Understanding the Societal and Scientific Challenge of Digital News Audience Fragmentation (NewsFrag)

Digitalization has created both the need for a deeper substantive

understanding of and unprecedented methodological challenges in studying

news audience fragmentation as one of the most central and societally

impactful topics of communication research in the digital age.

Therefore, the proposed project engages in methodological innovation to

provide the most robust and comprehensive account of news audience

fragmentation so far by mapping its prevalence, patterns as well as

individual and societal drivers and effects with greater breadth and

depth than ever before. Considering the most widely acknowledged

obstacles to a better theoretical and empirically grounded understanding

of news audience fragmentation, we specifically address the core issues

of whether and how audiences are fragmented in their exposure to news

contents (rather than sources) and, in particular, political news

content; how online intermediaries (like social media, search engines

and news portals) impact audience fragmentation; and how news audience

fragmentation dynamically evolves with and shapes individualization,

segregation and political polarization tendencies in modern democratic

societies. To achieve these conceptual breakthroughs, the project draws

on an unprecedented combination of secondary analyses of two unique

existing cross-national data sets with a groundbreaking primary data

collection for Germany. We expand on the latest advances in collecting

and linking web-tracking data (on news exposure) with panel surveys (on

users’ interests, viewpoints, etc.) and content analysis; and join them

with progresses in original network science (e.g., two-mode networks)

and computer science (e.g., few-shot learning using pretrained language

models) untapped in media and communication research so far. In

parallel, we transform communication research depending on digital

behavioral data (like web tracking) into a more sustainable effort,

incl. research transparency and adherence to open-science principles,

compliance with the legal and ethical state-of-the-art, and our

capability to publicly share and enable reuse of our data by other

scholars. Considering that a valid understanding of audience

fragmentation is an extremely multidimensional endeavor, the

interdisciplinary project group joins a broad array of complementary

substantive and methodological competencies. To overcome previous

isolated accounts in favor of an integrated theoretical and empirical

picture, the project is embedded in a network of national and

international cooperation partners, comprising both leading experts from

media and communication research and from original network science.