails vouchers promising cheap vacation deals.

Why the hard sell from Caribbean Cruise Line?

“I can’t speak to that. It’s not our company,” Ryerson said. “We just do traditional cruises.”

Sales tactics

But Celebration at least approves of the sales tactics, I pointed out, since they’re doing business with Caribbean. Ryerson chuckled when I told him about Caroline’s grandmom comment, but he emphasized that Caribbean conducts its own marketing efforts.

“We give net rates to a number of wholesalers,” he said. The wholesalers, he said, are the ones who market the deals, which is no different from any other cruise line.

My conversation with Ryerson was the closest thing to the truth I had heard from either company. When I called back the number Caroline had called me from, I got the telemarketing center for Caribbean Cruise Line, and the man who answered insisted Caribbean owned the cruise ship. He acted like he had never heard of Celebration Cruise Line.

And during my phone call with Caroline, she was incorrect in her claim that Caribbean Cruise Line is a member of the Better Business Bureau. There are several companies under that name that are listed in a directory produced by the Better Business Bureau, but none is an accredited member, and one of the companies racked up more than 180 complaints from customers who claimed they did not receive refunds.

It turns out there was one more catch that Caroline hadn’t told me. The “terms and conditions” page on Caribbean’s Web site says participants must listen to a time-share presentation during the getaway.

So the sales pitches don’t end when you hang up the phone.

Related: More insight into telemarketing cruise line

The post Offer for free Caribbean cruise getaway not so free appeared first on John Tedesco.