For journalists who covered Ferguson, the news from Minneapolis feels ‘uncomfortably familiar’

Journalists who covered Ferguson reflect on what they learned — and what feels different — as unrest unfolds again in Minnesota

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 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.