Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
I’m working on this tipsheet for a presentation tomorrow at a Watchdog Workshop in Austin organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors. My boss and I are going to talk about some methods we use to fact-check stories. Check out the tipsheet and feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment if you have more …
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 …
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 …
Express-News reader Jamie Blount might have shown us the future of newspapers in this letter to the editor today: While I don’t like the dismal news about how newspapers have fallen on hard times, I like the way the San Antonio Express-News has confronted the problem. I read the complete edition of the SAEN online …
As South Texas deals with a seemingly never-ending drought, San Antonio Express-News Environmental Reporter Anton Caputo teamed up with Austin American-Statesman Reporter Asher Price for a story about the water supply that cools nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project in Matagorda County. The utility companies of both cities own a stake in STP, which …
Interesting letter-to-the-editor today in the San Antonio Express-News written by Linnea Schlobohm, who sums up one of the main themes of this blog better than I ever could: After reading Brian Chasnoff’s beautifully crafted story on the San Antonio River, “Paradise Lost to Progress” (Front Page, Sept. 6), I remembered a recent TV comment predicting …
Jay Rosen at PressThink came up with a funny tweet last week: It’s a clever way of pointing out that journalists are spending way too much time on stories that people can get anywhere — for free — on the Internet. The lesson here is that the media need to stop making so many snowmen …
Texas Monthly’s Evan Smith, who is leaving the “national magazine of Texas” to launch the nonprofit Texas Tribune, is swiftly staking a claim for watchdog journalism by hiring reporters with a strong track record of digging up important stories. The Tribune, a fledgling Web publication, is going to cover state government and politics. It announced …