Digital News and the Consumption of Information Online

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will analyze patterns of online news consumption to determine the impact that digital technologies have on access to political information. Blogs, new media sites, news aggregators, social media platforms, and the online version of legacy media have multiplied the number of entry points to news. However, in spite of the many claims made about the effects of digital technologies on news consumption, there is still a scarcity of observational data on how audiences get their news online. In particular, there is no empirical evidence to allow a comparison of trends over time and across different political contexts. This project will fill this gap by making three contributions: (i) a methodology to measure patterns of news consumption using panel data that tracks online browsing behavior; (ii) new metrics to compare those patterns over time and across countries; and (iii) an application of the metrics to explain trends and differences in news consumption as they relate to the media and regulatory contexts in which they take place. Ultimately, the goal is to use a novel comparative approach to characterize online news consumption and use that information to evaluate the impact that digital technologies have on access to politically-relevant information. The question as to how digital platforms are transforming news consumption has gained much prominence in recent years. Some argue that digital technologies encourage fragmentation, balkanization, and the self-selection of audiences in "filter bubbles" that reinforce preexisting views. Some others go one step further to argue that digital media is radically transforming the democratic process by allowing misinformation to spread more easily. This project will provide novel evidence to evaluate those claims in a comparative perspective, drawing data from two sources: international surveys conducted annually by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to study news consumption across countries; and representative panels tracking online browsing behavior in those same countries, collected by a media measurement company. The project will use measures of audience reach and audience duplication across online news providers to build networks of audience flow. The project will analyze these data to answer four main questions: (1) Is there evidence of increasing fragmentation in news consumption? (2) Are there systematic changes in the centrality of digital-born news media compared to legacy media sites? (3) Are there significant differences in news consumption patterns across socio-demographic groups? And (4) are there significant differences across countries and regulatory contexts? Many observers and commentators have recently emphasized the increasing relevance that social media (like Facebook or Twitter) have as entry points to news and political information. This project will provide unprecedented data to contextualize the actual role that social media platforms play in the overall news consumption landscape.