Open records quiz: Can officials question your motives and withhold documents from you?
The motives of the person requesting the information has no bearing on whether a document is public.
Students
How to spark readers’ interest and tell a hell of a story they won’t forget
Chivers left us hanging. He didn’t immediately tell us if the boy lived. And that suspense is a good thing.
Updated: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists
When you’re covering a story, some apps can be just as useful as a notebook and pen.
Reporting tool: Bookmarking and searching your personal archive of web pages with Diigo
If you bookmark lots of websites, then at some point you’ve fruitlessly searched for a specific page that you bookmarked years ago with your browser. Not fun. Diigo is a bookmarking tool that lets you build a searchable archive of websites that interest you. There’s a social-media component to Diigo. You set up a profile, …
Reporting tool: Taking notes with Evernote
Shawn Miller wrote an amazingly detailed review of Evernote, a free service that lets you take notes, pictures and recordings; sync them with Evernote; and read and search all your material on Web browsers, desktop software, and mobile apps: Why install the same application in so many different places? Evernote stores your collected items in …
Reporter’s notebook: Tips for putting together the pieces of a puzzling, complex story
On March 26, City Hall reporter Josh Baugh got an adrenaline-pumping tip: FBI agents had seized files at the office of Fernando De León, a city official who reviewed permits for real estate development in San Antonio. The tip sparked a frantic series of phone calls that afternoon as Josh and I tried to figure …
Using LucidChart to connect the dots between people and organizations
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 …
The stories behind the Pulitzer winners
The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to some outstanding journalists today. Long before the awards were announced, several of the reporters had already been interviewed about how they chased down difficult, complex stories that made a difference: Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed Daniel Gilbert about how he found the time at a small newspaper to uncover …
The next step: Bloggers as journalists
Zachary Adam Cohen penned a great piece for bloggers who want to do more than write clever riffs off the work of others. The post disappeared into the mists of the Internet but here are the relevant parts: I personally love blogs that rip content from a bigger site and comment on it. I think …
How a journalist solved the murder case of the ‘most hated woman in America’
This speech is a decade old but it never grows stale. It still offers a fresh, compelling look at what makes a good reporter tick. John MacCormack is a veteran journalist at the San Antonio Express-News. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a controversial atheist who had been reported missing in Austin. Most people believed O’Hair was …