The development of an extensive database of digital media, whether digital-born or not, is of the utmost importance for a wider economic, cultural, political, social, and territorial understanding of the media sector (Salaverría and Martínez-Costa, 2021). Most importantly, literature shows that, despite living in a digital framework, the territorial spread of digital media. and the place where they are headquartered, reflect much older and institutionalized territorial inequalities and discrepancies. The creation of Iberifier - Iberian Digital Media Research and Fact-Checking hub, in September 2021, impulses the construction and compilation of a comprehensive database of all digital media operating in Portugal, as our research center is one of its partners, following the methodological framework proposed and recently implemented by our project’s partners at University of Navarra (Spain). This paper aims to present implemented procedures and our preliminary results discussing particular challenges we came across. The increasing importance of digital media, particularly digital-born media, on news diets in both Spain and Portugal in recent years is well documented (Amoedo et al., 2021; Cardoso et al., 2021; Newman et al., 2021). Despite the fact that we benefited greatly from the contributions of our Spanish colleagues, building a database of digital media for Portugal requires specific attention to several challenges. The Portuguese regulator for news media (ERC - Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação) provides extensive and periodically published databases (including, but not limited to) news media, journalistic companies, and enterprises, reaching a large number of officially registered journalistic projects (ERC - Listagem de registos - https://www.erc.pt/pt/listagem-registos-na-erc). Although we have access to this formal information, our research came across an informal and secondary sphere of unregistered digital media, which operate mainly on social media and tend to rely on disinformative and polarizing content under the guise of journalistic and editorial structures. These projects add to an increasing blurring of boundaries between news journalism and partisanship in the Portuguese context, revealing a possible dissolution of the boundaries separating mainstream journalism from alternative media (Alvares et al, 2021). By mimicking news brands, these structures find considerable reach, mainly on social media, contributing to wider disinformation phenomena that may have consequences at a political, social, and economic level. (Kapantai et al., 2020; Fletcher et al., 2019; Greifeneder et al., 2021) We argue that digital media mapping efforts constitute a very reliable tool to further the knowledge of the operation of the digital media sphere. Not only do they allow the collection of data, such as geographical and territorial variables on the development of digital media, but they also generate knowledge on the operation of lateral phenomena such as disinformation. Furthermore, we aim to show that the creation of publicly available databases, which help characterize national digital media landscapes, are an important source of information for the general public, policymakers, researchers, media managers, and other actors involved in the business side of media, as they allow for a piece of extensive knowledge on how the digital news markets work. The exploration of variables such as social media resources, formats, journalistic genres, territorial reach, and funding systems are vital to a wider understanding of supply and demand dynamics, helping media and news entrepreneurs and innovators to quickly identify potential market niches and opportunities, which will help to create a more diverse digital media ecosystem and economy, ahead.

Iberifier - Iberian Media Research and Fact-Checking hub (project received funding from the European Commission under the call CEF-TC-2020-2 (European Digital Media Observatory) Reference: 2020-EU-IA-0252 European Digital Media Observatory

media management,media,journalism

• Economia e Gestão - Ciências Sociais
• Sociologia - Ciências Sociais
• Geografia Económica e Social - Ciências Sociais
• Ciências da Comunicação - Ciências Sociais