La Gordiloca and the vicissitudes of social media journalism on the U.S. – Mexico border

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the case of La Gordiloca, a Facebook-based journalist from Laredo, TX, to interrogate the increasing role of social media within news-making processes. Applauded by The New York Times as a paragon of twenty-first century journalism and under scrutiny from local businesses and law enforcement for defamation and misuse of official information, she occupies a space between digital journalist and social media celebrity. Combining a content analysis with focus groups of Laredo residents, we argue that her work reflects a constitutive paradox unique to social media journalism: Whereas new technologies expand opportunities for citizens to participate in the process of news production, they also enable the corrosion of norms/practices that oriented previous forms of news production.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media journalism
• citizen witnessing
• self-branding
• local and community journalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Ariadne A. Gonzalez (Ph.D., Texas A&M University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Communication at Texas A&M International University. Her research centers on the Borderlands, Latinx media representation, and issues of difference and identity focusing on Latinx and immigrants' work-life experiences.

Stuart Davis is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Ji-Won Kim is an Assistant Professor in the College of Communications at Dankook University. Her research areas include media technologies, journalism, and political communication.

Notes

1 Focus groups were conducted with the approval of the Institutional Review Board at Texas A&M International University. This research project was granted “exempt” status with ID# #2019-02-10.

2 Though not included in our analysis, it is worth noting that La Gordiloca also had a personal website (www.lagordiloca.com) and a mobile application from roughly March 2019 (website)/December 2019 (application) to July 2020, when both were retired. Both registered significantly less activity than its Facebook equivalent. When examining the materials on the site and application, the first element worth noting is the lack of content. Tabulating every story on the website shows that the total number of posts (69) is approximately one quarter of the posts in the aforementioned month of November 2019 on the Facebook site (244); the application online registered 32 stories throughout its entire existence. Furthermore, unlike the Facebook page the site and application focused almost exclusively on news stories. Beyond the low frequency of posting and type of content, the webpage lacks the interactive elements that characterize the Facebook site. While the Facebook page is animated by user comments and Villareal’s posts referring to comments and conversations with site readers, the website and application had no interactive component.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by PSC CUNY Research Foundation: [Grant Number Faculty Research Award A]; Urban Communication Foundation/AEJMC: [Grant Number Gene Burd Award for Research in Urban Journalism S]; Texas A and M International University: [Grant Number University Research Grant].