Wednesday, July 10, 2013

What happened on June 27

Annnddd...I lied.

No, that's a little strong. When I made a promise at the end of my last post, I meant it; I was not deliberately deceiving.

I just forgot to follow through. I'll blame the holiday for that. But I don't have anything/one to blame for not having posted since then.

I was supposed to talk about what happened on June 27. To put it simply, on June 26, I became a witness to unplanned hard news. I attended a community meeting, and as the meeting was winding down, one of the men there who had stepped outside, rushed back in and said something like, "Everbody in the building needs to come outside right now."

When we went outside, we saw a photojournalist and a schoolteacher, both of whom I had spoken with just minutes before, on the ground, in handcuffs.

I took a picture:


...and posted it on Facebook, with this status: "RIGHT NOW a journalist and a schoolteacher who just left the meeting are in handcuffs. Call all media! Share!"

I knew that this was a breaking news story that deserved a larger audience than my Facebook friends. And I began shooting video. And I took more pictures, and posted them to Facebook, and posted more verbal updates as the evening progressed, and by the end of the night, I had an account up on Homewood Nation, which became the go-to spot for the story - which, on June 27, more than 4,000 people did go to.

That was, to say the least, very cool for me. Even more cool was that all three major TV stations wound up using both my photo and my video and crediting Homewood Nation as they did - over and over.

It's been two weeks now, and I haven't kept all of those readers, but I hope that some are sticking around, or coming back, or that they will come back.

BUT - I haven't posted anything THERE since July 2.

Sigh. This whole fear-of-success thing, or whatever the heck it is that's going on, has got to go.

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