‘Survival practices’. Local journalistic communication and new ‘methodologies’ to avoid the news desert and media illiteracy in Italy

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, since digitalisation began to play a dominant role in information, many local newsrooms have closed in both the United States and Europe. An in-depth study published by the Wall Street Journal in 2019 showed that between 2004 and 2018, around 1,800 local newspapers closed in the United States, leaving 200 counties without a newspaper and half of the counties in the entire country with at most a single newspaper. Even in Italy, many local newspapers have closed permanently, some have closed only the geographically remote offices serving small towns, and others have stopped printing the paper newspaper and have remained online only. Through desk research and semi-structured interviews with 13 local journalists from some of Italy’s most important regions and cities, we tried to understand the «survival strategies and methodologies» that the media have adopted, or that newspapers still active could adopt, to avoid so-called news deserts and the growth of media illiteracy and misinformation. Today, the role of the new information technologies, used in a strategic and participatory way in emergencies, both by journalists and by communities and institutions themselves, favours forms of communication, cooperation and immediate intervention: the consideration of the ‘local’ in the press and the relevance of the press in the local are intertwined and mutually supportive conditions.