La Gordiloca and the vicissitudes of social media journalism on the US - Mexico border

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.