Imagine you see a building burn in your neighborhood. Or a landslide blocking your way home. You turn on your social media or try to find a local media website to see what happened, what the authorities report, when the problem is going to be solved. And you find nothing. No media, or no news about that in the few local media you come across.
That is a local news desert, a term coined in the US to define those places where local media don’t exist anymore or, for some reason, are not doing their job.
According to the latest study by the Press and Society Institute of Venezuela (IPYS), 83% of Venezuela’s 366 municipalities have insufficient or fragile news offerings. Adjusting for population, IPYS estimates that 17.7 million of the country’s 28.7 million people (61.7%) live in areas where access to verified, pluralistic, independent, and sustained information is, at best, a sporadic privilege.
IPYS Venezuela first started to cover the issue in 2020 with its “Atlas of Silence” initiative, followed in 2023 with its first own Local News Deserts report. Caracas Chronicles contacted Daniela Alvarado Mejías and Cristina González, both involved in the making of this report, to explain some of its results.
“In 2020,” they said, “we identified at least five million people without enough access to local information. In 2023, we found 15 million people living in news deserts and what we called moderate deserts. And now in 2026, we identified 17.7 million people living in deserts or semi-deserts. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we went from five million to almost 18 in six years. Each new edition has been more exhaustive, with the reach of investigation widened and its methodology refined.”
For IPYS, one of the main factors in separating local news deserts from forests is the existence of proper conditions: “It’s not enough that a radio, TV station or a dedicated news website simply exist. We are interested if they produce local information regularly, if they have journalists, if they check their sources and have enough resources to function. Deserts or semi-deserts cover 83% of the Venezuelan territory, and the latter label covers half of the map. In such places, journalism has not disappeared.”
“Radio remains very important and almost all stations that we identified had content published on digital platforms. Reality forced media outlets to adapt and combine multiple platforms.”
The making of this report shows the swift changes that have occurred in recent months. Last year was highly negative for Venezuelan journalism. According to IPYS’s annual report, 25 journalists were imprisoned at the time, 95.8% of journalists admitted to self-censoring out of fear of retaliation, and 9 out of 10 opted for remote rather than in-person coverage.
“The military operation of January 3 happened in a country where journalists were working in very difficult conditions. Therefore, any event of such magnitude takes place in the middle of an information ecosystem that is already very weakened,” according to Alvarado and González.
Its fieldwork took place between April and June of this year, right after the opening gestures to the press by the interim government. When it comes to how the local press responded to the June 24 earthquakes, IPYS says that the human effort was key to overcoming the limited resources and what journalists faced in covering the aftermath.
“We found concrete difficulties. For example, 53.8% of consulted outlets do cover socio-environmental crises in a limited manner. Only 12.4 % have equipment and safety protocols, and 9.1% have tools to monitor those situations. We also found that many outlets don’t work on disaster prevention and 41% informed about risks only after the disaster took place.”
Another relevant finding of the report is that many local news outlets are choosing to use social media as their main platform instead of the traditional higher-cost mediums like newsprint or television. “Today, social media is fundamental to distributing information… 9 of 10 outlets use Instagram.”
But radio still has a role to play, as 39.2 % of local outlets have either an AM or a FM frequency. “Radio remains very important and almost all stations that we identified had content published on digital platforms. Reality forced media outlets to adapt and combine multiple platforms.”
Alvarado and González clarify that getting information online isn’t equal to having local news. “You can get news all day through Instagram or WhatsApp and yet could not find out what’s happening in your location… For us, what matters isn’t much the platform but that there are journalists producing their own reports, checking what’s going on and attending to the issues communities care about.”
IPYS found many small newsrooms with one to three reporters, which in 40% of cases depend on advertising as their only income.
One of the factors behind the current state of local news in Venezuela is the lasting impact of official censorship, which has continued despite recent events. According to the report, 66.2% of outlets reported at least one limitation on their ability to inform, with self-censorship being the most frequent (53.8% of cases). Additionally, four out of ten media outlets rely primarily on official sources.
“Censorship doesn’t only make media outlets disappear, or that certain news are not published; it also affects the way journalists work and the subjects that they dare to investigate… Therefore, there can be media working in a community, but if they can’t investigate freely or check the version that is offered by authorities, the information continues to be insufficient,” Alvarado and González told us.
The other issue is the economic vulnerability that local outlets and journalists suffer along with the communities they serve. “If there are problems with electricity, connectivity or transportation, that makes the job of journalists harder. And if the local economy is weak, getting resources to sustain an outlet is more complicated.”
IPYS found several small newsrooms with one to three reporters, which in 40% of cases depend on advertising as their only income.
The report has several conclusions on how to improve the access gap to reliable local news in the country. One, if not the most urgent, is that “journalists should work without censorship, threats and with access to public information. If those conditions don’t exist, the local news sector won’t get any stronger.”
Support to those local news outlets is needed as well, from having financial and logistical resources to their employees engaging in journalistic training and/or practices. Besides mentioning the obvious role that the state has to play, IPYS Venezuela includes other actors like journalistic guilds and related NGOs, international organizations, the private sector universities, journalists and press workers and even the citizenship at large in cooperating to “repair the informative tissue,” which is key for any process of democratic reconstruction.
“In the end, it’s not just about having more news,” Alvarado and González conclude. “It’s about people having access to information to understand what is happening where they live and demand that their rights are respected. And that is essential for any democracy.”
