Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
If you drive through the bustling oil patch of the Eagle Ford Shale near San Antonio, it won’t take long to find the surreal sight of flares burning natural gas like perpetual bonfires. Natural gas is cheap. Pipelines are expensive. So instead of collecting the fossil fuel, many oil and gas operators build tall, metallic …
The friendly folks at the Association of Health Care Journalists held a conference last week in San Antonio, and they invited me to present an introduction about Google Fusion Tables. If you’re familiar with Microsoft Excel or Access, you might like Fusion Tables. It’s a free tool that allows you to create interactive maps and …
If you’ve ever suspected your neighborhood gas station is stiffing you at the pump, you might already know you can file a complaint with the Weights and Measures Program at the Texas Department of Agriculture. The agency’s inspectors verify the accuracy of gas pumps. But which stations rack up the most complaints, flunk the most …
One of the golden rules of writing is show, don’t tell. The same holds true for stories based on public data. Check out this cool interactive map by Nolan Hicks and Yang Wang showing food stamp recipients by Zip code for the whole state of Texas.
Check out this amazing presentation at Google I/O 2011 about Google Fusion Tables.
The reporters used reader-friendly multimedia presentations to make the data come alive.
The population explosion occurred during a decade when city officials emphasized the importance of living near downtown and limiting urban sprawl.
Public databases empower journalists to do their own research and find surprising answers.
Hopefully it encourages more journalists to take the plunge into computer-assisted reporting.
Texas state officials surprised when public data is posted online by John Tedesco Karisa King and I were cleaning our corner of the newsroom last week, and I rediscovered this gem of an e-mail written by an official for the Texas Department of Insurance. The state agency oversees the amusement-ride industry. When a patron is …