John Tedesco

I had the day off today, but with all the tweets coming out of an Express-News staff meeting this morning, it almost felt like I was there.

Executives from Hearst Corp., which owns the San Antonio Express-News, met with staff and answered questions about the future of the paper. Here’s an outline of what was said, courtesy of Storify:

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)

I was flipping through the “A” section of the paper Wednesday morning when I noticed a full-page ad for something called Treasure Hunters Roadshow. It was an “advertorial,” an advertisement designed to look like a news story. The headline declared: “Hundreds of people cash in at the San Antonio Roadshow yesterday!” The roadshow was holding an event from Tuesday to Saturday at the Wonderland of the Americas mall for anyone hoping to make some quick cash from unwanted antiques and old jewelry.

My first thought was a question: Is this the same thing as “Antiques Roadshow” on PBS? The fact that the ad was trying to mimic the credibility of a news story suggested it was a different outfit. But I didn’t know for sure.

Thanks to the miracle of Google, it took a few seconds to figure out that Treasure Hunters Roadshow is different from “Antiques Roadshow.” In fact, the producers of the PBS program had filed a federal lawsuit against Treasure Hunters Roadshow, complaining that it was tricking customers with the logo of a treasure chest, and the term “roadshow” in its name.

I asked my bosses if I could write a story pointing out the difference between the two roadshows, and they said go for it.

One of the great things about the Internet is you can quickly obtain primary documents. When I saw the references on some websites about the federal lawsuit against Treasure Hunters Roadshow, I logged into Pacer, a government website that offers public access to federal court records. Although the lawsuit was filed in Illinois, where Treasure Hunters Roadshow is based, through Pacer I could download the actual filings. Here’s the original complaint:

Roadshow

I drove out to the mall to check out the rival roadshow operation. There were scores of people, many of them elderly, holding boxes of heirlooms in a conference room. Employees in black polo shirts peered at items under bright lamps. I spoke to a few people and they said it was a fairly painless experience — no one was pressuring them to sell Uncle Ted’s dusty collection of baseball cards. One woman said she was sure the offers weren’t for the full market value of the goods, but she wanted to get some idea of how much money she could get for an old teapot.

I asked to speak with the manager and two guys, Jason Zyla and Keith Hammons, showed up. They were friendly, answered all my questions, and gave me unfettered access. They insisted that few customers mix up Treasure Hunters Roadshow with “Antiques Roadshow.” It used to happen — but not any more, they said.

They said their employees don’t use high-pressure tactics on customers, and they’ve written some large checks to people who brought in valuable antiques. They said they make fair offers, but are up front with customers that the roadshow has to pay expenses and make a profit, too.

“We don’t do this for free,” Hammons told me. “And I would tell anybody that, hey, we can’t give you one million percent of what it’s worth. You got to cut back a little bit, just for expenses.”

Although Treasure Hunters Roadshow holds events all over the country, not many media outlets note it’s an entirely different operation from “Antiques Roadshow” and the two parties are involved in a legal dispute. So I wrote a story with the goal of pointing out to our readers that there is a difference. Here’s the story and some of the websites I found:

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.

Storify lets you do that.

Check out this story module I created on Storify about a celery recall at a food processing plant in San Antonio:
(more…)

Construction workers on the River Walk's Mission Reach

I had written some stories about local stimulus projects a few months ago, so it was interesting to read this report by the Center for Public Integrity that showed how elected officials who publicly critisized the Recovery Act had privately sought stimulus funds for their Congressional districts and states.

A cool thing about this project is that bloggers can embed the findings in their own posts. It allows their readers to search the documentation — and uses social media to help the story go viral. Check it out:

You might notice an odd byline on this recent story about concealed handgun permits published by the San Antonio Express-News. I worked on the article, but so did reporters Brandi Grissom and Matt Stiles, who work for the nonprofit Texas Tribune, an entirely separate news organization based in Austin. The same stories, video, maps and photo that ran in the Express-News also appeared on the Tribune’s website.

As scores of nonprofit, public-service media organizations sprout up around the country, “collaboration” is the latest buzzword in journalism circles. The gun-permit story was the result of the first collaboration between the Express-News, a daily newspaper established 145 years ago at the end of the Civil War, and the shiny new Texas Tribune, which launched nearly a year ago as a web-based source of Texas news and public data. The Tribune’s founder, venture capitalist John Thornton, believes in-depth journalism is a public good — but not necessarily good business anymore. So he joined forces with Evan Smith from Texas Monthly, made the Tribune a nonprofit that relies on donations, and hired top-notch journalists from other newspapers, such as Matt and Brandi.

The folks at the Tribune offer their content for free to anyone who wants to republish it, and they’re eager to collaborate with other news organizations. The Tribune got a cold reception at a few Texas newspapers, but my bosses were always open to the idea of teaming up with the Trib. Their attitude was, if there’s a good story and it makes sense to work together, let’s do it.

One idea was to write about data kept by the Department of Public Safety that showed how many concealed handgun permits are issued for every ZIP code in the state. When you view the data on a map, it shows the affluent North Side of Bexar County had higher rates of permits issued than neighborhoods close to downtown San Antonio, where crime rates were higher. It was a curious pattern that occurs in every major Texas city, and Matt asked if we were interested in teaming up on a story about it.

We started working together in early September. Before this project, I knew Matt and liked his work. I didn’t know Brandi personally but liked her work, too, especially this story and this story. And I liked how the Tribune got people excited about investigative journalism. The owners were building something new, not looking for new ways to downsize and cut costs like every other newspaper in the country. It was a nice change.

Brandi, Matt and I relied on conference calls, e-mails, and Google Documents to share material and ideas. Both the Tribune and the Express-News have talented staff who could have done this story on their own. But by teaming up, we were able to throw more people at the story, gather more information, finish it faster, and reach a broader audience. Matt called it a “force multiplier.”

One thing that worked well for us was having a clear division of labor. I did the shoe-leather reporting in San Antonio and interviewed gun instructors here; Brandi interviewed people and experts in other parts of Texas, and Matt handled the data analysis. I wrote some early drafts using Google Documents so we could all work on the stories. Brandi plugged in information she gathered and beefed up the articles, especially the one about the surge in gun permits during the Obama administration.

The Express-News benefited from this arrangement. If I had worked on the story by myself, maybe I would have thought to interview the gun owners, experts and public officials Brandi spoke with — but maybe not. And who knows if I would have had the time to do all that. And we also tapped into the power of the Texas Tribune’s awesome data library. By teaming up with the Tribune, the Express-News posted some cool interactive maps created by Matt. That’s a tangible feature that might not have been there for our readers if the Express-News handled the story by itself.

By teaming up with the Express-News, the Tribune got an extra reporter out of the arrangement and benefited from one of the primary strengths of the newspaper, which pays reporters to spend weeks or even months to work full-time on a story. I hung out at shooting ranges, attended two concealed handgun classes, shot some video, and interviewed gun owners and gun instructors.

All this time spent “hanging out” helped me collect telling details and colorful quotes that enriched the story, and I learned a lot about the issue. I liked how a folksy gun instructor, Michael Arnold, quoted the Chinese military genius Sun Tzu to tell his students the importance of using force as a last resort.

Several other Express-News staffers helped out. While I was at a shooting range, Photographer Edward Ornelas shot some cool photos — I love the shot of the shell casing flying out of a pistol. At the office, Database Researcher Kelly Guckian crunched crime data we had to add some context to the story. And graphic artists Harry Thomas and Michael Fisher used the maps created by Matt for the print edition.

What this all means is that in an age of shrinking newsrooms, collaboration briefly augmented the Texas Tribune and the Express-News. And the results most likely surpassed anything the two organizations could have accomplished on their own in the same time frame.

Pitfalls: Coordinating the data-heavy graphics was a bit of a pain. It’s not like Matt could simply walk across the Express-News newsroom and talk to our graphics people. It took some back and forth to get everything right. Maybe we stumbled upon an actual use for Google Wave to deal with that.

I asked Matt and Brandi, who left large corporate newspapers to join the more nimble and experimental Tribune, whether it was a pain dealing with mainstream newsrooms again. They said so far, so good. The gun story got pushed back a week because the Sunday print edition of the Express-News was jammed up with other stories. That’s not a problem the Tribune has to deal with. In this case we thought it was OK because it gave us some breathing room to keep working on the story and make it better.

Overall though, we’re pretty jazzed about the way it all worked out — and we’re talking about our next cool project.

The Guardian offers a WordPress plugin that lets bloggers republish stories. In return, a Web advertisement automatically runs at the bottom of the post, and the money from the ad goes to the Guardian. It’s an interesting way to widen the Guardian’s audience and its advertising reach, especially at a time when some news organizations are erecting pay walls around their websites.

“One of the obvious pros for us is the wider distribution and therefore the influence of our journalism,” The newspaper’s lead developer, Matt McAlister, wrote in an e-mail to me. “This tool is helping us to reach out to people around the world via the influencers who have a particular view to add and a desire to amplify the things that we publish. And if that works the way we hope it does then we will also form a high value ad network to offer commercial partners.”

One of the plugin’s nifty features is how it gives you access to the Guardian’s news feed right in your WordPress panel. It’s your own personal, searchable library of thousands of stories:

You can also browse by topic, and by the type of article, blog post, podcast, slideshow or other features.

You might notice I’m a few months behind in blogging about the plugin, which was released over the summer. That’s because until recently, it didn’t work for me. First there was a problem with my version of php. And once that got fixed, I couldn’t get access to the news feed. The Guardian’s Daniel Levitt was very responsive when I first asked for help back in July. But the mysterious problem didn’t get sorted out until recently, when a plugin update finally allowed me to use it.

Also, some stories in the news feed aren’t available. When I tried republishing a story about the WordPress plugin, I got an error message that stated: “We are very sorry, but that particular article is not available for redistribution.”

So the plugin offers cool features to share stories, but some bloggers might run into technical difficulties with it. Nonprofit news sites ProPublica and The Texas Tribune offer an easier-to-use “republish” method that allows bloggers to simply cut and paste the material. You don’t get a news feed this way, but it’s quick and painless.

“We love the ProPublica copy/paste feature and think it would make a lot of sense to offer that capability, too,” McAlister said.

The Guardian’s plugin is an interesting experiment. Instead of complaining about readers’ expectations to get news online for free, the Guardian is trying to figure out how to share free content, widen their audience, and make money, too.

Maybe it will work. Maybe the effort will fizzle. But it beats wringing our hands and yearning for the good old days.

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

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.

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no …

Journalists will tell you that where once newsroom incentives rewarded more deeply reported stories, now incentives skew toward work that can be turned around quickly and generate a bump in Web traffic …

None of this is written down anywhere, but it’s real. The Hamster Wheel, then, is investigations you will never see, good work left undone, public service not performed.

To some degree, the Hamster Wheel has always plagued news organizations but it’s getting worse. Starkman quantifies the damage — more stories are being cranked out by fewer journalists at the Wall Street Journal, for example, and time-strapped reporters are relying more on public relations spin.

The scariest part about the Hamster Wheel? It is a structure of our own making — no one is forcing journalists to get on the wheel. But we suffer from a misguided notion that we have no choice.

(Photo credit: sualk61)

Little Green Footballs is making an interesting offer to its online community: Pay $10 a month as a subscriber, and you’ll get to visit a cleaner, faster, ad-free version of the blog:

This isn’t just a cosmetic improvement; to display those ads from Google Adsense and Amazon, we have to make several calls to external web servers, which take quite a bit of time. And if those servers are slow or offline, it can cause the entire LGF page to load more slowly or even time out on rare occasions.

When you view our site with advertisements turned off, every page loads more quickly; it’s a very noticeable speed boost. (And as the designer of this mess, I have to say it looks a lot nicer too without the visual clutter.)

So, for the very low price of about 33 cents a day (less than the cheapest cup of Starbucks coffee), you can read LGF without the ads, at super-charged speed.

Maybe newspaper websites, which are often bogged down with ads, could benefit from this kind of revenue model. If outright paywalls don’t work, give loyal readers a chance to pay for a premium service. Would you pay good money for the luxury of an ad-free newspaper website?

I think I just might.

(Photo credit: Pink Ponk)