John Tedesco

Reading Scott Huddleston’s latest update about the turmoil at the Alamo, I wondered how many people remember the roots of the problem and why the state of Texas got involved in the first place. I doubt casual readers know Scott deserves some of the credit for the changes — or the blame, depending on how you view the Alamo’s caretakers, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

Huddleston

Scott got involved when a tipster told him that some members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas questioned the group’s leadership, and were forming their own splinter group to raise money for the Alamo.

“I wanted the story to be more than ‘she said, she said,’” Scott told me. He began obtaining copies of contracts, emails, letters — anything that would shed light on what was going on at the Alamo. He found examples of questionable spending and a lack of focus. “Their biggest challenge was an inability to raise money for capital improvements,” Scott said.

“I felt like I needed to be shaking the bushes just to keep up with them,” Scott said.

After his first story about the rift was published, he filed an open records request with the state of Texas to find out how the Daughters were spending funds raised from license plates with Alamo themes. It turned out the Alamo only received a portion of the funds for upkeep.

As more members of the Daughters publicly criticized the group’s leadership, some were expelled for speaking with the media, which led to more follow-up stories.

Scott wrote at least 60 articles in the past two years that mentioned the Alamo and its troubled caretaker. Most stories were about the turmoil within the organization and its track record at the Alamo. For long, seemingly never-ending sagas like this, newspapers really need to devise a way to help readers see the whole picture.

Google’s Living Stories project tried to address this problem. It’s no longer supported but it inspired ProPublica to generate a similar design that gives readers a timeline and easy access to past posts about the topic they’re interested in.

Dipity is also cool — I made this timeline compiling most of Scott’s stories.

It’d be great if newspapers came up with something like Living Stories. Sometimes a story is bigger than a single article. We ought to figure out a way to systematically tell that story in a compelling way.

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.

Google unveiled a free tool for journalists who are interested in analyzing public data. Google Refine is a “power tool for working with messy data.” It helps import information and clean up data-entry problems that lurk in many government databases.

It’s open to everyone but it looks like Google created this tool with an eye on computer-assisted reporting. Google’s introductory video touts “Dollars for Docs,” a data-driven story by ProPublica that showed how drug companies paid doctors to promote their products.

Analyzing databases is a niche skill in newsrooms. Not all reporters are comfortable doing queries in Microsoft Access or sifting through thousands of computerized records, but those skills can really empower reporters who are trying to make sense of a complicated world. Columbia Journalism Review published a great profile of Daniel Gilbert, a reporter for the Bristol Herald Courier who came across a potential blockbuster of a story about unpaid royalties from mineral rights. But the issue was so complex he didn’t know how to unlock it.

His editor persuaded the newspaper’s publisher to pay for Gilbert to attend a database boot camp at Investigative Reporters and Editors, and Gilbert learned skills that helped him piece together the gas royalties puzzle. The result: “Underfoot, out of reach“, a series of stories that showed how millions of dollars owed to landowners had been tied up in an “an opaque state-run escrow fund, where it has accumulated with scant oversight for nearly 20 years.” Gilbert won the Pulitzer Prize.

I haven’t played around with Google Refine yet, but I hope it encourages more journalists to take the plunge into computer-assisted reporting. There are some amazing, data-driven stories to be told out there. We just need more people to tell them.

(h/t: Jennifer Peebles)

Google announced it added more news sources to its Fast Flip experiment, and the San Antonio Express-News is now flippable.

Fast Flip is part of Google’s re-imagining of how readers find and consume news. Google takes snapshots of a publisher’s stories or blog posts. You can flip through pages like a magazine until something catches your eye, click on the page, and go to the actual Web site that interests you. Google also recently launched Living Stories, where a news article is treated not as the end, but as the beginning of a conversation with readers.

For some reason, in Fast Flip the Express-News pages aren’t as visually appealing as other publications because Google isn’t capturing the pictures and graphics on our Web site. Fast Flip has also been criticized. Is this Google tossing the media industry a bone to appease publishers who blame Google for their financial woes?

I think Google makes a strong case that newspaper Web sites are instantly recognizable as newspaper Web sites — they’re often clunky and difficult to navigate. Fast Flip and Living Stories are attempts to try something different.

Maybe the day will come when a reader visits the home page of a news site and have the option to change the format. Like reading stories chronologically in a blog format? Click that option. Like the Fast Flip style or the Living Stories style? Click on those options. Everyone has a different preference … let them choose the one they like best.

Paul Bradshaw wrote an interesting review of Living Stories, Google’s vision of how news should be read, shared and discussed online. Partnering with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google has created an experiment that tries to move beyond the limitations of typical newspaper Web sites.

Life Magazine visits Texas in this 1938 issue

Run a search for “San Antonio” and you’ll find all kinds of stories and photos:

Here’s Google’s original blog post about this new research tool. “This is part of a broader effort across Google to help bring offline content online and allow people to find it with a simple Google web search,” wrote Google’s product manager Brandon Badger. Hat tip to Marilia Martins who tweeted about this today.