June 12 will mark the one year anniversary of the devastating shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. This year’s LGBT Media Convening, which appropriately took place in Orlando.
Jeff Truesdell of People moderated a panel featuring Billy Manes with Watermark, Erik Sandoval with CBS Orlando, Emilie Arnold from the Orange County Regional History Center, and Meredith Talusan.
Talusan, who was covering the shooting for BuzzFeed, points out that there were many articles written by white gay men covered the news in a way that framed Pulse as a sanctuary for the LGBTQ community.
The coverage of the events was immediate for many news outlets, but Talusan was wanted to look at the story from a different angle. She points out how there was a lack of featured coverage of the tragedy by minority voices.
“For me, there was a gap between people directly experiencing an event and those experiencing it metaphorically,” says Talusan.
Her gripping piece, “This Is How Queer People In Orlando Are Mourning After The Pulse Shooting” provided a different point of view of what the public was seeing from major news outlets. The piece gave a candid and intimate look at the memorial for Edward Sotomayor Jr., one of the victims of the shooting.
The article not only takes a deeper dive into the tragedy, but unpacks the news with a perspective that was underrepresented in the mainstream media.
