Reflections on Reporting on a George Floyd Protest March and Unrest in Reno while Being a Father

Camera in hand, masked, while rolling a stroller and wearing all black, I took my 10-year-old and five-month-old to the first part of the George Floyd protest march yesterday in downtown Reno, a city which has had its own long and unsavory share of police brutality and killings of minorities. We are also the former college town of Colin Kaepernick. My two-year-old was napping, and my wife was home, making it a perfect time for me for a protest escape. As a child in the 1980s, my mom always took me to marches in Washington, D.C., and based on my 10-year-old's questions I think it was a good move on my part, even if there were some early trepidations. There was some yelling over another kid wearing a shirt with a U.S flag and a scary looking man dressed in military fatigues with a rifle, which got me tense and hyper aware.

Overall, though, it was a peaceful and inspirational march, even if justified anger against racist police brutality and killings was the underlying mood. In the age of COVID-19, masks are making protests more covert, allowing people to vent injustices even louder with more anonymity it seems. The American protest has become a cacophony of homemade signs as well, making it a simultaneously collective and individualistic experience.

I had thought I'd be able to interview someone for the Biggest Little Streets podcast I coordinate, but I could tell that wasn't going to happen, so I asked my 10-year-old to hold my trusted Zoom H2 from my Africa reporting days while speeches began. I laid down some of the audio, with short videos, to make the below minidoc for the Our Town Reno street reporting collective I coordinate. Usually students do all the reporting, but when they're off during the summer and there are no community volunteers coming forward, I sometimes feel the need to document some of what's going on in Reno, where I've lived for over six years now. Like many places, it's full of complexities and different communities which sadly rarely interact.



After I got home to feed my three boys an early dinner, a former student sent me photos of the Reno police headquarters being spray painted with graffiti, its flag torn down and burned. My wife kept a close watch of live reporting social media, some of it by some of our former students at the Reynolds School of Journalism, where we both teach. One of the videos by a former Our Town Reno reporter Lucia Starbuck, now working professionally, showed City Hall being vandalized and stormed into. I suggested going with my 10-year-old downtown again but my wife wisely said it would be too dangerous for him. After putting my two-year-old in bed, I decided to strap on my roller blades to give it a reporting go myself.

Soon after I arrived, there was tear gas and rubber bullets, protestors throwing rocks and general mayhem in a small area. One driver panicked and almost overran me trying to do a U-Turn into my path. The roller blades allowed me to check closer in and then quickly back out whenever the tear gas came. I didn't stay long, but was able to produce the short minidoc below, along with accompanying social media.



Back home, I fell asleep listening to a local radio station carrying a television feed, lamenting the broken glass, damaged tv vehicles and small fires which ensued, with an anchor blaming it all on out of towners, while a curfew was in effect. Seemingly their own reporting crews had a pass. Back in my reporting days, I would have filed stories all night and gone to see the damage in the early morning hour. Now I congratulate my students and former students for a job well done. Protests happen, and I believe it's important for journalists, citizen journalists, and those in between to cover whatever is going on, as our society fitfully tries to make progress. Even though I teach journalism now as my full-time career, I've always been a reporter at heart, especially of breaking news, with the pulse of the people as my main concern.