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 País (Spain), Público (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 me...