I get it. Newsrooms are shrinking, subscription are going up, and it feels like there’s not enough time in the day to read some dusty old newspaper — even if it comes in a slick digital version.

But that doesn’t change the fact that major metropolitan newspapers still boast the largest newsrooms in their communities. By a mile. More than TV stations. More than radio stations. More than every local blog combined.

Before you send me an example showing a newspaper didn’t live up to its potential, let me save you some time. I agree with you. Newspapers have many faults. But even with many faults, newspapers are still worth reading. No other local publication in your city invests the time and resources to tell readers something new and amazing about the world. Many days — not every day, but many — you’re simply missing out if you don’t read it.

Let’s look at just one example, the San Antonio Express-News, where I work. If you didn’t read San Antonio’s daily newspaper in 2016, here’s a sampling of what you missed.

(Full disclosure: These articles were written by my colleagues, many of whom are friends and, in one case, the mother of my children. All their stories still kick ass.)

The Next Million: Did you know San Antonio will grow by a million people by the year 2040? Do you know what that means for you and what city officials plan on doing about it? Express-News Staff Writer Vianna Davila spent a year finding those answers. That’s right. She got paid to spend a whole year on this package of stories about an issue that directly affects you and your kids.

For the past year, the San Antonio Express-News has interviewed scores of people — homeowners, renters, planners, experts and developers — to understand and examine past and present growth in San Antonio and Bexar County, as local officials begin to confront a startling possibility: Today, nearly 1.9 million people live in Bexar County, but the population is expected to grow by another 1.1 million people by the year 2040.

With this increase will come unprecedented demand for more housing, jobs and seats in classrooms; it will put tens of thousands of new vehicles on the roads.

How to accommodate so many new people is a staggering challenge, in a place where development already has spread in virtually any direction it wants, unconstrained by any natural barriers, in order to meet the needs of a city and a county that’s been steadily growing for decades.

The Endless War: Soldiers are still fighting and dying in the Middle East, and the Express-News has not forgotten them. The paper sent Martin Kuz, a military writer who used to work for Stars and Stripes, to Afghanistan to write about the endless conflict. Martin and Military Reporter Sig Christenson have also covered the surge in suicides among troops who return home and grapple with post traumatic stress disorder.

These are painful, emotionally fraught minefields that Martin and Christenson routinely navigate to write stuff like this:

Richard Rodriguez brooded in his backyard on a cool evening in March after another argument with his wife. The idea to end his life bloomed in his mind with cold conviction.

The former Army reservist stood up and began walking toward the freeway a few miles from his house in Harlingen. He wanted to reach a particular curve that lies beyond the glow of streetlights.

In that dark emptiness, when the moment beckoned, he would hurl himself in front of a vehicle. He would quiet at last the chaos inside that he carried home from Iraq six years earlier.

Rodriguez rationalized that the location was far enough from the house that his wife, Vicky, and their three young children would seldom pass by the site. Nor would the date of his death coincide with their birthdays, the couple’s wedding anniversary or any other meaningful family occasion.

“I had everything figured out,” he said. “The best way to help everyone was for me to die.”

Death of a Jurist: Express-News readers were the first to learn that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died at a West Texas ranch. The paper’s scoop was the result of luck and hard work that began with a tip to Express-News veterans Bruce Davidson and former Washington correspondent Gary Martin. That tip sparked a mad scramble of reporters to call their sources to confirm the story.

Reporter John MacCormack was already in West Texas with photographer Edward Ornelas. “Johnny Mac” has covered the region for years and can often be heard in the newsroom pestering sources for news, asking gems like, “What are you going to give me so I don’t write the usual blather?” MacCormack and Ornelas showed up at the ranch in time to see the hearse leave with Scalia’s body.

“The death of a Supreme Court justice might be the definition of a national news story,” wrote Slate staff writer Leon Neyfakh about the scoop. “The fact that it was first reported by a local newspaper is a dramatic reminder of just how valuable it can be to have seasoned journalists in place when big news happens.”

State senator tied to bizarre bankruptcy: Newspapers excel at sending reporters to mundane meetings and court hearings, and reporters excel at complaining about those assignments. But that grunt work leads to hidden nuggets of news.

Check out my Q&A with business writer Patrick Danner, who mines court records looking for good stories. Danner attended a bankruptcy hearing and stumbled upon a bizarre case involving state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio. Uresti is a lawyer, and one of his clients accused him of persuading her to invest $900,000 in a company that later went bankrupt:

About 10 months after a legal team including state Sen. Carlos Uresti secured a substantial settlement for Denise Cantu in a wrongful-death lawsuit, she invested $900,000 — the bulk of the proceeds — with a San Antonio frac-sand company that was paying the senator commissions for attracting investors.

Uresti helped represent the Harlingen woman in the case after the rear tire on her Ford Explorer blew out, causing the SUV to veer into a grassy median, roll over and kill her 13-year-old daughter, 4-year-old son and two friends in August 2010.

Now, most of Cantu’s money is gone, along with at least $5 million the frac-sand company, FourWinds Logistics, raised from three other investors, a filing in federal bankruptcy court here shows. Total claims against the company exceed $14 million, another document states.

Some investors have accused FourWinds, which now is in bankruptcy and out of business, of fraud. At least one has called it an illegal Ponzi scheme.

Danner continues to bird-dog the story as the FBI investigates and company officials face criminal charges.

Behind from the Start: Did you know that one in every six women who gave birth in Bexar County in 2014 received no prenatal care? Local health officials didn’t know about that astonishing statistic — until former Staff Writer Jessica Belasco asked them about it.

Check out her deeply researched series of stories about premature births and the high rate of mothers who only receive prenatal care late in their pregnancies — or not at all:

In recent years, the prenatal care deficit has grown worse in Bexar County, a trend undetected by local health officials until they were asked about it by the Express-News for this series.

Nearly one in every six women, or 15.4 percent, who gave birth in Bexar County received no prenatal care in 2014. That’s up from about one in 40, or 2.7 percent, just three years earlier, according to the most recent figures from the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District. By contrast, the rate for Texas overall was 4.6 percent in 2013.

Add the nearly 4,000 pregnant women who didn’t get any care with the more than 6,000 pregnant women who received care late in pregnancy — after the first trimester — and the rate hits a staggering 39 percent of all live births in Bexar County in 2014.

“It’s a significant issue in our community,” said Dr. Thomas Mayes, head of pediatrics at the UT Health Science Center. “In a country that has a wonderful health system, there should be virtually nobody that doesn’t get prenatal care. Nobody.

“Richest country in the world, and we have this kind of rate. It’s just a travesty, to be honest with you.”

Hard Times Hit Eagle Ford: No reporter has covered the Eagle Ford Shale oil boom — and bust — as prolifically as business reporter Jennifer Hiller. She’s written about wildcatters, out-of-control gas flares, pollution, and workers whose lives look like something out of a sad country song, just to name a few. Her mileage reimbursements will put our kids through the first year of college.

Jennifer has driven everywhere and met everyone in the Eagle Ford Shale, which explains how she was able to write this tragic story about the high death toll at drilling sites in the Eagle Ford — she had met one of the victims before his death:

In January 2013, Nestor Lerma Jr. paced the perimeter of a dusty oil drilling site, cellphone pressed to his ear, struggling to hear over the noise of diesel engines as he called Danielle Daniel.

She was eight months pregnant, and he checked on her each time he climbed down the derrick.

“Some days she gets really stressed. I can hear it in her voice,” Lerma said. “That’s what the oil field is. You have to be away from your family.”

They had been together three years, so Daniel knew all about this life — time away from home, missed holidays, the scent of oil on Lerma’s skin. It was the smell of money. It meant bills would get paid.

“I do get scared that one day I’m going to get that phone call,” Daniel said at the time. “That’s the only thing I don’t like about that whole situation. If something happens to J.R., they can replace him. We can’t. We can’t replace him.”

On May 1 this year, she got the call, or a version of it, when a police officer tracked her down in person.

Lerma, 38, was dead — one of at least 34 oil field workers in South Texas who have died on the job in recent years.

Covering the Cartels: The Express-News’ border coverage frequently goes beyond the border. Jason Buch, who covers immigration and border affairs, journeyed to El Salvador, the most violent country in the world, to explain why residents are fleeing en masse to the United States.

But avid readers of the Express-News know there’s a wealth of information about the cartels that’s buried in court files across Texas. They know this because Buch monitors money-laundering cases and criminal trials that often reveal far more about cartels such as the Zetas than the Mexican government has ever made public.

One trial Buch and federal courts reporter Guillermo Contreras covered shed light on the Allende massacre:

In Piedras Negras, the Zetas were frantic.

There wasn’t much that could bother the cartel in one of its strongholds. Its gunmen patrolled the Mexican city across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass in caravans of armored vehicles, casually displaying automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Police stayed out of the way. The gang’s leaders even owned one of the city’s biggest commercial developments.

In March 2011, however, Mario Alfonso “Poncho” Cuellar, a major trafficker from the region, had gone missing. He wasn’t a member of the Zetas but worked closely with the cartel’s then-No. 2 boss, Miguel Treviño Morales. He was the godfather to the children of Treviño’s brother Omar.

And now Cuellar, the Zetas correctly believed, was in the United States, cooperating with federal agents.

“It was panic time in Piedras because Poncho Cuellar had flown away from them,” a federal witness named J. Rodríguez said. “They picked up every single person who had anything to do with him.”

So began what became known as the Allende Massacre, the disappearance of as many as 300 people named for the small town near Piedras Negras where many of them lived, according to testimony this month in a San Antonio federal courtroom.

The trial drew the first clear connection between the allegations of corruption and the mass killings in Mexico.

“Guillermo and I have been nibbling around the edges of these court cases in Texas that have to do with corruption in Mexico, but they always end in plea deals and very little information is made public,” Buch told me.

“In 2014 I went to Saltillo, the capital of the Mexican state of Coahuila, because a lot of former officials have property in San Antonio and some are being investigated by the U.S. government. In 2015 I went to Piedras Negras and Allende, Coahuila, to write about mass disappearances there at both the hands of the cartels and the police. This trial, for the first time, really drew a line between the allegations of corruption and the killings in northern Mexico.”

Trapped in a Dying Body: Everyone with a Facebook account remembers the Ice Bucket Challenge. But Express-News readers learned what ALS really does to its victims and their families when Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje wrote about the devastating effects of ALS, a fatal condition that ruins the body while the mind is lucid.

Stoeltje focused like a laser on one family struggling with the incurable disease. With unique access to the Root family, Stoeltje was there until the end. She writes with a touching but unflinching style:

There were indications the end was near.

Walt had lost interest in things he used to care about — getting in his chair, going outside, watching movies; even “The Ghost Whisperer” had lost its charm.

There were physical signs as well. The swelling. Blood mottling in his extremities. Agitation where he pulled on his sheets, anxiety that was likely linked to a sensation doctors call “air hunger.” Fevers that arose when the sun went down. His fingernail beds were blue.

A hospice nurse now was in his room constantly. Walt was getting regular doses of morphine to help with the air hunger.
Debra, a pillar of strength thus far, was taking these changes hard.

“I went home the other day and just sat on the couch and wailed,” she said.

Even now, though, when his room filled with visitors, Walt tried to rally, some light returning to his eyes. He never wanted anyone to leave.

Debra’s pastors have counseled her to assure him that all will be well.

“They said, ‘You need to give him permission to let go,’” she said. “But I don’t want him to go yet. I’ll know the right time. I don’t think he’s ready to go yet.”

Buttressing all these fine stories were editors, photographers, designers, and graphic artists that made them even more compelling. Stoeltje wasn’t the only one bearing witness — photographer Lisa Krantz was there, too, making a story about death come to life with powerful images.

The daily miracle of newspapers is that they’re under siege from external pressures and internal inertia, yet somehow keep cranking out good stuff. And these were just the big stories I remembered. There were many, many more that scraped beneath the surface of news events that other outlets covered superficially, while the Express-News told readers what was really going on.

I can’t say what newspapers will look like in the coming years, but I hope they’ll stay just as relevant as they are now. Here’s to 2017.

The post If you think newspapers are lame, here are big stories in San Antonio you missed in 2016 appeared first on John Tedesco.

This interactive map we created from the data follows a familiar pattern. From our story that ran today:

Voters in outlying areas of Bexar County turned out in strong numbers and overwhelmingly supported Republican presidential winner Donald Trump, especially on the far, suburban North Side.

But Democrat Hillary Clinton, who lost the national election and Texas, still won the popular vote locally and seized more than twice as many voting precincts as Trump in other parts of Bexar County, according to an analysis of election data by the San Antonio Express-News.

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

The analysis shows a county divided by geography and ideology. Some of the strongest turnout occurred in large precincts that ring Bexar County and lean conservative. Nestled in that sea of Trump supporters is an island of inner-city precincts that might be smaller in size, but collectively supported Clinton and other Democrats in high numbers.

What explains the divide? Many of the precincts that favored Clinton were in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods such as Precinct 2045 near Woodlawn Lake, where 65 percent of the voters cast ballots. Most voters in that precinct preferred Clinton over Trump, 952 votes to 258.

“It doesn’t help that we’re the most economically segregated community in the United States,” said Manuel Medina, chairman of the Bexar County Democratic Party, referring to past studies examining the economic divide in San Antonio.

Click on any precinct to view voter turnout and the final results. Overall, Clinton won 474 voting precincts in Bexar County while Trump won 198. Out of 598,081 ballots cast in Bexar County, Clinton won 53.7 percent of the vote to Trump’s 40.3 percent.

The post Interactive map shows how Bexar County voted in the 2016 presidential election 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.

Natural gas is cheap. Pipelines are expensive. So instead of collecting the fossil fuel, many oil and gas operators build tall, metallic spires called flare stacks to burn the gas and release it into the Texas sky.

For years, no one could say with any certainty how much natural gas was going to waste. Everyone knew flaring in shale country was a problem. But officials at the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that oversees the oil and gas industry, had never released figures showing how much was being burned in the Eagle Ford.

Instead, the agency released only statewide figures showing the overall volume of flaring was low compared to overall production — about one percent.

Whenever a government agency touts rosy statistics, there’s probably a database behind those numbers. And if you obtain that raw data, you might be able to figure out what’s really going on.

Today’s Express-News story about flares burning 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas so far in 2014 is a good reminder of the value of public databases — and why journalists need to get their hands on them to analyze the records for themselves.

There’s no question analyzing data can be a lot of work. We filed an open records request with the Railroad Commission for a copy of the flaring data in the spring of 2013. It’s a huge database of monthly reports showing how much oil and gas is produced in Texas and where those hydrocarbons go. Flaring and venting are one of the “disposition” categories in the data.

I drove to the agency’s Austin headquarters with a flash drive that could handle the enormous database. It was a beast — more than 25 gigabytes of 85 million records. All that summer we used software to convert the Railroad Commission’s archaic data to CSV files, a format we could use in the newsroom. After that, it took weeks to crunch the numbers and uncover the hidden pitfalls.

Read more: Workers dying on the Eagle Ford Shale

Why go through the hassle? Why should frazzled journalists take the time to learn how to analyze data? Don’t we have enough to do?

The answers is, journalists need to know a lot of skills — how to interview people, how to write clearly, how to find information. Analyzing public data should be a part of that skill set. It opens doors to stories that couldn’t otherwise be told. This is what journalism is all about.

When we were finished reviewing the flaring data, our analysis showed that the volume of flared gas in Texas had increased by 400 percent since 2009. And most of that gas came from the Eagle Ford Shale near San Antonio. This chart essentially told the story of flaring in the shale that no one had figured out — not even state officials:

Quantifying the volume of flared gas opened up new questions and possibilities. When Projects Editor David Sheppard asked how much air pollution was created by all this flaring, we found out there was a way to calculate an estimate. We obtained emails from the state’s environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, that showed how to estimate levels of air pollution created by gas flares. Those formulas were based on the volume of flared gas – which we had. So we plugged those numbers into Excel spreadsheets to come up with the amounts of sulfur, volatile organic compounds and other pollutants that came from flaring in the region.

In August, the Express-News published the results of our investigation, Up in Flames. The total volume of wasted gas in the shale from 2009 to 2012 was almost 39 billion cubic feet — enough to meet the annual heating and cooking needs for all 335,700 residential customers who relied on gas last year in CPS Energy’s service area, which includes San Antonio.

Sunday’s story is based on a fresh batch of flaring figures obtained by Express-News Data Editor Joseph Kokenge, who scraped the data directly from the Railroad Commission’s website.

The new numbers for 2013 and 2014 show that flares burned and wasted even more of the fossil fuel. In the first seven months of 2014, more than 20 billion cubic feet of gas went up in smoke — enough to fuel CPS Energy’s 800 megawatt Rio Nogales power plant during the same time frame.

The post Up in Flames: Flares wasting natural gas in the Eagle Ford Shale appeared first on John Tedesco.

San Antonio lawyer Al Acevedo Jr, center right, pleads guilty of bribing a state district judge. @mySA pic.twitter.com/6pLLkkQQcw

— Jerry Lara (@fotografolara) March 17, 2014

“In exchange for these bribes, Judge McGinty provided favorable judicial rulings which benefited me and my clients,” Acevedo says in the court document. “Judge McGinty provided these favorable judicial rulings as requested, and as opportunities arose. These favorable rulings included leniency at sentencing and less restrictive conditions of release.”

Related: Have you been asked to donate to Shop with a Sheriff? Call me.

The clients included a man who was convicted of DWI and sentenced by McGinty to three years imprisonment. In court, McGinty had said the defendant had committed so many offenses it didn’t make any sense to put him on probation. Yet after Acevedo asked him to reduce the sentence, the judge did just that and sentenced him to four years community supervision:

On Sept. 10, Gabriel A. Lopez stood before then-state District Judge Angus McGinty and received three years in prison and a $1,500 fine for his no-contest plea to drunken driving.

He admitted his blood alcohol level was 0.21 — more than 21/2 times the legal limit. It was his third driving-while-intoxicated conviction.

“There comes a time when someone has committed so many offenses that it doesn’t make sense to put them on probation,” McGinty told Lopez, 35, who appeared with attorney Leandro Renaud.

The judge noted Lopez had 11 prior criminal cases and had received probation four times, while three of those were revoked.

“That’s unacceptable, Mr. Lopez,” McGinty admonished. “I do not think probation is appropriate.”

But just three days later, on Sept. 13, Lopez stood before McGinty again, this time with lawyer Al Acevedo Jr. And this time, he walked out a happier man after the judge changed Lopez’s sentence to four years of probation.

“Mr. Lopez, when you were here last, and I sentenced you, it’s because I thought you had earned the right to go to” prison, McGinty said. “Your attorney has done a good job of pointing out some facts that I didn’t adequately consider before.”

In reality, the FBI has alleged, Acevedo had the good graces of the judge because he had served as McGinty’s personal car service — paying for repairs on the jurist’s two luxury cars with the expectation that the scales of justice would tilt heavily in favor of Acevedo’s clients.

Later, Acevedo’s law partner congratulated Acevedo. “I guess it does make a difference givin’, givin’ people money, right?”

Acevedo laughed. “Sure does,” he replied.

Other clients that benefited from the judge’s leniency included an alleged bank robber and a man charged with aggravated robbery.

McGinty resigned after word of the federal investigation spread but hasn’t yet been charged.

The post San Antonio lawyer Alberto Acevedo says he bribed judge, got favorable treatment appeared first on John Tedesco.

A few months ago, my boss, Express-News Projects Editor David Sheppard, asked me to see what we could find out about wrong-way crashes on highways. It seemed like there were a lot of these deadly accidents in the news lately, and local officials had recently unveiled a $500,000 pilot project to install flashing wrong-way signs and radar on a 15-mile segment of U.S. 281.

I wrapped up what I was working on and teamed up with reporter Vianna Davila, who covers transportation. We had to answer two deceptively simple questions. How often do wrong-way crashes happen? And how does Bexar County compare to other counties?

We turned to a giant database maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation called the Crash Records Information System. It’s derived from accident reports filled out by law enforcement officers, and it tracks hundreds of details about every accident in Texas — including wrong-way crashes.

But we soon learned there was no quick and easy way to filter the data for the specific wrong-way accidents we were looking for — crashes on major divided highways with exit and entrance ramps.

Related: Road rage in Texas: Find accidents in your neighborhood with this interactive map

The database had a “road type” field, with categories that included interstates, tollways and U.S. and state highways. So far, so good. But some state highways are actually busy roads, such as Bandera Road. The wrong-way crashes on those boulevards are different from the type of accident we were examining. We weren’t writing about distracted drivers who cross a center line into oncoming traffic. We were writing about drivers who head up exit ramps and into oncoming traffic on busy highways and interstates.

We ended up selecting the five Texas counties with the largest populations, mapped the wrong-way accidents with Google Fusion Tables, and then eyeballed each location to make sure it actually occurred on a major highway. Here’s how the finished product looked for Bexar County:

It took hours of work but the result was a set of specific crashes we were looking for. And the final numbers were surprising — Bexar County ranked high in wrong-way accidents for the years 2007-2011. It even had more crashes than Dallas County, which is more densely populated and has more traffic. To our knowledge, no one has done this kind of comparison in recent years.

If you work for a news organization and you’re jumping into data journalism (and you should be), it’s a good idea to share your methodology and findings with the government employees who oversee the data. You don’t want to be surprised by an error they catch after the story is published. And it gives the agency a chance to respond if your findings cast the agency in a harsh light.

It was certainly surprising to learn Bexar County ranked so high. The other surprise was how long the deadly problem flew under the radar. Despite several high-profile, deadly wrong-way crashes, local officials didn’t start talking about ways to prevent them until the summer of 2010.

To learn more, check out our two-part series about wrong-way crashes. And check back here when we see how the pilot program is working to stop wrong-way drivers.

The post Wrong-way crashes on San Antonio highways happen more often than you might think appeared first on John Tedesco.

Newspapers are very good at producing something we all know: the news article. But Scott has been writing article after article about the problems at the Alamo. In fact, his first story was published two years ago. Like many newspapers, we haven’t done a very good job tying those stories together online to give readers the context and history of the controversy. We’re not answering a basic question about the issue: How did we get here?

Scott got involved when a tipster told him that some members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas questioned the group’s leadership, and were forming their own splinter group to raise money for the Alamo.

“I wanted the story to be more than ‘she said, she said,'” Scott told me. He began obtaining copies of contracts, emails, letters — anything that would shed light on what was going on at the Alamo. He found examples of questionable spending and a lack of focus. “Their biggest challenge was an inability to raise money for capital improvements,” Scott said.

Before his first article was published, Scott heard that the Dallas Morning News was working on its own story about troubles at the Alamo. Nothing gets a reporter’s heart pumping like another reporter chasing down the same story. He kept digging, partly because he didn’t want to get scooped by the Morning News.

“I felt like I needed to be shaking the bushes just to keep up with them,” Scott said.

After his first story about the rift was published, he filed an open records request with the state of Texas to find out how the Daughters were spending funds raised from license plates with Alamo themes. It turned out the Alamo only received a portion of the funds for upkeep.

As more members of the Daughters publicly criticized the group’s leadership, some were expelled for speaking with the media, which led to more follow-up stories.

“They deserve a lot of credit,” Scott said of the outspoken critics. State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, also took a keen interest in the issue and eventually wrote a bill that shifted more oversight of the Alamo to the state. The bill became law on Sept. 1 and significantly altered the role of the Daughters. The Texas General Land Office now oversees the Alamo, and will determine what role the Daughters will play as a contractor of the state. If a contract between the state and the Daughters isn’t signed by Jan. 1, control of the Alamo and the site’s equipment and property acquired with state funds must be transferred to the Land Office.

Scott wrote at least 60 articles in the past two years that mentioned the Alamo and its troubled caretaker. Most stories were about the turmoil within the organization and its track record at the Alamo. For long, seemingly never-ending sagas like this, newspapers really need to devise a way to help readers see the whole picture.

Google’s Living Stories project tried to address this problem. It’s no longer supported but it inspired ProPublica to generate a similar design that gives readers a timeline and easy access to past posts about the topic they’re interested in.

It’d be great if newspapers came up with something like Living Stories. Sometimes a story is bigger than a single article. We ought to figure out a way to systematically tell that story in a compelling way.

The post Remembering the Alamo — and the media’s role in its fate 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.

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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.

Michelle Mondo’s bizarre story about four women who might have been wrongly convicted of molesting two girls certainly qualifies.

Michelle learned of the case when an essay about it was published in April 2009 in Texas Monthly. The author, a Canadian professor named Darrell Otto, had been surfing the Internet and found a 1998 Express-News article about four friends — Anna Vasquez, Cassandra Rivera, Elizabeth Ramirez, and Kristie Mayhugh — who were all serving long prison sentences for a strange crime:

Four young women in that city, acting on their own, had allegedly restrained and, in ritualistic fashion, sexually assaulted two girls, aged seven and nine, over two days. There was no physical evidence tying the women to the assaults, yet the newspaper reported the case against them without a hint of skepticism. It mentioned nothing about mental illness or confessions. Psychology-wise, the only point noted was that the women were lesbians, although academic research clearly shows lesbians are not predisposed to sexually abuse children. I was frustrated by the lack of information.

Otto was convinced the women had been wrongly convicted. Express-News Metro Editor Jaime Stockwell read the essay and asked Michelle to look into the case.

This wasn’t press-release journalism that critics of the media rightly complain about. Michelle spent 18 months on the story, whittling away at it in her spare time as a crime reporter for the Express-News. It wasn’t easy. When I stopped by her desk last week to ask her about it, the beeps and sporadic radio transmissions from the police scanners she was monitoring occasionally interrupted us. Try investigating a possible wrongful conviction when at any moment you have to drop everything and run out to a structure fire.

Related: ‘San Antonio 4’ set free after doubts raised in bizarre criminal case

Michelle stuck with the story. She dug up old court records, tracked down family members, interviewed the convicted women, and waded through “accusations and counter accusations involving different famlies in different states,” she said.

Her findings were published on the newspaper’s front page:

A San Antonio Express-News investigation — including interviews with witnesses and experts and a review of police reports, medical studies and thousands of pages of trial transcripts and other court documents — raises troubling questions about the scientific legitimacy of medical evidence deployed against the women, whether authorities checked a previous rape allegation made by the girls and whether anti-gay views prejudiced Ramirez’s jury.

In two trials, the defense called no witnesses to rebut the testimony of pediatrician Nancy Kellogg, then as now the medical director of Child Safe — at the time, it was called the Alamo Children’s Advocacy Center. But research available when she examined the girls classified the three signs of sexual trauma she found as either normal, inconclusive or impossible to identify as a scar, as she did.

On and off the witness stand, the girls changed their accounts of the timing, weapons, perpetrators and other basic details of the assault every time they told it to authorities, records show.

The girls’ family was mired in conflict before and after the trials, with members making abuse claims in two Texas counties and in another state. It wasn’t the first time the nieces had made a rape outcry.

The trial of Ramirez, held separately from the other women, showcased her sex life, and her jury foreman, a minister, had told attorneys that homosexuality was wrong on religious grounds.

When Michelle interviewed the convicted women for her story, they maintained their innocence — and wondered where the media had been all this time.

“All four of them asked me, ‘Why was I doing the story now?'” Michelle said.

It’s a fair question. Had reporters failed to scrutinize this case in the 1990s when it really mattered?

I checked our news archives. There were about a half dozen stories about the trials, including one with the headline: “Defendants say accusers made up story of assault.” The stories described the crime as a gang rape. I couldn’t really find any in-depth coverage — the articles ran in the Metro section and the longest one I found was about 500 words long. At the time, I had been at the paper for about a year but today I don’t even remember the trials. It looks like the charges were part of the depressing, never-ending stream of twisted child abuse and murder cases in Bexar County that we keep having to write about. Most of the time, those heinous crimes really did happen. Most of the time.

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This being Texas, Michelle is doubtful the women will be freed any time soon. But after the story ran, she’s heard from the women and their families. Maybe it’s too little too late, but it means something when a third party like Michelle comes in, spends a lot of time looking at the evidence, and publicly points out inconsistencies in a criminal case that shattered the lives of the defendants.

“For them, it was a very big deal for somebody to point out, ‘Wait a minute, these women aren’t what they were portrayed as,'” Michelle said.

The post Four women are in prison for a bizarre case of child abuse. Did they do it? appeared first on John Tedesco.

Finley checked it out and discovered Gunn — a Yale-educated surgeon — had robbed a bank in Austin.

“I’ve been watching doctors do lots of bizarre things for many years, but robbing a bank was new,” Finley told me. “It seemed like a very, very strange and tragic thing.”

The spark of curiosity about Gunn led to weeks of reporting by Finley, who talked to dozens of people and dug up public documents to piece together a story about the little-known doctor. Some of the best news stories are born this way: Simply asking, “Why?”

“To me, it’s the perfect narrative,” Finley said. “Why would a well educated surgeon rob a bank?”

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Finley is a skinny, graying veteran of the newsroom best known for his deadpan wisecracks and his gift for writing about complicated topics. To really understand Gunn’s story, Finley read every public record he could get his hands on. At one point, he flew to Kentucky, where Gunn had once worked, to dig up court records. He found a medical consultant’s report that described Gunn’s track record as a doctor. There was also a bankruptcy case in Texas and other documents Finley obtained at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Finley’s story ran last week and it has some striking quotes about Gunn. “He in my opinion was not a very good physician. Honestly, I think he did not have much sympathy or empathy for patients and their families,” said Dr. Joseph Miller of Arkansas.

But it took a lot of work to get people to open up.

“Almost nobody wanted to talk about this guy,” Finley said. Most potential sources were afraid of Gunn’s temper.

But the weeks of reporting paid off. To me, this is why journalism is so cool — you get paid to find stuff out, satisfy your curiosity, and learn something interesting about the world that no one else knows.

And then you get to share it on the front page of the Sunday paper with thousands of your closest friends.

The post From surgeon to bank robber: What caused Dr. John Christian Gunn’s fall from grace? appeared first on John Tedesco.