Agenda and demand for information on the Ukrainian war in the international press

The selective power of digital audiences, fragmented and multiplatform, produces a discrepancy between what the media offer as most relevant in their agenda and what the public prefers to consume or share. A 'news coverage gap' that is analysed in this paper applied to the case of the Ukrainian war in the international press. For this purpose, the news highlighted on the frong page, the most read by the web audience and the most shared by Twitter/X users of the digital editions of El Pais (Spain), Publico (Portugal), The Guardian (UK) and The New York Times (US) is collected for four weeks of 2022. The initial sample (N=1680) forms a final useful sample (N=259) on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict to which a content analysis is applied around four categories: journalistic narrative, multimedia, interactivity and tabloidization treatment. The main results show that three of the four media dedicate less than 25% of their front page to the Ukrainian war. A breaking news coverage, augmented by 'hook' headlines, which decreases as time goes by and which barely finds interest in the audience, with consumption and dissemination rates between 10% and 3%. This disparity between the most relevant journalistic selection and the preferences of the public reflects an audience that disregards the criteria of journalistic relevance and media that fail to capture their interest or attention regarding the coverage of the conflict.