Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
Kelly Guckian, the database editor for the San Antonio Express-News, produced this handy interactive map showing low-water crossings in San Antonio. During this week’s downpours in South Texas, Kelly’s map is a potentially life-saving resource for people who want to zoom in on their neighborhoods or other parts of town to check out dangerous, flood-prone … Read more
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo. The same week the San Antonio Express-News cut nearly a third of its newsroom, one of Denver’s daily newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, closed its doors forever. You might ask, as some readers have, so what? Newspapers are far from perfect. But I’ll let Laura Frank, an investigative … Read more
View Larger Map I made a quick Google map of the data we analyzed for this story about fire response times in San Antonio. Many residents of the exclusive Dominion, home of the San Antonio Spurs’ David Robinson and other celebrities, aren’t happy about a slow response to a recent fire that destroyed a $1 … Read more
After retired state Sen. Frank Madla and members of his family died in a fire in November 2006, the tragedy raised an obvious question: Are San Antonio firefighters doing a good job arriving to fires quickly and keeping residents safe? Express-News Projects Editor David Sheppard asked us to find out. At this point, what would … Read more
Body Solutions CEO Harry Siskind cried and apologized in a San Antonio courtroom yesterday. His claims that a fruity drink could burn fat “while you sleep” had been debunked. He no longer pays radio disc jockeys to tout Body Solutions on the air. He’s not sitting in the front row at San Antonio Spurs games … Read more
Day 2 of “Texas’ Deadliest Export” is out. The series shows how easy it is for Mexican drug cartels to buy guns in Texas. Sunday’s story by Reporter Guillermo Contreras focuses on the straw buyers — the people with clean criminal histories who buy guns that wind up being used in cop killings and gun … Read more
Meet Stumpy. This pale zombie was the subject of a video I shot during a daylong class at the San Antonio Express-News offered by Angela Grant, our online media producer. Angela gave us tips about how to shoot video. Then she sent us out to film whatever we wanted for a few hours. After that, … Read more
Anton Caputo, the environmental reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, won this year’s Risser prize for his series about the impact of climate change in Texas. The $3,000 prize is named after James Risser, a Pulitzer-prize winning journlist who wrote about environmental problems that are unique to the Western United States. Anton wrote about shrinking … Read more
Our paper’s web guru, Fernando Ortiz, designed this new web page to showcase some of the best journalism at the San Antonio Express-News. The page offers a list of links to online forums where readers can talk about the stories, and it highlights the most recent project by Todd Bensman about gunrunning in Mexico. At … Read more
Express-News Reporter Todd Bensman wrote an outstanding article in Sunday’s paper about Mexican drug cartels buying assault weapons in Texas to battle rivals and Mexican police. Bensman’s story showed how cartels hire people with clean criminal histories to buy firearms at Texas gun shows and gun shops. Bensman traced the path of several guns found … Read more