"To date, the study of news deserts, geographic spaces lacking local news and information, has largely focused on countries in the Global North, particularly the United States, and has predominantly been interested in the causes and consequences of the disappearance of local media outlets (e.g., new ... spapers and TV stations) to the social fabric of a community. In this article, we extend the concept of “news deserts” by drawing on literature on the geography of news in Africa, where information voids have long been documented but have not been studied within the conceptual framework of news deserts. Using computational tools, we analyse a sample of 519,004 news articles published in English or French by news websites in 39 African countries. We offer evidence of the existence of online news deserts at two levels: at a continental level (i.e., some countries/regions are hardly ever covered by online media of other African countries) and at a domestic level (i.e., online news media of a given country seldom cover large areas of the said country). This article contributes to the study of news deserts by (a) examining a continent that has not been featured in previous research, (b) testing a methodological approach that employs computational tools to study news geographies online, and (c) exploring the flexibility of the term and its applicability to different media ecosystems." (Abstract) more

"Theories on mediatization have been developed in Latin America in parallel to those flourishing in the Global North. This article analyzes the former while keeping an eye on the more available theoretical production in English-speaking publications. The main part of the article covers Eliseo Verón ... ’s initial reflections on the semantization of violence to his later development of an evolutionary approach to mediatization. The article then introduces the contributions made by Latin American researchers who have followed in Verón’s wake during the last decade. The article concludes with an overview of the parallelisms between the two theoretical strands, and considers their complementarities as well as the possible exchanges between them." (Abstract) more