Financing of digital news sites in the “almost deserts” of Santa Catarina

Analysis based on Atlas da Notícia (2024)

Abstract

With the crisis in the media sector's traditional funding models, organizations need to look for new ways to remain sustainable in a scenario in which journalism is losing its leading role as the main place to advertise to social networks and programmatic advertising. In an attempt to understand how these changes affect local journalism, we propose an analysis of the ways in which online outlets are financed in the almost news-deprived regions of the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Despite being the fifth state in the country with the highest number of outlets, 197 of Santa Catarina's 295 municipalities (66.78%) are deserts or near-deserts of news. By cross-referencing data from Atlas da Notícia v.6 (Projor, 2024), we identified 11 exclusively digital newspapers in ten cities considered almost deserted. In our analysis, we identified the use of methods such as traditional advertising, legal advertising, requests for donations and commissioned links, which contrasts with our hypothesis that, in a crisis scenario, local journalism would adopt unconventional financing strategies and provides clues about possible trends for the sustainability of outlets in places with a low density of journalistic information.