Jeffrey Layne Blevins: Social media lessons from #Ferguson

By National Urban League
Published05 AM EST, Sun Dec 22, 2024
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By Jeffrey Layne Blevins, www.stltoday.com

I returned home to Cincinnati after visiting family in St. Louis the evening of Aug. 10, 2014. Hell was breaking loose in Ferguson. As a St. Louis-area native, I was eager to know what was happening. Coverage on cable news networks was limited, and so I took to the internet and then social media to get first-hand accounts of what was taking place in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown Jr. by a white police officer, Darren Wilson.

Following #Ferguson as it trended on Twitter throughout the months that followed, I became more curious, as a journalism professor, about how social media might affect the relationship between traditional news media and the public. 

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