Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
WOAI’s Brian Collister, the investigative television reporter often seen shoving a fuzzy microphone in the faces of fleeing public officials, has a new blog at mySA. Brian is one of the few TV reporters in town who actually digs through records and analyzes public data. One of my favorite stories by Brian features a skillful …
What others are saying about watchdog journalism, and how to fund it: Related: Sign up for blog updates from John Tedesco The Nation: News flash: Investigative reporting costs money. Bad Idea magazine: David Cohn, the founder of the investigative journalism project Spot.Us, says “crowdfunding” can help pay for watchdog stories. “I think that this kind …
Google announced it added more news sources to its Fast Flip experiment, and the San Antonio Express-News is now flippable. Fast Flip is part of Google’s re-imagining of how readers find and consume news. Google takes snapshots of a publisher’s stories or blog posts. You can flip through pages like a magazine until something catches …
Paul Bradshaw wrote an interesting review of Living Stories, Google’s vision of how news should be read, shared and discussed online. Related: What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files Partnering with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google has created an experiment that tries to move …
In this great post at Mashable, Leah Betancourt profiled five journalists, including yours truly, and asked why we use social media: There’s a lot of hype behind measuring social media ROI. But what about the payoff on an individual basis? Those who invest time into social media on a daily basis need to see a …
I hate celebrity news. So it should be refreshing to read the chorus of complaints about the media unfairly wallowing in the muck of Tiger Woods marital “transgressions.” Here’s what reader “w_sands” posted on an Associated Press story on our site: Woods says he let family down:” Is this really any or our business? If …
Yesterday I mentioned the clash that occurred in 1908 between Adina De Zavala and Clara Driscoll, both members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the custodians of the Alamo. Zavala barricaded herself in the Long Barrack to ensure its preservation. Over the years, members of the nonprofit organization have at times disagreed about …
One of the cool features of Bexar County’s digital archive is that you can do crazy keyword searches for people like “David Crockett” and other historic figures in San Antonio to discover deeds and other public records filed in their name. Some of these records document important events in the city’s history. Out of curiosity, …
More outstanding reporting by Tracy Idell Hamilton and Anton Caputo, who have been writing story after story about the secrecy at CPS Energy. The city-owned utility spent the summer touting a proposed $13 billion expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear plant. Problem is, the actual price could be as much as $4 billion higher …
Check out this Chesterfield Cigarette ad published in the San Antonio Express newspaper in 1919: Chesterfields satisfy your smoke-hunger just as a drink of cold water satisfies your thirst. They go straight to your smoke-spot. Anita Baca, a photo editor at the Express-News, brought in a gigantic volume of aged, crinkly newspapers from 1919. The …