9. Decision Point

Hudes, MacDonald and Hood were on deadline and had to make the decision of whether to include information from the Facebook page in the National Post’s June 4 coverage of the shooting. Hudes was working late into the night and it was still unconfirmed whether the Facebook page belonged to the same Justin Bourque whom […]

2. Covering an Active Shooter

Hudes had found himself in the precarious position of gathering information on a developing story about a mass shooting, with scattered details coming in from panicked locals and a distracted police force. Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has covered several mass shootings, wrote for the Poynter Institute recommending that journalists […]

1. ‘My Kingdom Will Come:’ 2014 Moncton Shootings

At around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, June 4, 2014, the New Brunswick RCMP were notified of an armed man, dressed in camouflage, walking in the Moncton suburb of Glen Cairn. Locals reported the sound of gunshots; shortly thereafter, there were reports that five RCMP officers had been shot, three fatally. By midnight, police had locked […]

Facebook Faceoff: Active shootings and social media verification

Case Study by Casimir Boivin, Avneet Dhillon, David Greenberg and Kayla Rosen February 2017 Introduction In the summer of 2014 Sammy Hudes was working as an intern at the National Post. On June 4 news broke that there had been a shooting in Moncton, N.B., that left three RCMP officers dead and two others wounded. [1] The police […]