So is this fragmentation a bad thing?

In lots of ways the answer to that question depends on your larger thoughts about how politics ought to be practiced and what your notion of the "ideal citizen" really is. A lot of future- of-news commentators speak as if digital fragmentation were universally bad. It certainly sounds terrible—fragmentation implies the shattering of something whole. But what the fragmentation of news audiences also does is that it creates new communities, and new freedoms to learn about the issues that concern them directly. Perhaps the Internet really has shattered the large community conversation that existed in the era of monopoly local newspapers and three big networks. But we shouldn't forget that that "large conversation" also reflected the narrow interests of a specific group of people and often excluded many other points of view. Now these less powerful communities can be created out of the very process of fragmentation itself, and with this can come new freedoms to engage in politics in new ways.