Audience fragmentation is often taken as evidence of social polarization. Yet the tools we use to study fragmentation provide limited information about how people allocate their attention across digital media. We offer a theoretical framework for understanding fragmentation and advocate for more audience-centric studies. This approach is operationalized by applying network analysis metrics to Nielsen data on television and Internet use. We find extremely high levels of audience duplication across 236 media outlets, suggesting overlapping patterns of public attention rather than isolated groups of audience loyalists.

New media have made available a wide range of platforms and content choices. However, audiences cope with abundant choices by using more narrowly defined repertoires. Unfortunately, we know little of how users create repertoires across media platforms. This study uses factor analysis to identify user-defined repertoires from data obtained by following 495 users throughout an entire day. Results indicate the presence of four repertoires that are powerfully tied to the rhythms of people's daily lives. These were in turn explained by a combination of factors such as audience availability and individual demographics.

With the emergence and rapid acceptance of online news come new and varied opportunities for user engagement with content, along with alternative metrics for capturing those behaviors. This study focuses on interactive engagement with online news videos. We propose a theoretical framework for conceptualizing user engagement on a continuum from exposure to interactivity. Furthermore, we make a distinction between user-content (e.g. commenting) and user-user (e.g. replying to another user's comment) modes of interaction. We then explore publicly available measures of these concepts and test a series of hypotheses to explore commenting and conversational behaviors in response to YouTube news videos. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications for advancing our understanding of user engagement with online news.

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