ABSTRACT
Dina Cappiello of the Houston Chronicle kept getting the same skeptical response from some of
her colleagues as she worked on her story about toxics in Houston’s air. “‘You’re going to
tell us the air in Houston is polluted?’ they asked. ‘Yeah, right.’” Everyone knew that for
years the EPA had rated Houston’s air quality among the worst in the nation. Cappiello’s
reporting was finding that not only was the air foul but that the chemicals were endangering
the health of people in many Houston neighborhoods. Despite this discovery, she feared
that many readers would share that same cynical attitude as her colleagues. How was she
going to overcome that reader skepticism? One day she sat with one of the newspaper’s
better writers to discuss the problem. At the end of the talk the writer wrote five words on
a piece of paper-“It’s worse than you thought.” Cappiello wrote it on a card and stuck it
at the top of her computer. She used that five-word message to mold her thinking about
the six months of reporting and to guide what became a six-part series (Cappiello, 2006).
