Web Editor: Ferguson
Everyone in the St. Louis area knows where they were during a particular August 2014 weekend. At the time, I was the digital editor for the Riverfront Times, and I was working Saturday, Aug. 9, at the office, putting together slideshows and monitoring social media for story tips. That's when I saw the initial tweet from a man who said Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer, had shot and killed black teen Michael Brown and left his body on the asphalt for hours. After finding several resident tweets confirming the information, I alerted my editor-in-chief, who immediately put a nearby reporter on it. Brown's death sparked endless local and international coverage about this small St. Louis suburb and launched increasingly necessary conversations on race and police brutality.
As digital editor for the RFT, I was the hub for online communication during this ever-changing time. I coordinated the RFT's photo coverage and freelance pool, used social media to amplify the livetweeting from our field reporters and coordinate their locations, gathered citizen observations for my own stories, wrote detailed introductions to related slideshows, and syndicated relevant photos and stories from our newspaper chain's other periodicals around the country. A few of my items are below, in chronological order, where possible. Note: Due to CMS changes, items do not appear as they did when originally published; formatting is different, some photo captions are gone and some links are broken.
Learn more about my everyday work as digital editor at https://www.behance.net/gallery/53680201/Riverfront-Times-Slideshows
Below, a few Twitter posts (of thousands) from the back half of 2014:
