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In this July 25, 2019, photo, flowers and other items lay near a memorial plaque in the sidewalk near the spot where Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

In the summer of 2014, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis. As journalists began getting arrested, Poynter sent me back to the city — where I’d spent five years reporting — to cover what was happening. For a few days, I worked with a borrowed gas mask, a notebook, a backpack, my phone and a lot of goodwill from the journalists working there.

What’s happening now in Minneapolis is a vastly different story, largely told by journalists who also covered George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020. Still, while compiling a list of newsrooms ([link removed]) in Minnesota to follow for nuanced, accountable, community-centered reporting, I’ve been thinking a lot about the journalists I met more than a decade ago in Ferguson.

I reached out to them by email to check in.

Where were they now?

How did they look back on their work?

And did they have any advice for journalists in Minnesota?

Here’s what they told me, edited lightly for clarity and style.

Robert Cohen worked as a photojournalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That work earned the newspaper’s team a Pulitzer Prize ([link removed]) . He left the Post-Dispatch in 2024.

Still a news junkie, the daily paper still lands in my driveway most days, even though I get almost all news online. I've been following my former colleagues working so hard in Minnesota. That work churns memories of what happened in Ferguson in 2014 following the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Ferguson was really the launchpad of the rapid dissemination of a news story as it developed and grew live on Twitter. While the visuals we see today are similar, the landscape is entirely different. Ferguson is surrounded by dozens of municipalities, many with their own tiny police departments. When the first “Code 1000” was heard on police scanners, dispatched to help overwhelmed Ferguson police, officers from all of those departments came out in force to quell disturbances. Many appeared untrained in crowd control, shouting orders at protesters and media alike. To my eyes, they looked a lot like some current ICE agents working today in Minneapolis. In Ferguson, after a couple days, those officers were no longer used, replaced by tactical officers of the St. Louis County Police and the Missouri State Highway Patrol. In Minneapolis, they remain.

Though tear-gassed more times than I could count, and once pepper-sprayed point-blank in the face by a county police officer, I was never seriously injured. At least one colleague was hit by a rubber bullet in her leg, though police claimed no less-than-lethal munitions were used. Members of the media discovered casings and boxes on several mornings following violent protests, disputing those claims. Still, I never thought I might lose my life.

Today, those protesting ICE actions in Minnesota and those covering those protests in the media are truly risking their lives, no matter if they are protesters trained in civil disobedience or journalists trained in working in hostile environments. Many people reference a return to Germany in the 1930s. In the current environment, that's a tough statement to challenge.

Emanuele Berry worked as a culture and race reporter with St. Louis Public Radio and launched the podcast “We Live Here.” ([link removed]) She’s now the executive editor of “This American Life.”

I moved to St. Louis just a few weeks before Michael Brown was killed. I was young, only a few years out of college, and I was the only Black reporter at a local public radio station. In the moment, I felt swept up by the adrenaline and the urgency of what was happening. With a decade of distance, though, I see that as a profession, we did some of our best and worst work in Ferguson.

The reporting was essential. We were on the ground, holding power to account, documenting what might have been erased, something powerful happening. At the same time, there was reporting that leaned into spectacle and it felt like the town, its people, and its complexity had been reduced to one-dimensional tropes.

The thing I remember most distinctly from reporting during that period was how upset and used people felt after national media attention waned and left. As a local reporter, so many bridges were burned for me by the actions of others. So I’d say, please treat your sources with respect. Explain your job to them. Explain what you plan to do with the interview. Follow up with them. Let them know if something was published that includes them. Do not treat people as simply soundbites. People are opening up to you during a chaotic and vulnerable time, and you should really honor that. This feels basic, but in the rush of trying to get the story, it’s important to remember.

Be intentional about your story choices. Ask yourself whether you’re there simply because everyone else is in the breaking news cycle, or because you have something specific to add. Often, the most compelling stories aren’t found in moments of spectacle, but in the quieter, ongoing work of people’s lives. What is the personal goal or mission someone is trying to accomplish?

I think (“This American Life” producer and reporter) Chana Joffe-Walt did a great job of this in her stories covering Yousef Hammash ([link removed]) over the last year in Gaza. The war is part of the story, but the reporting centers on what he wants and needs to accomplish in his own life.

Make sure you have a safety plan in place. What are you and your newsroom’s red lines? Who are your contacts if you are in trouble? Make sure your staffers in the field feel like they aren’t out there alone.

Lastly, please take care of your mental and physical health. I remember working a full day, driving up to Ferguson, which is about 30 minutes outside of St. Louis, covering whatever protests were happening, driving back to the station, filing a spot, and getting home by midnight or later. Then I’d wake up and do it all again. I was mentally and physically burnt out. I don’t remember cooking, going to the gym, drinking water, or seeing the sun. I was a mess, and I didn’t feel like I could share that with anyone in my newsroom, or that I had space to have feelings about it or make sense of what I was seeing. It pushed me to a point where I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue in journalism. So please, editors and newsrooms, take care of your reporters in Minnesota. Check in with them. And reporters, ask for help and ask for space.

This is such an important story, and I want us to get it right.

Amber Hinsley worked as an assistant professor ([link removed]) of communications at St. Louis University in 2014. She’s now an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University. Hinsley worked as a crime reporter in Los Angeles earlier in her career.

My SLU colleague Hyunmin Lee and I studied the different ways journalists and activists used social media (Twitter specifically) as a crisis communication tool following Michael Brown’s death and the unrest in Ferguson. We found that local journalists primarily followed professional norms like sharing objective information, and local activists more often shared opinions and calls to action. Back then, I feel like we had fewer journalists trained in how to safely cover protests and how to respond when questioned or threatened by law enforcement. Ferguson was a training ground for a lot of journalists and news organizations — in that they learned they needed better training before sending journalists into those situations and to have conversations about journalists experiencing trauma in their work before and after they cover the crisis.

Minnesota and Ferguson, obviously, are different situations. We’re not seeing the same type of ongoing destruction that occurred in some places around Ferguson, but the community-level frustration is there. We are seeing similarities in the ways that different sides seek to establish their narratives as the “truth.” Those narratives are playing out across a variety of platforms, and it’s a lot for journalists to sift through in their reporting — even more now than before. In Ferguson, it seemed that some journalists were targeted for arrest (in cases that were ultimately dropped). What scares me for journalists in Minnesota is that they may not have the opportunity to identify themselves as journalists or that the identification will be ignored in a situation that quickly escalates with violence.

Journalists need to have frank conversations with their newsroom leaders about expectations for coverage and to what extent their organization will support them in case of arrest or injury.

Richard Weiss is a former St. Louis Beacon ([link removed]) colleague of mine and a longtime writing coach. He co-founded the nonprofit ([link removed]) River City Journalism Fund.

I was out of town when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in 2014 — in a completely different world. While Brown’s body lay baking on the pavement in the August heat in St. Louis, I was with my wife, Sally, outside calm, cool Bemidji, Minnesota, at the edge of Lake Plantagenet. I remember feeling guilty and a little helpless, watching the news roll in on my phone and wondering what, if anything, I could possibly do from there.

That feeling has stayed with me. It still shapes how I think about journalism when a community is hurting, and the story is bigger than any one newsroom.

I was 63 then and had taken a buyout from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a decade before. But I stayed close to local journalism, mostly trying to figure out how to keep social justice reporting alive when newsrooms kept shrinking. One result of that work is the River City Journalism Fund ([link removed]) , a small nonprofit that Sally (J. Altman, Weiss’ wife and fellow journalist) and I founded that helps pay for local reporting in the St. Louis region.

Covering Ferguson wasn’t just about protests, press conferences, or live shots. The hardest and most important part was trying to explain the deeper stuff — how housing policy, policing, municipal boundaries, school systems, and race all collided in one place. A lot of that story had been sitting there for years. It just took a crisis for the wider world to notice.

Local reporters were also covering their own communities — neighbors, friends, schools their kids attended. That adds a layer of emotional weight that outsiders don’t always see. It forced a lot of us to think harder about listening, accuracy, fairness, and how easily trust can be lost.

It also taught me that the real work doesn’t end when national attention goes away. The aftermath — policy changes, court cases, community fatigue, small improvements, lingering anger — matters just as much.

Watching what’s happening now in Minneapolis feels uncomfortably familiar. The facts are moving fast. The emotions are high. Different versions of the story are flying around at once. And local reporters are right in the middle of it.

A few things I’d offer, based on what we learned over the last decade: Zig when others zag. Where are the holes in the coverage offered? How can you effectively fill the gap on your own and with others? Spend as much time as you can listening to people who actually live there. Not just activists or officials, but residents who are trying to make sense of what’s happening in their own lives. Keep explaining the “why,” not just the “what.” The timeline matters, but the backstory matters more. Be clear about what you know and what you don’t know yet. Audiences can handle uncertainty better than false certainty.

Back in Bemidji, staring at a peaceful lake while Ferguson was burning up the news cycle, I felt useless. What I’ve learned since is that showing up, listening carefully, helping other people tell their stories, and sticking with the work longer than the headlines last actually does matter — even when it doesn’t always feel like enough in the moment.


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Thanks for reading. This newsletter will be off next week, but I’ll be back Feb. 11.
Hug your people,
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Kristen Hare
Faculty
The Poynter Institute
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