The Consumption of Political News Across Media Environments: A Comparison of Patterns in the US, UK, and Spain

• In Event: Understanding Information Repertoires and News Consumption

Abstract

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and how similar outlets are in the audiences they serve. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this paper, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone – that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and thus more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.

Authors

• Silvia Majo-Vazquez, ACOP - Asociacion Comunicacion Politica

• Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, U of Pennsylvania