Let’s say you want to share an interesting news story with your friends. You might use a variety of different tools — Digg, Twitter or Facebook to name a few — but the end result is usually the same. You share a link, and that link leads to one destination — the article.
But what if the news story is sparking a big reaction from readers? People are tweeting and blogging and posting interesting responses online. You might want to not only share the article, but also the conversation about the article.
Bob Woodward is one of the most famous investigative reporters on the planet. So it’s nice to see he’s still spending some evenings tracking down sources and knocking on their doors, just like he did during his youthful Watergate years.
The perfect time to knock? 8:15 p.m., after dinner but before bed time. Good to know.
The package got some interesting feedback from readers, ranging from “no duh” to discussions about why law-abiding citizens in low-income neighborhoods aren’t seeking concealed-carry licenses.
John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” also responded with a blog post stressing how the cost of concealed gun licenses can reduce the number of people who obtain them:
This is the point that I have been trying to make with my research for years. Higher permit fees and the costs of getting training not only reduce the number of permit holders, but they also make it so those who benefit the most from permits don’t get them. Both of those reasons work to reduce the benefit from right-to-carry laws.
The tendency to live, work and worship among people who agree with us has accelerated in recent years and shows no sign of waning. In that context, the notion that the two major political tribes harbor different views about guns isn’t shocking.
Any time the media delves into the hot-button issue of guns, some readers are going to be suspicious of the finished product. But I enjoyed speaking with the gun owners and instructors who were quoted in the story and video — I think they figured out I wasn’t a stereotypical sensational journalist. Instructor Michael Arnold invited me to a concealed handgun class and I got to hear him paraphrase Sun Tzu as he told students the best way to win a fight is to avoid a fight. Brock Wilkerson at A Place to Shoot also invited me to a concealed handgun class at his shooting range. Wilkerson let me spend two afternoons at the range and I met his customers and cool employees.
They helped us put the voices of real people in the story. Along the way, I leaned a lot — and hopefully, our readers did, too.
A few months ago, the Texas Medical Board sent out a routine public notice listing doctors who have been disciplined. One name in the list stood out to Express-News Medical Writer Don Finley: A San Antonio surgeon, Dr. John Christian Gunn, had lost his medical license after being convicted of a felony.
Finley checked it out and discovered Gunn — a Yale-educated surgeon — had robbed a bank in Austin.
“I’ve been watching doctors do lots of bizarre things for many years, but robbing a bank was new,” Finley told me. “It seemed like a very, very strange and tragic thing.”
The spark of curiosity about Gunn led to weeks of reporting by Finley, who talked to dozens of people and dug up public documents to piece together a story about the little-known doctor. Some of the best news stories are born this way: Simply asking, “Why?”
“To me, it’s the perfect narrative,” Finley said. “Why would a well educated surgeon rob a bank?”
Finley is a skinny, graying veteran of the newsroom best known for his deadpan wisecracks and his gift for writing about complicated topics. To really understand Gunn’s story, Finley read every public record he could get his hands on. At one point, he flew to Kentucky, where Gunn had once worked, to dig up court records. He found a medical consultant’s report that described Gunn’s track record as a doctor. There was also a bankruptcy case in Texas and other documents Finley obtained at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
Finley
Finley’s story ran last week and it has some striking quotes about Gunn. “He in my opinion was not a very good physician. Honestly, I think he did not have much sympathy or empathy for patients and their families,” said Dr. Joseph Miller of Arkansas.
But it took a lot of work to get people to open up.
“Almost nobody wanted to talk about this guy,” Finley said. Most potential sources were afraid of Gunn’s temper.
But the weeks of reporting paid off. To me, this is why journalism is so cool — you get paid to find stuff out, satisfy your curiosity, and learn something interesting about the world that no one else knows.
And then you get to share it on the front page of the Sunday paper with thousands of your closest friends.
Karisa did. And what she found out was published on the front page of last Sunday’s San Antonio Express-News:
After the development firm NRP Group LLC lost its second bid for tax credits to finance an affordable-housing project on the city’s West Side, an influential ally intervened in the company’s cause.
State Rep. Jose Menendez took the lectern at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs and urged board members to fund the San Juan Square II project, a 144-unit apartment complex that would replace blighted public housing. …
What Menendez did not tell the board at the meeting was that the development represented something else: a financial boon for the company he works for, Stewart Title, which had received $91,000 for issuing title insurance on the project’s first stage, and landed nearly all of NRP’s business on affordable-housing deals.
Payouts from the San Juan developments were among about $1.8 million paid to Stewart Title from NRP housing deals since 2003, records show.
Since joining the Legislature in 2000, Menendez has been one of the most outspoken supporters of NRP and other developers in the affordable-housing sector.
At the same time, the San Antonio Democrat has ascended the ranks of Stewart Title to become vice president for commercial development in the company’s national division.
Karisa said she spent six weeks working on the story about Menendez. It was easy to confirm that he worked for Stewart Title. But his ties to the company raised a hard-to-answer question: How much money did Stewart Title make from the housing deals? That’s not something you can answer by Googling it.
Sometimes journalism is simply the act of quantifying something. You might know the broad outlines of a story very early in the reporting process, but you have to figure out how to fill in the gaps.
If you’ve ever bought a house, you know real-estate transactions churn out tons of paperwork. Normally most of those records are private. But because tax breaks were involved in the housing deals Karisa was looking at, the real estate records were considered public information, open to anyone who asked.
Karisa found the fees paid to Stewart Title by driving to Austin and reading the records for housing projects that receive tax breaks, which are filed at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs in Austin. “I spent two days just going through boxes and boxes of documents,” Karisa said.
As she read through the files, Karisa typed key information such as the title fees into a simple Excel spreadsheet. After days of work, she was able to add up the fees for each housing project: A grand total of $1.8 million in title fees were paid to Stewart Title.
What did Mendendez have to say about that? Check out the whole story, it’s a great read.
Hand it to Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson — his feud with the Texas Attorney General and the San Antonio Express-News is, at the very least, exposing a flaw in the state’s open-records law.
Adkisson doesn’t want to release private e-mails in which he discussed public business. The attorney general’s office told him he has to release the e-mails. However, there’s an important caveat: Adkisson is the one who’s responsible for identifying the e-mails that pertain to the public’s business.
Adkisson. The guy who doesn’t want to give up any e-mails. He’s the one who’s supposed to go through his Hotmail account or whatever and turn over copies of e-mails that can be deleted with a mouse click.
In related news, a public interest group, the Corrupt Regime of Associated Politicians (C.R.A.P.) announced today that they’ll be conducting all business on Yahoo! e-mail accounts.
Journalists at the San Antonio Express-News watch a Webinar by News University
Poynter’s News University hosted a Webinar today about tools for mobile journalists. Instructor Damon Kiesow, who posts on Poynter’s Mobile Media blog, brought a clear message to the discussion: These nifty smart-phone apps are simply tools that help us tell stories. The technology should not overshadow the journalism.
At the same time, you need to stay on top of this rapidly evolving technology and use it to truly understand it. I had blogged about handy Android apps for journalists a few weeks ago. Here are some more smart phone apps and tools Kiesow recommended:
Audioboo: For instant podcasting — make a recording on your phone and upload it straight to the Web. Simple.
Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla: Can be used for researching businesses and finding customers.
Eye-Fi: Smart cards for cameras that create WiFi connections and let you upload photos. Awesome.
This, my friends, is South Padre Island, where Jen surfed and baby Pete got to marvel at the ocean for the first time.
But when it was time to go and we tried to catch our Southwest Airlines flight out of Harlingen, a “mechanical issue” delayed our plane before it even arrived at the airport. Once it landed, all the passengers lined up to board. But then we were told the mechanical issue had to be fixed again. The hours dragged by as we entertained Pete and hoped he stayed in a good mood.
When you’re stuck at the airport, it’s a good idea to channel your inner Louis C.K. and remember that long-distance trips used to take weeks or months, not hours. At the same time, it does get annoying when you realize you could probably drive to your destination faster than the time you spent waiting at the airport. And you also wonder exactly how safe your plane is if it’s grounded for a nagging “mechanical issue.”
I asked one of the Southwest attendants what the nature of the mechanical issue was, and he told me it was a hydraulic leak. The mechanic on call was about 30 miles away in Brownsville, and he didn’t even arrive to start fixing the leak until 4:20 p.m., about two hours after our flight was supposed to depart. He drove up in an SUV, talked on his cell phone for about 10 minutes, and started taking apart the left engine:
The chances of getting hurt in a plane crash are very, very low. But if you’ve got nothing to do while a lone mechanic is trying to figure out what’s wrong with the plane that’s about to hurtle you and your family through the sky, there’s a way to pass the time and check the plane’s safety record.
Look for the “N” number near the tail. Here’s a photo of the number on our plane:
With that number, you can visit this website maintained by the National Transportation Safety Board and check a database of reports documenting aviation accidents and incidents. You can search by all kinds of parameters — including the N-number of a particular aircraft.
You never know what you’re going to find when you do these searches. Nearly 10 years ago, an engine on a Continental Airlines jet carrying six Corpus Christi officials malfunctioned and the flight had to make an emergency landing. No one was hurt. I checked the N-number and found the same plane had a similar problem nearly a year earlier. Here’s the top of the Dec. 8, 2000 story I wrote:
A Continental Airlines jet that made an emergency landing after an engine failed Wednesday experienced a similar incident last year in Florida, government records show. No one was injured at the Corpus Christi International Airport when a Boeing MD-80 carrying 65 passengers – including six city officials – made an abrupt emergency landing shortly after one of its engines lost power.
City Council members described hearing loud popping noises from the right side of the aircraft. Jim Nelson, chief of public safety at the airport, said the plane was able to land with its remaining engine.
“We could tell something was wrong,” City Council member Melody Cooper said. “It was really scary. All they told us was they couldn’t fire (the engine) up to full power. I guess we didn’t know enough to scream.”
On March 16, 1999, the same passenger jet had taken off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida when a “loud bang” was heard during the first few minutes of flight.
The plane’s left engine failed, according to a Federal Aviation Administration incident report, and the pilot circled back for an emergency landing. None of the five crew members and 141 passengers was injured. …
The accident database is an amazing resource. You can search the narrative field of all the incident reports. So you could search for the words “bird” or “birds” if you’re curious how often they cause problems for aircraft. That became an important issue after a flock of birds struck a US Airways flight and forced it to land in the Hudson River.
The N-number can tell you the model of a plane, who owns it, and its age — our plane, not surprisingly, was a Boeing 737, the workhorse of Southwest Airlines. You can also look up Service Difficulty Reports, which document what are usually minor problems. Landings.com also offers access to the same government databases.
In our case, about the craziest thing I could find for our plane was a service difficulty report in 1998 that said the plane had to make an unscheduled landing because of a leaky window. In the accident database, there was no mention of our 737′s N-number, which made me feel better when we finally boarded the flight and made our way home.
Check out this open-records story by Josh Baugh: A Bexar County official wants to sue the attorney general in an effort to withhold e-mails from the San Antonio Express-News — because the official believes the newspaper is biased:
Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson refuses to comply with a Texas attorney general’s ruling that ordered him to release e-mails in his private accounts that contain public information. This week he instructed the Bexar County district attorney’s office to sue the AG.
The San Antonio Express-News submitted an open-records request under the Texas Public Information Act on Feb. 17, seeking all e-mails between Adkisson and grass-roots toll opponent Terri Hall regarding business of Bexar County and the Metropolitan Planning Organization, of which Adkisson is chairman.
The request sought e-mail correspondence from Adkisson’s county-provided e-mail address as well as from two private accounts he maintains. The newspaper is seeking the e-mails because they would offer insight into Adkisson’s management style at the MPO.
The story raises two issues that ought to trouble open-records advocates:
One is that public officials are keenly aware that their government e-mails are public documents, and they are turning to private e-mail accounts to conduct government business.
The other is Adkisson’s explanation for seeking to withhold his e-mails from the newspaper: He believes the Express-News is biased and has a pro-toll road agenda.
Even if Adkisson’s claim were true, the point is irrelevant when it comes to public information. In Texas, a government record is either public, or it isn’t. In order for an agency to withhold a record, it must cite a legal exemption. For example, a section of the Texas Public Information Act says investigative files of law enforcement agencies don’t have to be made public.
The motives of the person requesting the information has no bearing on whether a document is public. In fact, under the law, officials aren’t even supposed to ask why someone wants the information. Otherwise, government officials could withhold everything from the public simply by saying they don’t trust the people asking for the information. Or they could play favorites and give information to preferred journalists and bloggers.
So now the county is going to spend taxpayer money on a legal effort to withhold information from taxpayers. Maybe Josh can find out how much money the county will spend on the case — assuming no one questions his motives for asking.
The first thing you need to do today is read this story by New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers. It’s about a boy in Afghanistan who was bitten by a viper and faced certain death if he didn’t receive medical treatment from U.S. troops.
Go ahead, read the whole thing. Chances are, you won’t be able to stop.
All done? Did you notice how Chivers piqued your curiosity? He didn’t give away the ending.
Chivers began the tale by telling us about the boy and the snake bite, and the father who knew his son could die.
But then Chivers left us hanging. He didn’t immediately tell us if the boy lived. And that suspense is a good thing.
Not all news articles can be told in a simple but compelling chronology. But many stories that could be, aren’t. Imagine how the story about the viper bite would have been handled by most writers. The first two sentences are Chivers’; the last one is mine:
KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — Five-year-old Sadiq was not a casualty of war. He was simply unlucky. The boy had opened a sack of grain at his home early on Wednesday morning, and a pit viper coiled inside lashed up and bit him above the lip.
His father, Kashmir, knew his son was sure to die. With no hospital anywhere nearby, he rushed the boy to an American outpost to plead for help. By midafternoon, Sadiq’s breathing was labored. Respiratory failure was not long off.
But after a harrowing night, U.S. troops saved the boy, who is alive and well today.
Most readers would have scanned the beginning of that story and said, “That’s nice.” Then they’d turn the page to scan the top paragraphs of the next inverted-pyramid-style news article.
Chivers took a different approach. The engine of his story, the thing that drives readers all the way through it, is the question: What happens to the boy?
To find out, you have to sit down and invest yourself in the whole the story. And along the way, you get lost in the article and forget you need to pack lunch for the kids before they go to school. You’re half a world away in Afghanistan, hoping the snake-bitten boy survives.
Check out this 
