John Tedesco

The suit at the 18 second mark is 100 percent pure awesome.

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)

The San Antonio Express-News building. Photo credit: Sean McGee on Flickr

They might be right for leaving and I might be an idiot for staying. But right now, I still see the Express-News as a place that gives reporters a chance to do good work.

It seems like every day I read an online comment accusing the mainstream media of abandoning watchdog journalism. But at the Express-News, we still have a crew of skilled journalists who are paid full-time salaries to dig up stories that tell readers what’s really going on in the city. That’s huge.

Take a look at these headlines published in 2009:

I’m not here to be a cheerleader for every decision made by the Express-News or its parent company, Hearst Corp. I’m personally frustrated by the glacial pace of change at the paper — we don’t even have an iPhone app yet, for crying out loud.

But this is still a newspaper that publishes hard-hitting investigative stories that truly make a difference. As long as it remains that kind of paper, my New Year’s resolution is this: I’m going to try to stick it out.

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.

In this great post at Mashable, Leah Betancourt profiled five journalists, including yours truly, and asked why we use social media:

There’s a lot of hype behind measuring social media ROI. But what about the payoff on an individual basis? Those who invest time into social media on a daily basis need to see a return on that time to make it worthwhile. Journalists who regularly use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook on the job with success make it part of their daily routine, and focus on communicating quality content that’s worthwhile to recipients.

There’s good advice for everyone in this post — not just journalists. “Though this post focuses on journalists, many of their tips can be more broadly applied to anyone working with social media tools.”

I hate celebrity news. So it should be refreshing to read the chorus of complaints about the media unfairly wallowing in the muck of Tiger Woods marital “transgressions.” Here’s what reader “w_sands” posted on an Associated Press story on our site: “Woods says he let family down:”

Is this really any or our business? If any reader of this rag had anything like this going on in there lives it probably would not be known outside of their immediate social circle. And please, no feedback that because he is a celebrity we have the “right” to know. “Right” being the key word here…where are his rights? Lost because he is a celebrity? I think not!

Normally I’d wholeheartedly agree. But there are two factors about this sordid saga that, to me, actually make this celebrity story newsworthy, at least in the early days of the coverage:

Once that falsehood was released publicly to millions of fans, the media was right to try to figure out what really happened.

I’ve stopped paying attention to the most recent titillating coverage about Tiger’s alleged mistresses. I don’t care. But in the initial days after the accident, I was glad to see TMZ correct the public record about the accident and get the truth out.

(Photo credit: Keith Allison)

Here’s a clever video that pokes fun at iPhone commercials and reminds us about the “amazing full-color display” of old-school newspapers.

The Web is amazing. It gives journalists a way to produce interactive graphics and videos, post breaking news and share conversations with readers.

But newspapers are easier to read. Newspapers offer huge photos and compelling lay outs. And you don’t need a Wi-Fi hot spot to use newspapers.

iPhones and newspapers are both cool. Just in different ways.

(h/t mUmBRELLA and crindalyn)

San Antonio Express-News

While I don’t like the dismal news about how newspapers have fallen on hard times, I like the way the San Antonio Express-News has confronted the problem. I read the complete edition of the SAEN online Monday through Thursday and then read the print edition Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This arrangement gives me the flexibility to keep up with the news in ways that are conducive to both my work and personal schedules.

While I-10 replaced U.S. 90, the airplane replaced the train and TV replaced radio, people continue to use those old modes of travel and communication. Probably, the same could be said about the Internet replacing the newspaper. The old reliable is still in use because it offers attractive, viable alternatives to the modern.

Blount makes an interesting point. Weekends are when a lot of people have time to sit down and fully digest the newspaper. Weekdays, not so much. But online traffic spikes. An Associated Press story today examined how newspapers are cutting back print operations on less profitable days such as Mondays, when advertising is thin.

“In an industry struggling with bankruptcy filings, diminished advertising and the exodus of many readers to the Internet, about 100 U.S. newspapers have either reduced the number of days they publish or gone to the Web entirely,” wrote reporter Jim Salter. This is not entirely a bad thing, the story says, since the newspapers save money from reduced production costs. The papers publish later in the week with editions that are their real cash cows.

So maybe Blount is on to something.

If the media need a reason to keep funding investigative journalism, maybe these survey results will help.

As South Texas deals with a seemingly never-ending drought, San Antonio Express-News Environmental Reporter Anton Caputo teamed up with Austin American-Statesman Reporter Asher Price for this story about the water supply that cools nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project in Matagorda County.

The utility companies of both cities own a stake in STP, which creates a situation where both newspapers are examining a proposed expansion of the nuclear facility. Instead of competing like newspapers in a bygone golden era, both papers are collaborating in an era of shrinking newsrooms and budget cuts.

In this case, the final product was interesting. Sunday’s story by Anton and Asher was a good read. The reporters pulled together some useful information about how much crucial coolant the plant needs and whether the Colorado River can provide it. There’s an interesting map produced by the Statesman that shows the top water users along the Colorado River, giving readers a sense of the demand for water. And Express-News graphic artist Mike Fisher created this cool animation explaining why water is important for a nuclear plant.

The Express-News and the Houston Chronicle, both owned by Hearst Corp., already share news resources, but the Express-News has rarely teamed up so extensively with a newspaper owned by a different company. The Statesman is owned by Cox Newspapers. The last time I can think of an example of such cooperation was in the late 1990s, when reporters with the Express-News and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune were often in contact during the coverage of Sheila Bellush, a mother of quadruplets who had lived in San Antonio, moved to Florida, and was killed in a murder-for-hire plot hatched by her ex-husband, Allen Blackthorne.

We seldom, if ever, wrote stories or shared bylines with the folks in Sarasota. We mostly shared information and court documents, which made sense for a story that was playing out in two cities a thousand miles apart.

Maybe this will be a rising trend among Texas newspapers as newsrooms shrink, but hopefully they collaborate for valid reasons, not because it sounds good in an editorial meeting. The journalists need to be crystal clear about what, exactly, the collaborators bring to the table.

Interesting letter-to-the-editor today in the San Antonio Express-News written by Linnea Schlobohm, who sums up one of the main themes of this blog better than I ever could:

After reading Brian Chasnoff’s beautifully crafted story on the San Antonio River, “Paradise Lost to Progress” (Front Page, Sept. 6), I remembered a recent TV comment predicting the demise of newspapers because everything in them is old news.

I beg to differ. Chasnoff did more than give me a headline and some statistics. He pulled me into a compelling story and, more importantly, presented vivid images of the river, its history and its potential future.

That’s not old news. That’s news in-depth. And that’s what we need when we’re making decisions about finances, resources and quality of life. Long live good reporters and good newspapers.