Not So Distinct After All: Assessing Social Stratification of News Users on the Web

ABSTRACT

Studies in journalism and cultural sociology have long identified differences in the types of news consumed by people from diverse sociodemographic backgrounds. Relying on population surveys, they have primarily found readers or viewers of popular news types such as tabloid newspapers to be vastly different from those of so-called serious types, notably broadsheets. This article contributes to this debate in two ways: first of all by studying social stratification of online rather than offline news users, and secondly by using digital trace data rather than self-reported questionnaires to document patterns of consumption. Taking Danish news websites as a case in point, the article analyses the relationship between news use and three key sociodemographic characteristics: age, gender, and education. Departing from theories of social stratification, the article formulates three hypotheses about the distribution of Danish news users and then analyses web usage across a national sample using commercial audience data. The results show that Danish news users display more similarities than differences across sociodemographic groups, suggesting that social stratification is less prevalent than prior research indicate. In conclusion, the article discusses these somewhat surprising results in relation to the study design and theoretical contributions.

KEYWORDS:

• Stratification
• concentration
• fragmentation
• digital trace data
• audience measurement
• news
• website
• tabloid
• broadsheet
• public service

Acknowlegements

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Journalism Studies. Their suggestions have improved the article in all aspects. This article has also improved from the feedback provided by members of the research group “Digital Communication and Aesthetics” at the University of Copenhagen.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Gemius lost the contract to carry out the official web statistics in Denmark to TNS Gallup (gallup.dk) as of January 1, 2016. Since then, several large news websites (including the two major tabloids and one of the notable broadsheets) have withdrawn from the official web statistics.

2 For a detailed discussion, see http://fdim.dk/brugertalsberegning (accessed 27 June 2017).

3 Hard news is defined as content that is “about politics, public administration, economy, science and technology, and/or addresses public and political issues, involves decision makers and power holders, or proposals and decisions with relevance to society” (Willig et al. 2015, 23, translation from Danish by author).

4 Soft news is defined as “news that emphasises people, emotions, and individual events. Stories about sports, consumption, and private matters are typically soft news stories. Guides, reviews, interviews, and profiles are classic soft news genres” (Willig et al. 2015, 23, translation from Danish by the author).

5 MetroXpress has since merged with the tabloid newspaper, BT. However, at the time of data collection, MetroXpress had a distinctively young and social profile in its news coverage. Therefore, it is classified as a separate news type in the analysis.

6 There is an ongoing discussion in the academic literature on how to weigh the strength of ties in duplication networks (for an extended discussion, see Ksiazek 2011; Fletcher and Nielsen 2017; Taneja, Wu, and Edgerly 2018; Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, and González-Bailón 2018). However, no matter which statistical technique one applies to the duplication matrix, all connections remain significant in the network.

7 The term “social privacy” is intended to describe privacy from immediate peers, as opposed to broader notions of privacy that imply freedom from commercial or political interferences. Internet providers, companies and states do not, of course, offer users any form of extended privacy as studies of internet surveillance have documented for years (see e.g. Turow 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been carried out in relation to the projects “Meaning Across Media” (headed by Kjetil Sandvik and supported by The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities) and “The Peoples’ Internet” (headed by Klaus Bruhn Jensen and supported by the Carlsberg Foundation).