Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News

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 cru...

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Main Authors: Mukerjee, S, Majó-Vázquez, S, Gonzalez-Bailon, S
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Oxford University Press 2018
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author Mukerjee, S
Majó-Vázquez, S
Gonzalez-Bailon, S
author_facet Mukerjee, S
Majó-Vázquez, S
Gonzalez-Bailon, S
author_sort Mukerjee, S
collection OXFORD
description 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 United Kingdom and the other during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. 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.
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spelling oxford-uuid:b845e9b7-3bc5-4d86-b0e0-8926100241722022-03-27T04:54:44ZNetworks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital NewsJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:b845e9b7-3bc5-4d86-b0e0-892610024172EnglishSymplectic ElementsOxford University Press 2018Mukerjee, SMajó-Vázquez, SGonzalez-Bailon, SHow 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 United Kingdom and the other during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. 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.
spellingShingle Mukerjee, S
Majó-Vázquez, S
Gonzalez-Bailon, S
Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
title Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
title_full Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
title_fullStr Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
title_full_unstemmed Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
title_short Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
title_sort networks of audience overlap in the consumption of digital news
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