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Online Audience Engagement with
Legacy and Digital-Born News
Media in the 2019 Indian Elections
Silvia Majó-Vázquez, Subhayan Mukerjee, Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Introduction
In this RISJ Factsheet, we study online audience
engagement with legacy and digital-born news media
across social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter)
and the open web during the 2019 Indian General
Election on the basis of data collected between 11
April and 19 May.
1
We analyse cross-platform online
audience engagement with a sample of 101 major
Indian news media during an election in which more
than  ve thousand candidates ran for the 543 available
seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian
parliament, and nine hundred million eligible voters
were called to the polls in the largest democratic
election in the world.
Using the Indian General Election as our case study,
the purpose of the factsheet is twofold. First, we
analyse patterns of news audience behaviour across
social media platforms and compare these to the open
web. Second, we examine the relative performance
of (and competition between) legacy news media like
newspapers and broadcasters, and newer digital-born
news media.
The Indian case is not just intrinsically important, but
also of broader relevance as an example of a market
in the Global South characterised by rapid growth in
internet access and a signi cant number of new digital-
born news media competing with legacy media for
audience attention and engagement. Legacy brands
building a digital presence o the back of an existing
printed newspaper or television channel still have wider
online reach according to Comscore (see Table A1), but
several digital-born news media have built signi cant
reach and generate high levels of engagement on social
media. In previous research, we have shown how both
digital-born and legacy news media in India are actively
seeking to build online audiences both on the open
web and via social media platforms like Facebook and
Twitter (e.g. Aneez et al. 2017).
In this factsheet, we present an empirical analysis of
the extent to which new, digital-born news media have
challenged the dominance of incumbent legacy news
media in India, comparing audience engagement
across the web and various social media platforms
during the election.
We focus on a sample of 101 of the most important
legacy and digital-born news media in India (see Table
A1). From this list, we shortlisted 73 and 78 outlets
respectively, whose Twitter pro les and Facebook
feeds we monitored over a period of two months. In
total, we gathered nearly 66 thousand Facebook posts
and over 63 million tweets. Moreover, we collected
web tra c statistics to assess the online website
audience of all 101 outlets (when available). The
FACTSHEET
June 2019
1
The counting day was 23 May 2019. See Figure A1 for all the election phases.
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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web-browsing data provides us with a benchmark to
assess the dierence, if any, between the distribution
of audience on the web and the two social media
platforms we cover, allowing us to understand cross-
platform online audience engagement.
Key Findings
We nd that:
Regional news outlets
2
dominate the provision of
political information on Facebook. In each election
phase, vernacular language newspapers lead the
ranking of most active news outlets on the platform
by a large margin.
Indian broadcasters are the second most active in
terms of posting political information on Facebook
(behind regional news outlets). However, they produce
far less news content on Facebook when compared to
the leading category, vernacular language newspapers.
On Twitter, digital-born outlets and national daily
newspapers are the most active and dominated
the provision of news content during the elections.
National broadcasters, however, were not far behind,
and almost closed the gap during a few of the election
phases.
While Facebook was the preferred channel for news
distribution for vernacular language newspapers,
national outlets, both digital-born and legacy,
prioritised Twitter. The platform is widely used in
urban areas and among English-speakers, core
constituencies for these national outlets.
Turning from supply to demand, we nd markedly
higher audience engagement (relative to their
number of followers) with digital-born outlets,
national and regional, on both Facebook and Twitter.
During the elections, Great Andhra, One India and The
Wire, for instance, recorded the highest engagement
per follower on Facebook; whereas on Twitter, BBC
India enjoyed the highest level of engagement with
their audience during the elections. Legacy media
generally see lower levels of audience engagement
relative to their follower numbers on both Facebook
and Twitter.
Looking at the most viral pieces during the elections
– produced by ABP News and Times Now on Facebook
and Twitter respectively – we nd that video
narratives continue to provide the highest returns in
terms of engagement for news outlets on Facebook
(in line with what we have found in other countries in
previous research). This points to a path for potential
growth for news outlets that use video narratives on
these platforms.
At the structural level, we nd no evidence of audience
fragmentation in Indians’ online news consumption,
despite growing concerns over political polarisation.
Looking specically at Twitter data, we nd that users
tend to access news content from a range of dierent
sources. Analysis of web trac similarly nds no
evidence of fragmentation. The existence of active,
visible, and vocal partisan minorities engaged in oen
highly polarised debates (sometimes in orchestrated
ways) can create the impression that the overall online
environment in India is fragmented along partisan
lines, but our research suggest that is not the case.
General Overview
The online media environment in India is mobile-rst
and platform dominated (Aneez et al. 2019)
3
. In the last
few years, the country has been in the midst of structural
changes that have fundamentally aected the media
sector, with very rapid growth in mobile internet access
and hundreds of millions of Indians turning to search
engines, social media, and messaging applications
for news, information, and communication. Internet
access is far from universal, but mobile web use is
spreading quickly and both attention and advertising is
increasingly moving online.
A number of new digital-born news outlets have
launched and now compete directly with long-
established legacy brands building their digital
presence o a longer history in print or broadcast,
and some of these digital-born sites are increasingly
popular and important. Examples include Firstpost,
OpIndia, The Quint, and The Wire. Both legacy
and digital-born outlets are enmeshed in a highly
politicised media ecosystem and subject to attacks
from both politicians and activists. This criticism
reects the increasing polarisation in Indian politics
and is interlinked with concerns over freedom of the
media in the country.
4
India is a large and complex market, and dierent
parts of the population use news in dierent ways.
2
In this study, we refer to non-English outlets as regional or vernacular language news media.
3
The study only focuses on English-language Indian news users.
4
India ranks 140 out of 180 countries in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index. https://rsf.org/en/2019-world-press-freedom-index-cycle-fear
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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Looking specically at English-language internet
users, one recent study documented how many more
Indians identify social media as their main way of
accessing news online (24%) than say they go direct to
the websites or apps of news media (just 18%) (Aneez
et al. 2019). As in many other markets in the Global
South, both Facebook and Twitter are widely used by
internet users to access news, far more than in the US,
UK or most other European countries (see Figure 1).
18% of English-language internet users in India name
Twitter as a source of news, and 52% name Facebook
(Aneez et al. 2019).
Figure 1. Twitter and Facebook use for news across
countries
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Germany Fran ce UK US India
5
22
9
46
14
28
15
18
39
52
Twitter Facebook
Note: Source data Digital News Report (2019) and India Digital News
Report (2019).
Social media (beyond private messaging applications,
such as WhatsApp) are thus central to online political
communication in India. Narendra Modi, the recently
re-elected Prime Minister, has relied heavily on social
media since his rst election, in 2014, to circumvent
legacy news media outlets
5
as well as the initial
opposition to his candidacy by his own party, the BJP
(Das and Schroeder 2019). With almost 48 million
followers on Twitter and 44 million Facebook fans,
Modi ranks among the most popular political leaders
on social media in the world. US President Donald
Trump, for comparison, has 61 million Twitter followers
and 24 million Facebook fans.
Data Collection
To understand patterns of audience engagement
across social media platforms and provide evidence
about the rising competition between legacy and
digital-born outlets in India, we analyse the online
activity of 101 news outlets on Twitter, Facebook and
the web during the recent elections in the country (see
Table A1 for the full list). We used a strategic sample
for this study by combining 1) news outlets with the
highest audience reach on the web, as measured by
the third-party audience metre Comscore, and 2)
news outlets that have enjoyed high visibility on social
media and recorded high engagement rates among
their followers, independent of their audience reach
in terms of website trac.
As mentioned earlier, India has witnessed a surge in
new media outlets in recent years. In order to build
a sample of the most representative digital-born
outlets, we consulted with Indian journalists and
academics, and on that basis included 37 digital-born
outlets. These include ‘national’ brands that seek to
attract audiences across the country like Dailyhunt
and The Quint, as well as ‘regional’ ones like Great
Andhara or Valai Tamil, which seek more localised
audiences specic to certain states. We also include
64 legacy media outlets in our list, among them 38
regional outlets. Notably, these regional outlets,
which publish in the vernacular languages of the
states they are popular in, play a very central role in
India’s news ecosystem (Figure A1 locates all regional
outlets studied here). Some of these regional outlets,
for example, Dainik Bhaskar, Amar Ujala and Dainik
Jagran, reach audiences that are much larger than
those reached by top national news brands (see Table
A1 for the complete ranking).
6
They achieve this largely
by penetrating deeper into specic linguistic regions of
the country, rather than widely across several states.
Finally, it is important to note that while our sample
does not represent or cover the entire Indian online
media ecosystem, it is comprehensive enough to
provide a robust assessment of the state of the
competition between digital-born and legacy media
outlets, and the distribution of news audience
attention in the country.
The time window for our analysis includes the entire
period spanning the general elections which began
on 11 April and ended 19 May 2019. During this period,
there were seven polling days (‘phases’) in dierent
states of the country (Figure A1 locates the polling
phases).
5
Before the 2014 election campaign, Modi had not done any interviews with news media outlets, therefore journalists, as well as Indian
citizens, had to rely on his Twitter activity to get updates on his political activity.
6
The growing importance of vernacular media in Indian national politics is shown by Neyazi (2011 and 2018).
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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S 
Twitter
Figure A2 summarises the Twitter data collection
process. Broadly, we aimed to collect all tweets related
to the general election during our time window. To do
so, we relied on the Twitter Streaming API and used as
search queries the names and usernames of political
parties and candidates and the news outlets in our
list. (In our analysis here we focus specically on the
sample of legacy and digital-born news media).
Additionally, we also used the most important hashtags
during the election period to track all conversation
around the election. Due to the multithread nature
of an electoral event and to avoid missing important
tweets mentioning outlets on our list, we monitored
Twitter conversations in India by using external tools
to identify relevant hashtags every day, and updated
our list of queries daily (for a complete description of
the process see Majó-Vázquez et al. 2017).
In total, we collected 63,252,755 tweets from which
we subset 50,965,208 tweets matching the above-
mentioned criteria
7
. In sum, we followed the Twitter
activity of 73 news outlets. However, for the actual
analysis, we excluded those outlets that tweeted less
than once a day on average during the time window of
the study.
Facebook
As with the Twitter sample, we rst manually veried
each of the news outlets in our list that had active
Facebook pages. Then, we used a third-party tool
called CrowdTangle to gather all posts published
during the election period by those pages. For our
analysis, we only kept those pages that posted on
average at least one news piece per day about the
election. Finally, we narrowed down to posts only
relevant to the elections by applying a set of keyword
lters in the English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam,
Telugu, Marathi, Kannada and Gujarati languages (see
Table A2). In total, we studied 65,941 posts published
by 78 news outlets’ Facebook pages.
Comscore
The nal dataset of our analysis was obtained from
Comscore, an online audience and trac metrics
rm. We collected the audience data for all the media
outlets on our list (when available), for the months
of January, February and March 2019. Although the
elections ocially started on 11 April, the discourse
and news coverage surrounding the elections were
already very contentious since, at least, the state
elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and
Mizoram in November 2018.
We averaged the available data for the three-month
period and used it to trace audience navigation
patterns across news media outlets. This web-
browsing data oered us a benchmark to assess
the dierences, if any, between the distribution of
audience on the general web and on social media
platforms, particularly, Twitter.
Results
N  
Figures 2 and 3 summarise the news content provision
by media type on social media. As is clear from the
visualisation, regional news outlets dominated
the provision of political information on Facebook
throughout the election period. During each election
phase, vernacular language newspapers led the
ranking of most active media category on the platform
by a large margin. The second polling day, 18 April, was
the busiest in terms of content produced by regional
outlets, despite not being the phase when the largest
number of constituencies went to vote. In total, during
phase 2, regional news outlets published 1,294 posts,
a signicantly greater number than the 549 posts
published by national broadcasters, the 361 posts
published by the national newspapers and the 302
posts published by digital-born outlets. It is worth
mentioning again here that our sample included
38 regional outlets and 37 digital-born sites. Even
during the sixth phase of polling, which included Delhi
and the surrounding national capital region (NCR),
national broadcasters and newspapers still trailed
behind vernacular outlets in terms of the volume of
news content posted on Facebook.
7
Notably, the extensive use of Twitter during the polling days combined with the high percentage of Twitter users, at least among the Indian
English-speaking population, pushed us beyond the 1% limit allowed by the Streaming API on several occasions during the data gathering
process. An essential drawback of the Twitter Streaming API is the lack of information concerning what and how much data one gets once
it reaches the 1% threshold (for an in-depth discussion see Morstatter et al. 2013).
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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In contrast, an analysis of content produced on
Twitter during the election period reveals a very
dierent picture. While no media category enjoys a
clear dominance, regional outlets signicantly trail
behind digital-born outlets, national newspapers
and broadcasters in terms of tweeting frequency, as
the latter seem to have embraced a platform that
enables them to provide fast updates, and facilitates
the spread of breaking news. This nding is in line
with previous research showing that although Twitter
accounts for a small portion of the total trac from
social media, broadcasters like News18 and NDTV still
see it as a platform that is in some ways as important
as Facebook, though the latter is far more widely used
(Aneez et al. 2017).
Figure 2. Volume of Facebook posts over time by media type
11 April 18 April 23 April 28 April 6 May 12 May 19 May
1000
500
Total number of Facebook posts
0
DATE
Digital-born, national
National daily newspaper
Regional newspaper
TV, national
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7
Figure 3. Volume of tweets over time by media type
600
400
Total number of tweets sent
0
200
DATE
Digital-born, national
National daily newspaper
Regional newspaper
TV, national
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7
11 April 18 April 23 April 28 April 6 May 12 May 19 May
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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A 
At the individual level (see Table 1) India Today is the
most active news provider on Facebook and the
second most active on Twitter. Incidentally, while this
national magazine, which reaches 13% of the online
audience population, is among the most visited news
sites in India, in terms of audience reach it is still far
behind the two leading news outlets, The Times of India
and NDTV. However, interestingly both The Times of
India and NDTV distributed less than half the amount
of content on Twitter and Facebook that India Today
did. Leaving aside the regional news outlets, which,
as mentioned earlier, were the most active category,
national broadcasters like ABP News, Republic TV,
News 18 (on Facebook) and Times Now and India TV
(on Twitter) invested the most resources in distributing
news content on social media during the elections.
Table 1. Ranking of the 20 most active news media outlets on Twitter and Facebook
Type Brand Total Tweets Followers
TV, national Times Now 6402 8908131
Magazine, national India Today 6234 5190729
National daily newspaper Hindustan Times 5362 6776071
TV, national News 18 5114 4177604
Digital-born, national The Quint 3735 287912
National daily newspaper Times of India 3006 11806259
National daily newspaper The Indian Express 2593 3112332
TV, national India TV 2273 697204
Regional newspaper Amar Ujala 2210 807934
TV, national NDTV 2154 11441545
TV, national News Nation 2108 129616
Business daily newspaper The Economic Times 2103 3222828
National daily newspaper Daily News and Analysis 1929 1994425
National daily newspaper The Tribune 1829 51088
TV, national ABP News 1771 8304506
Digital-born, national Firstpost 1641 2014574
TV, regional Suvarna News 24X7 1412 96885
Regional newspaper Punjab Kesari 1410 150725
Regional newspaper MaalaiMalar 1365 174257
Digital-born, national OpIndia 1329 144028
Type Brand Total Facebook
Post
Page Likes
Magazine, national India Today 4738 9948654
TV, national ABP News 3652 18641014
Regional newspaper Sakal 3219 1441842
Regional newspaper Rajasthan Patrika 3204 6315052
Regional newspaper Amar Ujala 2934 7782895
National daily newspaper Times of India 2473 11110203
TV, national Republic TV 2116 1828726
TV, national News 18 1929 6272685
TV, national NDTV 1885 7718871
Regional newspaper Deccan Herald 1857 592628
Regional newspaper Dainik Jagran 1802 14423639
National daily newspaper The Indian Express 1653 7152936
TV, national India TV 1581 8079791
Regional newspaper Dinamalar 1467 2752765
National daily newspaper Daily News and Analysis 1462 1376085
Regional newspaper Dinakaran 1375 4077966
Regional newspaper Mathrubhumi 1286 2788679
TV, regional ABN Andhra Jyothi 1224 1316240
Digital-born, national Scroll.in 1208 1548065
Regional newspaper Anandabazar Patrika 1111 5214648
TWITTER
FACEBOOK
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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E
In the absence of data on o-site audience reach – and
on the extent to which o-site activity on social media
drives trac to the website or app of a given publisher –
we use the total number of interactions generated per
content posted on social media as a proxy for audience
engagement.
8
We therefore analyse the number of
interactions around each of the Indian news media
outlets in our sample on social media during the
election period to understand cross-platform online
audience engagement, and to measure the level of
engagement around each on social media relative
to their number followers. Figure 4 shows that when
we control for the number of followers, only Republic
TV, which is among the most active news content
providers on Facebook, is also among the top ten
outlets that recorded the highest engagement during
the elections.
Notably, digital-born outlets registered higher
engagement per thousand followers or fans on
Facebook and Twitter than legacy media did. At an
individual level, Great Andhra, One India, Swarajya and
The Wire have the highest ratios of engagement per
thousand followers per post on Facebook. All of them,
with the exception of the national magazine Swarajya,
otherwise reach relatively smaller audiences on the
web (see Table A1). However, they do enjoy markedly
high success in building audience attention on
Facebook.
8
The measure of Facebook engagement is built adding the total number of reactions, comments and shares and dividing it by the number
of posts and then by the number of followers. Similarly, Twitter engagement includes all mentions, retweets and replies that each outlet
receives.
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
greatandhra oneindianews swarajyamag thewire.in NewsTrendIn TheTribuneChd lokmat RepublicWorld thetelegraphindia V6News.tv
Average engagement
per post per 1000 followers
1.69
0.2960.298
0.317
0.353
0.406
0.443
0.816
0.841
1.519
Media Facebook page
Figure 4. Engagement on Facebook by media outlet
On Twitter, BBC India built the highest level of
engagement with their audience during the elections,
followed by the national digital-born outlets, OpIndia
and Sabrang. Fourth in this ranking is the Deccan
Herald, a regional newspaper popular in the southern
states of India that published over a thousand posts
during the election and received high levels of
engagement.
Figure 5. Engagement on Twitter by media outlet
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
BBCIndia OpIndia_com sabrangindia DeccanHerald thewire_in Telugu360 DailyhuntApp JantaKaReporter thetribunechd NewsNationTV
Average engagement
per tweet per 1000 followers
2.39
1.77
0.81
0.50 0.49 0.46
0.41 0.41 0.39 0.39
Media Twitter handle
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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When we look at individual posts, the broadcasters
ABP News and Times Now recorded the most
engaging posts on Facebook and Twitter respectively
(see Figure 6). The fact that these posts went viral
suggests that video narratives continue to provide
higher returns in terms of engagement for news
outlets (in line with what we have found in previous
research, eg Majó-Vázquez et al. 2017). To provide
evidence that this is the case, we analyse the average
engagement for various types of post on Facebook.
While the average engagement – including reactions,
comments and shares – with photo and URL posts
were 364 and 472 respectively, it was as high as 1,053
for live videos and 1,509 for videos on Facebook.
YouTube posts, however, did not do too well (average
engagement being a meagre 24)
9
. Overall, this result
shows a path for potential growth for news outlets
within these platforms.
N A N
Finally, drawing on previous research on news
audience networks, we assess the structure of
audience networks of news consumption at the
macro level on Twitter and on the web (Mukerjee et
al. 2018). We use digital trace data to provide new
evidence on the level of distribution of India’s news
audiences, assessing whether there is evidence of
audience clusters around a few news outlets on
Twitter and, if so, whether this is dierent than that
we nd on the web.
To do this, we map all retweets, mentions and replies
to the outlets on our list on Twitter, and build a
network using the following logic: nodes represent
the individual outlets, while the edges between them
represent the number of Twitter users who replied to,
retweeted, and mentioned the corresponding pair of
news outlets. This measure, for every pair of outlets,
serves as a proxy for the shared exposure to those
outlets. By analysing the extent to which the nodes
in this network share overlapping audiences when it
comes to retweeting, mentioning and replying activity,
we can see how the Twitter audience is distributed
(or not) across Indian news outlets on the platform.
In parallel, we collect similar shared audience data of
the outlets’ website trac as well, from the audience
meter rm Comscore. This dataset tells us two things:
one, the monthly audience reach for each individual
outlet, and the monthly shared audience overlap
between every pair of outlets.
Figure 6. Top Facebook post and tweet by engagement
9
This might suggest a limited exposure to YouTube videos on Facebook, which in turn could be explained by the rivalry of the latter with
Google which owns YouTube.
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
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Using these two datasets, each of which corresponds
to Twitter and website trac activity respectively,
we build the two networks depicted in Figures 7
and 8. In the rst gure, we see the Twitter audience
network where each node represents the Twitter
account of a news outlet and the links between them
represent the total number of retweets, replies, and
mentions they share. Similarly, Figure 8 shows the
website audience overlap network, where each node
represents a news website corresponding to the
news outlet in our sample. The ties between those
nodes measure the amount of audience that they
share, averaged over the three-month period. In both
networks, the thicker the edge between a pair of
nodes, the greater is the overlap between them.
Aer mapping the audience behaviour on Twitter
and the web, we apply a simple algorithm to identify
the communities that appear in both networks.
10
The
higher the number of communities, the greater is the
‘modular’ nature of the network, and thus the level of
audience fragmentation. As shown by the modularity
scores obtained for each network, we can conclude
that there seems to be no evidence of fragmentation,
beyond what is expected in any network with the
same number of nodes and edges, be it on Twitter or
on the web.
11
This suggests that both on Twitter and
on the open web, Indian online news audience engage
with a range of oen very dierent news providers.
Despite growing political polarisation, on the whole
Indian news audiences still maintain a substantially
diverse news diet online, at least in terms of the
outlets that they consume news from on Twitter and
on the open web.
10
The algorithm used is a community detection walktrap algorithm (Newman 2010) which attempts to nd the communities in a network by
simulating the path of a random walker who starts from a random node in the graph. The intuition behind this process is that a perfectly
random walker will get trapped within communities in the network, since there are more edges within them than there are without.
11
The modularity scores are -0.0115 for Twitter and -0.0117 for the web network.
Figure 7. Twitter networks
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 10 |
Note for Figures 7 and 8: See Table A1 for the full list of outlets included in the Twitter and web audience analyses. For visualisation
purposes, we removed the edges with weights that were less than the average weights in both networks, and only kept the strongest
connections. The size of the nodes represents their centrality on the network. The more central a node is, the higher is the number of other
nodes it shares overlap with.
A visual inspection of the Twitter networks reveals that
the largest legacy news outlets, like The Times of India,
NDTV, or the Indian Express, are the most prominent
nodes, occupying the most central positions. This
means that they share high levels of overlapping
interaction with the highest number of nodes in the
Twitter network. In other words, Twitter users who
interact with these outlets, also tend to interact more
with most of the other outlets in the network.
This points to the fact that these users have a relatively
omnivorous media diet in so far as exposure to news
outlets is concerned. However, while the audiences of
the largest legacy news outlets exhibit a more diverse
news exposure on Twitter, on the web a variety of
digital-born outlets also occupy very central positions
along with legacy outlets.
This suggests that the audiences of these newer
digital-born outlets also navigate a diverse set of
media outlets, including the mainstream legacy
outlets, without necessarily being trapped within echo
chambers. Our analysis thus provides a reminder that
while the existence of active, visible, and vocal partisan
minorities engaged in oen highly polarised debates
(sometimes in orchestrated ways driven by particular
political agendas) can create the impression that the
overall online environment in India is fragmented
along partisan lines, our ndings suggests that is not
the case overall.
Figure 8. Web audience networks
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 11 |
A  
Sílvia Majó-Vázquez is Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Subhayan Mukerjee is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Taberez Ahmed Neyazi is Assistant Professor of New Media and Political Communication at the National University of Singapore.
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
with the support of the Google News Initiative.
References
Aneez, Z., Chattapadhyay, S., Parthasarathi, V., and
Nielsen, R. K. (2017). Indian News Media and the
Production of News in the Age of Social Discovery. Oxford:
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Aneez, Z., Neyazi, T. A., Kalogeropoulos, A., and Nielsen,
R. K. (2019). Reuters Institute India Digital News Report.
Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Majó-Vázquez, S., Zhao, J., and Nielsen, R. K. (2017). The
Digital-Born and Legacy Media News Media on Twitter
during the French Presidential Elections. Oxford: Reuters
Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Morstatter, F., Pfeer, J., Liu, H., and Carley, K. M. (2013).
‘Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from
Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose’. ArXiv
Preprint ArXiv:1306.5204.
Mukerjee, S., Majo-Vazquez, S., and González-
Bailón, S. (2018). ‘Networks of Audience Overlap
in the Consumption of Digital News’. Journal of
Communication, 68(1), 26–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/
joc/jqx007
Neyazi, T. A. (2011). ‘Politics aer Vernacularisation:
Hindi Media and Indian Democracy’. Economic and
Political Weekly, 46(10): 75-82.
Neyazi, T. A. (2018). Political Communication and
Mobilisation: The Hindi Media in India. Cambridge and
Delhi: Cambridge University Press.
Newman, M. (2010). Networks: An Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., and
Nielsen, R. K. (2019). Digital News Report. Oxford:
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Das, A., Schroeder, R. (forthcoming). ‘Online
Disinformation in the Run-up to the Indian 2019
Election’.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Jayant Sriram, the
senior assistant editor at The Hindu, Ariadna Net
València, Prabhat Mishra and Arif Nadaf for their
valuable work as research assistants. They also
gratefully acknowledge the work of the Data Science
Centre of the Graduate School of Economics at the
University Pompeu Fabra, specially of Nandan Rao and
Richard Knudsen, who assisted us in collecting and
analysing the data for this report and accommodated
all our requirements. The authors are also very
grateful to the research and administration team at
the Reuters Institute for input, insight and support:
Lucas Graves, Joy Jenkins, Anne Schulz, Richard
Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Scott Brennen, Nic
Newman, and Alex Reid. They would also like to thank
Soma Basu, a journalist in India, for valuable input.
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITALBORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE  INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 12 |
Appendix
Figure A1. Map of India election phases and location of regional outlets
Note: Please see Table A1 to  nd the reference for the regional outlets located on the map. All regional outlets are located on the map
except for those that are widely circulated in more than one third of Indian states e.g., Dainik Bhaskar or Dainik Jagran.
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 13 |
Type* Brand** Region Twitter Facebook
Online
audience
reach %
National daily newspaper Times of India
✓ ✓
45.9
TV, national NDTV
✓ ✓
22.1
TV, national Times Now
✓
21.5
TV, national News 18
✓ ✓
18.1
Digital-born, national Dailyhunt
✓ ✓
17.1
National daily newspaper The Indian Express
✓ ✓
16.4
Regional newspaper Dainik Bhaskar North & Central India
✓ ✓
14.4
Magazine, national India Today
✓ ✓
13.3
Business daily newspaper The Economic Times
✓ ✓
12.7
Digital-born, national One India
✓ ✓
12
National daily newspaper Hindustan Times
✓ ✓
11.1
Regional newspaper Amar Ujala North India
✓ ✓
10.7
Regional newspaper Dainik Jagran North & Central India
✓ ✓
8.6
Regional newspaper Rajasthan Patrika (1) Rajasthan
✓
8.1
TV, international*** BBC India
✓ ✓
6.3
Digital-born, national Firstpost
✓ ✓
5
National daily newspaper The Hindu
✓ ✓
4.6
TV, regional Asianet News (2) Kerala
✓ ✓
4.4
Digital-born, national India.com
✓ ✓
3.9
Digital-born, national The Quint
✓ ✓
3.9
TV, national ABP News
✓ ✓
3.1
Regional newspaper Punjab Kesari (3) Punjab & North India
✓ ✓
2.9
Digital-born, national Redi.com
✓
2.7
TV, national India TV
✓ ✓
2.5
Digital-born, national The News Minute
✓ ✓
2.3
TV, regional Odisha TV (4) Odisha
✓
2.3
Digital-born, national Catch News
✓
2.2
Regional newspaper Loksatta (5) Maharashtra
✓
2.1
TV, national NewsX
✓
2
National daily newspaper Daily News and Analysis
✓ ✓
2
Digital-born, national ScoopWhoop
✓ ✓
1.9
Digital-born, national Scroll.in
✓ ✓
1.9
Regional newspaper Lokmat (6) Maharashtra
✓ ✓
1.7
Business daily newspaper Business Standard
✓
1.6
National daily newspaper The New Indian Express
✓ ✓
1.5
Digital-born, national BloombergQuint
✓ ✓
1.4
TV, regional ABP Majha (7) Maharashtra
✓
1.3
Regional newspaper Malayala Manorama (8) Kerala
✓ ✓
1.3
Magazine, regional Ananda Vikatan (9) Tamil Nadu
✓ ✓
1.3
Regional newspaper Eenadu (10) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓ ✓
1.3
Regional newspaper Prabhat Khabar (11) Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal
✓ ✓
1.3
Regional newspaper Anandabazar Patrika(12) West Bengal, Delhi
✓ ✓
1.3
Regional newspaper Dinamalar (13) Tamil Nadu
✓ ✓
1.1
Regional newspaper Mid Day (14) Mumbai
✓
1.0
Regional newspaper Divya Bhaskar (15) Gujarat
✓
1.0
Regional newspaper Deccan Herald (16) Karnataka
✓ ✓
0.9
Regional newspaper Sakshi (17) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓
0.8
Digital-born, national The Better India
✓ ✓
0.8
Magazine, national Swarajya
✓
0.8
Regional newspaper Deccan Chronicle (18) Telangana
✓
0.7
Regional newspaper Telegraph India East India
✓
0.7
Regional newspaper Sakal (19) Maharashtra
✓
0.7
Digital-born, national Mashable India
✓ ✓
0.6
Table A1. Reach of Indian news outlets and list of Twitter and Facebook news pages studied
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 14 |
Type* Brand** Region Twitter Facebook
Online
audience
reach %
Digital-born, national OpIndia
✓
0.6
Regional newspaper Kannada Prabha (20) Karnataka
✓
0.6
Digital-born, national The Wire
✓ ✓
0.5
Digital-born, regional Telugu 360 (21) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓
0.5
Digital-born, national Sify.com
✓ ✓
0.4
Digital-born, national India Times
✓ ✓
0.4
Digital-born, international BuzzFeed
✓ ✓
0.4
TV, regional ABN Andhra Jyothi(22) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓
0.4
Magazine, national Outlook
✓
0.4
Regional newspaper Dinamani (23) Tamil Nadu
✓
0.4
Digital-born, national Khabar247
✓
0.4
Digital-born, regional News Trend (24) Odisha
✓
0.4
Regional newspaper Mathrubhumi (25) Kerala
✓
0.3
Digital-born, regional Great Andhra (26) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓ ✓
0.3
National daily newspaper The Tribune
✓ ✓
0.3
Digital-born, business VCCircle
✓
0.3
National daily newspaper The Pioneer
✓
0.3
TV, national Republic TV
✓
0.3
Digital-born, national Janta Ka Reporter
✓
0.3
Digital-born, national Vice India
✓ ✓
0.3
Digital-born, national The Hu Post India
✓ ✓
0.3
Regional newspaper The Hans India (27) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓
0.2
Regional newspaper MaalaiMalar (28) Tamil Nadu
✓
0.2
TV, national News Nation
✓ ✓
0.2
Regional newspaper Namasthe Telangana (29) Telangana
✓
0.2
Digital-born, regional Valai Tamil (30) Tamil Nadu
✓
0.2
Digital-born, national Quartz India
✓
0.2
Digital-born, national Youth Ki Awaaz
✓
0.2
Digital-born, regional Tupaki (31) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓ ✓
0.1
Regional newspaper Dinakaran (32) Tamil Nadu
✓
0.1
Magazine, international Forbes India
✓
0.1
National daily newspaper The Statesman
✓
0.1
Public service media All India Radio
✓
0.1
Regional newspaper Mangalam (33) Kerala
✓
0.02
Magazine, national Economic and Political Weekly
✓
0.01
Regional newspaper Gujarat Samachar (34) Gujarat
✓
0.01
Digital-born, national Newslaundry
✓
0.01
Regional newspaper Dina Thanthi (35) Tamil Nadu
✓ ✓
n/a
Public service media Doordarshan News
✓ ✓
n/a
TV, regional Suvarna News 24X7 (36) Karnataka
✓
n/a
Digital-born, national Sabrang
✓
n/a
Digital-born, national India Spend
✓ ✓
n/a
TV, regional V6 News (37) Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
✓
n/a
Digital-born, national The Logical Indian
✓
n/a
Digital-born, national NYOOOZ
✓
n/a
Digital-born, national Firkee
✓
n/a
Digital-born, national The Post 24
✓
n/a
Regional newspaper Sandesh (38) Gujarat
✓
n/a
Note: Twitter and Facebook data are available for those outlets that have a check mark (✓) next to the outlet’s username. The source for
online reach and overlap data is Comscore MMX Key Measures, % reach multiplatform, Feb. 2019.
* We use the label ‘regional’ for vernacular language newspapers although some of them are widely circulated in North, Central and East India.
** The number is used for referencing on the map (see Figure A1).
*** BBC India is a website but is labelled as TV to acknowledge its parent legacy brand, the BBC.
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITALBORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE  INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 15 |
• Tweets containing the name of an Indian party or candidate
• Tweets posted by candidates or parties
• Replies to one of the candidates or parties
• Tweets containing top hashtags:
OR
Final Sample
50,965,208
Total Tweets
Collected
63,252,755
• Tweets containing an Indian media name or username or
tweets posted by an Indian media outlet account
#Elections2019
#2019LoksabhaElections
#rahulvsmodi
#Mission2019
#KisKiSarkar
#indiabackinaction
#RamMandir
#LokSabhaElections
#LokSabhaElections2019
#LokSabhaElection2019
#IndianElections2019
#Loksabha2019
#Decision2019
#लोकसभाचुनाव2019
#IndiaDecides2019
#VoteForIndia
#DelhiVotes
#ElectionResults2019
#Verdict2019
We rst
ltered tweets
that fullled
these criteria:
The resulting
sample was
further ltered
via tweets that
contained:
Figure A2. Sampling and  ltering process
Note: We did not collect tweets including the name of the media outlets on URLs.
ONLINE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH LEGACY AND DIGITAL-BORN NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2019 INDIAN ELECTIONS
| 16 |
Table A2. Filtering Facebook keywords
election polling station
candidate circumscription
Lok Sabha Lok Sabha
party #IndianElection2019
rally #Election2019
politician #2019LoksabhaElection
vote #LokSabhaElection
voting #LokSabhaElection2019
poll #Loksabha2019
Note: All ltering keywords have been translated into Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati. When
applicable, plurals are used as ltering keywords too.