Desertos de notícias na região da zona da mata mineira: produção e carência de informação local

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the supply of local information in three municipalities in the Zona da Mata Mineira characterized as news deserts: Cipotânea, Santa Bárbara do Monte Verde and Sericita. It uses as its main reference the concept of news deserts developed by Abernathy (2016) to identify, in this case, municipalities that do not have any local communication vehicles, according to Atlas da Notícia - a platform developed by ProJor that began to explore the concept. in Brazilian territory, in 2017. Its main question is: what does it mean to be a news desert in the Zona da Mata Mineira? It focuses on the identification of possible productions of local information and on the consumption of news by the inhabitants of the localities. This research takes into account aspects such as: concentration in the media industry in Brazil; the centralization of content and geography; communication rights; and the lack of local information in the Brazilian territory. In order to apply the central concept, this study also uses the Research Regions of Influence of Cities, from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics; and the Atlas of Human Development in Brazil for the Municipal Development Indexes (HDMI). Interviews were carried out with the identified information producers and an application was also made with the population of the three municipalities.