HOW BLACK LIVES MAT TER MADE THE NEWS

It was barely August, and I was doing early morning shifts as a radio host. That meant getting up right around sunrise and biking a few blocks through thick summer shadows to WYSO, the small radio station on the campus of Antioch College. Our newsroom was bare bones. A clunky PC glowed from one of the two desks, wire copy popping up on the screen in a steady stream. It was still called wire copy, as if it comes to us through an old telegraph wire, but it was actually the Associated Press sending dispatches over the internet. Every morning I'd sit in the dark, drink coffee, and run my eyes over tornados and fires and kidnappings and infanticides and voter turnout and political play-by-plays, the occasional "human interest" story. Once in a while there'd be some bit of humor or joy, usually on a slow news day.

On this particular morning shift, the story that jumped out at me was a police story, or rather a story about a man and the police, a quick AP dispatch about an event in Beavercreek, Ohio, a suburb ten miles from where I was sitting in the air-conditioned dark, with my face lit by the virtual wire. It opened something like this:

A man in a southwest Ohio Wal-Mart store waved a rifle at customers, including children, and was fatally shot by police when he wouldn't drop the weapon, according to police and a recorded 911 call from a witness.

Authorities say a customer also died after suffering a medical problem during the evacuation of the store Tuesday. Police identified her as Angela Williams, 37, of Fairborn.

Police identified the man shot Tuesday night at a Wal-Mart in the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek as 22-year-old John Crawford of Cincinnati. He died at a hospital.

He waved a rifle. He wouldn't drop the weapon. Did I revise the wording, knowing even then to be skeptical of police narratives? I might have added another "police say" to qualify, aware that a man who is dead cannot tell his side of the story. I had, after all, been an activist around this stuff for years; before I was a journalist, I co-created and ran a website full of young people of color's stories about harassment and violence at the hands of police in Chicago. Growing up, my dad, an attorney, had told me, "Cops always lie." So I knew enough to know that a police statement does not a true story make. What I didn't know was that this was the beginning of the end of my faith in the whole system of news-making into which I'd been trained. That August, everything was about to change — the way the news covered policing, the way I thought about the news, and the relationship between activism and the news. It was a tipping point, but I couldn't see that yet.

Of course I couldn't. It was 5:30 a.m.; I was alone in the so-called newsroom, rushed because I was prepping for a 6 a.m. hard start, when I'd have to be ready with a four-minute newscast, the weather for today and this week, and traffic updates, saying all this into a mic while operating the soundboard and not making mistakes of any kind, or at least not making the kind of mistakes people catch: a mispronunciation, a wrong name, a verbal stumble, running over my time. With an audience of several thousand even that early, people notice when you mess up.

So that morning, in a mix of other sad stories, I read the copy about that death in Beavercreek and didn't think too much of it — another shitty news day. Beavercreek is an almost-entirely white suburb of Dayton, Ohio. I didn't think much about who the man might be who'd been killed, but I pictured some wacked-out white dude, waving that gun at some kids. Incidents with white dudes and guns seemed to happen every day somewhere, so, sure as I was that journalists shouldn't trust police, I figured they'd stopped some shit from going down that could have been national news, could have dominated my day: "Shooter kills four children in Ohio Walmart," Lewis Wallace reports from Dayton. Instead it was just a "police-involved shooting," a blip. One life, which can begin to seem like nothing when you're reading out death every day. This is horrible, but I'm saying it because it's true and it can become part of how you think when you're doing daily news.

There are lots of true stories in the world. Daily news is where they are first pared down, selected out in a process called "news judgment": the split-second decisions about what is a story, and just how big and new that story is, how much airtime or word count it deserves. The decisions about which truths get told can have a ripple effect — sometimes a protest that gets news coverage becomes a larger protest; an act of violence or terrorism gains imitators and followers; a radical ideology propagates in the mainstream in part because it's been talked about on the news. I was astounded and humbled most days by the fact that I had this kind of power to choose what would become news. There I was, a weird transgender punk, alone in a dark room with my cup of coffee, making decisions that would, in small or large ways, shape what people believed their world was made up of, what was important and possible. I was also acutely aware of the stories that didn't get told, the dispatches that came through the wire and went nowhere. At the time, it was rare that a story about a police shooting got told in much depth. These deaths were covered like poverty or cancer: a thing that happens, too routine to highlight every time in a headline.

If you were one of the people reading newswires in the morning, it was obvious what stories and events were being left out. But for the people listening, it was like they never happened.

The day brightened. People came in and filled up the cheerful old gray-carpeted science building that the radio station was now housed in, after years in a moldy basement under the student center. WYSO was the NPR station for the cities of Dayton and Springfield, but still remained in its founding spot on a college campus, and a strange college campus at that. Antioch is known for its anarchist leanings and frequent closures due to budget problems. Even with the closures, the station had been thriving there consistently since the 1950s, and it had become a mainstay. We had a membership who trusted us, a relatively diverse staff, a robust community outreach program. We were proud that we aired voices from all over the region talking about the problems that affected our listening area, like the still-lingering recession and water pollution and abandoned homes, gas prices and troubled charter schools and closed-up strip malls. We covered immigration, welfare, health care, and the sprawling US Air...