1,720,996 research outputs found
sj-pdf-1-ijpp-10.1177_19401612211072700 - Supplemental material for Rethinking Audience Fragmentation Using a Theory of News Reading Publics: Online India as a Case Study
No full textSupplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ijpp-10.1177_19401612211072700 for Rethinking Audience Fragmentation Using a Theory of News Reading Publics: Online India as a Case Study by Subhayan Mukerjee in The International Journal of Press/Politics</p
sj-pdf-1-hij-10.1177_19401612241242431 – Supplemental material for The Influence of Sexism and Incivility in WhatsApp Political Discussions on Affective Polarization: Evidence from a 2022 Multi-Party Election in India
No full textSupplemental material, sj-pdf-1-hij-10.1177_19401612241242431 for The Influence of Sexism and Incivility in WhatsApp Political Discussions on Affective Polarization: Evidence from a 2022 Multi-Party Election in India by Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Ozan Kuru and Subhayan Mukerjee in The International Journal of Press/Politics</p
Rethinking Audience Fragmentation Using a Theory of News Reading Publics: Online India as a Case Study
No full textScholarly work that seeks to theorize about fragmentation of media audiences has largely been restricted to the experiences of advanced democracies in the west. This has resulted in a preponderance of research endeavors that have sought to understand this phenomenon through ideas that are pertinent, perhaps solely to those contexts, and not as applicable outside, particularly in the Global South. This has potentially limited our imagination into various other ways in which audience fragmentation can manifest in these often-overlooked countries. In this paper, I use the case of online India as an example to offer a theoretical framework – that of news reading publics – for understanding audience fragmentation as a more global socio-political phenomenon that allows for rigorous comparative research, without being restrictive in scope. I draw from existing theories in communication and related disciplines and show how such a framework can be situated within existing social science theory. I argue that this framework should make us think of audience fragmentation in western contexts to be special cases of a more general model. I also show how network analysis can be used as a context-agnostic tool for identifying news reading publics and demonstrate the utility of such a method in complementing this theoretical framework. Finally, I discuss potential future research directions that this framework generates.
Keywords: news consumption, online news, uses and gratifications, issue publics, audience behavior, audience fragmentation, network analysis, Indi
Online News in India: Appraising the Digital News Consumption Landscape in the World’s Largest Democracy (2014-2018)
No full textHow do people in the world’s largest democracy consume news online? In this paper, I aim to answer this question by conducting a quantitative assessment of the online news consumption behavior of a large sample of Indian internet users (N ≈ 50,000) over a period of 45 months. In doing so, I contribute to theoretical debates about global news media use, by systematically appraising the prominence and trends in audience share of different types of news sources, thereby shedding light on the digital news consumption landscape of a crucial, but understudied context. Theoretically, I engage with the displacement-complementarity hypothesis and find no evidence that digital-born media have contested the hegemony of legacy media in India online. Next, I investigate the regional-national media divide and find that regional, vernacular media have suffered significant declines in their audience shares over time. This begs the question whether the notion of “polycentrism” – the idea that the Indian media environment is comprised of national and regional media of equivalent weight – is at all applicable online as it is offline. These findings also run counter to claims of “internet vernacularization” that have been touted in the past. Finally, I propose the concept of audience mobility, and use it to identify qualitatively distinct dynamics in how vernacular audiences in India have migrated to national vis-à-vis international outlets. The findings and their implications are discussed in light of contemporary changes in Indian society that is characterized by rapid digitization and increasing literacy
Online News in India: A Quantitative Appraisal of the Digital News Consumption Landscape in the World?s Largest Democracy (2014-2018)
No full text10.1080/1369118X.2024.2317898Information, Communication & Society2781650-167
Choosing to Avoid
No full textSocial media platforms provide multiple affordances, which convey several cues
to guide users in making decisions about which news to consume. Traditional
factorial designs have failed to experimentally study the effects of multiple, simultaneous cues operating on social media. As a result, there is little consensus
in the literature about their exact effects on news choice. In this study, we use a
conjoint experimental design to examine how source outlet cues, message cues,
and social endorsement cues shape news selectivity on Facebook. We find that
people significantly avoid news items with out-party outlet and message cues.
We also find that people select news based only on in-party messages cues,
but this effect is smaller than avoidance of out-party cues. Only strong partisans demonstrate a preference for news items with in-party source and message
cues. Finally, we find no evidence that social endorsement affects people’s news
selection behavior
- …
