Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
I’m helping out with the coverage of the “slope failure” at the Hills of Rivermist, the neighborhood in San Antonio where shifting soil and a buckled retaining wall jeopardized homes. Here are some useful resources to learn more about what happened: In Google Earth you can view a series of aerial photos to see how …
Bing makes online maps that offer a bird’s eye view of a landscape, creating a 3D image effect. This is a nice feature for big news stories like this one: Authorities evacuated about 80 homes in a Northwest Side neighborhood Sunday when ground caved in behind several houses, pushing earth down a 30-foot hill and …
What others are saying about watchdog journalism: California Watch: Mark Katches put out a call for the most memorable investigative stories of 2009. “Despite our industry woes, strong watchdog reporting is thriving at news organizations large and small — including nonprofit newsrooms.” Nieman Journalism Lab: What qualifies as a Spotlight story on Google News? Here …
There’s a ton of free Internet people finders that let you find sources or long-lost classmates. But you often have to perform several searches on several different Web sites because their content varies wildly. Argali is a useful search tool that lets you perform one search while it does the grunt work of aggregating results …
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 …
What others are saying about watchdog journalism: PolitiFact Texas: New watchdog site checks the truthiness of claims by Texas political candidates. California Watch: Yet another watchdog site goes live, this one in California. The Daily Caller: Tucker Carlson launches his own watchdog site with the help of $3 million.
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 …
Express-News reader Rick Pratt wrote an interesting letter to the editor that discussed the consequences of our spending habits: Dr. Carbonell suggests we shouldn’t travel to Cuba because we would only be lining the pockets of its dictatorial leaders, the Castro brothers. This is probably true, but where would he suggest we spend our hard-earned …
What others are saying about watchdog journalism: FishbowlNY: The public is hungry for investigative journalism — and willing to donate money to nonprofit journalism start-ups. “It truly is journalism for the people. And if traditional orgs don’t have the resources to give the people what they want to read, we’ll have to pay for it …
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 …