Extract
The seeds of audience fragmentation: specialization in the use of online news sites.
A number of recent appraisals of developing media technologies have emphasized the potential for the new media to fragment audiences (e.g., Chaffee & Metzger, 2001; Havick, 2000). This fragmentation is presumed to result from technologies that allow and even encourage people to narrow the focus of their media consumption to pursue their individualized interests and needs (Sunstein, 2001; Webster & Phalen, 1997; cf. Webster & Lin, 2002). As a result of a narrowed focus on specific content, people appear likely to ignore other messages. Katz (1996) has argued that such a process is problematic for the functioning of modern democracies. Fragmented audiences are unlikely to consume a common diet of news, potentially leaving them underinformed about central issues facing a nation. Individually tailored media use "seems to be fast displacing national comings-together, and pleasure seems to be pushing public affairs ever more out of sight" (Katz, 1996, p. 25). Such an environment threatens the very foundation of political systems based on assumptions of citizen awareness and involvement (Berelson, 1952; cf. Schudson, 1998).
The key element of worries about fragmentation in the news domain is the premise that people will specialize their news consumption when given highly focused Internet-based outlets (Chaffee & Metzger, 2001). Perhaps as a result of that assumption, there has been relatively little focus on the extent to which online news outlets themselves are specialized. Surely, audience fragmentation is most likely to occur when there are discrete media outlets that offer differentiable products. However, few studies have looked at any one specific domain of the Internet to determine how much specialization exists at that area. As a result, specialization in media outlets is often assumed without being explicitly evaluated. The present study attempts to fill that gap in the literature. If it finds site specialization to be a common phenomenon, this study may provide supporting evidence to those predicting American audience fragmentation. Fragmentation, Specialization, and Diversity Fragmentation describes a potential relationship between audiences and information. As a general function, news media provide information about the world outside an audience member's experience. As Lippmann (1922/1965) observed, the media operate as a spotlight, shining on only a portion of the social world at a time. Given that audiences are selective in their exposure to information (Katz, Gurevitch, & Hass, 1973; Zillman & Bryant, 1985), they are actively choosing what portion of the illuminated world they wish to see. The more pe...See the full content of this document
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