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Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of roughly 700 articles published on the Breitbart News 'Cartel Chronicles' site between 2015 and 2021, this article analyzes the ways conservative citizen journalism projects strategically mobilize key tropes from international human rights to justify calls for militarization on the US/Mexico Border. Specifically, it details how widely accepted human rights frameworks like freedom of the press and protection of the rights of children are used both as evidence of humanitarian breakdown within Mexico and as a condemnation of the Mexican government. I argue that through its selective and motivated employment of human rights, Breitbart is promoting a form of 'bullshit human rights', defined as the purposefully misleading mobilization of rights claims deracinated from their context and repurposed without consideration for the truth they hold for the individuals who experience them. The suffering documented by 'Cartel Chronicles' serves only as fuel for Breitbart's larger political project of militarizing the US/Mexico Border without consideration of human costs. Paradoxically, bullshit human rights call for an increase in violence in order to protect against human suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses an innovative experiment in transforming citizen journalism from a general discourse to a specific set of criteria that can be reproduced in classroom settings. Specifically, it discusses how the Rio de Janeiro-based non-governmental organization Viva Rio created a set of classes called Citizen Health Journalism that attempted to train community health workers (titled “health agents”) in the technical and philosophical dimensions of this mode of journalistic production. The classes looked to capitalize on the unique identities of these agents. Recruited from the favelas (or unincorporated urban slums) of Rio to be public health workers within their own communities, these individuals had both the life experiences (as residents) and professional experience (as healthcare workers) to offer unique insights about their communities. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of training materials and participant observation in 2013 at the training courses, I argue that while turning citizen journalism into a curriculum can help make the discourse more accessible to neophytes, it also potentially sacrifices the convictions and attitudes that encourage individuals to act as citizen journalists in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]