No People, No News: News Deserts and Areas at Risk in Spain

Abstract

In recent decades Spain has suffered a gradual process of depopulation and exodus from rural areas to large capitals. The España Vaciada political and social movement denounces the country’s territorial inequality, while the government is working on a strategic plan to address the demographic challenge. At the media level, there is concern about citizens’ access to a local and quality journalistic service, key to the strengthening of communities and their democratic functioning. The main objective of this research is to explore the phenomenon of news deserts in Spain, identifying the areas that can be considered news deserts and those that are at risk of becoming so, based on the mapping of digital media in the country. The characteristics of the digital media of the autonomous communities with the highest presence of news deserts are studied to ascertain whether the risk factors of population or richness index are connected to their appearance. The results reveal that 6,304 (77.53%) Spanish municipalities can be considered news deserts, inhabited by 11.6 million people, 24.51% of the country’s total population. In addition, another 523 municipalities are at risk of becoming news deserts. In the regions with the largest number of news deserts, there is a clear concentration of media in the main capitals and a weak ecosystem of local and hyperlocal media. Depopulation is the main risk factor in the loss of media and news coverage in local communities.

“News Desertification” in Europe: Highlighting Correlations for Future Research

“…Naturally, at this nascent stage of analysis, there is a myriad of methodological refinements that are still required to enable us to have a more granular and comprehensive understanding of the factors that might be driving news desertification or, vice versa, what might be the ramifications of news desertification for the wider information ecosystem. In particular, it is necessary to identify and control for potential confounders, such as inter alia, economic performance including average per capita income (Saiz-Echezarreta et al 2023), democratic performance (the EIU Democracy Index), the Corruption Perceptions Index, education and media literacy levels, levels of trust in the traditional media and public institutions, and demographic trends (Negreira-Rey et al 2023), which can also be reasonably expected to be correlated with both the independent and dependent variables of our analysis. In practical terms, we wish to develop a multiple linear regression model to better understand the interplay between these variables in addition to adding other contextual factors that were overlooked in this paper.…”