John Tedesco

Veteran observers of San Antonio politics experienced a deja vu moment the other night when a familiar story graced their TV screens. WOAI Trouble Shooter Brian Collister told viewers that Bexar County judges are using a flawed process to appoint lawyers to indigent defendants. If this story rings a bell, it should — Collister broke a similar story in 2002 about then County-Court-at-Law Judge M’Liss Christian giving David Garcia, a lawyer and city councilman at the time, most of Garcia’s indigent defense work at the courthouse.

This was an interesting fact, considering how Christian and Garcia were rumored to be a romantic item.

In 2002, the Express-News and other San Antonio news organizations scrambled to keep up with Collister’s bombshell coverage of Christian and Garcia. But for this more recent court story, Collister did something weird — the hyper competitive TV reporter asked if the Express-News wanted to team up.

How the heck did that happen?

It turned out Collister was working on his courthouse story around the same time Express-News reporter Brian Chasnoff was also digging into the issue. Last month, Chasnoff wrote a story about Bexar County’s erratic method of appointing defense lawyers to low-income clients. The story was based on a state report by the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense, which determined that Bexar County was violating the Texas Fair Defense Act.

It was an important story. If you’re poor and accused of a crime in Texas, you’re entitled to a court-appointed lawyer. That lawyer is supposed to be randomly appointed to your case from a rotating pool of eligible lawyers. But in Bexar County, judges were appointing hundreds of lawyers who weren’t even on the approved list, and a small number of lawyers had amassed the most work and income.

The state report obtained by Chasnoff did not identify the lawyers who got the most work. But Collister had already obtained a county database that named names. It identified the lawyers receiving court appointments; how much they were paid; and the judges that gave out the work. A handful of attorneys were making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is where things get interesting.

In the old days, Collister would have done his own story in an effort to compete with the Express-News. But times have changed in journalism. There are fewer warm bodies in newsrooms, and while there’s still heated competition between news organizations in Texas, there’s also a new willingness to pool resources, collaborate on stories, and reach wider audiences.

So Collister approached the Express-News and asked if it wanted to team up for a detailed story about court-appointed lawyers.

“The idea was, ‘You have a piece of the puzzle, I have a piece of the puzzle. Let’s work together and make a better story,’” Collister told me. “The days of there being cutthroat competition, to a point, are over.”

It was an odd sight watching Collister hanging out in the Express-News, hovering over Chasnoff’s desk and collaborating like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I asked Chasnoff what it was like working with Collister. Chasnoff said he was pleasantly surprised. He didn’t encounter the heavy handed reporter on TV who shoves fuzzy microphones in people’s faces during ambush interviews. Collister had good ideas, and his court data saved Chasnoff a lot of time. Before they teamed up, Chasnoff had requested similar data from the county, so partnering with Collister meant Chasnoff didn’t have to waste time waiting for the information. “He had the goods,” Chasnoff said.

Chasnoff wrote a long news story that ran in the Sunday paper and WOAI produced its own version of the story. They identified the top lawyers and how much they were paid and posted the data online:

The top earner, lawyer Hilda Valadez, earned more than $400,000 in the past three years, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the average court-appointed attorney.

In at least one courtroom, the inequity appears rooted in cronyism. Attorney Edward Adams, who contributed the most in the past year to the failed re-election campaign of County Court Judge Monica Guerrero, also was appointed the most cases and earned by far the most money in Guerrero’s court in the past three years.

Both news organizations brought different strengths to the table. WOAI told the story with pictures and audio, while the newspaper story went into greater depth and detail. Collister said he was pleased by the long, nuanced newspaper article. In most TV stories, he has to leave a lot of good material on the cutting room floor — that’s the nature of the beast in TV news, which is always crunched for time. So it was nice to have the newspaper story include points that he didn’t have a chance to air.

“To see it all get out there is just really gratifying,” Collister said.

I like news scoops as much as the next guy. But I’m starting to warm up to the notion that there’s a benefit to teaming up, every once in awhile, with other news organizations to pool resources and reach a broader audience.

Even after the stories ran, the teamwork between Collister and Chasnoff continued. The stories generated interesting tips from readers and viewers. Chasnoff said he and Collister have been sharing tips, and they might work on follow-up stories together.

“His attitude is, we stay unified,” Chasnoff said, “and we push the story forward.”

Observations from Bexar County voters and Express-News journalists on Election Day:

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:

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.

We teamed up with the Texas Tribune for this story that explores why Texans tend to get concealed handgun permits in affluent areas, but not in low-income neighborhoods with higher rates of crime.

Tribune reporter Brandi Grissom and I wrote the story, along with an article about the surge in gun permits that occurred in 2009 after Barack Obama was elected. Matt Stiles at the Tribune helped with the data analysis and made some cool interactive maps that compare the pattern of gun permits to income levels and election results.

The package got some interesting feedback from readers, ranging from “no duh” to discussions about why law-abiding citizens in low-income neighborhoods aren’t seeking concealed-carry licenses.

John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” also responded with a blog post stressing how the cost of concealed gun licenses can reduce the number of people who obtain them:

This is the point that I have been trying to make with my research for years. Higher permit fees and the costs of getting training not only reduce the number of permit holders, but they also make it so those who benefit the most from permits don’t get them. Both of those reasons work to reduce the benefit from right-to-carry laws.

Express-News columnist Scott Stroud wondered if this is yet another sign of a polarized society:

The tendency to live, work and worship among people who agree with us has accelerated in recent years and shows no sign of waning. In that context, the notion that the two major political tribes harbor different views about guns isn’t shocking.

Any time the media delves into the hot-button issue of guns, some readers are going to be suspicious of the finished product. But I enjoyed speaking with the gun owners and instructors who were quoted in the story and video — I think they figured out I wasn’t a stereotypical sensational journalist. Instructor Michael Arnold invited me to a concealed handgun class and I got to hear him paraphrase Sun Tzu as he told students the best way to win a fight is to avoid a fight. Brock Wilkerson at A Place to Shoot also invited me to a concealed handgun class at his shooting range. Wilkerson let me spend two afternoons at the range and I met his customers and cool employees.

They helped us put the voices of real people in the story. Along the way, I leaned a lot — and hopefully, our readers did, too.

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.

In January, Express-News Reporter Jason Buch profiled Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a U.S. citizen from Laredo who had risen through the ranks of a Mexican drug cartel. In high school, Valdez Villarreal was a jock who got the nickname “Barbie” for his light-colored eyes and hair. Years later in Mexico, he was poised to become a ruthless drug boss.

This week, Valdez Villarreal was arrested in Mexico and NPR featured an interesting interview with Jason yesterday about Villarreal. You can hear a Mexican ballad that extols the virtues of the drug lord, and how he’s such an intelligent businessman. Great stuff.

After Reporter Karisa King began writing about the complicated world of tax breaks for housing developers — and how those incentives are being abused — tipsters told her to check out state Rep. Jose Menendez.

Karisa did. And what she found out was published on the front page of last Sunday’s San Antonio Express-News:

After the development firm NRP Group LLC lost its second bid for tax credits to finance an affordable-housing project on the city’s West Side, an influential ally intervened in the company’s cause.

State Rep. Jose Menendez took the lectern at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs and urged board members to fund the San Juan Square II project, a 144-unit apartment complex that would replace blighted public housing. …

What Menendez did not tell the board at the meeting was that the development represented something else: a financial boon for the company he works for, Stewart Title, which had received $91,000 for issuing title insurance on the project’s first stage, and landed nearly all of NRP’s business on affordable-housing deals.

Payouts from the San Juan developments were among about $1.8 million paid to Stewart Title from NRP housing deals since 2003, records show.

Since joining the Legislature in 2000, Menendez has been one of the most outspoken supporters of NRP and other developers in the affordable-housing sector.

At the same time, the San Antonio Democrat has ascended the ranks of Stewart Title to become vice president for commercial development in the company’s national division.

Karisa said she spent six weeks working on the story about Menendez. It was easy to confirm that he worked for Stewart Title. But his ties to the company raised a hard-to-answer question: How much money did Stewart Title make from the housing deals? That’s not something you can answer by Googling it.

Sometimes journalism is simply the act of quantifying something. You might know the broad outlines of a story very early in the reporting process, but you have to figure out how to fill in the gaps.

If you’ve ever bought a house, you know real-estate transactions churn out tons of paperwork. Normally most of those records are private. But because tax breaks were involved in the housing deals Karisa was looking at, the real estate records were considered public information, open to anyone who asked.

Karisa found the fees paid to Stewart Title by driving to Austin and reading the records for housing projects that receive tax breaks, which are filed at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs in Austin. “I spent two days just going through boxes and boxes of documents,” Karisa said.

As she read through the files, Karisa typed key information such as the title fees into a simple Excel spreadsheet. After days of work, she was able to add up the fees for each housing project: A grand total of $1.8 million in title fees were paid to Stewart Title.

What did Mendendez have to say about that? Check out the whole story, it’s a great read.

The biggest single stimulus project scheduled to be built in Bexar County is a new highway interchange between traffic-clogged Loop 1604 and U.S. 281 on San Antonio’s far North Side. The project is estimated to cost $130 million, with $80 million coming from federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2015.

But the site sits on the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, the primary source of San Antonio’s drinking supply — and the source of San Antonio’s fiercest debates about pollution from urban sprawl tainting the aquifer.

Here’s a time line of events leading up to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas that could jeopardize the project. The lawsuit accuses transportation agencies of failing to protect the Edwards Aquifer.

In a way, it’s history repeating itself. The highway intersection was the site of one of the very first controversies involving the aquifer, when developers in the 1970s wanted to build a “super mall” near the location that sparked a petition and referendum by concerned residents who tried to halt the development.

All these years later, the dust hasn’t settled.

Construction workers on the River Walk's Mission Reach

Our latest story about the stimulus is about how much federal money is flowing to Bexar County, what kind of projects are being funded, and what will the lasting impact be?

Stimulus money is fixing headstones at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, building new playgrounds, painting buildings at Lackland AFB, paying for 50 new police officers and reshaping the San Antonio River.

It’s funding high-profile projects that will benefit future generations — and paying for obscure work that hardly will be noticed.

Sometimes, it feels like the biggest beneficiaries of the Recovery Act are companies that make the outlandishly sized checks for ribbon-cuttings, where politicians frequently take credit for stimulus projects.

But behind the photo ops are a large number of companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations that were awarded 775 grants and contracts in Bexar County worth more than $850 million, according to spending reports released last week by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Another $60 million in stimulus money is being loaned to local businesses.

We’ve been spending a few months examining the local impact of the Recovery Act — past stories are here and here. I’ve also been bookmarking useful resources through Diigo — feel free to check out my real-time list of handy websites.

For the latest story, we mostly relied on data you can download directly from Recovery.gov, the website of the Recovery Board. The data doesn’t have a “county” category, but you can match the zip code of each award with the zip codes of your county. If you’re simply interested in seeing what kind of stimulus projects are being funded in your county or neighborhood, the Recovery Board offers an interactive map that lets you drill down to the street level. Each stimulus project shows up as a dot — click on it to learn more details.