When Jen visited New York to write about San Antonio’s ties to High Line park, she called me and wondered if it’d be a good idea to make a time lapse-video of a walk through the mile-long urban park.
Abso-freakin-lutely.
Time-lapse videos are full of awesome sauce. Most I’ve seen involve the placement of a camera in a stationary location. But another cool method is taking the camera with you and snapping a photo every few seconds. It creates a cool first-person view of a journey or event. (more…)
Local weather watchers have been dutifully documenting San Antonio’s temperature, precipitation, and other climate data for 140 years. If you’re curious how this year’s drought compares to past dry spells, meteorologist Robert Blaha with the National Weather Service has done you a huge favor.
“We were able to find the records,” Blaha told me. “In the 1800s, they hand wrote (the climate data) in ink. It was in a paperback book. When I came here in 1975, they were in notebook format. In 2050, they’ll be in the format of that day.”
Blaha said the rainfall gauge in San Antonio has changed locations over the years. In the early days it was at a co-op station and then moved to Fort Sam Houston. In 1891 it moved to a downtown office building. Somewhere along the line it was at Stinson Field. In the 1940s it moved to the San Antonio International Airport and stayed there ever since.
All that work helps us compare this year’s drought to past dry spells. This year, we’ve received 5.6 inches of rain so far in San Antonio. That’s about half the total precipitation for the lowest year on record since 1900, when it rained 10 inches in 1917.
In 2010 it looks like we got quite a bit of rain –37.4 inches. But click on the monthly figures for 2010 and 2011. The data show that September 2010 was our last significant taste of rain.
In the nine months since then, we’ve barely gotten anything.
Check out this amazing presentation at Google I/O 2011 about Google Fusion Tables. The whole video is interesting. But for a journalist’s perspective on the importance of making data accessible to readers, at the 34:50 mark Simon Rogers of the Guardian’s Data Blog offers some interesting examples of how journalists can bring “data to life” with Fusion Tables, a free online tool.
Anyone who cares about journalism should read Al Tompkins’ post examining the innovative storytelling techniques that empowered the Las Vegas Sun series “Do No Harm,” a project by reporters Marshall Allen and Alex Richards. The reporters analyzed 2.9 million hospital records that revealed systematic, preventable errors at the local healthcare system. They found more than 300 patients who died from mistakes in 2008 and 2009 that could have been prevented.
Rather than rely on anecdotal sob stories that would be dismissed as scare-mongering by hospitals, the reporters used reader-friendly multimedia presentations to make the data come alive and show, in a powerful way, the scope and human toll of the problem. Thanks to the project, Tompkins writes, six pieces of legislation have been filed in the Nevada Legislature to reform and bring more transparency to the hospital system.
The project took two years — an eternity in journalism time. But it still offers important lessons for journalists. We’re no longer chained to simply telling a story with an 80-inch news article and a few pictures and graphics. We can use the Internet to let readers look over our shoulders and check out the raw documentation and data and videos for themselves. One of the most creative things the Sun did was make it incredibly easy for readers to offer feedback:
When the stories started running, the paper’s phones rang off the hook. Rather than let the calls fall into the digital abyss, the team edited some and provide a sampling of the public’s reaction. They also posted reader reaction to the website, allowing people to share their personal experiences with Vegas-area hospitals.
Marshall Allen invited readers to share their stories using an easy online form.
Because of these storytelling techniques, the project was impossible to ignore. It could prompt change — and save lives.
But where are all these newcomers moving to within Bexar County?
Kelly Guckian, database manager for the San Antonio Express-News, pulled together more detailed population figures from the 2010 Census to help show where Bexar County is gaining residents — and where it’s losing them.
Kelly focused on census tracts, which are geographic boundaries set by the Census Bureau that encompass, on average, about 4,000 people. This allowed her to zoom in on population changes at the neighborhood level. She did the tedious work of compiling and mapping the data, and I helped export it into this interactive Google map that shows how the far West and North sides of the county saw explosive gains in the blue areas, while many inner city neighborhoods in the yellow areas lost residents. Kelly and graphic artist Mark Blackwell also produced maps showing the population trends broken down by race and ethnicity, and MySA’s Mike Howell put it all together in an interesting package online.
The explosive growth on the county’s outskirts occurred during a decade when city officials emphasized the importance of living near downtown and limiting urban sprawl. Our news story about the Census numbers explored why many people either didn’t hear the city’s message — or ignored it.
In the news business, sometimes the worst part about major events is writing about their anniversaries. They arrive year after year with all the predictability and excitement of receiving Christmas fruitcake from your Aunt Helga. There’s usually no new information to offer, and the hapless journalist gets stuck trying to come up with an interesting story.
So I was pleasantly surprised by the Alamo Immortal project published by the San Antonio Express-News, which put a creative twist on the old story of the Battle of the Alamo and its 175h anniversary.
The idea was the brainchild of Dean Lockwood, director of news production at the newspaper. A history buff who knew the big anniversary for the Alamo was coming up, Dean started brainstorming a few months ago about new, original ways to cover the event.
“Sad to say, it’s something that can get a little taken for granted in the media,” Dean told me. “It’s something we cover year after year. You know, the same picture — Dawn at the Alamo.
“We could have gone that route and done the obligatory feature and a couple of other little things and everybody would have been fine with that,” he said. But Dean wanted to try something new, and he brainstormed with art director Adrian Alvarez. (more…)
Express-News religion writer Abe Levy wrote the most comprehensive story to date about the troubling saga of Father John Fiala, a Catholic priest who was accused of raping a 16-year-old boy in Rocksprings — and then soliciting a hit man to kill the teenager.
Abe relied on hundreds of court records to trace Fiala’s past transgressions, and the Catholic Church’s inability to deal with the priest:
The trail of complaints against Fiala began in the 1980s. In Nebraska, a businessman claimed Fiala targeted his eighth-grade son in 1988. The father, who the Express-News is not naming to protect his son’s identity, says Catholic supervisors broke promises then to ban the priest from all ministry with children and adolescents.
“I have no idea — I shudder to think — how many other children (Fiala) has harmed since 1988,” the man stated in a 2010 affidavit letter to Texas authorities after the Rocksprings teen filed suit. “My church could have prevented any further harm if they would have acted responsibly, but they chose not to.”
Abe told me he primarily relied on documents obtained through pre-trial discovery motions stemming from a lawsuit against Fiala and other defendants. The reporting process, he said, demanded “lots of careful reading, taking notes, and making a chronology.”
Many of the allegations against the priest are old. But as Abe’s story notes, the most recent allegation was made in 2008 — years after an overhaul by the Catholic Church in 2002 that was supposed to improve accountability and prevent abuse against children.
“They still did not catch this guy,” Abe said.
Some readers are sure to react to the story as an attack against the Church. Abe said there’s certainly abuse that occurs in other religions. But Catholicism is the largest faith group in the United States, with 68 million followers. It’s also the largest religion in heavily Hispanic San Antonio, with more than 700,000 parishioners.
“I don’t think it’s an attack,” Abe said, noting how the reaction from Church officials about the allegations against Fiala has been subdued. “No one disputed the fall from grace that this guy experienced.
“I think there are really good people in the Catholic Church,” Abe added. “There’s stuff that they do that’s fantastic.”
A prime example: A day after Abe’s story about Fiala was published, Abe wrote yet another story about a Catholic priest. But this tale was about a courageous priest named Father Ted Pfeifer, who risked his life in Mexico to protect villagers from drug cartels.
The timing of the two stories was coincidental. But it illustrates what Abe says is one of the most important things in journalism:
“Be true to the story,” Abe said. “I need to follow it wherever it leads, not where I think it should lead.”
