Culture&Society Blog del Narco and the Future of Citizen Journalism Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Luis Daniel Palacios Andrés Monroy-Hernández Reliable information is difficult to obtain in conflict zones, is a researcher at Microsoft where communication network outages, concern for jour- Research and an affiliate faculty at the University of nalists’ safety, and intense political struggles compromise Washington. Dr. Monroy- traditional news sources. In the context of the Mexican drug Hernández is the creator of the Scratch Online Commu- war, the anonymous Blog del Narco has served as an invalu- nity, a website where people able outlet for disseminating information about the con- learn to program, and of 1 Sana, a mobile healthcare flict. Soon after launching in March 2010, the blog became system for the developing one the fifty most visited sites in Mexico.2 The blog is well world. known for publishing articles about arrests, violent clashes, Luis Daniel Palacios is a and executions involving members of rival drug cartels, the Research Fellow at the Gov- ernance Lab and a Junior military, and law enforcement officers. These articles often Research Scientist at New include gruesome videos and photos not found on main- York University. At the Gov- Lab he leads the develop- stream media. To this day, the blog’s administrators have ment of the Open Data 500 remained anonymous, although one apparently published a project. book about the blog under the pseudonym “Lucy.” Shortly after the book’s publication in 2013, the blog stopped post- ing new articles, and “Lucy” reported being forced to flee the country due to personal safety concerns. Here, we examine Blog del Narco to better understand the information ecosystem in the Mexican drug war and, more broadly, to study how networked technologies are both challenging and augmenting traditional news journalism Summer/Fall 2014 [85] BLOG DEL NARCO AND THE FUTURE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM practices. Beyond the particulars of the officials alike try to control how and Mexican context, the case of Blog del what information becomes public, the Narco helps us understand a shift in violence has spread to the newsroom. what constitutes a news organization. Journalists have been intimidated and We begin examining these issues by executed, transforming Mexico into analyzing the blog’s cadence and topics one of the most dangerous countries using a corpus of text data from all of for reporters.5 According to the Com- its articles. We then problematize the mittee to Protect Journalists, fifty-six narrative around this anonymous news journalists and media workers have organization by examining issues of been killed in Mexico since 2006.6 provenance, attribution, identity, and Attacks on the media often come in the community. We end by arguing that, form of murders, kidnappings, intimi- rather than thinking of the website as an dation, and other forms of violence, individual actor, we must think of it as such as throwing grenades at media a transmediated networked entity with headquarters.7, 8 This violence has Journalists have been intimidated and executed, transforming Mexico into one of the most dangerous countries for reporters. closer relationships to other websites effectively censored news reporting in and to mainstream media than previ- some parts of the country, particularly ously understood. in the northern border cities where violence is the worst. After the mur- The Nature of Mexico’s Infor- der of a second journalist in Ciudad mation Ecosystem Today. Juárez, for example, a local newspaper Mexico has been witness to a conflict opted for self-censorship, addressing between law enforcement officials and cartels directly with the headline “What drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) Do You Want From Us?” to discern for several decades now. It was not what they could and could not publish.9 until President Calderón took office Similarly, the assassination of several in 2006, however, that the conflict journalists in the state of Veracruz has became a full-scale war, claiming over prompted massive protests. Such cen- sixty thousand casualties by the end of sorship has inspired citizens to use his presidency.3 Immediately after tak- different social media channels such ing office, Calderón launched large as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to military operations targeted at disman- report and curate the news—and to sim- tling the DTOs, which led to the splin- ply stay informed. Twitter, for exam- tering of groups and increased violence ple, has been widely used by civic media as the DTOs began battling each other “curators” to report on risky situations over control of drug trafficking routes.4 in near real-time.11 According to one As drug cartels and law enforcement of its creators, Blog del Narco emerged [86] Georgetown Journal of International Affairs HERNANDEZ AND PALACIOS Culture&Society as part of these citizen media efforts to “brands” of reporting sites. Unlike an address information blackouts.12 Based individual civic media curator on Twit- on interviews with Mexican social media ter, a branded site tries to emulate a users that we have conducted in the specialized and more traditional news past, as well as others’ observations, outlet. Although Blog del Narco per- it seems that people gravitated toward haps enjoyed the most success during Figure 1 Websites devoted to reporting narco violence social media for various reasons: to its heyday, we have identified thirty-two circumvent the centralized control that other websites performing a similar characterizes broadcast media; to pub- reporting function—seventeen of which lish anonymously or pseudonymously; are currently active. While early sites and to reduce personal risk by diffus- like NotiNarco and NarcoMexicano ing responsibility among many people consisted solely of blogs, newer outlets rather than one journalist in an arti- often include Twitter, Facebook, and cle’s byline.13, 14 YouTube accounts. Prior to the escalation of violence in 2006, only a few websites featured Information Vacuum and Blog news and reports about cartel activity del Narco. Although precursors of (see Figure 1). NarcoNews and Nar- Blog del Narco existed, the use of coMexicano, for example, have been the web for reporting on the Mexican active since 2000 and 2006, respec- drug war only became widespread after tively. Researchers have documented 2008. Several decades before Blog del how Mexican drug cartel members may Narco emerged in 2010, critical infor- have used the Internet and social net- mation pertaining to drug smugglers work sites such as MySpace, YouTube, was disseminated through a genre of and Facebook as early as 2005, if not folk music called narcocorridos, or drug earlier.15 Since 2008, however, we ballads. The genre gained popularity on observe a particular rise in different both sides of the border since at least Summer/Fall 2014 [87] BLOG DEL NARCO AND THE FUTURE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM the 1980s.16 More recently, a number net; and elblogdelnarco.info) were reg- of local governments have censored the istered on 26 May 2008, while Lucy’s genre and banned its reproduction in “Blog del Narco” (blogdelnarco.com) mainstream media, possibly contribut- remained unregistered until two years ing to both its online and offline pop- later. The public records for all of the Figure 2 New articles published in Blog del Narco ularity. Simultaneously, a new genre “El Blog del Narco” domains share the called “movimiento alterado,” or “sick same email address and physical address movement,” has gained a significant in Monterrey, Mexico—a city that expe- number of fans. The surge in violence rienced a surge in drug-related violence since 2006, combined with the silenc- around the same time. ing of journalists and increased Inter- At the time of writing, all of the net penetration in Mexico, created the aforementioned domains—as well as perfect trifecta for the popularization mundonarco.com—redirect their web of websites like Blog del Narco. traffic to elblogdelnarco.info, a website Today, the origins and ownership hosted on Google’s Blogger platform. of Blog del Narco remain an enigma. Coincidently, the first blog post of a According to Internet domain name separate Blogger website with a simi- records, domain names with the mem- lar name, elblogdelnarco.blogspot.com orable moniker “El Blog del Narco” (which stopped posting regularly after (elblogdelnarco.com; elblogdelnarco. September 2010), also dates back to [88] Georgetown Journal of International Affairs HERNANDEZ AND PALACIOS Culture&Society 26 May 2008. The last post on the of its content, a consistent presence Blogspot site, written by a user named on social media, and presumably some “Historiador,” mentions the creation luck. Figure 3 Total number of Twitter followers of Blog del Narco at @InfoNarco of elblogdelnarco.com. This suggests Methodology. To gather data on the that one person might own all of these blog, we downloaded all publicly avail- domains. Also at the time of writ- able articles (8,102 in total) from Blog ing, elblogdelnarco.info—unlike Lucy’s del Narco using a web scraping script.18 blogdelnarco.com—is currently active, We ran the script in multiple sessions as is its Twitter account (@MundoNar- over the course of 2013, allowing us co) with over one hundred thousand to retrieve articles from the very first followers. Lucy and Historiador, the (posted 2 March 2010) through the last administrators of each of these sites, day we scrapped (30 March 2013). We frequently reference one another in also collected publicly available infor- their posts and interact in the com- mation from the Blog del Narco Twit- ments sections of other sites. At one ter account (@InfoNarco) using snap- point Historiador even claimed “Blog shots from the Internet archive.19 In del Narco” had stolen the name of his addition, we extracted the main topics blog.17 from the corpus of data using Latent Evidently, the general “Blog del Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic mod- Narco” phenomenon goes beyond one eling.20 Finally, we used simple regular individual website and represents an expressions to determine the frequency entire ecosystem of websites.