How to look up incident reports about plane crashes

Photo courtesy of eyewitness Janis Krums from TwitPic If you want to find official reports about plane crashes and other accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board has a searchable database of incident reports on its Web site. Related: Adrift: Hot-air balloon pilots face little scrutiny from FAA despite higher crash rates The nice thing about …

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How to track a bill in the Texas Legislature

The Legislative session in Texas officially starts today, which means lawmakers will be filing thousands of bills dealing with topics ranging from the trivial to the profound. This year, bills have been filed that prohibit human cloning; expand the definition of college hazing; and encourage more “green” jobs in Texas, just to name a few …

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Fire response times: Using public data to uncover hidden stories

fire response times in san antonio

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 …

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Top five books every student journalist should own right now

Best books for journalism students

The best way to learn journalism is by doing it. But some journalism books so deftly explain the nuts and bolts of the craft, they should be read by every journalism student, and re-read every few years when those students become working journalists. Here are my top picks: “The Art and Craft of Feature Writing,” …

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Stumpy’s story: How I learned to shoot news video and edit footage

Stumpy the Zombie near the Alamo in San Antonio

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, …

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