Reddit, I'm Doing My Best to Update This

Late last night, a gunman opened fire during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 38. /../ This was, among so many other things, an exceedingly well-documented atrocity.

Take, for example, the many cell phone videos that captured the scene. Take the many tweets. Take the Twitter feed, in particular, of Adam Williams, whose brother was injured in the violence. Take the Redditor who was himself injured in the shootings, and who posted to the site -- along with a note, "my thoughts go out to those less fortunate than me" -- images of his bloodied, bullet-torn shirt. And of (warning: much more graphically) his bloodied, bullet-torn body.
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The secondary story, however, is the way the tragedy revealed itself to the rest of the world -- the way the tragedy transformed, through that revelation, into an information network. This was not just a documented massacre, but one that is being documented across the web, and across the web's media outlets: on Twitter, on Facebook, on news sites. Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, already offers a comprehensive entry for "2012 Aurora shooting." This entry is featured, along with other information sources, on Google News.

But one of the most effective sources of information about the massacre has been Reddit. In particular, "Comprehensive timeline: Aurora Massacre," a Reddit page that offers a tick-tock of the Aurora events that play out in granular, heartbreaking detail. Posted a few hours ago, it has already received hundreds of upvotes, and is on its way -- already -- to becoming one of the definitive documentations of the tragedy.

The Atlantic