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

The Local Media for Democracy (LM4D) project is the first project that explores news deserts in Europe comprehensively. Its final report highlighted challenges and opportunities for local and community media and identified the level of risk of news deserts in the 27 European Union (EU) Member States. As a pilot project, however, its results are still preliminary and open to evaluation, and, thus, they require further discussion and corroboration. Drawing from these results, and applying a multidisciplinary approach, we extrapolated research directions for the study of news deserts in the EU. By cross-analyzing data from the LM4D dataset with other datasets, we provide a preliminary analysis of three promising lines of research: (1) the relationship between public service media quality and news deserts, (2) news deserts and the spread of disinformation, and (3) social media usage and news desertification. We conclude by pointing out the limitations of this preliminary analysis and opportunities for further research on news deserts in the EU.