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News deserts in Ukraine: Mapping localities without local news

Media Development Foundation (MDF) (2024)
"First of all, following a reform in 2020 that reorganised Ukraine’s districts, merging many of them to form larger ones, the situation on the map is not critical. There are indeed "unhealthy districts", but the overall situation is better than it could be. With the exception of the temporarily occupied territories, most districts are "healthy" or "partially healthy". One of the limitations of this study is that there was no immersion at the amalgamated hromada level. We believe that the situation would be worse on closer examination. Secondly, it is clear that districts with oblast centres are always "healthy". Each oblast centre has at least one independent editorial team – a regional branch of the public broadcasting company Suspilne and Ukrainian Radio. These meet the criteria of our methodology, being independent and covering most of the critical information needs. And that is the nature of centres of public life, due to the number of people living there and the logic of journalistic activity. In general, the names of settlements that are far from the centres (district towns, villages) receive fewer mentions in the media (and media research). In the 11 oblasts covered by this study, we found 879 editorial teams that are definitely functioning at present. The average number of operating editorial teams per oblast is 60-70, with 10 or fewer of them being what we consider independent. The majority of independent editorial teams were found in Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts (14 and 13 respectively). The Kharkiv district (the area around and including the city of Kharkiv) is the "healthiest" of all the districts we studied, with 7 independent editorial teamsLuhansk and Dnipro oblasts have the least number of independent media outlets (3 and 7 respectively). In the case of Luhansk Oblast, many media outlets have simply ceased to exist due to the temporary occupation. Therefore, all the media outlets that actually serve the critical information needs of Luhansk Oblast residents are currently operating as internally displaced outlets outside their home oblast." (Overview of the oblasts)