A Multinational Computational Analysis of Hyperlinking in News

Studies of hyperlinks in news were prevalent in the onset of digital news publishing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, the rise of social media platforms redirected researchers' attention away from the open web, where hyperlinks played an essential role, to other corners of the digita...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journalism practice 2024-09, Vol.18 (8), p.2062-2084
Main Authors: Bhargava, Rahul, Bermejo, Fernando, Chesnutt, Kathleen, Jefferies, Danica, Ndulue, Emily Boardman
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
digital news
hyperlinks
journalism
Link studies
media analysis
media ecosystems
Social networks
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Studies of hyperlinks in news were prevalent in the onset of digital news publishing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, the rise of social media platforms redirected researchers' attention away from the open web, where hyperlinks played an essential role, to other corners of the digital ecosystem. As a result, research on the use of hyperlinks in news has waned in recent years, despite the continuing and frequent use of hyperlinks in digital news, and their role as connectors between social media and news media. We aim to fill that gap in the recent research literature on hyperlinks' use in news through a multinational computational analysis. Analyzing 1,481,969 hyperlinks from 579,294 stories in 869 sources across seven countries in five continents, we found that, despite significant variations across countries, hyperlinking is quite prevalent in digital news, that external links are more prevalent than previously found, and that US sites and social media platforms are frequent targets of hyperlinks across the world.
ISSN:1751-2786
1751-2794
DOI:10.1080/17512786.2022.2133780