John Tedesco

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.

Jay Rosen at PressThink came up with a funny tweet last week:

It’s a clever way of pointing out that journalists are spending way too much time on stories that people can get anywhere — for free — on the Internet.

The lesson here is that the media need to stop making so many snowmen and start building more igloos — digging up valuable facts that shelter people from a chaotic world of misinformation, and telling readers about those facts with storytelling skills that grab them and don’t let go.

The Hearst investigative series “Dead by Mistake” is an example of an igloo. It took months of work, the stories went into chilling detail about a little-known problem, and when the stories were published in Hearst newspapers across the country, the project went social on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and its own Web page. It created a unique resource for readers and opened up a conversation with them.

I’d say that’s worth $5.

This is why it’s so frustrating to watch media corporations, including Hearst, slash newsroom budgets. Journalists are still building igloos for readers, but it’s getting harder.

If newspapers decline to the point where we simply churn out snowmen all the time, readers are going to legitimately ask, why are we paying for this?

Evan Smith (left) on Texas Monthly Talks, interviewing John Edwards.

Texas Monthly’s Evan Smith, who is leaving the “national magazine of Texas” to launch the nonprofit Texas Tribune, is swiftly staking a claim for watchdog journalism by hiring reporters with a strong track record of digging up important stories.

The Tribune, a fledgling Web publication, is going to cover state government and politics. It announced today that it acquired the Texas Weekly newsletter and hired its first batch of five reporters. A common thread connecting each hire is how they’ve spent years aggressively covering state politics and government in Austin.

I’m most familiar with the work of Emily Ramshaw and Matt Stiles. Emily is a Dallas Morning News reporter who uncovered abuses in the Texas state school system, which serves people with mental retardation. Emily broke the story about state school workers in Corpus Christi who organized fight-club style matches between vulnerable residents. There were even cell-phone videos of the fights.

Matt worked at the Houston Chronicle’s Austin Bureau and often produced interesting, computer-driven stories based on data analysis. (He describes himself on Twitter as a “data monkey.”) Earlier this year, he analyzed a database of lobbyist spending kept by the Texas Ethics Commission and found lobbyists spent $12 million wining and dining state politicians.

Here’s a pdf of the complete press release by the Texas Tribune, which is funded by venture capitalist John Thornton.

The hirings indicate the Tribune is making good on its promise to publish original news online. Phillip Martin at Burnt Orange Report says: “The Texas Tribune is going to make a big, big splash when they launch in November.”

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattwright/)

Even Twitter gets in on the act.

Deborah Nelson

How best to get at the cost for society, for journalism and for journalists of the loss of thousands of jobs at American newspapers? This series tries to do it by asking journalists who have shown themselves capable of producing work of the highest caliber – winners of the Pulitzer Prize who are no longer at a newspaper – for their reflections on what happened to them, what it’s meant and how they view the future.

He interviewed Deborah Nelson, who won a Pulitzer in 1997 with Eric Nalder and Alex Tizon for their stories about abuses in a federal Indian-housing program. She left the news business to teach.

Deborah says:

Where did the news business go wrong? I’d start with the growing obsession over the past couple decades with short-term earnings, and a corresponding neglect of the long view. I remember feeling unsettled back in the early 1990s with how near-sighted the corporate financial model had become. I didn’t have a business degree, but anyone with a driver’s license knows the importance of keeping one eye on what lies ahead.

Eric Nalder wrote this great lede on the Seattle Times’ Pulitzer series on oil tanker safety after the Exxon Valdez disaster. He described standing on the deck of an oil tanker “as long as three football fields” with the lone crew member assigned to watch the distant horizon for small boats and icebergs – and discovering that the guy couldn’t see, that he suffered from double vision. That kind of describes the last 20 years of the newspaper industry. The iceberg was in view long before we hit it, but no one with any real vision was looking that far ahead.

Here’s what I remember about Walter Cronkite: In this interview with David Letterman after 9/11, Cronkite talked about the importance of the media reporting on the government’s planned invasion of Afghanistan.

Everyone talks about the public’s right to know, but Cronkite took it a step further by saying: “We have a duty to be kept informed.”

To make his point, he talked about German civilians who, at the end of World War II, expressed shock at the concentration camps in their own backyard:

They didn’t know what was going on behind those walls. Well, I can believe some of them may not have known. Maybe many of them didn’t know. But they were just as guilty as the Nazis themselves for what happened because they applauded when Hitler shut down their newspapers and shut down their radio and they said, ‘We don’t need to know. We trust our government.’ They became guilty when they did that. We have to know, as a duty.

A new cause for Sally Struthers. I love the shot of the copy editor eating ramen.

I just got off the phone with Tammy Haby, who I interviewed for this story about the safety record of Kiddie Park. Haby’s son, Holden, had his teeth knocked out in a rollercoaster accident at the old park.

“Thank you for bringing this all to light and sharing it with everybody,” Tammy said. “We appreciate it.”

Express-News photographer Helen Montoya and I visited the Haby family and I also interviewed Tammy several times over the phone. The family was willing to share their story because it was a very scary incident and they didn’t want the same thing to happen to others.

Tammy admitted she had some initial reservations talking with a reporter when I first called their house.

“Celebrities, they’re always saying, ‘Well, they took my words out of context.’” Tammy said of the media. So it was nice to hear that the experience was positive for both her and Holden, who was excited to see his picture on the front page of the newspaper.

“It was very professional, and I just really appreciate that,” said Tammy, who said she was happy to let me quote her on my blog.

There was a time when the memories of the accident were so raw that they couldn’t talk about it. Today, they felt comfortable sharing their story. And I think this is why the media can play such an important role in people’s lives. The reason why we come knocking on people’s doors is because these stories matter.

So thanks, Tammy and Holden, for letting me share your story.

It seemed like every section of today’s paper had a story that grabbed me and surprised me and told me something about the world I didn’t know before.

I”ve always thought one of the problems facing newspapers is that they have to go to press every day — even when there’s no engrossing stories to tell. There have been times when I “read” a paper in minutes because nothing grabbed me. Nothing made me think, “Wow, I didn’t know that.”

It sure was a pleasure to sit down with a steaming cup of coffee this morning and simply get lost in some compelling stories.

It had been a long time since I last heard from John Putnam. I met him in person once when we attended a court hearing at an old, eerily quiet courthouse in Llano, Texas, but we’ve had countless conversations by phone. And when the phone rang at my desk at the San Antonio Express-News a few days ago and I heard John’s familiar voice, I was dumbstruck by the latest news:

Someone had stolen his sister’s ashes.

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