It’s another thing to see how the results of that lopsided election look on a map. Each teal-colored area represents a victory for Medina’s challenger, Monica Ramirez Alcantara:

Bexar County primary for Democratic Party chair

Every registered voter in Texas lives in a voting precinct — a distinct neighborhood or geographic area. Election results for each precinct are available to the public, which means you can plug those numbers into a spreadsheet, add some formulas, and create nifty interactive maps that show which candidate won each precinct.

Related: Interactive map shows how Bexar County voted in the 2016 presidential election

I made these maps in Google Fusion Tables. Zoom in on your neighborhood, click on your precinct, and see who the voters in your area supported.

After last week’s election, we focused on maps of Medina’s race and a few others. Winners of each election carried the teal-colored precincts:

Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood: Lost to Joe Gonzales in the Democratic primary

Texas House District 118: Incumbent Tomas Uresti lost to Leo Pacheco

Bexar County Commissioner Paul Elizondo: Forced into a runoff

Medina told me on Election Day that much of the Democratic turnout was driven by new voters, many of whom were unhappy with the presidency of Donald Trump.

But as my story with political writer Jasper Scherer noted, some of Medina’s critics complained that Medina himself was guilty of sounding like Trump in his own campaign rhetoric. Alcantara said she heard that complaint from Democrats.

“Our constituents wanted change,” she said. “I believe they could see through all of the rhetoric that was going on. I think they used this opportunity to have their voices heard.”

The post Interactive maps: How Bexar County voted in the 2018 primary elections appeared first on John Tedesco.

I’m here to help.

We can all come up with excuses to avoid riding a bike to work or school. I know, because I made those same excuses, too. But in January, I finally bought a snazzy Cannondale Contro and became a bike commuter.

It’s been quite the journey. I ride a few days a week, and so far I’ve gradually saved about $350 in gas and maintenance expenses for my car. On the days I rode my bike, I avoided burning fossil fuels while burning an estimated 55,800 calories over the course of 1,000 miles.

Along the way, I dragged myself out of the insulated bubble of the automobile and explored parts of the city I’ve never bothered to really see before.

I’m not saying cycling is for everyone or that we all should abandon our vehicles. I live less than 5 miles away from downtown (although my usual biking route is longer). I can avoid busy roads most of the way. There’s a shower at the office I can use in the summer. When I need to drive somewhere during work hours, I use Lyft.

If you’re in a similar situation, here are some answers to questions you might be asking about the pros and cons of commuting by bicycle and whether it’s worth it:

How strenuous is bicycle commuting?

That depends on you and your route. I live in the Woodlawn Lake area and typically ride 6 to 7 miles to and from work on a route with modest hills.

I was already an avid jogger and hiker, but cycling wore me out after the first few commutes. I was sore and tired.

I got used to it. You will, too.

According to my Sports Tracker smart phone app, I’ve ridden more than 1,000 miles since January 2017 and burned nearly 56,000 calories. The vast majority of those trips were to and from work. I didn’t always feel like doing it. But most of the time it was fun and challenging and it slowly became part of my routine.

Is cycling dangerous?

San Antonio has a bad reputation for bicycling, much of it deserved. There are, indeed, motorists who don’t like sharing the road with cyclists and some streets are an obstacle course of bumps, debris and potholes.

One of the best ways to stay safe on a bicycle is to make sure drivers can see you. Buy front and rear LED lights that are bright and blinky. I bought mine on Amazon and they work fine. Shop around and find something that works for you. So far I’ve rarely had a problem with a motorist pulling in front of me or failing to yield. I’m not saying it’s never happened. But it’s rare.

Related: Interactive map of road-rage incidents in San Antonio

When I was deciding whether to make the jump into bike commuting, I spent a lot of time looking at Google Maps figuring out how I was going to get to and from work and avoid busy roads. Why ride on Broadway, where some drivers act like they’re Mad Max extras, when there’s a peaceful, parallel bike path that runs past Brackenridge Golf Course, dips under U.S. 281, then takes you to the pleasant Museum Reach of the River Walk?

Find those quieter routes and side streets. Google offers a bike-route feature in its maps app that can help.

Don’t motorists have to share the road with cyclists?

Yes, but not every driver likes it. I had someone tailgate me on Fredericksburg Road one time when we were the only two people on the road. It was weird. Sometimes cars and trucks speed by a little too close for comfort.

But motorists don’t cause every problem. Cyclists also have to obey the rules of the road. And not just that — they need to be smart. Spend some time learning how to be an observant, safe cyclist. Check out this guide that helped me. The title says it all: “How to not get hit by cars.”

Among the lessons: Don’t ride against traffic — it’s actually riskier than riding with the flow of traffic. Look out for parked cars — someone might open a door in front of you. Don’t ride on sidewalks — it’s a bad idea, plus it’s illegal in San Antonio.

You don’t always have to move as far to the right as possible to let traffic go by. The Texas Department of Transportation publishes a guide that notes cyclists can use the full lane if the street is too narrow to safely accommodate cars and bicycles at the same time.

Remember, you’re riding a type of vehicle. You have to be comfortable cruising among other vehicles.

To avoid feeling vulnerable riding with the flow of traffic, you can buy a mirror that attaches to your left handlebar or your helmet that lets you check your blindspot and see what’s coming up behind you.

I also bought a waterproof GoPro I attach to my helmet in case I have any close calls (or see something cool on my ride). Let’s say somebody clips me and takes off. I figure it will probably happen so fast I won’t be able to get a license plate number. The GoPro gives me a chance to take some video of that number, or at least get a good description of the car.

You can buy an air horn that attaches to your bike. It works as advertised — it’s loud and lets drivers know you’re there. I’ve only had to use this once, when I was riding at the roundabout on Fulton and Blanco and a car failed to yield to me.

For a less obtrusive warning, don’t forget a bike bell. You’ll need this for pedestrians, especially if you ride on the River Walk or one of the many creek trails in San Antonio.

What’s the best bicycle to buy?

For me, buying the bike was more daunting than actually riding the thing. There are so many choices out there.

You’re faced with three types: Sturdy mountain bikes, fast road bikes or hybrids of the two. From there you can dive into countless brands and variations.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time researching bikes and reading reviews. I finally lucked out at REI, where I found a slightly used Cannondale Contro for sale. REI employees are amazingly helpful and they also offer a free tune up you can use later if you buy a bike there.

You’ll want to find something with fenders and a bike rack or buy those extras later. Even if it’s not raining, sometimes you have to ride through puddles and you don’t want mud staining your work clothes. The bike rack helps you carry the standard gear of a bike commuter — a change of clothes, patches and spare tires, a pump, a bike lock and a multitool.

The best advice I can give is don’t get too hung up on finding the perfect bike. Find a decent one and start riding.

Can you wear work clothes or do you get all sweaty?

Depending on the weather and the distance of your commute, you can totally wear work clothes. There’s a lot of breathable, stretchy, moisture-wicking clothing out there, even for office attire. Check out Ministry of Supply if you have money to burn. Their stuff is expensive but their office slacks feel like yoga pants.

In mild weather I work up a bit of a sweat but I cool off at the office. Either I don’t stink or my colleagues are really nice. In the oppressively hot San Antonio summer, I wore exercise clothes to work and brought a change of clothes for the office, which has a shower, which I most definitely used. The ride home in San Antonio is brutal in summer. When you’re moving, the wind helps cool you off, but bring a water bottle and use it.

For chilly weather, check out this helpful guide that offers some tips about bundling up. When you ride a bike there’s going to be a windchill factor. But you’re also going to get warmer as you ride.

What gear should you buy for bicycle commuting?

Cycling makes you spend a little time thinking about the logistics of what you need to get from Point A to Point B. A bike drags you out of your comfort zone.

Did you prepare for the chance of rain today? Do you have your patch kit and other tools? Do you know how to change a flat if you need to?

In the summer, you’ll probably have to shower at your workplace after your morning ride, which means you’ll have to pack your clothes and gear into a backpack, messenger bag or saddlebags. I attached a trunk bag to my biake rack, and put the rest of my stuff in a Timbuk2 messenger bag. Messenger bags are bit more uncomfortable than backpacks, but they do allow more air flow to cool off your back. If you use a messenger bag, buy a cross strap to prevent it from sliding around.

You’ll have to come up with a system to keep track of all your stuff. Use a checklist to make sure you bring everything … you don’t want to show up sweaty at the office and realize you forgot fresh socks.

In the summer, I leave all my toiletries in a duffel bag under my desk so I don’t have to carry them back and forth. It’s just extra weight and space you don’t need to worry about.

Is cycling worth the hassle?

What I learned in 1,000 miles of bicycle commuting is you really get to experience and explore the city in ways that just aren’t the same in a car.

I’ve driven down Mulberry Avenue a million times but never bothered to take a detour on Avenue A, a narrow side street that winds along the shady San Antonio River.

Well, things changed on my bike. One day I was riding by that bumpy little street and decided to find out where it goes.

It turns out, the street ends at a cool pedestrian crossing that spans the river. It was a tranquil setting — and I had no idea it existed until I bought a bike.

All kinds of things good things happen when the wind is in your face.

How much money do you save riding a bike?

When I drive my car to work, it’s 8.8 miles round trip. IRS guidelines say driving a car costs 54 cents a mile in fuel, insurance and maintenance costs. So I’m saving about $4.75 a day every time I ride my bike.

That might not sound like much but it adds up over time. I’ve ridden to and from work 75 times so far, which means I’ve saved about $350.

Keep in mind, I had to buy my $680 bike and the gear to go with it, so it will take several more months of commuting to break even. I also got extravagant with a $300 GoPro, although I use that for other things besides biking. It’s easy to get sucked into buying tons of gear and apparel that can quickly get expensive if you’re not careful.

But compare that to how much it costs to own a car. Even if you go a little crazy on a bike-gadget shopping spree, riding a bicycle even a few times a week saves money that will gradually add up over the years.

Plus, you don’t have to worry about those long Mary Poppins lines at the gas stations.

Every bicycle commute is a small victory. You got off your ass and did something to stay healthy. You did something to keep a car off the road and help the environment. And you did something to break out of your vehicular rut and challenge yourself.

Those small victories add up.

Did I overlook any good tips? Leave a comment or let me know and I’ll update this post.

Update No. 1: Abigail Rodriguez, San Antonio’s former bike coordinator who is now with VIA Metropolitan Transit, emailed me some useful tips I didn’t know.

The Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization offers a free, hourlong “Street Skills” class for anyone 14 years old and older who wants to brush up on their cycling skills. If you sign up in advance, you get a free helmet and set of bike lights. Nice.

VIA buses have bike racks. Abigail said she knows some cyclists who can’t shower at the office in the summer, so they’ll take the bus in the mornings, change at the end of the day and ride home from work.

“You only get half the workout, but the summer days can be brutal, even in the morning,” Abigail told me.

Update No. 2: The MPO publishes a bicycle map that shows “traffic stress” on local roads, giving you an idea of how comfortable cyclists might be riding on any given route.

Here’s an interactive version of the traffic stress map I downloaded from the MPO’s website. Click on a colored trail or road to view more information about it:

Check back here for new updates.

A note about affiliate links: Sometimes I blog about stuff that helps journalists. I pay for all the products I review on my blog. To help defray those costs, I use Google ads and Amazon’s affiliate advertising program, which provides a way for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com. There’s no extra cost to you, and I’ll never link to stuff I don’t like or try to make you buy something that sucks. These reviews are my honest opinions. Thanks for reading.

The post Is bike commuting the answer to the crazy gasoline crisis of 2017? appeared first on John Tedesco.

Texas weather can be wild and dangerous, as Hurricane Harvey is showing us this week, so here are some techniques that have helped me track the impact of storms, floods and other natural disasters in San Antonio and other parts of the state:

Weather forecasts and warnings

The National Weather Service provides so much useful information it’s hard to know where to start. For Bexar County, I usually check the service’s detailed “zone” weather page, which provides a snapshot of current conditions, forecasts and hazardous weather warnings.

Zone forecasts are available for all counties — you can find the ID number for your zone in this list of Texas counties. The list includes links to RSS feeds and profiles for each zone. Click on a profile, and you’ll see all current weather watches, warnings or advisories for that particular zone.

I follow my local office of the National Weather Service on Twitter and turn on mobile notifications when the weather turns bad. The forecasters in your area use Twitter to provide a steady stream of updates and weather data.

ICYMI: Here's a short summary of the peak winds & highest observed rain totals from #Harvey.

For a full listing: https://t.co/4vep1s1DY4 pic.twitter.com/omNlaa5C60

— NWS San Antonio (@NWSSanAntonio) August 29, 2017

AccuWeather Platinum is the best smartphone app I’ve found to keep track of the weather. It not only tells you when it’s going to rain in your location, it predicts the intensity and duration. It also offers an interactive Doppler radar map.

Google provides a real-time, interactive map of public alerts for a wide variety of emergencies.

Measuring rainfall

The National Weather Service offers hourly weather observations, including rainfall totals, for the past three days at the San Antonio International Airport, the main site for weather stats in Bexar County.

The weather service also compiles archives of observations and data for the San Antonio area, and it issues public information statements with more rainfall totals, river flooding and other statistics.

Floods and traffic

Bexarflood.org provides an interactive map of low water crossings and their current status. You can sign up for alerts when a crossing closes or opens. The city of San Antonio also posts emergency street closures.

The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service offers an interactive map of current and predicted river levels. Each site on the map is color-coded to show where major flooding is expected to occur.

TexasFlood.org, a state website, provides a similar river-level map that lets you add additional layers of data, such as weather advisories and Doppler radar images. You can set up an account and sign up for email or text alerts when specific gages show a river or creek is flooding.

Drive Texas is a map provided by the Texas Department of Transportation that shows current traffic conditions on Texas highways and roads. The map shows any flooded roadways.

Rescues and emergency responses

The San Antonio Fire Department’s “active calls” page shows a list and location of emergencies firefighters are responding to, including high-water rescues.

Broadcastify provides a digital feed of police and firefighter radio traffic at departments across the United States. The scanner traffic is available on its website and through a smartphone app.

The Texas Department of Public Safety provides daily situation reports about any emergency conditions in the state and how officials are responding. The reports cover everything from hurricanes to droughts.

CPS Energy provides a map showing the location of current power outages in its service area and the number of customers without power.

Did I forget anything? Contact me or leave a comment below if I missed any useful resources and I’ll be sure to add them to the list.

The post Web tools to track weather, flooding and natural disasters in Texas appeared first on John Tedesco.

If you read weather updates on Facebook from the San Antonio Express-News, then you’re keenly aware that it’s summer and the forecaster is not happy about it.

“There is no weather,” a typical forecast reads. “There is only this. Always this. Unchanging. Eternal. Forever. This.”

Then there was this gem:

“It’s mostly sunny and almost 100 degrees again, a forecast that’s not even fit for a country music song. Well, certainly not a good country music song that goes platinum and wins a bunch of awards as a crossover sensation that does particularly well with the 18-24 demographic while simultaneously sparking a resurgence in line dancing that leads to lots of bad paperback romance novels with taglines like, ‘She danced to remember. He danced to forget. They found one another — and love — on The Line.’

“The forecast would at least need some summer showers to pull that off. You can’t just openly profess your secret love outdoors when it’s 100 degrees. It’s simply not done.”

Don’t forget the update that called for readers to create their own forecasts, with a suggestion of “partly snuggly and 40 percent of kitten.”

The comedic genius behind these quirky Facebook posts is Chris Lykins, a recent hire by the Express-News team that oversees the newspaper’s premium site for subscribers.

Over the past few months, Chris has miraculously transformed boring weather forecasts into creative, amusing rituals that a growing number of readers look forward to.

I sat down with Chris to talk about his unique job, his inspiration, and his goals as the newspaper’s funny weather guy. Here are the highlights, lightly edited:

Question: First of all, where did you get the idea to write these clever weather updates?

Answer: I started when I first got on Facebook when I was at Seguin at the Gazette and was just trying to inject some levity. Because so much of what we do is really kind of depressing at times. You’re dealing with sad stories and tragic stories. And I was just trying to spice things up a little bit and make it clear that newspapers offer more than bad news. And it started to take off from there.

It ended up driving a lot of new Facebook fans. What was silence sort of got replaced by conversations. And not just on the weather posts but on the other stories that we posted.

People were getting more engaged?

Yeah, we sort of built this community to the point where I didn’t even have to really do a lot of moderation on some of the story posts because people took it upon themselves that this was their home on Facebook and they were going to treat it that way. So it was a pleasant sort of surprise.

You didn’t expect that.

I really didn’t know. I’ve always had an offbeat, quirky sense of humor. And there were a couple people at first who really didn’t like it. They expected the newspaper to be stoic. The thing I used to explain to people is, the newspaper has always been more than that. It’s always had comics. And puzzles. And opinions pages. It’s more than just headlines that you typically see. So we wanted to bring a little of that to Facebook and it paid off.

What time frame was this when you were at the Gazette?

Oh, gracious.

Because then you went to New Braunfels, right?

Yes, that was one of the things that I was asked to do when I came over to New Braunfels. And I probably did it for two years maybe in New Braunfels. And probably five or six before that in Seguin. But it got progressively more elaborate as I went on.

Probably the best known stuff was the three posts that I did in New Braunfels that ended up being a weather romance. It just happened one night. I was sitting at home and I was thinking, I gotta come up with a different way to do this because I’m running out of this one-liner material. And I said, what would it be like if I wrote it from the perspective of a Harlequin romance novel? And so I did that one time and it blew up huge and pulled in these crazy numbers. And so I did it a second time about a month later. And then that one actually got picked up by Chron.com and ended up on mySA here.

Is that how you got on our radar screen?

I’m not real sure but I”m sure that probably factored in a little bit. So that was a story that got picked up and that’s sort of when I was like, oh, it got noticed.

This is reminding me of a Reddit threat where a guy wrote fictional updates on what would happen if modern troops went back in time and fought the Roman empire and it went viral. Is this a weird, unexpected, creative thing that’s going on that people respond to?

Yeah, particularly with the romance stuff. What worked out so well was this was after the peak with E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey, and these erotic meteorological ramblings really did well. And I think it’s because people are sort of hungry for something a little different.

What’s great is a lot of people who are in San Antonio who have started picking up on this, they’re kind of taking ownership of this. Being in smaller community newspapers before I came here, I always thought of San Antonio as this sort of giant, metro establishment. But people in San Antonio consider the Express-News their hometown paper. It really struck me that it’s all the same, no matter the size of the city. People want to take ownership in the things that cover them.

So that’s really been kind of fun to watch that community and to watch people tag their friends and say, ‘Hey, have you read this?’ and watch those numbers climb on a daily basis. It’s been a lot of fun.

Coming up with something funny to say about the weather sounds incredibly daunting. You’re kind of like the astrologer for the Onion. Somehow, there’s always something different about the same thing. Where do you get your ideas?

Just absolutely random things that sort of pop into my head. Sometimes I’ll hear a song and I’ll think of a way I can segue into that or it’s just random crazy neurons. And summer is brutal. It is very difficult to come up with different things when it’s 103 degrees, partly cloudy, for days and days and days on end.

Well, it seems like that works because we’re all stuck in summer.

Yeah.

And so we’re all sharing in the joke of this suffering, right?

Right.

Does that create a receptive audience for these weather jokes?

I think it does because it’s the thing that impacts all of us.

Yeah. There’s no escaping it.

You’re not going to get away. What’s really kind of interesting is during the winter, you’ll see those winter Texans, they get in on that. Because it’s all part of that thing. They leave and come here to escape it. I’ve poked fun at them before when it’s 50 degrees outside and everybody who’s from here is wandering around in jackets and you see people out in shorts and tank tops and it’s like, ah, they’re from Minnesota. The weather is like death and taxes. It’s one of those constant things.

How do you measure the response from readers? Shares and likes?

Yeah, we look at that. I look at reach, too, to see how far it goes. A lot of times I will go back and I will look at the people who have public shares, I’ll read what they’re writing and what kind of comments they get on that. The best one was somebody saying, ‘If they keep doing this, I might have to resubscribe.’ And I’ve had several of those over the years. And I’ve had people message me, or call, and say, ‘I’ve resubscribed to the paper because of this.’ And it’s like, that’s great. That’s the high bar you want. If you can get some of those, now you’re rollin’.

The theory behind it at first was, OK, we need to bring in people and make people aware that we exist. And then be able to put other things in front of them. Because not everybody is going to have a story about (city) council or what they’re going to do at the Alamo show up in their news feed.

Related: Fake Steve Jobs misses the real point

But if you have something that people go to every day because they want to see what I’ve written, then they get all of that other stuff. It’s sort of my way of kind of gaming the system because Facebook has changed the algorithm that determines what they see in their feed. But if they go to our page directly because they don’t want to miss something, now you have them.

Then other stories pop up in the feed below that.

Yep. Right.

We should mention here your day job is social media ninja, right?

Yes. I basically decide what comes off of the premium site and goes on to social media. How to spin it, when to play it. Sometimes that involves bits and pieces of the story that I think will attract attention. And sometimes it’s shepherding conversations to make sure we don’t go too far afield.

What are some of your favorite comments from readers related to weather updates?

Uuum … I’ve had some people say I’m gonna marry that guy. Which is problematic because I’m already married. There was the one today, ‘I need to be BFFs with this person.’

I saw that.

I get that quite a bit. Sometimes people are like, are you — and then they’ll tag somebody — the one who writes these? And those are always really funny for me too because I think most of us have that person in our circle of friends who’s always got something funny to say, who’s always there. I’m that for a slightly larger and growing crowd.

There was one earlier this month where you said, ‘It’s Friday, all bets are off, the weather is whatever you want it to be.’ You had some good comments. I like this one guy, he was like, ‘Scattered Cracker Jacks throughout the day with 100 percent of bourbon in the evening.’

I love that sort of interaction because it’s what we really need. People need to feel invested and part of something.

Is that a problem newspapers face where readers don’t feel like that?

Yeah, I think that’s something that, as other media has come in and you’ve ended up with these really close communication and collaborative tools with people, I don’t know that newspapers were as quick to adopt them as some other folks have been. And particularly new media.

And there’s a notion with some people that newspapers are more solemn and not as approachable. And so opening that door and saying look, we’re people just like you, is important.

Yeah, I think some people view newspapers as stodgy and oldertimerish. But in our features section, for example, we’ve had writers who lead rock bands. They’re lead singers of rock bands. Hector Saldana. These guys are as hip as they come. But do people know that?

I don’t necessarily think that they do. I think that it’s one of those things where newspapers have tried as an institution to make delineations about, you know, these people may have political opinions, but they’re not reflected here. And we’ve had to do that. But everybody who has done this work, we all have cool, interesting parts of our lives and cool, interesting stories to share. I don’t think we really have a way to reveal that to the readers.

Would these weather updates work in a different medium? Could they work in the print side of things, or is it more suitable in a quirky online format?

I don’t know how well it would work in print because the audience is fundamentally different. Like the weather romance stuff. I would never in a million years put it inside the New Braunfels paper.

The thing I mainly try to focus on is making sure everybody is in on the joke. Not coming across as terribly patronizing.

I guess you get instant feedback, too, online.

Yes. In milliseconds.

Did you know that Jack Handey from SNL’s Deep Thoughts used to work here?

I did not.

He did.

Really?

Yeah. He’s a real guy. Used to work here. Apparently his position was eliminated because he wrote an unflattering story about auto dealers. Do you think newspapers offer an adequate outlet for clever, funny people?

Well, I know they have talked about what they want me to do, maybe a column on the premium site. So they clearly want me to do more than what I’m doing.

How have our likes grown?

We’re coming up on 26,000. And when I interviewed for the job, I think we were at 19,000. I’ve been here since the end of March, so we’ve grown quite a bit. But more importantly, we don’t have a lot of what I call dead stories. Stories that have no likes, no comments, no shares. We don’t have a lot of those anymore. Because there’s more of a community built up now that is participating.

Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search

It’s been a lot of fun. And it is really flattering to see something that you wrote in the morning and you see how far it goes, how many people share it, and what people are saying about it.

All these people who say they want to be my best friend, how can you not feel great about that at the end of the day?

The post Meet Chris Lykins, the funny weather guy at the Express-News appeared first on John Tedesco.

Everyone’s needs are different. But for me, Evernote really shines as a vast, searchable archive that allows you to comb the full-text of every web page, document, photo or note you’ve saved, and find what you need in seconds.

Here’s how it works. When you type some words in Evernote’s search box, you’re not just searching the titles of your files. You’re not just searching the tags of your photos. You’re searching the entire contents of everything you saved in Evernote. This even applies to anything you take a picture of that has words, such as business cards, thanks to Evernote’s sweet optical character recognition capability.

For people like journalists who work on deadline, this can be incredibly useful for quickly finding a needle in a haystack.

Related: Go back in time with Cogi to record fleeting moments

Evernote isn’t perfect — its desktop app can get sluggish and I get frustrated with it sometimes. But I realized how powerful this tool could be when I worked on a story about the family history of Johnny Manziel several years ago. I used Evernote to save every article, court record and web page I came across during the course of my reporting. Then, when I was writing the story and had to look up something, I could use Evernote to instantly search the entire text of those files.

An example: I came across several old news stories about the friendship between Manziel’s great-grandfather, a wildcatter and boxer named Bobby Joe Manziel, and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.

Manziel retired from boxing and moved to East Texas in the 1930s to try his luck in the oil fields as a wildcatter. Almost broke, Manziel asked Dempsey for some money to drill for oil in Gladewater.

The well was a gusher. Dempsey later said that gamble was the smartest investment he ever made.

But there were discrepancies in the stories I found about how much Dempsey invested. Some said $400. Others said $700. Well, which was it?

Enter Evernote. I searched for “Dempsey” and the varying dollar amounts in my Evernote files and all the relevant articles popped up. It didn’t take long to determine that the older, more contemporaneous stories claimed Dempsey invested $400. One article quoted Dempsey directly. Problem solved.

Related: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists in 2017

Now imagine life without Evernote. I would have had to reread a pile of photocopied articles looking for any mention of that investment.

Is it possible? Sure.

Was Evernote a useful tool that totally sped up the process?

Absolutely.

I wouldn’t upload sensitive files to a cloud-based app like Evernote. But for the vast majority of information you rely upon in your day-to-day life, Evernote can transform those records into a vast archive that’s instantly searchable — and instantly more useful.

The post What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files appeared first on John Tedesco.

As the Uber Tech Lead at Google, Dan studies how people search the web. He started sharing little-known search techniques three years ago at the IRE conference in Boston. Since then he’s annually offered tips at IRE that can help everyone — not just reporters — find exactly what they’re searching for online.

Here are some of Dan’s new strategies and tools for 2014, and a recap of the most useful tips from his past presentations that I’ve used myself. You can check out posts about his other talks here and here.

Go back in time

One of the coolest new tools offered by Google this year allows you to jump in a time machine in Google Maps’ Street View.

Let’s say you’re walking around downtown San Antonio and you’re curious about the site of a historic building on Commerce Street across from Main Plaza. An inferno destroyed the building a few years ago and now there’s nothing but a vacant lot:

In Google Street View, click on the clock symbol in the corner of the screen to check out how that spot looked over the years. In this case, you can look at what the Wolfson Building looked like before the catastrophic fire:

The Wall Street Journal used this time-machine effect to illustrate dramatic growth in Brooklyn.

The cool thing about this is how you can pan around and get different perspectives of the sites you’re interested in.

Gallery of Google Map Mashups

The Google Maps Gallery allows organizations to mesh their data with Google maps. All these mashups are searchable, and Google links to the original sources if you want to download the information yourself.

Let’s say you’re curious about which counties in the United States are prone to tornado strikes. A search of “tornado” in the Google Maps Gallery shows a map based on federal data showing tornado strikes, total property damage, injuries and deaths by county:

Wildcards in Google Maps

(Update: Google dropped this map feature, which is a bummer. It was extremely useful and I hope they bring it back.)

Type an asterisk in the search bar of Google Maps and it will show you every business and significant, named place it knows about in the area you’re viewing.

If you plan on using any of this information in a news story, you’ll want to take steps to confirm what you’re seeing in the map. But this is a really quick way to get a sense of what’s in the area.

For example, if you’re writing about the Wolfson Building fire and want to get a quick idea of what businesses were nearby, in Google Maps, focus on the site on Commerce Street and try the wildcard search:

Force Google to search for certain words

By far the most common search function I use in Google is “intext,” which Russell discussed at his first presentation in Boston.

Sometimes Google tries to be too helpful. It changes your search terms and uses words it thinks you’re searching for– not the words you’re actually searching for.

And sometimes the websites in Google’s search results don’t include all your search terms because Google decided those pages might still be relevant.

That might be OK for general searches. But it’s not very helpful if you’re looking for pages with specific terms or words with unusual spellings. How do you make Google search for those exact words?

Typing intext:[keyword] (with no space on either side of the colon) might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Dan’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website.

If you’re researching the story of the Wolfson Building, for example, you’ll probably want to make sure that Google always includes that unique name in the search results. Typing intext:Wolfson San Antonio will force Google to include the term “Wolfson.”

Intext also works with phrases in quotes. So typing intext:”Wolfson Building” will strong-arm Google into showing you that exact phrase.

To learn more details about Google’s search operators, check out my post about his talk in Boston where he gave us a treasure-trove of advice.

Customized site searches

Google’s site search let’s you search for information on a particular website. Typing site:mysanantonio.com “Wolfson Building” would show pages with that phrase that were published by the San Antonio Express-News. But what if you wanted to regularly check what other local news outlets published in the San Antonio area?

Google can focus on multiple websites with its custom search engine. You tell Google which websites to search, save your settings and Google creates a link to the custom search page. Now you can search those specific websites any time.

This technique is handy for anyone interested in a particular beat or issue. I created this customized search of San Antonio media and blogs to quickly see how news organizations are covering a story. You can also sort the results by time or relevance, and conduct an image search with the terms you want on those websites.

Control F is your friend

Not everyone knows this so it’s worth repeating: Type “Control F” in Windows or “Command F” on a Mac to launch the “find” function in your browser to locate a specific word or phrase on any web page. It’s faster than reading the whole page if you’re looking for something in particular. “If you don’t know this, you’re roughly 12 percent slower in your searches,” Dan said at the IRE conference in Boston.

This year, Dan said useful Chrome extensions expand the usefulness of the “find” function. Let’s say you want to find more than one word. You could type an expression such as Wolfson|Building|Fire to highlight all those words. Handy.

Dan regularly blogs about search strategies by challenging readers with puzzles. It’s a good way to stay in practice. And practice, Dan says, is the best way to hone your search skills.

The post New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell appeared first on John Tedesco.

In February 2009, an 8-year-old girl from Schertz died, alone, of acute appendicitis — a disease that could have easily been treated if caught in time.

In the hours leading up to her death, people concerned about the girl — including officers from the Schertz Police Department — had warned the Texas Department of Child Protective Services that she was a victim of neglect.

CPS didn’t act. And on Feb. 5, 2009, authorities found the girl’s body in a soiled bed.

Her name was Sarah Brasse.

It wasn’t so long ago in Texas that you would have had a tough time learning any of those tragic details.

In fact, according to the state officials in charge of protecting children from abusive adults, you would have had no legal right to even know Brasse’s name.

And you certainly wouldn’t be able to know the agency missed opportunities to help Brasse.

But a decade of diligent reporting by three Express-News journalists shined a spotlight of transparency on tragedies involving Brasse and scores of other children in San Antonio, helping the public understand the unfathomable.

In Brasse’s case, a state watchdog is now investigating how CPS could have done a better job protecting her. But that investigation probably wouldn’t have happened without the work of Express-News Writer Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, who obtained internal CPS documents about the case that gave readers a rare look inside a troubled state agency that failed to act, despite repeated warnings about Brasse’s welfare.

“The lack of agency action just really stunned me,” Melissa told me.

Focusing on a hidden problem

Any longtime reader of the paper knows that Melissa’s stories were the latest in a series of articles that have unfolded in the pages of the Express-News over the years about the failures and challenges at CPS.

It’s worth revisiting these powerful stories, all of which took months of difficult work about a topic people don’t like to read. The projects that stand out were written by three journalists — Melissa, Cathy Frye and Nancy Martinez Preyor-Johnson. I sit next to Melissa in the newsroom, and I’m Facebook pals with Cathy and Nancy, who now work elsewhere, so I asked them how they wrote these outstanding pieces of journalism that grabbed readers and didn’t let go.

In 2004, the Express-News published a series of stories by reporter Cathy Frye about Unit 39, a group of overwhelmed CPS caseworkers in San Antonio.

The first story began this way:

Courtney Mayfield grabs two chunks of her ash-blond hair, lowers her head over her cluttered desk and groans.

This isn’t a good week. December is rapidly approaching, and she’s still searching for a crackhead mom on the run with a toddler.

Tracking a homeless woman who’s roaming the streets with two sick kids in tow. Listening to the pleas of a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want to go to a children’s shelter.

Then there’s the deadline, that impossible deadline. In two weeks, the Child Protective Services caseworker is supposed to have 70 percent of her investigations closed. She’ll never make it, not with 90 open cases stacked across her desk and the floor of her office.

And if she doesn’t? Banish the thought. The stakes are high, the pressure immense. In the next office, a young colleague of Courtney’s with 120 cases to work and a rising sense of futility phones her roommate and cries.

How did Cathy know all that? Because she was there. She spent months tagging along with CPS caseworkers, having been granted unusual access to the secretive agency.

“The way the system is set up, it’s very difficult to get in and make these people real to your readers,” said Cathy, who now works at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Shrouded in regulations protecting the confidentiality of child-abuse investigations, the agency usually didn’t welcome outsiders. But a spike in child deaths that year prompted a public outcry — and created a unique situation for Cathy to get an insider’s perspective at the agency.

“They were under a lot of heat,” recalled Cathy. “Basically, I was the least of their problems.”

Related: How to contact an investigative reporter

Cathy packed her stories with telling details that she witnessed firsthand. The only way to do that is spending lots of time with people until they eventually start acting like themselves:

Courtney waits outside a dingy white duplex with pale blue trim. A sour smell wafts from a front window, which is partially covered by a grimy sheet.

“Can I come inside yet?” she calls, just as a hugely pregnant woman walks out, holding a toddler’s hand. The woman nods, a wide, anxious smile creasing her round face.

“It’s not that clean,” she apologizes, opening the door. “I’m pregnant. I get really tired.”

The home boasts only a tiny kitchen, living area and a single bedroom. Furniture is scarce. The bedroom contains a bunk bed that sleeps three and a stained, twin-size mattress propped against a wall.

Courtney inspects the rest of the home. Refrigerator contains food. Lights work. Plumbing works. No apparent roach infestation. Then she asks the woman to demonstrate how her son’s asthma treatment machine works. As the frazzled mother tries to assemble the contraption, it becomes quite clear to Courtney that she’s winging it.

Courtney asks about the new baby, due to arrive in December. “Do you have a crib? Do you need things?”

Courtney heads back to her car. She can see that this woman functions at a lower mental level.

“Really, I need to get a better feel for what she’s understanding and not understanding, ” Courtney says. This may be a case of medical neglect. Or it may be the woman simply needs someone to help her manage her son’s condition.

Yes, the whole family sleeps in one bedroom, but that’s not neglectful, Courtney says. And yes, they are poor, but that’s not neglectful either. They appear to be doing what they can with what they have.

“It’s got to be really, really bad before I say they have to change,” Courtney says. “You have to pick your battles. Is it more important to fight with mom because there are a few roaches in the kitchen or is it more important to fight with her to keep her boyfriend away?”

“The little details are always the most telling things,” Cathy said about how she crafts an interesting narrative. “A lot of the time, that requires spending more time with people.”

As Cathy shadowed caseworkers, she went with them during their interviews with parents accused of abuse or neglect. They went to their houses. And to Cathy’s surprise, most parents didn’t object to her presence. That included a mother accused of beating her teen-age daughter with a meat tenderizer, leaving square-shaped wounds.

“There was a lot of shame,” Cathy said. “The meat-tenderizer mom, when she came in, it was almost like she felt like she deserved to be not only punished, but shamed for that in some weird way. She let me in for the entire interview. She was very candid.”

Rare access at Child Protective Services

That kind of access to the inner workings of CPS and the cases it handles is extremely rare, as Nancy’s stories a few years later in 2007 demonstrated. At the time, CPS was refusing to release anything beyond bare-bone statistics about the children who died in Bexar County. The agency refused to even release the names of victims.

“I really want to tell the stories behind the numbers,” Nancy said, echoing the same goals Cathy had for her stories about Unit 39. Nancy spent six months tracking down sources — police reports, autopsy reports, tipsters — to flesh out the details behind each child death.

“It was very, very difficult,” said Nancy, who is now a teacher. “It was begging sources to help out with information.”

On July 15, 2007, the Express-News published the first article of Nancy’s project. The series was called Four Feet Under … the usual depth of a child’s grave.

It began this way:

The state of Texas doesn’t want you to know about Ruben Reyna.

You should not know he was beaten to death with blows to the head or who is suspected of killing him.

You should not know that Child Protective Services had investigated his family on two earlier allegations of abuse involving Ruben.

You should not know if Ruben lived or died next door to you.

You should not even know the boy’s name. State law says so. That information is confidential.

One CPS official says the law is necessary. “It’s an important law, not meant to protect the reputation of our agency, rather to protect the citizens of Texas, ” said Sherry Gomez, CPS San Antonio region director. But critics say the lack of transparency prevents the sort of public scrutiny that has helped bring about meaningful reform elsewhere.

“The way you protect children’s rights is by exposing the system to scrutiny so it can be made better, said Richard Wexler, executive director for the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Virginia. “The child is dead, so there is no issue of invasion of privacy. There won’t be real accountability until the system is completely open to scrutiny so that we can see all the mistakes they make and when they get it right or when a tragedy is not their fault.”

The series revealed shortcomings in state law that state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, had been trying to change.

“He was personally motivated by the article and even had it framed,” Uresti’s former communications director, Mark Langford, wrote in an email after I asked him about the impact of the stories.

In 2009, Uresti’s Senate Bill 1050 required CPS to release basic details about children who died from abuse or neglect. Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed the bill into law. Melissa told me that CPS officials describe it as “The Express-News law.”

“It’s impossible to say how widely read the series was outside of San Antonio, but he definitely believes it influenced the Bexar delegation and local child advocates who supported the effort, came to Austin to testify for SB 1050 and other legislation, and lobby each day on behalf of children,” Langford wrote. “So … job well done Express-News.”

But even after passage of the bill, it’s still difficult for outsiders to learn about mistakes at CPS and whether officials are being held accountable. The fatality reports don’t go into that kind of detail.

“The average person can’t read that and say, ‘Oh, OK, this is what they should have done and they didn’t,'” Melissa said.

Few details released in child deaths

That’s what her stories about Brasse accomplished. Melissa obtained internal documents that showed, for example, how CPS took no action when Brasse’s parents didn’t provide medical care and health insurance for their children, despite being told to do so by CPS.

The records described an agency that seemed cowed by Brasse’s father, who threatened to sue. The day before Brasse died, people warned CPS that the mistreatment was escalating. Yet CPS failed to send a caseworker who could have seen she was in “imminent danger.”

“When later pushed to explain what happened to Sarah, CPS decided to police itself. Three employees conducted an in-house review, thus avoiding outside scrutiny,” Melissa wrote in her story.

Many of these problems sound familiar — Cathy and Nancy’s past stories struck the same troubling chords. As powerful as these stories are, did they make a difference?

For the reporters who wrote these articles, the impact on government bureaucracies and intractable societal problems is hard to measure. But that doesn’t mean these stories about children dying at the hands of adults aren’t worth telling. And it doesn’t mean readers don’t care, especially if the stories are written with telling details.

“I don’t think you can give up on them,” Cathy said of the victims. “At some point I still believe there are lot of people in the background — defense attorneys, caseworkers — who know that being more transparent is beneficial.”

“A miracle is not going to happen,” said Nancy, who suffered nightmares after reading document after document about dead children. “I don’t think it will ever change.” But newspapers can’t ignore child abuse, and Nancy said she was overwhelmed by the reader response to her stories.

“I saw readers were really, really responding,” she said. “They were responding with letters, emails, phone calls.”

It’s good to hear this kind of talk in the Buzzfeed age of cat GIFs and viral videos. Dark but important topics don’t usually attract page views. So reporters have to figure out a way to make these stories matter to people.

“I will never forget that story,” Nancy said.

Hopefully, neither will the people who read it.

The post Telling stories about the unthinkable: How three journalists shined a spotlight on child abuse appeared first on John Tedesco.

Maggie’s was the place to go in the 1990s if it was late and you were a hungry college student (like me). Nestled among the car dealerships on San Pedro Avenue outside Loop 410, the two-story restaurant was open late and offered some of the best shakes ever.

Maggie’s permanently closed, reopened as a Champ’s restaurant, closed, then reopened in 2009 as Barbaresco Tuscan Grill and Enoteca, a swanky Italian restaurant.

Barbaresco was a lot different from Maggie’s. On its opening day, guests were treated to readings of Romeo and Juliet while an attractive, semi-nude woman lay on a table, her body strategically covered with pasta.

Brothers Mauricio and Alejandro Sánchez Garza had bought the old Maggie’s restaurant, along with numerous other businesses and properties in San Antonio, and heavily invested in it. Now the Drug Enforcement Administration has accused the brothers of using those businesses to launder millions of dollars in drug money from Mexican cartels.

Express-News reporters Jason Buch and Guillermo Contreras wrote about the money-laundering case in a story published Sunday. The article detailed key properties and businesses the brothers were involved in, which is a hell of a way of grabbing readers’ attention. A lot of people like me remember Maggie’s. Finding out the building is tied up in a federal money laundering investigation definitely piqued our interest.

I sit next to Jason in the newsroom so I talked to him a bit while he worked on the story. One difficulty he faced was keeping track of the tangled spider web of people, businesses and properties connected to the Mexican brothers. To make sense of everything, Jason used a plugin for Microsoft Excel called NodeXL, which allows you to create a social network diagram.

Jason typed in more than 250 entities and their related entities in a spreadsheet, and NodeXL displayed that information in a graph that showed spokes between each connection.

“It allowed us to see, literally see, how everything was connected,” Jason told me.

Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search

In complicated stories with lots of moving pieces, building a chronology to keep track of key events is also important. By chance I learned about a new open source, interactive timeline tool by Zach Wise and told Jason about it. Timeline is also based on information contained in a spreadsheet. In Google Docs, you type in the dates and chatter, provide links to photos, videos, or other media, and then Wise’s Timeline tool uses javascript to display an interactive chronology that you can publish on a website.

Jason and Guillermo were going to have to write a chronology in their notes anyway. Wise’s Timeline tool let them share their relevant information with readers in a really compelling way. Their timeline looks drop-dead gorgeous. And they linked to federal documents in the timeline, so readers could see the allegations for themselves.

Maggie’s is long gone. But it was fascinating to see what became of it.

The post How Mexican cartels launder drug money in San Antonio (Hint: Check the North Side) appeared first on John Tedesco.

I stumbled across this story by using Google’s advanced search options. Google lets you search specific websites for specific files and specific terms. So a way to find little-known databases and interesting stories is to search a government website for spreadsheets, pdf’s, and other type of documents.

Related: How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

For example, let’s say you want to focus on the city of San Antonio. In Google’s search box, you’d type site:sanantonio.gov, to limit the results to pages from the city’s website. Then use “filetype” to focus on specific types of files. The term filetype:xls searches for spreadsheets. Filetype:doc searches for Microsoft Word documents. Filetype:pdf searches for … you guessed it, pdf files.

You can do broad searches or get creative and add words you think might lead to interesting stuff. Check out this search with the term “injuries.”

One of the top results is a form for a vehicle accident report that is filled out by city employees whenever they’re involved in an accident. All the entries and check boxes in the form suggest this information is typed into a database of some kind. And if that’s the case, that means you can request the data, analyze it yourself, and see if there’s a story lurking in those numbers.

Using the Texas Public Information Act, I asked for any database the city had that tracked insurance claims from vehicle accidents. The process took awhile and there was a lot of back and forth. At first, the city’s Risk Management Office only sent me a pdf with two categories of information: case numbers and dates. The format and info was worthless.

But eventually they sent more complete spreadsheets that tracked the dollar amount of the claim, whether it was denied, and a brief description about what happened. It was interesting reading.

No one outside City Hall had ever looked at this data before. Thanks to a nifty Google search, now everybody can.

The post Check out every insurance claim filed against the city of San Antonio appeared first on John Tedesco.

Bob Costas’ grilling of accused Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky should be mandatory viewing for all journalism students who want to learn how to handle a confrontational interview.

Costas wielded a strong command of the facts. Listened intently to each answer. Asked focused questions and follow-up questions. And he wasn’t satisfied with vague proclamations of innocence.

Related: Using bookmarks and links to organize better notes

Years of cable news have brainwashed viewers into thinking a confrontational interview involves talking heads bullying and yelling at people.

Not true. Costas shows you can be polite — and tough — at the same time.

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