ARE NEWS AUDIENCES INCREASINGLY FRAGMENTED?
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Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented? A Cross-national Comparative
Analysis of Cross-platform News Audience Fragmentation and Duplication
Richard Fletcher (corresponding author)
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
OX2 6PS
United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 611075
richard.fletcher@politics.ox.ac.uk
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
OX2 6PS
United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 611074
rasmus.nielsen@politics.ox.ac.uk
Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank all those who worked on the 2016
Reuters Institute Digital News Report project for their input, and participants at the OII-RISJ
work-in-progress seminars for their feedback.
ARE NEWS AUDIENCES INCREASINGLY FRAGMENTED?
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Abstract
The move to high choice media environments has sparked fears over audience fragmentation.
We analyse news audiences across media platforms (print, television, and online) in
six countries, going beyond platform-specific, single-country studies. We find
surprisingly high levels of news audience duplication, but also that cross-platform audiences
vary from country-to-country, with fragmentation higher in Denmark and the United
Kingdom than in Spain and the United States. We find no support for the idea that online
audiences are more fragmented than offline audiences, countering fears associated with
audience segmentation and filter bubbles. Because all communication exists in the context of
its audience, our analysis has implications across the field, underlining the importance of
research into how trends play out in different contexts.
Keywords: audience behaviour; fragmentation; duplication; news; comparative
research
ARE NEWS AUDIENCES INCREASINGLY FRAGMENTED?
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One of the most important questions of our time is whether the forces that drive us apart are
more powerful than those that hold us together. With the erosion of twentieth-century mass
audiences, media and communication researchers have approached this question in terms of
audience fragmentation versus audience duplication—audience fragmentation describing a
situation where people increasingly use media they only share with small groups of like-
minded individuals, and audience duplication a situation where the audience for individual
outlets may seem small and circumscribed, but most people in practice use many different
media, and many media are used by people of many different persuasions. The underlying
concern is whether a fast-changing media environment characterized by more and more
abundant information, and more and more sources to choose from, will provide the kind of
shared space of information, debate, and engagement that various political theorists argue a
well-functioning democracy needs (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1997; Neuman, Just, and Crigler,
1992; Dahlgren, 2009; Habermas, 1989).
Media and communication researchers have different views on the issue. On the one
hand, a number of prominent authors have warned against the social and political
implications of what they see as a more and more fragmented media environment,
characterized by self-selecting news and opinion “echo chambers” (Jamieson & Cappella,
2008; Berry & Sobieraj, 2014) and more personalized, segmented, or “balkanized” audiences
(Stroud, 2011; Sunstein, 2009; Turow, 1997; Katz, 1996), driven at least in part by the
development of digital media. On the other hand, a growing number of audience researchers
have pushed back and argued that, beneath what James Webster (2005) has called the “veneer
of fragmentation”, there is a high degree of audience duplication suggesting a “massively
overlapping culture”, even in a time of unprecedented media choice (Webster, 2014, p.98; see
also Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2011; Trilling & Schoenbach, 2013; Webster & Ksiazek, 2012;
Weeks, Ksiazek, and Holbert, 2016).
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The debate around fragmentation and duplication raises profoundly important
questions about the role of media in democracy as we continue the move to a relatively high
choice media environment with an increased potential for fragmentation (Prior, 2007;
Neuman, 2016). While in large part motivated by normative concerns, the question at hand is
also fundamentally empirical. To what degree are audiences fragmented, and to what degree
do they duplicate? In this paper, we present a cross-national comparative analysis across six
countries (Germany, Denmark, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States) of
cross-platform news audiences (including print, television, and online) to advance our
understanding of this question. We start from the audience-centric approach pioneered by
James Webster and his collaborators, which aims to use techniques from social network
analysis to map the degree of fragmentation or duplication within a media environment by
measuring the extent to which the audiences for different outlets overlap with one another
(Webster & Ksiazek, 2012; Webster, 2014; Yuan & Ksiazek, 2015; Taneja & Webster, 2016;
Taneja, 2016). As such, we pursue the idea that audience fragmentation and duplication can
only be understood if one considers both supply (the media structure) and demand (media
use). In the broader discussion we engage with, definitions, operationalizations, and
diagnoses vary, as different authors have built their analysis around different terms. But, the
core underlying concern is the same—the potential erosion of a shared space of information,
debate, and engagement. We focus specifically on the issue of fragmentation versus
duplication which (i) is substantially important, and (ii) can be consistently measured both
across countries and across offline and online platforms, thus bringing empirical clarity to a
contentious and consequential issue.
We build beyond Webster et al.’s work in three important respects. First, in line with
the idea that we need to consider both media structure and media use, we move past the
national focus that characterizes most of the work cited above, and present a cross-national,
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comparative analysis of the relative balance between audience fragmentation and audience
duplication across a strategic sample of six structurally different high-income democracies
with different media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Brüggemann et al., 2013). Second, in
line with the idea that any examination of fragmentation and duplication should put the
audience—and not any one individual media platform—at the center of the analysis, we
present a cross-platform analysis of media use across the most important platforms, including
print, television, and online. Third, because the reason we are interested in the relative
balance between fragmentation and duplication is primarily concerned with the social and
political role of media as a shared space for information, debate, and engagement—and not
with, for example, entertainment—we focus specifically on audience fragmentation and
duplication when it comes to news.
Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al.,
2016), we find (i) that cross-platform audience duplication varies from country to country,
with audiences in the United States—the focus of almost all previous studies—and Spain
overlapping to a greater extent than those in Denmark and the United Kingdom, where a few
very widely used sources tend to dominate the information environment. We also find (ii)
that the higher choice online news media environment is no more fragmented than the
comparatively low choice offline news media environment—in some cases in fact
significantly less fragmented, meaning that there is little evidence to support the widely-held
assumption that higher choice in itself inevitably produces fragmentation.
Our findings caution against the use of single country studies to speak about news
audiences throughout the rest of the world, even as more and more people access news online
and the potential for convergence in media use increases, and underlines the need for further
comparative research to develop our understanding of the interplay between structural
differences in media systems and audience difference in media use in different countries. In
