El derecho a la información en las zonas despobladas como oportunidad de empleo y desarrollo en el medio rural: caso de los medios digitales hiperlocales en las comarcas de Aragón, España

The problem of depopulation, which is present on all political and social agendas, has received little attention from the field of Communication. In this research, this pending issue is addressed from two points of view: first, the fundamental right that citizens of rural areas have to be able to access local information and high-quality public services, and second, the possibilities of employment and settlement in rural areas that, thanks to the development of the Internet, the birth of small hyperlocal digital media is fostering in sparsely populated areas. The objective of this contribution is to analyze the case of the counties of Aragon where, in the last five years, some 30 small media outlets have appeared to guarantee local information and create jobs. With the aforementioned purpose, an exhaustive search was carried out to draw a map of digital-native hyperlocal media in Aragon and analyze their general characteristics, to thereby extract a profile of the new distribution of hyperlocal communication in rural areas of this autonomous community. This snapshot is completed with a survey of 393 local advertisers on their perception of the profitability of inserting their advertising into different media. This research allows us to conclude that the new media respond to a one-person model, created by young journalists, sometimes victims of an ERE (redundancy plan) in a traditional medium, and that they take advantage of free or low-cost digital resources to build hyper-proximal media. These media are financed mainly by institutional advertising and local companies. Each of them, however, presents significant differences that sometimes arise motivated by the demand for content or formats corresponding to the region in which they are developed.