ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by exploring how theories of power help us understand what may motivate the Black Lives Matter activists' desire to bear witness. It offers an account of the lived experiences of Black Lives Matter activists who decided to use their smartphones to report news long after a high-profile, fatal police shooting rocked their hometowns. The chapter provides a discussion about what the trend toward mobile journalism as a tool for counter-narrative might mean for protest news coverage of the future. In professional journalists own words, the leading activists of the movement explained how they are motivated to report news on a long-term basis because they feel a deep responsibility to revise existing news narratives about black victims of police brutality and black protesters. Phenomenology allowed the author to identify common threads in how Black Lives Matter activists see themselves and situate themselves as protest journalists who have mobile-mediated agency.
