This week TIME led with stories of the Baltimore riots that shook America. The cover reads “America 1968 2015: What has changed. What hasn’t.” The black-and-white photographs shows a young black man wearing a scarf as a mask, fleeing from the police. It appears that nothing has changed in the past 47 years in America since that tragic day when Martin Luther King was assassinated and the streets of Baltimore erupted.
The photograph corresponds to the photojournalist codes of a news magazine. But it has created an enormous amount of buzz due to the source of the photograph: an unknown and aspiring photojournalist on the scene who posted the picture on his Instagram account.
Liked and shared by thousands of people, including stars like Rihanna (to her 17 million fans), the image became a symbol of the riots and landed on the front page of TIME. This marks the first time that the weekly magazine has chosen a cover this way, and it demonstrates the power of social networks today.
