MEXICO CITY  Mexico’s drug cartels hang banners, attach warning notes to bodies and post videos on the Internet to intimidate the police, the military, the news media, their rivals and anyone else who gets in their way.

But this week, one gang adopted a new tactic: kidnapping journalists to get their videos on the air.

Gunmen abducted three television cameramen in the northern city of Gómez Palacio in the state of Durango on Monday as they finished covering a prison protest in the midafternoon. A local newspaper reporter was seized that evening.

By 6 p.m., Jaime Canales, a cameraman working for a local television station, had called into the station’s newsroom, the newspaper Milenio reported. Mr. Canales said his captors wanted the station to broadcast three videos, which were already posted on a blog, as a condition for his release.