Investigative Journalist in Houston, Texas
With all the doom and gloom we keep hearing about newspapers, you’d think no one ever reads them. Tell that to Aaron Blanco. Six days ago, reporter Brian Chasnoff wrote a cool feature story about Blanco and his company, Brown Coffee Co., where Blanco roasts fresh coffee beans in small batches to unlock pungent, fruity … Read more
God, I love the Onion.
I just got my copy of the San Francisco Panorama, the hefty, 320 page, one-time-only newspaper that feels as vast as the bridge pictured on its cover. The brainchild of David Eggers, the Panorama is intended to remind us what a newspaper can be — a skillfully written, stunningly designed product that grabs readers, surprises … Read more
Check out this Chesterfield Cigarette ad published in the San Antonio Express newspaper in 1919: Chesterfields satisfy your smoke-hunger just as a drink of cold water satisfies your thirst. They go straight to your smoke-spot. Anita Baca, a photo editor at the Express-News, brought in a gigantic volume of aged, crinkly newspapers from 1919. The … Read more
Express-News reader Jamie Blount might have shown us the future of newspapers in this letter to the editor today: 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 … Read more
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 a 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 … Read more
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 … Read more
If you were under investigation by both mainstream journalists and bloggers, who would be easier to intimidate: One single newspaper, or dozens of bloggers? Pulitzer-prize winner Alex Jones says the downfall of newspapers threatens investigative reporting, because papers have the legal muscle to shrug off threats of lawsuits. Michael Masnick at Techdirt and Tim Lee … Read more
To reveal how cutbacks are damaging the newspaper industry, John Temple is profiling talented, Pulitzer-prize winning reporters who are no longer in the business: 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 … Read more
Gotta love this letter to the editor by engineer Wendell Peters published today in the San Antonio Express-News: After an explosion at one of our power plants, CPS Energy urged us to conserve power. I was curious to see how much power is used by the digital billboards gracing our highways. The CPS meter is … Read more