The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries
The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries
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DOI：
10.1080/10584609.2018.1546244
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发表时间：
2019-04-03
影响因子：
7.5
通讯作者：
Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Majo-Vazquez, Silvia;Nielsen, Rasmus K.;Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra
衡量新闻来源之间的受众重叠，可以让我们了解人们媒体饮食的多样性以及新闻媒体在受众方面的相似性。这提供了一种解决关键问题的方法，比如受众是否越来越分散。在本文中，我们使用受众重叠估计来构建网络，然后分析网络以提取骨干，即具有统计意义的重叠关系。我们认为，这种骨干结构的分析提供了指标，可用于比较不同国家，群体之间的新闻消费模式，并随着时间的推移。我们的分析方法提供了一种理解受众结构的新方法，可以进行更多的比较研究，从而在日益数字化的媒体环境中对受众行为进行更多的基于经验的理论理解。
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 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.