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.
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.
Known as “Johnny Mac” in the newsroom, John MacCormack is a talented, colorful reporter. He likes telling a good yarn, both in person and on the front pages of the San Antonio Express-News. One time I heard him on the phone telling a source: “What are you going to give me so I don’t write the usual blather?”
His trademark wit was on display when he gave this speech explaining how he figured out that missing atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair was not dining on bonbons in New Zealand, as police theorized, but had actually been brutally murdered.
Last year, MacCormack and Express-News Photographer Jerry Lara spent months documenting the toll of violence from the Mexican drug war, and how life on the Texas border has dramatically changed for the worse. The result was a compelling series of articles and photos called Mexico in Crisis. MacCormack won an award for his work this month from the Inter American Press Association.
Given MacCormack’s gift of gab and skill at reporting, I thought it’d be entertaining and educational to do a Q&A with him, and learn how he and Jerry worked on the stories.
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…)
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.
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.”
When you hear about the massive downsizing of newsrooms across the country, usually the discussion focuses on the loss of institutional knowledge, or how readers are being asked to pay more for less, or how lay offs are a shortsighted way for newspapers to stay profitable.
All that is true. But the chaotic climate at newspapers is leading to another shoot-yourself-in-the-foot consequence: When newspapers shed staff and create uncertainty in newsrooms, they wind up creating new competitors who happen to be the very journalists they used to employ.
That’s what’s happening with a new online start up in San Antonio, Plaza de Armas. It was founded by Greg Jefferson, a former political writer for the San Antonio Express-News, and Elaine Wolff, the former editor of the San Antonio Current, the city’s alternative weekly.
The website’s official launch was today. It’s the first local news site in San Antonio that will try to stay profitable through an online subscription model. Subscribers will pay $5.99 a month or $60 a year for exclusive content.
Elaine and Greg weren’t laid off by their employers like so many of our colleagues. But the survivors of today’s newsrooms must ask themselves some tough questions: Do we have a future at our publication? Is this still a place where we can do good work? Is it time to move on?
We all come up with our own answers, and Greg and Elaine reached the conclusion it was time to strike out on their own. They might be successful. Or they might fail. But they decided to take a chance, and now the Current and the Express-News are going to have to scramble to catch up with any scoops published by the well-wired news veterans at Plaza de Armas.
Plaza de Armas is an alternative voice that, overall, is good for readers. But it’s also an offspring of the turmoil at the Current and the Express-News. Now both newspapers have one more competitor to deal with.
A great news story tells readers something new about the world in a compelling way. It’s even better if the reporter digs up the story through her own initiative. And it’s even better if the issue is so important or shocking that readers simply can’t put down the paper or — nowadays — their iPad.
Michelle Mondo’s bizarre story about four women who might have been wrongly convicted of molesting two girls certainly qualifies.
Michelle learned of the case when an essay about it was published in April 2009 in Texas Monthly. The author, a Canadian professor named Darrell Otto, had been surfing the Internet and found a 1998 Express-News article about four friends — Anna Vasquez, Cassandra Rivera, Elizabeth Ramirez, and Kristie Mayhugh — who were all serving long prison sentences for a strange crime:
Four young women in that city, acting on their own, had allegedly restrained and, in ritualistic fashion, sexually assaulted two girls, aged seven and nine, over two days. There was no physical evidence tying the women to the assaults, yet the newspaper reported the case against them without a hint of skepticism. It mentioned nothing about mental illness or confessions. Psychology-wise, the only point noted was that the women were lesbians, although academic research clearly shows lesbians are not predisposed to sexually abuse children. I was frustrated by the lack of information.
Otto was convinced the women had been wrongly convicted. Express-News Metro Editor Jaime Stockwell read the essay and asked Michelle to look into the case.
This wasn’t press-release journalism that critics of the media rightly complain about. Michelle spent 18 months on the story, whittling away at it in her spare time as a crime reporter for the Express-News. It wasn’t easy. When I stopped by her desk last week to ask her about it, the beeps and sporadic radio transmissions from the police scanners she was monitoring occasionally interrupted us. Try investigating a possible wrongful conviction when at any moment you have to drop everything and run out to a structure fire.
Michelle stuck with the story. She dug up old court records, tracked down family members, interviewed the convicted women, and waded through “accusations and counter accusations involving different famlies in different states,” she said.
Her findings were published on the newspaper’s front page:
A San Antonio Express-News investigation — including interviews with witnesses and experts and a review of police reports, medical studies and thousands of pages of trial transcripts and other court documents — raises troubling questions about the scientific legitimacy of medical evidence deployed against the women, whether authorities checked a previous rape allegation made by the girls and whether anti-gay views prejudiced Ramirez’s jury.
In two trials, the defense called no witnesses to rebut the testimony of pediatrician Nancy Kellogg, then as now the medical director of Child Safe — at the time, it was called the Alamo Children’s Advocacy Center. But research available when she examined the girls classified the three signs of sexual trauma she found as either normal, inconclusive or impossible to identify as a scar, as she did.
On and off the witness stand, the girls changed their accounts of the timing, weapons, perpetrators and other basic details of the assault every time they told it to authorities, records show.
The girls’ family was mired in conflict before and after the trials, with members making abuse claims in two Texas counties and in another state. It wasn’t the first time the nieces had made a rape outcry.
The trial of Ramirez, held separately from the other women, showcased her sex life, and her jury foreman, a minister, had told attorneys that homosexuality was wrong on religious grounds.
When Michelle interviewed the convicted women for her story, they maintained their innocence — and wondered where the media had been all this time.
“All four of them asked me, ‘Why was I doing the story now?’” Michelle said.
It’s a fair question. Had reporters failed to scrutinize this case in the 1990s when it really mattered?
I checked our news archives. There were about a half dozen stories about the trials, including one with the headline: “Defendants say accusers made up story of assault.” The stories described the crime as a gang rape. I couldn’t really find any in-depth coverage — the articles ran in the Metro section and the longest one I found was about 500 words long. At the time, I had been at the paper for about a year but today I don’t even remember the trials. It looks like the charges were part of the depressing, never-ending stream of twisted child abuse and murder cases in Bexar County that we keep having to write about. Most of the time, those heinous crimes really did happen. Most of the time.
This being Texas, Michelle is doubtful the women will be freed any time soon. But after the story ran, she’s heard from the women and their families. Maybe it’s too little too late, but it means something when a third party like Michelle comes in, spends a lot of time looking at the evidence, and publicly points out inconsistencies in a criminal case that shattered the lives of the defendants.
“For them, it was a very big deal for somebody to point out, ‘Wait a minute, these women aren’t what they were portrayed as,’” Michelle said.
