Isolating ourselves is the best way to guard against the coronavirus, but it’s more important than ever for journalists to make connections with real people like you during this crisis and listen to your stories.

Maybe we can’t meet in person for the foreseeable future. Maybe the only way we can communicate is through a Zoom video conference while my kids play Minecraft and yell insults at each other.

That’s OK.

Journalists at the Houston Chronicle created this online form to make it easier for you to contact us. If you feel comfortable talking to a reporter and sharing how COVID-19 has directly affected you, your job or your loved ones, please fill out this form and a Houston Chronicle reporter will get in touch with you.

Thanks for reading, and keep in touch.

The post Journalists want to hear your coronavirus story. Here’s how to reach the Houston Chronicle appeared first on John Tedesco.

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.

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.

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.

The good news is, there’s a statewide system in Texas to track how often people die in police custody. The bad news is, no one is taking responsibility to make sure the reports are accurate or even filed at all.

When I started working at the Express-News eons ago in 1997, one thing I learned as a cops reporter is that Texas law requires police departments to file a report with the Attorney General’s office every time someone dies in police custody.

The reports are available to anyone who asks, and under the law, the definition of “custody” includes police shootings.

Those “custodial death” reports came to mind this summer after two Bexar County deputies fatally shot a combative suspect, Gilbert Flores, moments after he raised his hands above his head in an apparent attempt to surrender. A bystander, Michael Thomas, recorded the shooting on his cell phone, sold the video footage to KSAT-TV, and it became a national news story.

The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and the Bexar County district attorney refused to release any records about the shooting. Since custodial death reports are filed with the Attorney General’s office, I bypassed the sheriff’s office and filed an open records request with the AG for the custodial death report for the Flores shooting.

Missing information

When the AG’s office emailed me a copy of the report, there was a gaping hole. At no point did it mention that Flores had his hands raised when he was shot. The sparsely worded narrative stated:

Officers were dispatched to 24414 Walnut Pass for a family violence call. Suspect attacked the officers with a knife and was shot by the officers after the suspect refused to drop the knife. Suspect resisted arrest.

Maybe it’s not surprising the sheriff’s office didn’t include that pertinent fact. But the omission raised a basic question: What exactly is required of a law enforcement agency when it files a custodial death report, and is anyone making sure the information is accurate?

Police accountability

A few Google searches and phone calls taught me a lot more about the law and the history of custodial death reports. For example, Texas law requires a “good faith effort to obtain all facts relevant to the death and include those facts in the report.” It’s a misdemeanor if the agency files the report but fails to include “facts known or discovered in the investigation.”

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

Using the eminently valuable website of the Texas Legislative Reference Library, I tracked down who wrote the law and learned it was a former Bexar County lawmaker named Walter Martinez, who filed his bill in 1983 to help the public learn more about custodial deaths.

“At the time, a pretty energetic prison reform movement was going on in the state,” Martinez told me. “We really didn’t know what the record was with regard to deaths while in custody.”

When Martinez’s bill became law, it set up a potentially useful resource for anyone researching police use of force in Texas. But how well did law enforcement agencies actually follow the statute, and did they ever face any repercussions for failing to follow it?

Those questions led to this news story:

The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office failed to file at least five state-mandated reports about people who died in police shootings since 2005, was late in filing a dozen more fatality reports and left out key details about two deadly shootings involving deputies.

The missing details include how one suspect had his hands raised above his head when two deputies opened fire. In another case, a report didn’t quote a deputy who can be heard on dash-camera video saying, “He started attacking me and I shot him.” The deputy then swears, saying either “Fuck him” or “Fuck it.”

Sheriff’s spokesman James Keith noted that the five missing reports of fatal shootings all occurred before Sheriff Susan Pamerleau took office Jan. 1, 2013. During her tenure, four custodial death reports were late. Keith blamed that on a misunderstanding that’s been cleared up.

“The investigator didn’t have a clear understanding of the law and the requirement that these had to be submitted within 30 days,” Keith said.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office doesn’t take any steps to make sure law enforcement agencies are being diligent in filing the reports.

“We are simply a repository for this information,” spokeswoman Katherine Wise wrote in an email when asked if the attorney general’s office has any system in place to flag late reports.

While the AG doesn’t check how often reports are filed past the 30-day deadline, there’s a simple way to find out by using the agency’s own data.

You can request a copy of a large spreadsheet the AG compiles from the custodial death reports submitted by law enforcement agencies. This is a lot more detailed than what the AG posts on its website. Out of 4,250 death reports filed in Texas since 2005, the records show that law enforcement agencies filed nearly 700 reports — 16 percent — after the 30-day deadline. Some reports were more than two years late. Here are some examples:

Late custodial death reports in Texas

Late report

In Bexar County, a report that was more than a year late was filed with the attorney general’s office Nov. 26, 2013. It described how Sgt. Frank Bellino had responded to a call Oct. 14, 2012, for a possibly intoxicated man who was walking along Culebra Road and creating a hazard for passing drivers.

The report says the unarmed man, Joe Guerra, 19, became aggravated and refused to obey instructions. “He charged at me,” Bellino was quoted as saying, and Bellino opened fire. Guerra later died at a hospital.

I learned a lot about this case from a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Bellino and the sheriff’s office by Guerra’s family. Their lawyers unearthed dash-camera footage from a patrol car that recorded Bellino moments after the shooting explaining what happened.

“He just went fucking nuts on me,” Bellino told a fellow deputy. “He started attacking me and I shot him.” Bellino then can be heard swearing, saying either “Fuck him” or “Fuck it.”

Sean Lyons, a lawyer representing the Guerra family, told me there’s no question that Guerra was inebriated, but he disputed claims that Guerra was in any condition to fight. The custodial death report in Guerra’s case was not only a year late, he said, but paints an inaccurate picture of what happened.

“You’re basically learning the opposite of what went wrong,” Lyons said of the report. “Because the report goes out of its way to make it sound like Bellino did all he could to de-escalate the situation and that Guerra was the aggressor, when in fact, Bellino immediately threatened Guerra’s life, threatened to fucking shoot his ass, and used escalating language.”

Keith declined to answer most questions about the case, citing the litigation against the sheriff’s office. But he did say the office believes that the custodial death reports are supposed to be a general account of what happened.

“The thought is, the investigation is still ongoing, you’re not going to know every single answer, every specific detail within that 30-day time period,” Keith said.

Martinez, who served as a state representative from 1983 to 1985, said the law governing custodial death reports might need to be revised and strengthened to clearly show who’s responsible for making sure the records are accurate and filed on time for the public to review.

“If no one’s following up or taking responsibility for ensuring that it’s done, then there’s a break in the chain,” Martinez said.

The post Police reports about people who die in custody are late, missing in Texas 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.

Local weather watchers have been dutifully documenting San Antonio’s temperature, precipitation, and other climate data for 140 years. If you’re curious how this year’s drought compares to past dry spells, meteorologist Robert Blaha with the National Weather Service has done you a huge favor.

Blaha helped dig up old climate records and published monthly rainfall totals for San Antonio going back to 1871. I stumbled across this interesting piece of the city’s weather history while helping out with a story about the drought, and I made this interactive chart based on the data. (There are a few gaps in the rainfall totals in the 1800s, so the chart starts at a nice round number — the year 1900.)

“We were able to find the records,” Blaha told me. “In the 1800s, they hand wrote (the climate data) in ink. It was in a paperback book. When I came here in 1975, they were in notebook format. In 2050, they’ll be in the format of that day.”

Blaha said the rainfall gauge in San Antonio has changed locations over the years. In the early days it was at a co-op station and then moved to Fort Sam Houston. In 1891 it moved to a downtown office building. Somewhere along the line it was at Stinson Field. In the 1940s it moved to the San Antonio International Airport and stayed there ever since.

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

All that work helps us compare this year’s drought to past dry spells. This year, we’ve received 5.6 inches of rain so far in San Antonio. That’s about half the total precipitation for the lowest year on record since 1900, when it rained 10 inches in 1917.

In 2010 it looks like we got quite a bit of rain –37.4 inches. But click on the monthly figures for 2010 and 2011. The data show that September 2010 was our last significant taste of rain.

In the nine months since then, we’ve barely gotten anything.

(Photo credit: Terry Shuck on Flickr)

The post Just how bad is the Texas drought? View San Antonio’s precipitation data from 1900 to 2011 appeared first on John Tedesco.

But where are all these newcomers moving to within Bexar County?

Kelly Guckian, database manager for the San Antonio Express-News, pulled together more detailed population figures from the 2010 Census to help show where Bexar County is gaining residents — and where it’s losing them.

Kelly focused on census tracts, which are geographic boundaries set by the Census Bureau that encompass, on average, about 4,000 people. This allowed her to zoom in on population changes at the neighborhood level. She did the tedious work of compiling and mapping the data, and I helped export it into this interactive Google map that shows how the far West and North sides of the county saw explosive gains in the blue areas, while many inner city neighborhoods in the yellow areas lost residents.

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

Kelly and graphic artist Mark Blackwell also produced maps showing the population trends broken down by race and ethnicity, and MySA’s Mike Howell put it all together in an interesting package online.

The explosive growth on the county’s outskirts occurred during a decade when city officials emphasized the importance of living near downtown and limiting urban sprawl. Our news story about the Census numbers explored why many people either didn’t hear the city’s message — or ignored it.

The post Interactive Census map shows population trends in Bexar County and San Antonio appeared first on John Tedesco.