Viral UC Davis pepper-spraying photo launched on Tumblr
You’ve probably seen the photo, or at least seen a YouTube video, of Lieutenant Pike blasting that hot orange stream of pepper spray into the eyes of seemingly passive UC Davis students in an Occupy protest.
Photo: Brian Nguyen
The Atlantic interviews Brian Nguyen, a first year UC Davis student and school newspaper photographer who took the now infamous picture. Nguyen tells The Atlantic that he tried pitching the photo to many newspapers, sites and his contacts in the industry, but most were uninterested (also, it was 1 a.m., so few were around). While The Atlantic’s James Fallows picked it up, the photograph really took off when he posted it on Tumblr:
I didn’t actually realize that it was going to get national attention until it got national attention I suppose. I spent that night emailing different photo editors and my contacts in the industry, but at that point it was too late, around 1 a.m., to really get any traction. A couple of news organizations weren’t interested. I gained traction on Tumblr first, submitting my photos to The Political Notebook, then to James Fallows. I suppose that’s when it went viral.
After the pepper-spraying pic/videos went viral (and you know things really go viral when people begin creating memes), then all the big big news organizations picked it up. Another example of the power of the internet masses.
FYI, The Political Notebook is a blog that mixes real-time news submissions (from pictures to articles to documents) with analysis and opinion with a liberal/progressive bent. It was started by a journalist named Torie Rose DeGhett who began it as a site to showcase her work and it “morphed into a fairly full-time news and analysis blog.”
