THE MEDIA DESERTIFICATION OF LOCAL SPORTS JOURNALISM: EXPLORATORY STUDY IN THE SOUTH MATO GROSSO CONTEXT

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to identify characteristics and trends of sports news coverage in online news portals in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2019. We developed a descriptive and exploratory research, analyzing the media product, with a quantitative-qualitative approach to the data. We mapped the set of 698 news in 18 different online portals in the region. The findings indicate that there is an intense process of media-sports desertification in Mato Grosso do Sul beyond the news deserts and quasi-deserts existing in 50% of the local municipalities. We identified the journalistic impoverishment about local sports in the geographic coverage of the news, in the diversity of sports modalities, in gender equity, in the multidimensionality of the sports phenomenon, as well as in the informative channels and sources of information mobilized for the construction of news.