Il giornalismo in Sardegna dall'istituzione della Regione Autonoma ai giorni nostri. Tra conservazione e innovazione

The aim of this work is to carry out a study on the history of journalism in Sardinia from the institution of the Autonomous Region in 1948 to present days. This study will put into relief the features that characterized the regional media system, investigating its evolution over the decades. This was an important period for the region, which in the Sixties would have focused on the modernization of its economy, moving from a predominantly agricultural to an industrial structure. The main actor of the industrialization process would have been a class of entrepreneurs coming from Northern Italy. The process of economic modernization has also had reverberations in the information sector, due to the emergence of a monopoly of the petrochemical industry on the editorial property of the two regional newspapers "L'Unione Sarda" and "La Nuova Sardegna". This thesis intends to use a combination of sources (from newspapers to financial statements, from the oral testimony to the archival sources) that may allow to relate the history of journalism with the economic and financial affairs of the leading Sardinian media. Not only will this work try to describe the internal story of the regional media, making a list of theirs directors, their editorial composition and their editorial line, but also its goal is to understand – without having any claim to completeness – how these media have described Sardinia in the last sixty-five years. Hence, it will try to give an answer to the following questions: what did Sardinian newspapers write about? And what were the main themes they dealt with? How did they face the events and problems emerged after the Second World War? The research will focus not only on how Sardinia was described by the local media, but also on how this region was described by national newspapers and magazines. In this study Sardinia is seen from two main points of view: "Sardinia seen from the inside" and "Sardinia seen from the outside". The analysis of Sardinian media will move from newspapers to magazines, from radio to television and to websites. This work, although it is proposed to trace the history of journalism in a specific region, will try, as far as possible, to place the local events within the national dynamics. The hypothesis of this study is that Sardinia, despite its geographical isolation, has not been a peripheral reality in the field of journalism. It would prove to be often the protagonist, fulfilling a central role, sometimes as a pioneer and forerunner of trends that occurred later on a national scale. As it will be demonstrated in the present study, the region was indeed a cutting edge, particularly in the emergence of private radios and televisions, in the convergence of various media, in the Internet field, in free press and digital terrestrial television. Sardinia can be regarded almost as a breeding ground for many experiments, a sort of local observatory for technological innovations to be exported on a large scale.