His Reddit posts from his Denver bedroom offered the best live coverage through the night and morning. “It feels like I'm helping out people who need to know this stuff.”
In the early morning, as professional media scrambled to cover the movie theater shooting in Aurora, CO, the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of information wasn't a news site or a TV station. It was a series of posts on Reddit, the social news site, written by a user named "integ3r."
The original post, which grew beyond Reddit's character limit and has so far spilled into two more, is an exhaustive, minute-by-minute account of the development of the story, from the earliest indications that something horrible had happened to the emergence of a cohesive narrative. The post fuses together reports from traditional media, updates from a police scanner, and posts from social media — including Reddit, where a victim of the shooting posted images of his wounds. Integ3r, whose post is at the top of Reddit right now, has inarguably contributed more to the early understanding of this tragedy than any other single person.
Int3ger, whose real name is Morgan Jones, is a college-bound 18-year-old who lives at home in the Denver area. Jones told BuzzFeed FWD that he was up playing the fantasy-themed video game Oblivion in his bedroom, when he first heard about the news.
"I get updates from 9 News [a local television station) on Facebook, and I get a comment that says 'we're investigating shootings at a movie theater.'
The earliest reports were unclear and lacked detail, but Jones gleaned from comments on his Facebook that the shooting had likely taken place at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, and that there had likely been at least ten fatalities. "I was a little bit afraid," says Jones, "since some of my friends live in Aurora." (As far as he knows, his friends are fine.)
