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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.

MacCormack

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.

I was right.

Q: How did the series come about?

A: Well, it’s sort of a self-serving answer. But back in the middle of last summer, the lords were casting about for big ideas, big projects. And I told –

The lords being the editors.

Yeah, the editors. The editors were casting about for big stories, big ideas. And I said to [Express-News Projects Editor David] Sheppard, ‘As far as I’m concerned, the biggest story in Texas is what’s going on on the border in Mexico as well as how it’s affecting the changes on the Texas border.’ And he said, ‘That sounds right to me.’ The real push was when [Executive Editor Bob] Rivard was 100 percent behind it. If you’ve got the top dog behind you, you’re going to do things and things will happen.

The project didn’t really start out as a project per se. It gained momentum. The first thing Jerry Lara and I did was, we went to Juárez for the grito, which is the celebration of Mexican Independence. It was such a powerful story because the mayor of Juárez had to give it to an empty plaza. The whole city was bunkered down. And while we were there, some poor journalist for El Diaro was shot, whom we had just talked to. There was tremendously compelling material there.

Jerry Lara was the photographer who was with you the whole time.

Were there some dicey situations you had to deal with?

Well, the thing about working in Mexico right now on the border is you have no way to calculate the risk. I mean, we were in Juárez three times, we were in Monterrey, we were in Nuevo Laredo, we were in Matamoros, and we were in Progreso. And in every place people were being killed. But we had no way to calculate risk. So we just tried to be careful but not timid. And I had no idea whether I faced any danger at any point. But I know we were in many, many dangerous areas. On one occasion, we were in a bad neighborhood in Monterrey. And (Jerry) just said, ‘Look, I don’t like the looks of this. Let’s get out of here.’ And we left. We didn’t like squeal out or anything, we just got out of the neighborhood. Later we talked to the reporters for El Norte, and they said, ‘Man, we don’t go there. That’s a bad neighborhood.’ So Jerry was the guy with the antenna, the guy who could basically sense whether or not we were in danger. I’m bolder than he is, mostly because I’m more clueless.

What happened to the journalists you mentioned who got shot?

Well, we were in Juárez and we went to the plaza right by the cathedral. This was in September of last year. And we were just shooting color basically. We didn’t have anything specific in mind. And we ran into two photographers from El Diario. And they were young guys. Real young. And we could see they were photographers because they had the gafetes, which are the things you hang on your neck, and they had the cameras. So we all yucked it up and shook hands. You know, colleagues.

And then two hours later, we responded to a shooting at the mall. And those two guys had been shot up driving through the mall parking lot. One was killed and one got three bullets in him. And to this day I have no idea why they were attacked. We later learned that the plaza was a really dicey area because there’s a lot of street-level drug sales there. The local press had been warned to stay away from there. Long and short, the guy was killed and we had just talked to him two hours earlier. So it’s a very dangerous place but there’s no way to really calculate the risk.

What was your goal with the series of stories?

The second goal was, I was looking at this drug warfare in Mexico. And hundreds of people were dying. And I thought to myself, how could you not want to go chronicle this, write about it? Because it’s the most improbable, most violent, and most inexplicable thing going on in the world right now, in my opinion. We owed it to the Mexicans who live on the border. We owed it to our readers to go write about the drug violence. So there were kind of two themes: The border life is over as we knew it, and northern Mexico is collapsing into complete anarchy.

You also write about how the severity and nuances of the violence in Mexico varies from city to city. It’s different in Monterrey compared to Juárez, for example.

Yeah. In Juárez, for example, the press can function. The press still has somewhat autonomy. In Matamoros, the press is totally under the heel of the gangsters. They don’t dare write anything. In Monterrey, it’s 90 percent free. So if you use the press as an indicator, it’s very different in all three areas.

When we went to Monterrey, it was a big, bustling, modern, rich place. There was some violence but essentially normal life went on every day. When we went to Juárez, it wasn’t a ghost town, but tens of thousands if not more people have left. All the commerce was down, businesses had burned, closed. The place was like a shadow of what it had been. I didn’t spend much time in Matamoros. It’s probably the least stable place of all. It was like in a coma, you know? Every place is different. We’re not experts on this, we just kind of took snapshots.

Well, you told readers what you saw. Going back to the example of the grito, it was a pretty good example of how reporters can show, don’t tell. The scene and details tell the story.

Yeah, they can have all the generals they want on the balcony and they look good on TV. But when you’re standing with the mayor on the balcony, you’re looking out onto emptiness, you know? There’s soldiers, there’s cops, there’s blue and red lights, but there’s nobody down there. It’s like they’re holding it in a city that’s been evacuated, you know?

It tells the story right there.

It was a great photograph.

You mentioned the media, and you wrote how difficult it is for journalists down there to navigate what’s acceptable coverage and what’s not.

And it varies city by city.

How much of that did you know going in and what surprised you?

But what shocked me, what really made a big impression on me, is how in every place, the journalists are trying to work right up to the line of getting killed. In Juárez, they are much more aggressive, but there are certain things they can’t do. So they write right up to the line. In Matamoros, for example, they can do virtually nothing. But this one guy, he’s an editor at a big paper, he and I had this long talk. And he said, ‘You know, it’s absolutely controlled by the narcos. They tell you what to publish, what not to publish. We’re totally under their thumb.’

And I said, ‘Well, why are you talking to me?’ He said something to the effect of, ‘I want to preserve the little bit of the journalist that’s still in me.’ So I was just impressed by how in every circumstance, they worked right up to the point where their lives were in danger. And because it’s a fuzzy line, they never really knew. And so you could cross the line unknowingly, and you get killed.

They don’t feel sorry for themselves. I was scolded after I wrote that long piece about journalism in Mexico by an editor down there. He said, ‘Man, you forgot to tell all we are doing. You made it sound like we’re all up a tree with guns pointed at us. But every day we navigate this and we figure out what we can publish.’ He said, ‘You really forgot to say what we are doing, because you spent so much time saying what we can’t do.’

How do these media blackouts affect the Mexican public?

It’s a tool of the criminal element to assert control over society. If the press is completely intimidated, and the public has to rely on Twitter and not very mainstream sources for information, it furthers the societal breakdown. I mean, if you can wake up in the morning and read the paper and it tells you what happened yesterday, even if there are bombs dropping, you fell like you still more or less have a sense of reality.

But if you wake up in the morning, and you know there was giant shoot out in the plaza, but the story’s about some guy who got pulled over because he hit a horse, you’re entering a realm that’s unreal. It makes you feel more vulnerable. It’s a furtherance of societal breakdown.

Essentially, the (northern) third of Mexico is out of control of the government. I mean, they send the Army in, they send the Navy in, there’s shoot ‘em ups, they kill narcos. But this part of Mexico is operating beyond the control of the federal or the state governments. When you have a city like Monterrey, which is the equivalent of Dallas — it’s a huge city, it’s prosperous. But in the last couple months the violence has gotten worse there. And it’s simply because the criminal elements are so powerful that the state and federal governments and municipal governments, they can’t defeat them.

It’s impossible for an American to grasp this. It’s like the Russian gangs are running Long Island. Or the street gangs are running L.A. Or they don’t yield to the civil authorities. We have no concept of this. We live in a society where law and order is the rule. Systems work. There’s a justice system. They have none of that. The impunity level in Mexico is in the upper 90 percent. You shoot someone and kill ‘em, the chance of getting arrested and convicted is about as remote as getting hit by Hailey’s Comet. There’s total impunity. It’s really a nationwide crisis. And I don’t think most of us in the U.S. grasp this. I don’t think most Americans grasp how bad it is.

What’s the way out? What’s the solution?

The U.S. is, of course, a big part of the problem. There’s 20 or 25 billion dollars flowing into Mexico annually to pay for the illegal drugs here. That’s where the cartels get their strength. It’s a multi-national problem.

How much time did you spend on the series?

Basically four months. In four months, we went to seven or eight places.

It was very, very rewarding. It’s a rare thing to get commitment for travel and space and also the kind of green light to follow your own nose. It’s a wonderful thing if you’re a journalist. Without being a suck up, if I didn’t have the editors, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

Yeah, there’s a lot of expense involved in that.

Yeah. But it wasn’t even so much the expense. So we went to Juárez two or three times. We went to Monterrey. There’s not really a lot of money involved. The commitment is for the space in the paper. We had a lot of double trucks. I think my stories got cut a little bit. But when push came to shove, we always got the space. That was because the boss was behind it.

And it was readable and the pictures were really compelling. That probably helped.

It was a two-man show throughout. you can’t go to Mexico by yourself and do this kind of work. You better go with someone who you trust and knows the lay of the land.

When you sat down to write this, what was going through your mind? You’re down there in another country but you’re writing for people in the United States.

Well, I have a lot of respect for my readers. It was written one (story) after the other. For seven or eight stories. You’d go on a trip, spend a week or four days or five days somewhere. You come back. And then you’ve already done a lot of phone reporting. And then you turn that one around. You write it in two or three days. And then you get on the plane again. It was like covering — not a breaking story — but an evolving story. You go from one place to the other. It was fast-paced.

I don’t get writer’s cramp or anything like that or stage fright. So it was really, really fun. There were like two phases of it that were fun. The reporting phase was really fun. Because you’re in a strange place. You gotta come back with the goods. You don’t know what you’re doing. You fly to Monterrey, you have a few sources, but you really don’t know what you’re going to do. So you’re thinking on your feet the whole time.

To get back to what I’m trying to say, there are two phases. There’s the reporting phase where you really don’t know what you’re going to get. And there’s a certain amount of tension because you’re looking and you’re searching and you’re working long hours. And you’re looking for the story that’s out there somewhere.

And then you get back and then you start looking again for the story that you have in all your notes. And that’s a very tense, exciting thing to try to find the story. Because you know you have tons of great information. And then there’s that process that only writers can grasp where you’re sitting down with a mess of information. Your brain’s full. Your notebooks are full. And you got ten times more than you know you can use. But you have to come up with a very clear and compelling and truthful story. And that’s an experience and an adventure in itself.

And it’s satisfying when that picture starts to emerge.

Oh, yeah. It’s totally rewarding. It’s a lot of fun.

Well, great job, man, thanks so much.

Well, thank you. Good luck getting this down to something you can use.

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.

I’ve tried this technique a few times after seeing this video of a trip from Denver to Singapore by David DAngelo. I thought it was a cool way to show what the whirlwind journey was like:

This video by Express-News photographer Billy Calzada is about the difficulties kayakers face when they navigate a redeveloped stretch of the San Antonio River. About a minute into the video, Billy effectively used first-person time-lapse photography to show the hassle of being forced to take a kayak out of the river and walking about a mile to the next accessible location:

Jennifer Hiller

Most types of video editing software allow you to import a series of still images. When Jen got back I copied the photos to our hard drive at home and fired up Sony Vegas.

In Vegas you can import photos two ways. One is to go to “Options,” click on “Preferences,” then “Editing.” There you can adjust the sittings for the length of still images when you add them to your project. You can also have the images overlap slightly for a smoother look using cross fades.

For Jen’s project, the photos were at 3 frames per second:

Another options is going to “Project,” then “Import Media.” Check the box “Open still image sequence,” then select the photos you want to import. Vegas will merge all those photos into a single file for your project:

The finished product gives people a taste of it’s like to walk the High Line in a way that a traditional news article can’t do very well. These kinds of videos aren’t just trendy — they help journalists tell better stories.

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.

State regulators have responded to this outrageous, informative and entertaining story by WOAI Trouble Shooter Jaei Avila, who exposed the aggressive towing tactics of Bexar Towing. State officials are citing the company with nearly 50 violations and proposed a fine of $62,000.

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.

One idea they came up with was retelling the story of the Alamo as if the battle were unfolding before the eyes of an intrepid war correspondent.

There were no journalists who covered the actual battle in 1836, so they went with the next best thing — tapping chief copy editor Bob Kolarik to write articles as if he were there.

“I knew he was a pretty good wordsmith,” Dean said. But even Dean was surprised by how seriously Bob took the job. He stuck with the facts and used actual historical quotes, while having fun writing in the long-winded style of newspapers of that era.

“He took it in such a fun kind of direction but authentic as well,” Dean said.

So for 13 days, with the last dispatch running today, Bob wrote about each chapter of the battle. The stories were published on a spadea, a sheet that goes on the outside the front page. The sepia-colored pages looked decades old, as if they had just been unearthed from dusty archives. And they gave readers a front seat to the historic battle.

Today’s story concluded with the final battle in which almost every Alamo defender died. Kolarik wrote about it with colorful flourishes: “Gen. Santa Anna’s attack this morning on Fortress Alamo began long before the cock crowed, when night was as black as a raven’s heart at midnight.”

The articles included Wall Street Journal-style illustrations by graphic designer Mike Fisher, whose byline was “xylographer from the Staff.” Page designer Scott Stodard, also a history buff, helped design the pages and research the nuggets of information about the Alamo that ran inside the spadea. And the first day of the series featured artistic photos of the Alamo by Express-News photographer Billy Calzada.

The project didn’t end with the print edition. The paper’s website featured a stand-alone Alamo Immortal page featuring historic photos, graphics, and audio of the Alamo story told in the baritone voice of San Antonio news broadcaster Henry Guerra. The recordings had originally aired in the 1970s.

“Very little of this is new, but for a lot of people, it’s new to them,” Dean said, describing the research process. “It was kind of fun cherry picking all the cool stuff. We usually don’t have the excuse to sweep all the piles of historical dust together and do something cool with it.”

We often hear how print is dead, or how no one can make any real money on the Internet. But the truth is, both have distinct advantages, and it was great to see them used to full effect in Alamo Immortal. Kolarik’s historic articles were perfect for the printed page. Photo slideshows and audio are one of the strengths of the Web.

I also liked how the Web version did not publish the full dispatches from Kolarik; instead, it posted excerpts and directed readers to the paper for the rest of the story. Not everyone agrees with this approach, but I think it’s OK to give readers an incentive to buy a copy of newspaper, which still generates the bulk of revenue for the Express-News.

Alamo Immortal probably gave the paper a bump in circulation and ad sales. But Dean thinks it’s real value is more intangible — it broke out of the anniversary rut and gave readers something new. This is one of the biggest challenges for newspapers, which enlightens and surprise some days — but can also be as interesting as Aunt Helga’s fruitcake on others.

“It gave people a warm fuzzy feeling about something the Express-News did,” Dean said. “When they think of the Express-News for the next few weeks or months, they’ll at least have that as a little mile marker and say, ‘Hey, they did that cool thing.’

“If we did that five, six, eight times a year, that’s better than … not, you know?”

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.

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.