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The “ Courage For ” Facebook Pages : Advocacy Citizen Journalism in the Wild Saiph Savage Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico & UC Santa

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of two popular Facebook pages used to circumvent the information blackout imposed by criminal organizations in the regions of Michoacán and Tamaulipas. The pages go by the name“Courage for Michoacan” (CFMich) and “Courage for Tamaulipas” (CFTam), and have more than 170,000 and 490,000 fans respectively. Here we analyze the pages’ entire corpus of posts from their inception to the time we collected the data in the Spring of 2014, amounting to nine months with 6,901 posts of activity for CFMich, and 25 months with 18,977 of activity for CFTam. We then examined the pages’ daily activity patterns, and traits of their news reporting: length of the report, locations and public figures they mention. We found that the these pages engage in a form of citizendriven advocacy journalism, with the CFMich page focusing on state and country-wide affairs, while the CFTam one on neighborhood-level events. We conclude by discussing possible implications of our findings for the design of future tools for citizen journalism.