In Nia Wilson murder, an urgent social media lesson – Columbia Journalism Review

DAYS AFTER NIA WILSON, age 18, was murdered at the MacArthur BART stop in Oakland, protesters marched to the offices of KTVU, the Bay Area’s local FOX affiliate. The group sought retribution for an editorial decision made in KVTU’s coverage: in a segment that aired a day after Wilson’s death, an image pulled from her Facebook account showed her holding what appeared to be—but likely wasn’t—a gun. “I immediately felt there was something wrong,” Richard Koci Hernandez, a longtime Oakland resident and an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism, says of the report. “But it’s not a new phenomenon, if you’re paying attention to images.”