Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News

Abstract

How do people consume news online? Here, we propose a novel way to answer this question using the browsing behavior of web users and the networks they form while navigating news content. In these networks, two news outlets are connected if they share a fraction of their audiences. We propose two crucial improvements to the methodology employed in previous research: a statistical test to filter out non-significant overlap between sites; and a thresholding approach to identify the core of the audience network. We explain why our approach is better than previous approaches using two data sets: one tracks digital news consumption during the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK and the other during the 2016 Presidential Election in the US.We show that our filtering technique produces a completely different ranking of top sites uncovering structural properties in the audience network that would go unnoticed otherwise and consequently, providing a better measurement method to assess the level of fragmentation in the online news domain.

Digital News Consumption and Copyright Intervention: Evidence from Spain Before and After the 2015 “Link Tax”

“…We aggregate audience data for the months of September 2014 and September 2015 -that it, at the beginning and at the end of the time series tracking changes in reach. Overall, in analyzing these networks we follow the intuition of previous work but, crucially, we propose an important improvement to the methodology, as explained in more detail elsewhere (Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, & González-Bailón, 2017). The analyses conducted in prior work are limited in one important respect: the construction of audience overlap networks does not eliminate overlapping ties that might result from random noise in the data or just random browsing behavior.…”

“…However, we also show that there is an increase in audience fragmentation, which we define as a reduction in the audience overlap of news media sites. Crucially, the approach we take to measuring audience fragmentation makes an important methodological improvement to how audience networks were mapped in prior work (explained in more detail in Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, & González-Bailón, 2017). Ultimately, our goal is to discuss whether the increase in fragmentation could result from the "link tax."…”

Bring publics back into networked public relations research: A dual-projection approach for network ecology

“…A series of communication research has been conducted by network scholars in recent years to develop and refine techniques and parameters for audience-centric network analyses of news consumption (Ksiazek, 2011;Mukerjee et al, 2018;Taneja, 2017;Taneja & Webster, 2016;Webster, 2014;Webster & Ksiazek, 2012). There has been a long history of advertising research and political communication research on audience duplication, but the network approach to analyzing relationships between information providers (i.e., news outlets) and information receivers (i.e., audiences) didn't mature until recent years (Goodhardt & Ehrenberg, 1969;Ksiazek, 2011;Webster, 1985).…”

“…The low 0.86% centralization score in their network indicated a high level of equality in degree centralities and a large number of shared audiences among US news outlets. A group of scholars later improved Webster and Ksiazek (2012)'s approach, and examined audiences' digital news consumption in UK, US, and Spain (Majó-Vázquez et al, 2017;Mukerjee et al, 2018). The study on Spain examined citizens' news consumption behavior before and after a "link tax" law went into effect.…”

“…This audience-centric approach based on dual projection brought audiences back into digital news consumption research (Mukerjee et al, 2018;Webster & Ksiazek, 2012).…”