Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
What is the function of journalism? How hard is it to become a journalist? Why is it so important? Find answers from a real journalist.
After a tall retaining wall buckled in a San Antonio neighborhood, threatening dozens of homes, rancher Ernest Ruiz called us with a tip about another faulty retaining wall. Ruiz’s story had an interesting twist: The collapsed wall near his rural property hadn’t been constructed by Centex Homes or other homebuilders. This wall was owned by …
We sat down with Terry Gildea of Texas Public Radio for this week’s episode of The Source, Terry’s show about journalists who cover complicated issues in San Antonio. Terry is an oddity in the soundbite-world of broadcast media — he’s a radio reporter who values in-depth reporting. So we had an interesting talk about the …
Ever wonder what happens when you get a telemarketing offer that seems too good to be true, but instead of hanging up, you stay on the line to learn the catch? I did. And in the process, I got to to know a wonderfully clever woman named Caroline, who went all “Glengarry Glen Ross” on …
Somehow my unofficial beat during every election in San Antonio is to roam around and write about the problems and low-voter turnout that afflict our messy Democracy. While on “election snafu” patrol, I was relying on a list of voting sites put out by the Bexar County Elections Department. But the list of locations was …
Matt Stiles, data guru at the Texas Tribune, wrote a great tipsheet with links to user-friendly Web tools for generating charts and maps. Stiles was one of the presenters at a Watchdog Workshop last weekend in Austin organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors. Related: Sign up for blog updates from John Tedesco These are handy …
The day after a large retaining wall collapsed at The Hills of Rivermist in San Antonio, Centex Homes held a private meeting with residents. Outsiders, including city officials, weren’t invited. We received a video of the entire meeting, which shows Centex claimed that the neighborhood was safe because city firefighters were leaving. That was news …
The San Antonio Express-News published an investigative story Sunday that revealed how some local nursing homes consistently neglect the elderly but are allowed to stay in business with little or no penalty. Here are a few tips and resources we used for our story that might help you if you’re looking for a good nursing …
There are all kinds of writers out there but most of us have something in common: We take notes. We talk to people and type up the interviews. We jot down ideas and observations. We write phone numbers, key dates, to-do lists and questions. And as we amass all this raw material, we can get …
View Texas Stories in a larger map I was working on my clips page over the holidays and thought it’d be cool to make a new Google map of my past stories. Each dot on the map is a dateline for an article. I was a little amazed by the variety of far-flung locales I’ve …
2009 was a brutal year for the Express-News. We lost a third of the newsroom in March from painful layoffs, and the exodus of talent was demoralizing, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Even after the layoffs, we’re still occasionally losing bright journalists who don’t see much of a future in mainstream news. They might …