Assessing the Structure of the Networks of Digital News Providers in Europe

This chapter presents a methodological approach to analyze the structure of the online news domain before and after a media policy was passed. I use tools from network science to this end and I discuss the implication of the regulation for the public sphere.
By focusing on the Spanish case, this chapter illustrate how network science can help to inform decisions on news-link regulation. More broadly, it shows how tools borrowed from this discipline are useful for media policy research. Specially, when it comes to the study of the online sphere. I assess the changes in the fragmentation of the news domain before and after the Spanish copyright regulation came into force. The results suggest the supply side of the digital news domain is more fragmented after the law was enforced. The nature of the data though, does not allow to disentangle the causal mechanisms driving this change.

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Citation: “Assessing the Structure of the Networks of Digital News Providers in Europe” inin Van den Bulck, H., Puppis, M., Donders, K., Van Audenhove, L. (eds.), 2019. The Palgrave Handbook of Methods for Media Policy Research, London: Palgrave MacMillan.