We watched the chaos from our living room.
Orange is the New Black was ending when Michael saw the first tweets:
Michael: “Someone got shot at the rally downtown.”
Me: “Someone?”
Michael: “I think it was a cop. Or two.”
Me: “Oh god, this is going to be ugly.”
We spent the next few hours on Twitter and eventually started watching Facebook livestreams on the TV.
The Black Lives Matter march in downtown Dallas ended with a sniper firing into the crowd. All of the Dallas media outlets had a presence downtown, and everyone in the march had a smartphone, so we immediately got footage of the chaos.
It was like watching one of those “found footage” disaster movies – There were videos of gunshots, screaming crowds, and fallen policemen. But the live footage prompted more questions: How many people were dead? One sniper or three? Someone mentioned bombs. Are there really bombs? Are my new coworkers from the newspaper okay?
The local TV stations had to scramble to keep up with the pace of social media. At one point, a local news anchor just pulled up Tweetdeck and started reading tweets.
A news anchor pulling up Tweetdeck on live TV. Note that one of the columns says “competition.”
Your access to information depended on the strength of your Twitter lists, and it was apparent that the traditional TV outlets were hopelessly behind.