Marcus James McGee

MARCUS McGEE, then a graduate student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Public Violence and Violent Publicity: Mexico City’s “Red Press,” supervised by Dr. William Mazzarella. This project was based in close work with groups of journalists, newspaper vendors, social media influencers and neighborhood information brokers to study the circulation of one of Mexico City’s most controversial genres of news media: the nota roja or “red press.” The nota roja is a sensationalist genre of crime journalism that foregrounds sardonic headlines, hardboiled reporting and frontal images of those slain in accidents, political violence and disputes among organized crime groups. Most of the work consisted in conducting field reporting with crime beat journalists and learning how to cover murders as a reporter in the Mexico City metropolitan area. It also depended on broad networks cultivated with newspaper vendors, groups of crime beat social media influencers, homicide detectives, and neighborhood rumor mills. It tracks the circulation of narratives and images about violent death from crime scenes through neighborhood gossip circuits, social media, conventional news, and even censorship trials, literary subcultures, and art galleries. Organized generally through coordinates of classical publicity theory and its complicated relationship with violence, this project presents an empirically rich picture of the promises and vicissitudes of collective life lived under conditions of mass publicity in North America’s largest metropolis.