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.

It’s another thing to see how the results of that lopsided election look on a map. Each teal-colored area represents a victory for Medina’s challenger, Monica Ramirez Alcantara:

Bexar County primary for Democratic Party chair

Every registered voter in Texas lives in a voting precinct — a distinct neighborhood or geographic area. Election results for each precinct are available to the public, which means you can plug those numbers into a spreadsheet, add some formulas, and create nifty interactive maps that show which candidate won each precinct.

Related: Interactive map shows how Bexar County voted in the 2016 presidential election

I made these maps in Google Fusion Tables. Zoom in on your neighborhood, click on your precinct, and see who the voters in your area supported.

After last week’s election, we focused on maps of Medina’s race and a few others. Winners of each election carried the teal-colored precincts:

Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood: Lost to Joe Gonzales in the Democratic primary

Texas House District 118: Incumbent Tomas Uresti lost to Leo Pacheco

Bexar County Commissioner Paul Elizondo: Forced into a runoff

Medina told me on Election Day that much of the Democratic turnout was driven by new voters, many of whom were unhappy with the presidency of Donald Trump.

But as my story with political writer Jasper Scherer noted, some of Medina’s critics complained that Medina himself was guilty of sounding like Trump in his own campaign rhetoric. Alcantara said she heard that complaint from Democrats.

“Our constituents wanted change,” she said. “I believe they could see through all of the rhetoric that was going on. I think they used this opportunity to have their voices heard.”

The post Interactive maps: How Bexar County voted in the 2018 primary elections appeared first on John Tedesco.

If you Google “Sutherland Springs church shooting,” you’d have to wade through 1.4 million search engine results to read everything about the worst mass shooting in modern Texas history. We’ve been drowning in real news, fake news and everything in between.

How are we supposed to make sense of it all?

On Wednesday morning, I thought we might have enough information about the shooting to sift through the verified facts and write a detailed, chronological narrative about what happened.

A team of San Antonio Express-News reporters had spent the past three days in Sutherland Springs, doing the difficult work of interviewing witnesses and trying to figure out exactly what happened. Good Samaritans Stephen Willeford, who shot the gunman, and Johnnie Langendorff, who helped Willeford pursue him, had provided detailed accounts to other media outlets. I thought we could tell the story through the eyes of the survivors and the heroes.

Related: Contact John Tedesco at the Houston Chronicle

We also knew the killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, had been kicked out of the Air Force for abusing his wife and infant stepson and wasn’t supposed to be able to buy firearms — but the Air Force had never reported the domestic abuse case to the FBI, which meant Kelley could pass criminal background checks.

If ever there was a time for narrative journalism, this was it.

I emailed my editors Wednesday morning offering to cobble together a long narrative telling readers everything we knew at that point. My boss, projects editor David Sheppard, told me to go for it.

For any writers tackling a complicated story, the best advice I can offer is to start putting words on the blank page as soon as possible. If you don’t know where to start, that’s OK. Write details from your notes that you know for sure will be going in the story. Flesh out an outline. As your story grows you’ll move things around, figuring out how it all fits together. You finally reach a point where everything gels.

Working from home to avoid distractions, I spent Wednesday and Thursday writing, reading and transcribing interviews, figuring out what information we had and what else we needed.

It’s always a challenge trying to decide how to begin a story. But I quickly found my lede in notes taken by Guillermo Contreras, our federal courts reporter who had interviewed a witness, Lorenzo Flores.

Flores had been standing outside a Valero gas station across the street with his girlfriend, Terrie Smith, when he spotted a man in black tactical gear holding a military-style rifle standing outside the church before the first shots were fired. Flores told Contreras:

“I see this man and he had a high-powered rifle. And I had a bad feeling about it. I said, ‘Terrie, look at that.’ And the guy’s like making up his mind on whether to cross the street or not. Finally, I see him walk across the street from the church. And so, I’m like, there’s something wrong here. I had a bad feeling.”

Those details clicked with me. I chose that moment to begin our 3,400-word article about the tragedy at Sutherland Springs and how two men tried to stop it. The Express-News published it online Friday and it ran in today’s paper.

It’s just one story among thousands.

But I hope it helps make sense of the unthinkable.

The post Making sense of the unthinkable in Sutherland Springs appeared first on John Tedesco.

I’m here to help.

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

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

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

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

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

How strenuous is bicycle commuting?

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

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

I got used to it. You will, too.

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

Is cycling dangerous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the best bicycle to buy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What gear should you buy for bicycle commuting?

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

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

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

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

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

Is cycling worth the hassle?

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

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

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

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

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

How much money do you save riding a bike?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those small victories add up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check back here for new updates.

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

The post Is bike commuting the answer to the crazy gasoline crisis of 2017? appeared first on John Tedesco.

Texas weather can be wild and dangerous, as Hurricane Harvey is showing us this week, so here are some techniques that have helped me track the impact of storms, floods and other natural disasters in San Antonio and other parts of the state:

Weather forecasts and warnings

The National Weather Service provides so much useful information it’s hard to know where to start. For Bexar County, I usually check the service’s detailed “zone” weather page, which provides a snapshot of current conditions, forecasts and hazardous weather warnings.

Zone forecasts are available for all counties — you can find the ID number for your zone in this list of Texas counties. The list includes links to RSS feeds and profiles for each zone. Click on a profile, and you’ll see all current weather watches, warnings or advisories for that particular zone.

I follow my local office of the National Weather Service on Twitter and turn on mobile notifications when the weather turns bad. The forecasters in your area use Twitter to provide a steady stream of updates and weather data.

ICYMI: Here's a short summary of the peak winds & highest observed rain totals from #Harvey.

For a full listing: https://t.co/4vep1s1DY4 pic.twitter.com/omNlaa5C60

— NWS San Antonio (@NWSSanAntonio) August 29, 2017

AccuWeather Platinum is the best smartphone app I’ve found to keep track of the weather. It not only tells you when it’s going to rain in your location, it predicts the intensity and duration. It also offers an interactive Doppler radar map.

Google provides a real-time, interactive map of public alerts for a wide variety of emergencies.

Measuring rainfall

The National Weather Service offers hourly weather observations, including rainfall totals, for the past three days at the San Antonio International Airport, the main site for weather stats in Bexar County.

The weather service also compiles archives of observations and data for the San Antonio area, and it issues public information statements with more rainfall totals, river flooding and other statistics.

Floods and traffic

Bexarflood.org provides an interactive map of low water crossings and their current status. You can sign up for alerts when a crossing closes or opens. The city of San Antonio also posts emergency street closures.

The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service offers an interactive map of current and predicted river levels. Each site on the map is color-coded to show where major flooding is expected to occur.

TexasFlood.org, a state website, provides a similar river-level map that lets you add additional layers of data, such as weather advisories and Doppler radar images. You can set up an account and sign up for email or text alerts when specific gages show a river or creek is flooding.

Drive Texas is a map provided by the Texas Department of Transportation that shows current traffic conditions on Texas highways and roads. The map shows any flooded roadways.

Rescues and emergency responses

The San Antonio Fire Department’s “active calls” page shows a list and location of emergencies firefighters are responding to, including high-water rescues.

Broadcastify provides a digital feed of police and firefighter radio traffic at departments across the United States. The scanner traffic is available on its website and through a smartphone app.

The Texas Department of Public Safety provides daily situation reports about any emergency conditions in the state and how officials are responding. The reports cover everything from hurricanes to droughts.

CPS Energy provides a map showing the location of current power outages in its service area and the number of customers without power.

Did I forget anything? Contact me or leave a comment below if I missed any useful resources and I’ll be sure to add them to the list.

The post Web tools to track weather, flooding and natural disasters in Texas appeared first on John Tedesco.

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

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

Then there was this gem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People were getting more engaged?

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

You didn’t expect that.

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

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

Oh, gracious.

Because then you went to New Braunfels, right?

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

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

Is that how you got on our radar screen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

Right.

Does that create a receptive audience for these weather jokes?

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

Yeah. There’s no escaping it.

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

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

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

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

Related: Fake Steve Jobs misses the real point

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

Then other stories pop up in the feed below that.

Yep. Right.

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

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

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

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

I saw that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess you get instant feedback, too, online.

Yes. In milliseconds.

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

I did not.

He did.

Really?

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

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

How have our likes grown?

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

Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was Madalyn Murray O’Hair?

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

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

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

How many stories did you write?

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

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

What were the major breakthroughs?

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

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

Related: How a journalist solved the murder case of the ‘most hated woman in America’

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

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

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

How did you find out Danny Fry had been killed?

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

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

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

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

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

How did authorities find out where the bodies were?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.