The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries
In this article, the authors provide a new method to build audience networks that they then analyse to extract the backbone. The analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time.
Abstract: Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyse 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 behaviour in an increasingly digital media environment.
