If you want to know what really makes journalists tick, hanging out at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference will restore your faith in humanity.

The whole point of this year’s massive gathering of journalists in Orlando, Florida was about finding truth — how to dig up facts, how to double and triple check them, and how to make sure a complex story is right.

It’s insanely interesting, inspiring stuff.

These tools and techniques are useful for anyone who cares about doing their own research. And they help show just how much work good journalists put into news stories at a time when a depressing number of people mistakenly view the media as purveyors of “fake news.”

I typed up my notes from the most interesting sessions I attended and included a few pointers I’ve learned over the years:

Online privacy and security

Protecting your documents and sources from prying eyes entails more than installing a privacy app on your phone and calling it a day. It requires thinking about what kind of risks you face online and what you can do about it. It’s a process.

Here are some basic steps you can take to protect yourself online, courtesy of BBC researcher Paul Myers and Mike Tigas of ProPublica:

1. Use different passwords for all your online accounts. That way, if one account gets hacked, your other accounts are still safe. Use a password manager such as LastPass to keep track of everything. It works on phones and computers.
2. Use two-step authentication in case a hacker does figure out your password.
3. Encrypt your phone and computer hard drives in case you lose them or authorities try to access them. Veracrypt is a free, open-source option. Both Apple and Android phones offer encryption as well.
4. Use messaging services that rely on strong, end-to-end encryption that prevents anyone from reading your stuff — including the people providing the service. Some options:

Signal is a smart phone app that encrypts messages and files and creates very little metadata — digital bread crumbs that reveal telling details such as when you sent a message and who received it. As long as all parties in a conversation use Signal, secure their phones, and use the self-destruct option in the message settings, Signal is about as secure as it gets. It can also encrypt phone and video calls.

WhatsApp also offers encryption. It’s more popular, but it creates more metadata. It’s owned by Facebook and no one really knows what Facebook does with that information. However, more people use it and it might not arouse as much suspicion as Signal.

ProtonMail is a Gmail alternative that also provides end-to-end encryption. While Google can see your email and provide those messages to authorities, ProtonMail can’t. It does, however, create metadata that is not encrypted, so be aware of that. I list ProtonMail on my contact page to encourage sources to protect their communications. 

Slack is a cool app but it’s not encrypted, as Gawker sadly learned. Two Slack alternatives that offer encryption are Peerio and Keybase.

Jitsi Meet is a Skype alternative that encrypts video calls.

5. Google is an amazing search engine but it tracks all your searches, which could be used against you if you’re ever sued or authorities obtain your Google data. Search engines such as StartPage and DuckDuckGo don’t track your searches at all.
6. Spend some time configuring your browser in the settings menu to protect your privacy online. Blocking third-party cookies, for example, helps prevent websites such as Facebook from tracking you across the web. Automatically deleting cookies every time you close your browser clears out unwanted trackers.
7. Use a VPN — a Virtual Private Network prevents your Internet Service Provider, such as AT&T, from seeing what websites you visit. You have to find a trustworthy one, though — avoid freebees. Go with a reputable, fee-based service.
8. Anonymize yourself by using the Tor browser. Good for conducting research when you don’t want the website to know your IP address.
9. Be careful of cloud providers such as Google Drive and DropBox. They can read your files, which means authorities or litigants can read your files, too, if they provide those companies with a search warrant or subpoena. I’m trying out an app called Syncthing that stores files between your devices without relying on a potentially vulnerable middle man. So far I like it. When I record an interview on my phone, the file magically appears on my work laptop, my home computer and any other devices I sync with it. Same thing with other types of files.
10. Install browser plugins that protect your online activities. Some good options include:

Https Everywhere: Provides a secure connection between you and a website.

uBlock Origin: A well-regarded adblocker, useful for blocking malicious ads.

Cookie AutoDelete: Deletes cookies from a web page whenever you close that tab.

Canvas Defender: Guards against browser fingerprinting, which is a way to track your browsing habits without the use of cookies.

Be careful what you download. Many browser extensions claiming to protect you are actually out to get you. There’s a huge difference between uBlock Origin (good) and plain-old uBlock (bad). Even good extensions can change owners and suddenly get all spammy without you knowing.

Further reading:

Tipsheet by Paul Myers of the BBC:

Tipsheet by Mike Tigas, news app developer at ProPublica: https://bitly.com/ire18-security

Useful privacy websites:

www.privacytools.io

Social media research and verifying viral content

When a big news story blows up, you’ll have to wade through social media, viral content and fake profiles, trying to make sense of it all. Here are some pointers courtesy of Paul Myers of the BBC, research wizard Henk van Ess, and Craig Silverman, official debunker at BuzzFeed.

Useful browser extensions and websites to verify content:

Reverse image searches and video verifier: See where an image has been posted in the past to check its origins. This is possible with Google Image Search (click and drag a photo from your hard drive to the search page), TinEye browser extension, and InVid photo and video analyzer.

Make screen grabs of controversial content in case it gets taken down, and save videos and photos. Download Facebook videos: https://www.fbdown.net/. Download YouTube videos: www.youtubeconvert.cc. Mozilla Firefox has a handy screen grabber built into the browser (click on the three dots in the URL bar and click on “take a screenshot”).

Check if a picture was photoshopped: http://www.fourandsix.com/

Check who is sharing content with CrowdTangle, a free extension owned by Facebook. It shows the top sharers — and who might be trafficking in fake news.

Check when a photo was created and other hidden details with Exif Data: http://exif.regex.info/exif.cgi

Analyze Twitter profiles: https://foller.me/

Another way to analyze Twitter profiles: https://tweetbeaver.com/index.php

Analyze a Facebook profile or page: https://stalkscan.com/

Another way to analyze profiles on Facebook: https://inteltechniques.com/OSINT/facebook.html. Also has ways to check out Twitter and Instagram accounts: https://inteltechniques.com

Analyze a viral video on YouTube: https://citizenevidence.org/2014/07/01/youtube-dataviewer/

Guide: How to spot fake news online: https://africacheck.org/factsheets/guide-how-to-spot-fakes-and-hoaxes-online/

List of more useful sites:

How to find out who’s sharing content and possibly spreading fake news

Check out CrowdTangle, mentioned above. You can also Google the ID number of YouTube videos and Instagram photos to see who’s sharing that material:

Another way to type this search: In Google, type:

[Full link to YouTube video] -site:youtube.com

[Full link to Instagram photo] -site:instagram.com

This shows you sites outside YouTube or Instagram that linked to that material.

How to find facebook pages or profiles that got taken down after a major news event:

1. Find complete name of person you’re interested in.
2. Conduct a site search for that name on google (site:facebook.com person’s name) to find the URL of the deleted page.
3. Then go to archive.is, paste url of facebook page to see if there’s an archived version.
4. You can also do keyword searches on Archive.is. Awesome way to find content.

How to hack Facebook:

Sometimes Facebook is finicky about search terms and it doesn’t always give you what you’re looking for. What then?

The good news is, every Facebook page, place and profile has a unique ID number. Sometimes that number is in the URL of the web page. If it’s not there, you can find it by checking https://findmyfbid.com.

Once you get the numeric ID code, go hack Facebook.

Modifying the URL in your browser a certain way tells Facebook to conduct a search query. For example, typing https://www.facebook.com/search/984197758297116/likers shows all the people who like the San Antonio Express-News Facebook page.

The basic formula is:

www.facebook.com / search / Facebook ID number of your choice / likers.

Type those terms with no spaces in the URL bar of your browser. You have to be logged into Facebook for this technique to work.

You can get really creative with this technique. “Likers” is just one parameter in a search query you can use. There’s also:

/visitors: Shows people who have checked in at a place. Example: Visitors at the San Antonio Express-News: https://www.facebook.com/search/984197758297116/visitors

/photos-of: Shows photos referring to that ID number. Example: Photos of San Antonio Express-News: https://www.facebook.com/search/984197758297116/photos-of

/photos-in: Shows photos taken at a place: Example: Photos in San Antonio Express-News: https://www.facebook.com/search/984197758297116/photos-in

/stories-topic: Shows discussions mentioning the account tied to that ID number. Example: https://www.facebook.com/search/984197758297116//stories-topic

Check out more hacks here: http://researchclinic.net/facebook.html

You can also combine searches.

Let’s say you’re assigned a story about the Beatles and you’re looking for San Antonians to interview. Find the ID number of the Beatles’ official Facebook page, find the ID number of San Antonio, Texas, and you can write a query that shows you people living in San Antonio who like the Beatles.

San Antonio ID: 110297742331680 (I found this by typing “San Antonio, Texas” in Facebook, clicking on the first “place” result, and finding the ID number in the URL.

Official Beatles Page ID: 69116329538

Plug those numbers into this query, with no spaces:

www.facebook.com/ search / ID_number / likers / Place _ID_Number / residents / intersect

Like this:

Boom.

Again, the reason why this might be necessary is because if you type “Residents of San Antonio, Texas who like the Beatles,” sometimes the results don’t show a list of what you want. I tried typing “Residents of San Antonio, Texas who like Phil Hardberger Park” and it didn’t show a list of people. But it does show a list if you configure the URL correctly with the right ID numbers:

Here’s another more user-friendly resource to play around with some of Facebook’s graph searches: http://graph.tips/beta/

Further reading from Paul Myers, a researcher at the BBC:

http://researchclinic.net/facebook.html

http://researchclinic.net/investigative-tools.html

http://www.researchclinic.net/graph.html

http://researchclinic.net/facebooksecrets/index.html

Craig Silverman tipsheet:

How to quickly background people you plan to quote in a story

We quote strangers every day in the newspaper, often without taking the time to verify they are who they say they are. How many times have we covered a weekend story, interviewed a bunch of people, and assumed they had no skeletons in the closet that can come back to bite us?

Kate Howard of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting wrote a feature story about a guy without knowing his criminal history, and it turned out his criminal history was extremely relevant. She only found out about it after the story ran and the victim called her.

Kate argues we should all be doing quick-and-dirty background checks on everyone we write about, no matter how innocuous the story, so we don’t get blindsided. We need to make sure we know more about the people we’re highlighting in the paper.

Here are some of her tips:

Google the hell out of everybody in different ways. Try variations of their names and scroll past the first page of search results. Same thing with social media — check them on Linkedin and Facebook for sure, make sure they are who they say they are.

Check newspaper archives, we might have written about them before.

Court records: Parties involved in local lawsuits in Bexar County are easily searchable at https://apps.bexar.org/dklitsearch/search.aspx. The search also covers criminal cases.

Professional licenses: If someone tells you he’s an engineer, you can confirm that by looking up engineering licenses online. The same goes for other licensed professions, such as real estate agents, doctors, nurses, etc.

Look out for fake names. If someone identifies himself as “Hugh Jass,” be suspicious.

Further reading:

Kate’s tipsheet:

tinyurl.com/IREbackgrounding

People finders and other cool web tools

Pipl and Spokeo were frequently mentioned at IRE as useful tools to find phone numbers and social media profiles.

Truecaller boasts a searchable database of billions of phone numbers. Truecaller snagged those numbers from people who downloaded its app and shared all their contacts. It’s a good way to find out the name behind a phone number, just be careful when you sign up for it. Try setting up a ghost email account so your personal info isn’t collected.

Skype is a great people finder. If you have an email it lets you find the right person, not copy cats. Same thing with Facebook — try searching for emails to find profiles.

GeoLocate search: Allows you to conduct radius searches in Google maps with multiple keywords. Can be useful if you need to figure out where a photograph was taken. You can do things things like, “Show me all bookstores in downtown San Antonio that are within 50 meters of a coffee shop.”

Sqoop: Set up customized searches for corporate and federal court records. Free for journalists.

Court Listener: Free, full-text searches of many federal court records. Created by the makers of the “RECAP” browser extension that alerts you to free court records.

iFOIA: Good resource by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press with input by media lawyers to walk you through the FOIA process.

OpenCorporates: Searchable, crowd-sourced documents of corporations:

Charity Navigator: Features financial evaluations of charities worth at least $1 million:

Focus on solutions, not just problems

Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, offered some good reminders about the importance of looking for solutions to the problems we write about:

This technique strengthens our stories and prods officials to take action. Here’s an example from her tipsheet:

“The Cleveland Plain Dealer had done several major series on lead paint. They showed in convincing detail how the city was failing its children. But these series didn’t produce impact.

“What did bring major change was a 2015 solutions series: “Toxic Neglect.” The paper did a traditional investigation, looking at the lead problem, and the city’s failures, through the lens of race. But its real focus was the solutions component, showing how Rochester was doing a better job overall and how neighbors such as Grand Rapids and Akron had each solved pieces of the puzzle.

“Lead paint was seen as such an entrenched problem that city officials could dismiss “Cleveland is failing its children” as unavoidable. But “Cleveland is failing while its neighbors are succeeding” was a different message,one profoundly embarrassing to city and state officials.”

How to handle difficult stories

Investigative reporters Karen de Sá at the San Francisco Chronicle and T. Christian Miller at ProPublica gave some good advice about how to interview sources who suffered trauma and officials who fear exposure. The main message was to be transparent, be up front about where you’re going with a story, and give them every opportunity to respond.

This is usually helpful no matter what kind of story you’re working on. When I’m working on an unflattering story about someone this is what I usually do:

• Contact them as soon as feasible in the reporting process — not at the last minute before we go to press. In broad strokes, I tell them the gist of why I’m contacting them and the direction of my story, and I’d like to talk to them about it. I hope this starts a dialogue where I can continue to call them as I continue the reporting process and new questions arise.
• If they don’t respond I try to send them a message with the broad outlines of the story and my top questions. Sometimes this provokes a response. The main idea here is that no one should ever be blindsided by what they read in the paper, and you want to make sure you know about any disputed details.
• As soon as a story runs online, I send out a link to the main people in the article and ask if they have any feedback or questions and to please stay in touch for future stories. This tells them a) we care about being accurate and b) we’re not doing a hit-and-run piece.

Staying organized

Notes template: You can use the navigation pane in Word or Google Docs to create sections in your notes for interviews, questions, contacts, etc. This helps you avoid the chaos of disorganized notes. This is what I use:

Other useful tools to stay organized while reporting and writing a story are in this presentation by Sarah Hutchins of IRE and Taylor Blatchford of NICAR, bit.ly/IRE18-organization, and in helpful tips by Pulitzer Prize winner Leon Dash:

Evernote: Key feature is that Evernote lets you search everything — including text in images. It’s your vast, personal archive. Very handy on deadline when you’re trying to factcheck a factoid in a stack of documents. Two other apps mentioned at IRE that help with piles of documents are Everlaw and DEVONthink.

oTranscribe: An efficient way to transcribe your interviews. Everything happens in the browser so you don’t have to switch back and forth between your recording and your document.

Otter: Helpful transcription tool that’s free for the first 600 minutes every month. Click on a section of the transcript to hear that exact part of the recording. Not 100 percent accurate, but nothing is, and this helps you quickly find key sections of long interviews. Trint is a similar service that I’ve tried in the past and it’s been a lifesaver at times.

Note taking: Recommended by New York Times reporter Ellen Gabler, try creating a spreadsheet of all your telephone interviews. Columns can include the date, phone number of the source, topic of the story, and text of the interview. Sarah Hutchins recommends typing notes in Word and pasting them into your spreadsheet. All your interviews are in one place, and you can sort and filter by topic to find what you need quickly.

Document organizing: Another spreadsheet idea — create a spreadsheet of all the documents you gather.

Processing notes: Leon Dash said when he works on a project, he goes through all his interview transcripts, make notes of the key parts, then writes his book or story from those notes.

Scrivener: Popular writing tool that lets you organize sections of a story and see your notes as your write. Some writers swear by this app.

FOIA Machine: Provides contact info of FOIA officers automatically and offers boilerplate information for FOIA requests.

IFTTT: If This, Then That lets you create “applets” that join different services together.

For example, you can download all the tweets of a source you’re following on Twitter to a Google spreadsheet to make sure you never miss anything.

Best practices: Bookmark notebooks with post it notes, marking each interview. Lets you easily find them. On your computer, create digital filing cabinets for email and digital files. Create subfolders in similar ways on all your devices. Use dates in file names for computer documents, come up with a naming system. Avoid writing “finalfinal_final_draft2.” Write something like “Draft_JT_06252018”

Final thought: Don’t use all these tools all at once. Try each one out and give them a real chance to see if they work for you.

The post Insanely awesome journalism tips from IRE’s 2018 investigative reporting conference appeared first on John Tedesco.

I found the answers in the IRS Form 990 — the publicly available tax filing that must be filled out by a variety of nonprofit organizations in the United States.

It turned out the museum was overseen by a tax-exempt charity, which meant its tax records were open to the public, which meant anyone curious about the museum, like me, could learn all kinds of things about its finances.

The tax records helped me write a series of news stories about how the museum was actually a telemarketing operation that raised $12 million from 2004 to 2009 in the name of helping the families of state troopers who died in the line of duty. For every dollar raised, this “charity” had actually spent less than one penny on that worthy goal.

The museum’s activities had already caught the attention of the Texas Attorney General’s office and it went to court to shut down the telemarketing operation, claiming it was duping donors.

Today, the museum is history. The story I stumbled across offers a lesson for any journalist who writes about a nonprofit organization at some point in their career (and we all do). It pays to take the time to look up the 990 — even for seemingly innocuous stories.

The 990 filing, while not perfect by any means, is a road map that can guide you to a better understanding of how a charity works. How much money does it make? How much does it pay its executives? Has it ever been the victim of embezzlement?

The 990 isn’t just a tool for journalists, either. It’s for anyone who wants to know more about a charity. These organizations are often holding out their hats for donations. In return, you’re allowed to look at how they handle the money they raise. And it’s easier than ever to get your hands on these tax records online, often for free.

Here’s how to find 990s and analyze them. Sometimes, the things you discover will raise questions that need to be answered by the charity. But you’ll never know to ask those questions unless you read the 990.

Obtaining tax records of charities

Different types of nonprofits fall under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Many follow 501(c)(3) of the code, which covers charities that raise funds from a variety of donors. There are also charitable foundations that rely on fewer benefactors. Churches don’t have to file a 990. But religious schools and private universities do.

The IRS says you can visit the office of any group that falls under 501(c)(3) and request copies of their tax filings for the past three most recent years. If they made more than $25,000, they’re supposed to file a 990-EZ or the full 990 form, depending on their revenue. But if you’re in a hurry or don’t want to raise alarm bells at the nonprofit, there are also free online tools to obtain the records.

The pioneer in making 990s widely available is Guidestar.org. Sign up for a free account, and Guidestar lets you search by keyword and location to find the charity of your choice. Click on a profile, and you can download recent 990 tax forms.

OK, so you found the 990 you’re looking for. Now what?

Analyzing the 990

Here are a few things I usually look at. The front page of the 990 gives you an overview of the organization:

You can find basic information, such as the main office address and phone number, the year the charity was founded and how many employees it has:

You’ll also find the overall revenue, expenses, fundraising numbers and whether the group made or lost money. Remember, nonprofit doesn’t mean no profit:

In the case of the obscure museum I was curious about, we can see that its telemarketers raised $2.2 million in 2009. Is that a lot or a little? Whenever you look at a financial document, it’s helpful to compare it to past reports to put those numbers into context. My suggestion is to look at several years of 990 filings. Plug the numbers you’re interested in into a spreadsheet, and you can now spot trends.

In my case, I was interested in how much money the museum raised, and how much money its related nonprofit entity was donating to the families of fallen state troopers. The San Antonio Express-News has a paid account with Guidestar, which let us download 990 tax filings for the previous five years. I typed the revenue totals and payments into a spreadsheet.

Across a broad time frame, it was clear that little money was trickling down to the families who needed it.

Digging deeper

The second page of the 990 has the mission statement of the organization and what it claims it accomplished — useful if you want to compare the rhetoric to reality.

Page 3 is the beginning of a lengthy questionnaire. Interesting nuggets might be buried there.

Part VI of the questionnaire asks about the management of the organization and whether it had a “significant diversion” of assets that year. If an organization checks “yes,” that usually means it was the victim of theft.

You don’t see this checked “yes” very often, but the Washington Post published an excellent series in 2013 about more than 1,000 organizations that lost millions of dollars.

Answering “yes” to questions in the questionnaire can trigger a requirement to fill out supplemental information further down in the 990. There you can find, for example, “Schedule O,” which is where the charity explains how the “significant diversion of assets” happened.

The salaries of the nonprofit’s top employees and the identities of board members often makes for interesting reading, which you’ll find in Part VII of the 990:

Some organizations fill this out in an attachment because it’s so long.

Again, be on the lookout for supplemental information toward the back of the 990 for more information about how employees and board directors are compensated.

You might find a “Schedule J” that fleshes out compensation packages for the group’s leadership. You might also find a “Schedule L,” which details “transactions with interested persons.” That probably sounds better than what it is, the “Potential Conflict of Interest” section. This is where a charity might report “excess benefit transactions” to the IRS, which means it overpaid in a transaction with someone who had ties to the organization, such as a charity executive.

Part IV of Schedule L lists business transactions with “interested persons,” such as board members. Last year, this section caught my eye when I was covering a rare, public clash between Louis Agnese Jr., the longtime president of the University of the Incarnate Word, and UIW’s board. In Schedule L, Incarnate Word reported several transactions with businesses tied to the school’s board members, including Charles Amato, the past chairman of the board:

Such transactions aren’t illegal. But Agnese’s critics said the board at UIW had always strongly supported Agnese. It was surprising when the new chairman, Charles Lutz, announced he couldn’t condone Agnese’s conduct.

You also might find “Schedule R,” which details related organizations and partnerships, and any transactions with them. This is where I learned the Texas Highway Patrol Museum was tied to other organizations, which led me to yet more 990 tax filings.

Tying it together

Remember the cover page of the 990 and its overview of revenue and expenses? Be sure to review three sections that offer greater detail on those subjects.

Part VIII is the “Statement of Revenue,” which breaks down revenue streams for an organization. You’ll find how much money comes from membership dues, fundraising events, government grants and other categories.

Part IX is the “Statement of Functional Expenses,” where you can find how much an organization spends on advertising, legal fees, travel and other expenses.

Part X is the balance sheet, where you can see the breakdown of assets and liabilities. You can check for things like how much cash the group had on hand at the beginning of the year compared to the end of the year.

This numbers might not seem very sexy. But the simple act of reading them, plugging them into a spreadsheet and comparing them over time can lead to good questions and beef up a mundane news story.

What’s in a name?

Keep in mind that some organizations call themselves “foundations,” but they might not be. A foundation usually relies on one or several wealthy benefactors, and by law, it must spend at least five percent of its investments on charitable purposes.

Foundations file a slightly different tax form called a 990-PF. One difference is that the foundation lists its grants and recipients. You can see where the money’s going and where the foundation’s priorities lie.

This came in handy when I profiled San Antonio billionaire B.J. “Red” McCombs, who has made headlines for big-ticket multi-million dollar donations that gets his names on buildings. But the 990-PF for his foundation listed a variety of gifts totaling $4.7 million, most of which were smaller donations that never made the news.

“Those gifts you never hear about,” McCombs told me. But he’s convinced the smaller donations make a difference. “If it’s to the food bank, for example, we fully believe that they can take $100 and do five times as much with it as as we could possibly do.”

Other helpful websites

The 990 is a starting point. Even Guidestar, which revolutionized public access to 990s, cautions that these tax records aren’t the best barometer of whether a charity is fulfilling its stated mission.

But the 990 can still be useful. Time after time, I’ve found gems in these seemingly dry tax filings that made me a little more informed about a charity and gave me good questions to ask.

Here are some other resources for finding 990s and checking out nonprofits any time you drive by, say, an empty museum and wonder what their deal is:

• The IRS’ exempt organizations search tool: Allows you to verify an organization’s tax exempt status, and download the agency’s entire database of nonprofit entities.
• The Foundation Center’s 990 finder: Another free online source to track down 990s. The group offers an online guide to demystifying the 990 for foundations.
• Citizen Audit: An awesome, fee-based tool that lets you conduct keyword searches across millions of nonprofit tax documents.
• Federal Audit Clearinghouse: Searchable database of nonprofit organizations that receive federal dollars and must undergo audits.
• Charity Navigator: Offers 990s for nonprofits and rates thousands of organizations.

The post How to find and analyze tax records of charities: The IRS 990 form explained 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.

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.

But what stood out for me was a talk by investigative reporter Jason Leopold of Vice News about using the Freedom of Information Act to get your hands on that data in the first place.

“The Freedom of Information Act has become a very important tool for me,” said Leopold, who writes about the secretive world of national security where few people are willing to speak on the record.

To bypass those road blocks, Leopold began relying on FOIA to dig up public records and unearth good stories. Over the years he’s learned about the intricacies and pitfalls of FOIA. He’s been so prolific, a federal bureaucrat referred to him in an email as a FOIA terrorist. Leopold liked it and the nickname stuck.

“I file FOIA requests probably several times a week,” Leopold told several hundred journalists who packed a conference room at the Denver Marriott City Center on March 10.

Here’s what Leopold learned about FOIA, a law written nearly a half century ago that has its flaws — but can still be a powerful tool:

Speed up the FOIA process

One downside of FOIA is the backlog of open records requests at many federal agencies. It can take months, even years, to get anything.

To speed up the process, Leopold said it’s important to explicitly explain in your FOIA request not only what you’re looking for, but where it’s located at the agency.

“It’s crucial for reporters to build a template — a template that describes exactly where you want these agencies to search,” Leopold said.

Every federal agency has “systems of records” that are usually public and list where they are keeping certain databases and documents in their vast bureaucracy.

Let’s say you’re looking for emails about the German auto manufacturer Volkswagen and how it rigged emissions tests. You send a FOIA request. “The EPA is a large organization, obviously,” Leopold said. “So just sending it to the EPA would not necessarily get you the info you’re seeking in a timely manner.” Leopold said you could speed up the process, potentially trimming off months of delays, if you tell the EPA where to search.

This tip is also a bit empowering. Once the agency notices you know what you’re doing, it’s harder for it to blow you off.

For the FOIA analysts handling your requests, “if you’re not telling them what to do, they have to figure it out,” Leopold said.

Leopold also singled out the FBI.

“The FBI is the worst agency in the government when it comes to responding to FOIA,” Leopold said. The FBI has a 100 million records, and how it searches those records matters.

“Whenever you file a request with the FBI, you should always ask them to conduct a cross-reference search,” Leopold said. “That’s a separate filing system. And an ELSUR search — electronic surveillance database search. And oftentimes, the FBI will have documents in cross-reference files.”

For example, after Maya Angelou died, Leopold filed a FOIA request to see what files the FBI had about her. “They responded by saying, ‘We didn’t find any records.'” Leopold said. “So I appealed and said, ‘You guys did not conduct a cross-reference search.’

“And they went back, the did a cross-reference search, and the gave me these cross-reference files, which were actually really fascinating because these cross-reference files had to do with an investigation into communist activities in the ’60s. And there was Maya Angelou in this file.

“So it really sort of helps to get those documents and get that type of material,” Leopold said. “It will really also help, if you’re reporting on a story, to gain a wider knowledge of how the FBI conducts its activities.”

Appeal everything

FOIA has an appeals process, and Leopold uses it all the time.

“I cannot stress enough how important it is to appeal every response that you get,” Leopold said. “Even if the agency turns over everything you want. There may actually be more. I appeal everything.”

An example: For a story about the Obama administration scuttling FOIA, Leopold heard rumors about the Federal Trade Commission being involved. He filed a FOIA request and they sent about 30 pages.

“I appealed it. They said, ‘Oh, we found 900 more pages.'”

When you appeal, you don’t need to make a compelling legal argument. Simply write, “I appeal the integrity of the search.” It’s also very important to appeal any and all redactions. “You will really be surprised by some of these responses,” Leopold said.

The meta FOIA

File a FOIA request for the processing notes to see how the government agency is handling your initial FOIA request. It’s a way to gain a great understanding about how the FOIA process works.

Leopold said there’s a paper trail from the moment your request lands on an analyst’s desk that shows how your request is being handled. Processing notes sometimes have names of databases that are undisclosed, which could be valuable to your reporting.

“You get a good understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes,” Leopold said.

Leopold advised to wait about three or four weeks after receiving your FOIA case number to file this “meta” FOIA request. “I think those processing notes are hugely valuable,” said Leopold, especially for reporters who cover national security where it’s so difficult to obtain information.

A great resource

One thing that frustrates Leopold is that many reporters don’t know about a great resource: OGIS, the Office of Government Information Services.

This office is the “federal FOIA ombudsman” that provides mediation services for citizens dealing with federal bureaucracies. They can help you if an agency is stonewalling.

“They’re waiting for that phone call,” Leopold said of OGIS. But all too often, journalists aren’t picking up the phone.

“It’s not used as often as it should be,” Leopold said. “It does not cost anything. I’ve used their services before suing. They’ve actually been able to get documents for me.”

Expedited processing

Under FOIA, the burden is on the requester to prove there is a need for the information to be released immediately.

“Each agency is different with regard to expedited processing,” Leopold said. “The easiest office to be granted expedited processing is the Justice Department, even though they suck at FOIA,” Leopold said.

It doesn’t always work out the way you want. For one request, Leopold was granted expedited processing but still had to wait two years to receive what he asked for.

“So much for expedited processing,” Leopold joked. But he said it’s always a good idea to ask for expedited processing and figure out how to make that case. What is that pressing need? How would the public be harmed if that information was not out immediately?

Do your homework

FOIA logs: Read them regularly. Most agencies post their FOIA logs of past requests and responses on their website. You can actually see what other people are asking for, get ideas, and save yourself some time.

You can also check a website called FOIA online, which allows you to conduct keyword searches of multiple agencies and read any documents that were released.

It’s OK to sue

Leopold said there’s a myth that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to sue the government to resolve a FOIA dispute.

“If you are looking for a highly classified document, yes, be prepared for a fight that’s going to take many years,” he said. But otherwise, it’s not so bad. You or your news organization file a suit, and then life gets better. The litigation helps speed up the FOIA process if the agency is dragging its feet.

“Basically what happens after filing a lawsuit, you kind of go to the top of the pile,” Leopold said. “You end up working with a government attorney, and you come up with a production schedule.”

Leopold said FOIA litigation doesn’t cost as much as some people might think.

“The costs are really minimal,” he said. “I mean, four digits. It’s a sad reality about FOIA. It remains broken. We’re left having to litigate for documents that belong to the public.”

Fee waivers

To save money in open records costs, you need to ask for a fee waiver and make an argument as to why you’re entitled to it. You can write: “I’m a reporter. I publish regularly. I am going to use these documents to write a news story about this issue. I should be entitled to a fee waiver because it is in the public interest.”

When writing your request, be sure to use the phrase “any and all records relating or referring to …” That’s very important language, Leopold said. Don’t say you want documents “about” something. Agencies can deny your request, claiming they don’t know what you mean.

Related: How to contact an investigative reporter

By law, every agency also has to provide you with an estimated date of completion. You can request that, and if they fail to provide it, that can help your cause if you need to later appeal or file a lawsuit.

Keeping track of it all

“I have more than a thousand outstanding (FOIA) requests,” Leopold said. He makes sense of the chaos by using a “very simple” spreadsheet that includes the date of the request and when responses are due.

What’s Leopold’s success rate?

“You know, I’m not patting myself on the back here,” Leopold said. “I’m really successful. I turn all of this into news.”

What’s amazing about getting records through FOIA, Leopold said, is that sources are suddenly willing to talk once documents are unclassified and released publicly. It’s tedious work — but it pays off.

“It has become a very important tool for me,” Leopold said. “But yeah, I have a very good success rate.”

The post Insightful FOIA tips from ‘FOIA terrorist’ Jason Leopold at NICAR 2016 appeared first on John Tedesco.

Last week it happened again. Firefighters rescued 14 people, including two children, who were trapped inside a stalled elevator. This time they were only 50 feet high. But on a hot summer day they had no air conditioning for part of their two-hour ordeal.

If all these incidents are making you wonder about the safety record of elevators at the tower or your office building, there’s a quick way to find answers in Texas.

An obscure state agency, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, oversees a hodgepodge of industries such as barbers, boilermakers and tow-truck companies to name a few.

Elevators and escalators are also under TDLR’s purview. State law requires elevator and escalator owners to hire a licensed inspector annually to check the machinery. Many owners also hire contractors to conduct routine maintenance and repairs.

The results of the annual inspections are sent to TDLR, which has been posting them all online since 2001. The first time I worked on a story about a stuck elevator at the Tower of the Americas in 2006, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that TDLR offered a quick way access those annual inspection reports and other documents online.

Not every agency makes this kind of thing so easy, even in 2015.

Searching for records

On the search page, you can type parameters such as owner name or building address:

Click on the search result you want — in this case, the Tower of the Americas — and the next page shows how many elevators and escalators are in the building. Clicking on the “show documents” button takes you to a list of downloadable inspection reports and correspondence.

It’s a timely, useful resource. But it’s not perfect.

Past tragedy

While TDLR offers easy access to individual inspection reports, the agency doesn’t plug in the results of those inspections into any kind of database that could be analyzed and show just how often major problems are found.

And a tragedy at the Crockett Hotel in San Antonio revealed weaknesses in Texas’ regulatory system on Dec. 28, 2011, when a 65-year-old housekeeper named Gloria Rodriguez fell six stories to her death down an elevator shaft.

Past inspections for the elevator looked relatively benign. But after the fatal accident, TDLR’s chief inspector, Lawrence Taylor, scrutinized the elevator and found a litany of problems. In tests, Taylor saw the elevator car stop at a landing, then move upward of its own accord with no signal to run.

Taylor called that a “matter of grave concern.”

“Someone with special knowledge of the elevator control system knew that there was a problem with the brake and intentionally installed a jumper and moved wires in an attempt to overcome the problem(s),” Taylor wrote in his report. “However, no one actually did anything meaningful or effective to uncover the real problem(s) and embark on a course of action that would have solved the problem and prevented this tragic event.

“This tragedy was preventable,” Taylor wrote, “and was a direct result of the failure to have the elevator inspected as required and inadequate maintenance.”

TDLR fined the owner of the Crockett Hotel and its contractor, Otis Elevator Co., nearly $86,000 for Rodriguez’s death.

Over the years I’ve spoken with TDLR employees about the valuable service the agency provides by making so much information available on its website for so many years. But given the tragedy at the Crockett Hotel, just how reliable are the state-mandated annual inspections?

“When you consider how many elevators there are in the state and that they’re working every day, I think overall they are effective,” said Susan Stanford, a spokeswoman for TDLR.

Customers can help keep each other safe by checking certificates that are supposed to be posted near every elevator and see whether it’s overdue for an annual inspection, Stanford said. And she emphasized that elevator accidents are rare. Even at the Tower of the Americas, where elevators routinely get stuck, the incidents are usually a sign that safety mechanisms worked.

Related: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

“Instances involving a major violation don’t happen often, but they do happen,” Stanford added in an email she sent me today. “Inspectors identifying ‘reportable conditions’ are required to notify TDLR and must request the owner’s cooperation in shutting down the equipment until it is repaired or brought into compliance.”

Escalator danger

While it’s unnerving to be trapped inside an elevator at the 622-foot-tall tower, mundane escalators harm more people. Escalator and elevator owners have to report injuries to TDLR, and in San Antonio the injuries usually stem from escalator accidents. In 2010, a 3-year-old child trying to go up an escalator at Rolling Oaks Mall fell and got two fingers stuck. They were amputated.

I didn’t find much fodder in the most recent elevator inspection records posted for the Tower of the Americas. But after an earlier incident at the tower on Dec. 28, 2012, the search was more productive and led to this news story:

All three elevators at the Tower of the Americas, where several employees were trapped early Friday in one of the cars about 400 feet in the air, were behind schedule on state-mandated annual inspections, records show.

The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation sent notices in May to Landry’s Inc., the company that operates the city-owned landmark, warning that inspections due in April were late. The licensing department oversees elevator safety.

Landry’s later told the agency it completed the inspections in September and October. But the company hasn’t yet filed the results of the inspections for at least one of the elevators, according to a Dec. 27 notice the agency sent to Landry’s.

Past inspections at the Tower of the Americas uncovered rusted brackets that came loose from the tower structure. Inspectors also recommended adjusting safety mechanisms for all three elevators. The mechanisms, called “governors,” control speed. One of the elevators flunked a safety test for its governor.

So these inspection reports can be interesting reading. Just remember the Crockett Hotel and keep in mind you might not be seeing a complete picture of an elevator’s safety record.

The post How to check safety inspections for any elevator or escalator in Texas 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.

Natural gas is cheap. Pipelines are expensive. So instead of collecting the fossil fuel, many oil and gas operators build tall, metallic spires called flare stacks to burn the gas and release it into the Texas sky.

For years, no one could say with any certainty how much natural gas was going to waste. Everyone knew flaring in shale country was a problem. But officials at the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that oversees the oil and gas industry, had never released figures showing how much was being burned in the Eagle Ford.

Instead, the agency released only statewide figures showing the overall volume of flaring was low compared to overall production — about one percent.

Whenever a government agency touts rosy statistics, there’s probably a database behind those numbers. And if you obtain that raw data, you might be able to figure out what’s really going on.

Today’s Express-News story about flares burning 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas so far in 2014 is a good reminder of the value of public databases — and why journalists need to get their hands on them to analyze the records for themselves.

There’s no question analyzing data can be a lot of work. We filed an open records request with the Railroad Commission for a copy of the flaring data in the spring of 2013. It’s a huge database of monthly reports showing how much oil and gas is produced in Texas and where those hydrocarbons go. Flaring and venting are one of the “disposition” categories in the data.

I drove to the agency’s Austin headquarters with a flash drive that could handle the enormous database. It was a beast — more than 25 gigabytes of 85 million records. All that summer we used software to convert the Railroad Commission’s archaic data to CSV files, a format we could use in the newsroom. After that, it took weeks to crunch the numbers and uncover the hidden pitfalls.

Read more: Workers dying on the Eagle Ford Shale

Why go through the hassle? Why should frazzled journalists take the time to learn how to analyze data? Don’t we have enough to do?

The answers is, journalists need to know a lot of skills — how to interview people, how to write clearly, how to find information. Analyzing public data should be a part of that skill set. It opens doors to stories that couldn’t otherwise be told. This is what journalism is all about.

When we were finished reviewing the flaring data, our analysis showed that the volume of flared gas in Texas had increased by 400 percent since 2009. And most of that gas came from the Eagle Ford Shale near San Antonio. This chart essentially told the story of flaring in the shale that no one had figured out — not even state officials:

Quantifying the volume of flared gas opened up new questions and possibilities. When Projects Editor David Sheppard asked how much air pollution was created by all this flaring, we found out there was a way to calculate an estimate. We obtained emails from the state’s environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, that showed how to estimate levels of air pollution created by gas flares. Those formulas were based on the volume of flared gas – which we had. So we plugged those numbers into Excel spreadsheets to come up with the amounts of sulfur, volatile organic compounds and other pollutants that came from flaring in the region.

In August, the Express-News published the results of our investigation, Up in Flames. The total volume of wasted gas in the shale from 2009 to 2012 was almost 39 billion cubic feet — enough to meet the annual heating and cooking needs for all 335,700 residential customers who relied on gas last year in CPS Energy’s service area, which includes San Antonio.

Sunday’s story is based on a fresh batch of flaring figures obtained by Express-News Data Editor Joseph Kokenge, who scraped the data directly from the Railroad Commission’s website.

The new numbers for 2013 and 2014 show that flares burned and wasted even more of the fossil fuel. In the first seven months of 2014, more than 20 billion cubic feet of gas went up in smoke — enough to fuel CPS Energy’s 800 megawatt Rio Nogales power plant during the same time frame.

The post Up in Flames: Flares wasting natural gas in the Eagle Ford Shale 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.