Response To Webster And Taneja'S Response To "Networks Of Audience Overlap In The Consumption Of Digital News"

We appreciate the chance to respond to Webster and Taneja’s comments to our article (Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, & González-Bailón, 2018). We take this as a welcome opportunity to engage in the always-pertinent discussion on why measurement and methods are so important to reach meaningful theoretical conclusions from empirical work. For the sake of transparency, we would like to begin by stating that we sent the manuscript of our article to Webster and Taneja at the same time we submitted it for review to the Journal of Communication (back in May 2017), asking for comments or clarifications in case we had misinterpreted their analyses or findings. Both authors amiably acknowledged receipt, but they never sent us any written feedback until we received their response from the editor (March 2018), after the article was published. We would also like to state that, in our article, we acknowledge what we genuinely think is an important contribution: Webster and Taneja's work is amongst the first to apply network methods to the analysis of audience data. As we write in page 30, this past research “shows that the analysis of audience overlap data can offer relevant insights on exposure to information and media diets” and that the “network analysis of audience behavior can offer a powerful methodological approach to uncover the characteristics of media diets and the venues where audiences concentrate more clearly.” However, having carefully read their response, we still stand by the three main claims we make in our article: (a) that their past work does not offer a satisfactory benchmark to assess significant overlap between outlets that are very different in reach; (b) that disregarding the strength of the overlap misses crucial information when analyzing audience networks; and (c) that once overlap strength is taken into account, the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis of audience networks are not consistent with the idea of a “massive overlap culture.”