The Evansville Fire Department earlier this year acknowledged problems with its vehicle repair program and instituted a series of changes ranging from new reporting software to a new semiannual, independent inspection.

Those developments, though, came largely in response to the department's handling of repairs - fixing problems submitted by firefighters who work with equipment each day.

Following up on that story, I began an investigation into the department's routine maintenance program. The work - which includes all the normal maintenance you do for a car as well as tests of firefighting-specific equipment - is supposed to be done annually.

But after scouring a sizable stack of handwritten records detailing the maintenance history of all the department vehicles, I found that the work was often happening with much less frequency.

The resulting story ran on the front page of a recent Sunday edition. It's the first in a series of stories we plan on the fire department and some of the problems surrounding its vehicle maintenance program. Work on the next will begin this week.

In other news, I did some more video work when a major fire sparked at a horse stable in Henderson, the Kentucky city just across the river from Evansville. More than 25 horses were killed in the blaze, which quickly consumed the structure.

I shot the video with just my Flip camera and a monopod and then quickly edited it together using Moviemaker.

We're increasingly focusing on video across the newsroom - all reporters will be getting point-and-shoot cameras soon and I hope to receive a new camera capable of shooting widescreen HD video and some software with a little more editing options soon. One of my goals over the next year is to train additional staffers to be comfortable shooting and editing video from beginning to end.

Sort of in that vein, I recently had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at High School Media Day at the University of Southern Indiana. I shared a presentation I put together called "Journalism in the 21st Century" in which I showed examples of all the multimedia and Web work we're doing and talked about how important it will be in the coming years.

Lastly, I've been hard at work updating and redesigning the clips section on this site. It now has PDFs of select stories - complete with text and design - as well as embedded videos, photos I've taken, links to databases I created and examples from college and internships. I'm still working out a few kinks and trying to make it look normal in all different browsers, but I think it's coming along nicely. Check it out.