LOKMAN TSUI
The Hyperlink in Newspapers and Blogs
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of the New York Times on the Web, and the Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's “Back” button or icon until this page reappears.1
The hyperlink poses a dilemma for news organizations. On the one hand, links can be very useful in their ability to directly link to source material, such as public reports or official transcripts, in providing support for a news article. Considering that trust in what the people hear, see, and read has been steadily declining since the 1980s, the ability of the hyperlink to link a claim to its source can increase transparency of the news and subsequently restore some of the credibility of the mass media.2 On the other hand, news editors may fear to link to Web sites over which the news organization has no control, as the preceding disclaimer from the New York Times exemplifies. While the disclaimer itself is no longer used, it does nicely capture an anxiety regarding the clarity of boundaries in the digital space. Yet newspaper editors worried about readers' confusion may also consider that competition with blogs in the “marketplace of attention”3 may have made concern about linking moot. Most definitions of blogs include the hyperlink as one of its characteristics, suggesting that bloggers are not at all constrained by the attributional worries that might concern newspaper editors.
These comparisons may seem logical, but it must be said that no research or writing exists on the norms that bloggers or workers at the online divisions of newspaper firms hold toward use of the hyperlink. In fact, there are few studies of the ways hyperlinks are used by online news organizations in the coverage of news areas, such as politics. Such explorations are almost nonexistent regarding bloggers. The purpose of this essay is to report on a systematic comparison of the ways a sample of leading newspapers and blogs used hyperlinks. My central finding is that while the blogs link heavily to external Web sites, some major newspapers barely link at all, and others link exclusively to themselves. The strategies that explain these findings and their implications for democratic deliberation are topics deserving of further academic and public discussion.
How News Directs Attention
News has always been and is still a crucial means for organizing and directing our attention to valuable information. It distinguishes itself from other forms of public knowledge in its claim to truth. Crafting the news, journalists buttress the claim to truth by relying on the use of factual information. Facts, according to Tuchman, are “pertinent information gathered by professionally validated methods specifying the relationship between what is known and how it is known.”4 It is this process of sourcing, which includes fact-checking and verification, that defines news vis-à-vis other forms of public knowledge.5 However, the process of sourcing has traditionally been problematic in terms of transparency. How do we know whether the journalist really did verify sources properly? Tuchman argues that the notion of objectivity is a crucial strategy journalists developed to establish a relationship of trust with the public. Well known and widely accepted, for example, is the “two source” rule. It stipulates that a journalist has to check with at least two different sources before publishing something as fact.
Professionalism, objectivity, and a code of ethics all factor in the journalist's strategy in a bid for the public's attention and trust. These conclusions are drawn from what are considered a set of classic newsroom ethnographies.6 Obviously, notions of objectivity and professionalism continue to guide the production of news. However, considering that these ethnographies were conducted decades ago, do they still provide a comprehensive picture of how newsrooms function today? While we don't know for sure, it is doubtful regarding online news. A crucial difference in the way online news directs our attention is through the use of the hyperlink. The hyperlink allows news providers to suggest which voices are worthy of our attention and which voices are not. The hyperlink also is able to support the facticity of news, because of its inherent ability to specify “the relationship between what is known and how it is known,” simply by providing a link to the source. With over 70 percent of the U.S. population having accessed online news, it becomes paramount to have a better understanding of the production of online news and the role the hyperlink plays in it.7
How Online News Directs Our Attention
People trust the New York Times and Washington Post and link to them, but there are a huge number of people who are going outside the bounds of traditional media to these new media forms to get their information and, more importantly, to participate in the discussions around news and topics. (David Sifry, blogger and CEO of Technorati)8
Digital network technology has drastically altered the social conditions of speech.9 It has enabled the change from a situation where journalism as a practice is constrained by technology and reserved for a select few to a situation where barriers to publish are lowered to such a degree that Hartley argues that now “everyone is a journalist.”10 Jenkins similarly describes the rise of what he calls a “convergence culture,” which is blurring the lines between old and new media and is resulting in “a changed sense of community, a greater sense of participation, less dependence on official expertise, and a greater trust in collaborative problem solving.”11
This change in the cultural environment is perhaps best exemplified by the incredible rise in popularity of blogs. Many definitions of blogs point to the notion of a Web site with regularly updated entries, presented in reverse chronological order. Most definitions include the hyperlink as an important and even essential characteristic of what constitutes a blog.12 Herring distinguishes different genres of blogs, ranging from blogs that function as personal diaries to blogs that link to, comment on, and cover news.13 While most blogs (65 percent) do not make claims to be a form of journalism, they do mention that they sometimes or often practice journalistic standards, such as including links to original sources (57 percent) and spending extra time to verify facts they want to include in their postings (56 percent).14 Some research has framed the relationship between bloggers and journalists as adversarial. Others suggest that the question of bloggers versus journalists is over and that the two have a synergistic relationship.15 Lowrey, for example, suggests that a division of labor exists between the two, with bloggers relying on the work of journalists and taking up what they fail to cover at the same time. Because of a relative lack of institutional constraints, bloggers can afford to be specialized and partisan; to cite nonelite sources; and, in general, to cater to a niche audience.16 At a conference panel on blogging, journalism, and credibility, Rosen stated: “One of the biggest challenges for professional journalists today is that they have to live in a shared media space. They have to get used to bloggers and others with an independent voice talking about them, fact-checking them, overlooking them, and they no longer have exclusive title to the press.”17
Clearly, the boundaries of what constitute news are blurring, and we need to have a more inclusive understanding of online news that goes beyond what is offered by the traditional mainstream media.18 This sentiment is echoed by Jenkins, who argues that it would be “a mistake to think about either kind of media power in isolation.”19 Phrased in terms of the imperatives of media firms, the question is this: now that news is increasingly being created and read online, how have strategies for gaining public attention and trust adjusted according to the possibilities the Internet as a new medium offers? As a fundamental characteristic of the Internet, the hyperlink stands at the center of this subject.
The Functions of the Hyperlink for Newspaper Sites and Blogs
In its most basic form, the hyperlink makes it possible to connect one Web site to another. Due to its open-ended character, the hyperlink is a simple yet powerful tool that can be employed for many uses. The meaning of the connection is not implemented in the hyperlink itself and must often be inferred from the context.20 With regard to the possible functions the hyperlink can take on in online news, we can distinguish between linking for two purposes: citation and reciprocity.
Citation
Perhaps the most classic function of the hyperlink is to use it for citation.21 In its ability to connect a claim directly to its source, the hyperlink creates transparency in “the relationship between what is known and how it is known,” something Tuchman has referred to as the defining feature of factual information. Much of the strength of the claim, however, still depends on the credibility of the source it is linked to. This might explain the reluctance to link to external Web sites, since there is no control over either their content or availability, as the previously quoted disclaimer from the New York Times exemplifies. As an existing news organization with an already well-established reputation, linking to less credible, external Web sites might form a threat rather than an opportunity. It becomes paramount to distinguish between internal links, which are considered safe, and external links, which there is no control over. One way to do this is to put a firewall between internal and external links; in practice, this means clearly marking what is internal and external—for example, by adding a disclaimer and clearly positioning the links outside the news article. Another way would be to dispense with external links altogether.
Reciprocity
The second function of the hyperlink is to foster relationships of reciprocity. Blogs in particular seem to depend on a strategy of reciprocity, of exchanging links, to build up both credibility and popularity. When asked by an audience member at the conference “The Hyperlinked Society” what he could do to have his blog mentioned and linked on Jay Rosen's popular blog PressThink, Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, answered that his best bet was to link to his Web site first.22 Many search engines build on this concept of reciprocity. Measuring the relevance of a Web site through the number of incoming links is the basic idea behind PageRank, a crucial part of the success of Google as a search engine. It is also the basic idea behind Technorati, a search engine that keeps track of what is happening in the blogosphere. It measures which blogs are the most popular by their number of incoming links—by how many other Web sites link to them. The leading political blogs receive well over ten thousand incoming links from other Web sites. This includes such blogs as Michelle Malkin (10,240 incoming blog links) and group blogs, such as the Huffington Post (15,007 incoming blog links) and Daily Kos (11,475 incoming blog links).23
Incoming links are not just valuable for blogs, however, but also may carry great value for the traditional mass media. The idea of measuring incoming links—the idea behind PageRank and Technorati—is similar to a concept Tuchman has called “the web of facticity.” It is the idea that facts can be supported and validated by other related facts, cross-referencing each other. Tuchman was certainly not referring to the World Wide Web back in 1978, but the idea of a “web” of facticity gains an added layer of meaning in the context of the hyperlink and online news: it is now possible to make the web of facticity explicit through the examination of the use of hyperlink in news articles. In other words, a journalist is now able to write a story with factual information and directly link the fact to the source, showing the public explicitly how that journalist got to know what she or he got to know. In turn, the story can be validated by other Web sites linking to it.
In addition to considerations regarding audience understanding of the facts of a story or opinion piece, important commercial concerns regarding reciprocal linking may guide news Web sites and blogs. All newspaper sites and many blogs carry advertising. The price of the ads goes up with the number of people who come to the site and, often, by the time they spend on the site. Newspaper sites consequently have an interest in keeping readers in their territory for as long as possible, and we might assume that external linking would work against that. Bloggers also have an interest in keeping readers, but their desire to rank highly in blog search engines so that people will visit them may lead them to follow Jay Rosen's previously noted advice and link to other bloggers.
Previous Research on Linking
Research on news production in the digital age has been sparse, with little attention being paid to the role of the hyperlink.24 No writings examine the norms and strategies that the people who edit news or blog sites have toward links. A handful of studies do look at the presence of hyper-links on newspaper sites. In a study published in 2002, Barnhurst concludes that online newspapers rarely make any use of hyperlinks in news articles, with more than 75 percent having no link at all.25 Dimitrova and others found in 2003 that the destination of hyperlinks to an external Web site only happened in a stunningly low 4.1 percent of the total number of hyperlinks in newspaper articles.26 This seems to be in line with the findings of Tremayne, who reports a steady decline in the proportion of external links over the period of 1999–2002.27 Note, though, that these investigations were conducted during the Web's early years, and the current robust environment for the Internet might have brought changes in newspaper organizations' online procedures.
What about blogs? Contrary to what might be a general sense, by people who follow blogs, that heavy interlinking is widespread, Herring finds that about only half (51.2 percent) of the blogs that she surveyed link to other blogs, with even fewer (36.1 percent) linking to news sites.28 However, she also notes that this number is likely to be skewed by the high number of blogs that act as personal diaries, many of which do not link to other Web sites. One might expect the blogs that link to, comment on, and cover news to display a strategy that links heavily to other Web sites. Herring's sample, however, does not include enough of these political blogs to say anything (statistically) significant about what their typical linking pattern would be like.
For this study, I am particularly interested in link patterns of political blogs as an alternative form of online news. Political blogs are interesting because many of them are stars of the blogosphere, attracting the most attention. Shirky argues that blogs follow a distribution that closely resembles a power law, meaning a winner-takes-all situation, where a small minority of the total number of blogs gets the majority of attention, while there is a long tail of the remaining blogs that does not get the amount of traffic remotely near those at the top.29 A significant number of blogs at the high end of the power law distribution consists of these political blogs. Although the size of their audience is not quite comparable to those of the mass media, they are rapidly gaining influence.
Besides anecdotal evidence, however, there has been surprisingly little empirical research looking at link patterns of these leading political blogs. An exception is a study done by Adamic and Glance, who found in 2005 that the top forty political blogs refer to the mainstream media about once every post and referred to other blogs only one post out of ten.30 This result, however, might not be fully generalizable, as it sampled posts during the 2004 presidential election, a time where it is particularly likely for blogs to link to coverage in the mainstream media. That the top forty political blogs linked more often to the mainstream media than to other blogs is particularly striking because these political blogs live and die by the link.
The goal of this study is to address some of the gaps in the literature on hyperlinks. It seeks to answer two sets of questions. First, is the hyperlink used at all in online news; and if so, to what Web sites do they link, in what way, and how often? Second, from the specific ways hyper-links are used or not used, can we infer strategies regarding editorial control, the desire for high site ranking, and the interest in keeping people on the site?
Study Design and Method
I examined the online editions of four leading newspapers and five leading political blogs. The newspapers selected were the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. The five political blogs selected were the Huffington Post, Michelle Malkin, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress. These five blogs were listed as the five most popular political blogs by Technorati based on the number of incoming links.31
The study focused on the coverage of political news in two periods, together making up one full week. The first period was March 1–4, 2007. The second period was March 26–28, 2007. By focusing on two distinct periods, the hope was to limit issues of periodicity bias. Political news was chosen because this type of news provides many opportunities to link to external sites.
The news articles and blog postings were downloaded on March 4, 2007, for the first period and on March 28, 2007, for the second period. Starting from the front page of the politics section for the newspapers and the front page of the political blogs, all articles and postings were downloaded and saved. This was critical due to the habit of newspapers to put older articles behind (sometimes locked) archives.
Answering the research questions required a content analysis of the news articles and blog postings. Two units of analysis were used: the article and the hyperlink. This design was chosen to make the content analysis more functional by breaking down the articles into hyperlinks and to aggregate them back again once the analysis was finished. The articles were coded for the following categories: URL, date of story, author, title, and source. Another code sheet was developed to capture the characteristics of hyperlinks. Links were coded for URL, label (the underlined text that is being linked), placement (inside or outside the article body), destination (internal or external Web site), category of the destination Web site (blog, mainstream news site, governmental or other institutional site, and other), and type of content being linked to (text, video, photo, audio, or contact information—e.g., an email address). The destination Web site was coded for four categories: blog, mainstream news, government or other institution, and other.
For the purposes of this study, a blog was defined as a Web site with regularly updated entries, presented in reverse chronological order. A “mainstream news site” was a Web site of any major news organization; when in doubt, a site was coded as other. The category “government or other institution” included any Web site by any government or other major institution, such as Gallup; when in doubt, the Web site again was coded as other. Other destination Web sites who did not fit in any of the other categories were coded as other.
All collected news articles and blog postings were analyzed for content. Hyperlinks were coded insofar as they were deemed relevant to the news article or blog posting. The decision of what was deemed relevant was left to the coder but specifically excluded tags, trackbacks, and comments. Tags were defined as links that are used to categorize the news article, often located outside the main body of the article and internally linked. The justification for exclusion here is that they are not used for the purpose of citation or reciprocity. Trackbacks and comments were excluded to eliminate issues involved with the lack of conformity across newspapers and blogs in offering these two functionalities. To determine intercoder reliability, three news articles or blog postings for each day for each newspaper or blog were randomly selected and coded. The average intercoder reliability was established at 0.97 for the news articles and blog postings and at 0.87 for the hyperlinks, using Krippendorff's alpha.
Findings
Do leading newspapers and political blogs link heavily? The answer seems to be yes. The total number of articles coded was 806, and the total number of links was 3,876, with a mean number of 4.8 links per article. Two newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, were exceptions to this. USA Today had, despite the highest number of articles, only a little more than one link per article. The Los Angeles Times had even fewer links, on average only one link per three articles. The political blogs and the other two newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, all linked frequently in their political news articles. Surprisingly, it was not a blog but the New York Times that linked the most of all, with more than ten links per article on average.
Do the leading newspapers and political blogs link to external Web sites? Here is a stark difference between the newspapers and the blogs in this study. The political blogs all linked heavily and also linked heavily to external Web sites. More than a third of the links of the Huffington Post and Daily Kos and over three-quarters of the links of Think Progress and Michelle Malkin pointed to external Web sites. This is in sharp contrast with the newspapers. While both the Washington Post and the New York Times linked heavily in their news articles, they linked almost exclusively to themselves. Less than 1 percent of the links in the political news articles of the New York Times pointed to external Web sites, while only 3 percent of the links in the political news articles of the Washington Post did so.
How many links are placed outside the main body of an article? The leading newspapers all placed well over half of their links outside the main body. The leading political blogs, however, seemed to exclusively place their links within the body. The exception was the Huffington Post, which placed well over two-thirds of its links outside the main body. How many links placed outside the main body of the article also point to external Web sites? Here the picture is very clear: practically none of those in this study were linked to external Web sites.
Finally, when blogs link externally to Web sites, to what kind of Web sites do they most often link to? The newspapers were here omitted from this analysis, considering that only the blogs linked to external Web sites. In roughly one-third of the cases, the political blogs linked to other blogs, with Michelle Malkin (42.4 percent) and Crooks and Liars (47.5 percent) in particular being fond of linking to other blogs. The blogs also link frequently to mainstream news Web sites, including those of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Crooks and Liars (16.8 percent) linked the least to mainstream news Web sites, while Think Progress (42.5) linked the most frequently to mainstream news Web sites. A moderate number of the links were directed toward governmental or other institutional Web sites. Michelle Malkin (4.6 percent) linked the least frequently to such cites, while Daily Kos (12.1 percent) linked to them the most often. Finally, a fair share of their links went to other Web sites that did not fit into one of the three categories (blogs, mainstream news sites, and governmental or other institutional sites).
Discussion
J. D. Lasica, a media critic, blogger, and citizen media expert, has lamented the sparse use of the hyperlink by journalists.
Equally important—and still underused, in my view—is the ability to link to source materials, transcripts, public records and other original documents to buttress an article's reporting. In this age of public mistrust of the media, such steps enhance a news organization's credibility. In my freshman year at college my journalism professor told us that the first rule of good journalism is: Show, don't tell. So: Don't tell readers to trust you. Show them the goods.32
Is Lasica's lament valid? The findings of this study show that it is a mixed bag for the leading newspapers. While the Los Angeles Times and USA Today still do not rely on the hyperlink much, the Washington Post and, in particular, the New York Times certainly do not underuse the hyperlink, as this study has shown that they link heavily in their news articles. However, Lasica is correct in his sense of the lack of use of the hyperlink by journalists to source original material, or what he refers to as “showing the goods.” Even though the Washington Post and the New York Times link heavily, they also only exclusively link to themselves.
The leading newspapers do not use the hyperlink in their political news coverage for the purpose of citation. This is particularly unfortunate given the nature of political news, which affords many opportunities to link to external sources. Blogs, by contrast, link heavily and also link heavily to external Web sites. But how do we know that they use the hyperlink for purposes of citation and not for reciprocity? In cases when the political blogs link externally to other blogs, we cannot tell for sure. A blog might link to another blog to back up a claim but might also do this in the hope that the other blog will link back. However, the political blogs also link frequently to mainstream news Web sites. In this case, we can be pretty sure that the political blogs link for the purpose of citation. As this study has shown, there is zero expectation that the mainstream news Web sites will actually consider linking back to the blogs.
So why are newspapers reluctant to link to external Web sites? Although further research on the institutional processes behind online news production is needed, the findings of this study add support for several hypotheses that seek to explain the lack of external links. First, the study suggests little support for the hypothesis that the reluctance to link to external Web sites results from fear of losing control because it might threaten credibility. In the past, as the New York Times disclaimer has shown, links to external sites were often placed outside the main body of the news article; nowadays, both the disclaimer and the links to external sites are gone. But there really is no particular reason to hesitate linking externally for fear of losing credibility, as there are many credible Web sites that could be linked to. Pointing to press releases from the White House Web site might be useful to readers, for example. The fear of losing control, then, might be because of gatekeeping purposes. Dimitrova and others have previously suggested this second hypothesis.33
A third reason sometimes mentioned for mainstream news organizations' slowness to pick up on the potential of new technology, such as the hyperlink, points to technical or organizational inertia. The idea is that it takes time to get used to the new online environment. But inertia is clearly not the reason for news organizations' reluctance or even refusal to link to external Web sites. Tremayne has shown a clear decline in the number of external links over the years,34 and the findings of this study confirm this trend. Ironically, it seems that the more comfortable newspapers grow with the Web, the more inclined they are not to link to external Web sites and, instead, to link only to themselves.
That leaves a fourth possible suggestion for the lack of external links: newspapers' fear of losing advertising revenues by sending people out of their sites. It seems a reasonable possibility, though more research is needed to make this claim definitive. In general, more work is needed to validate the findings presented here and to determine why newspapers virtually ignore the use of links for citations. The point is not merely an academic one. In view of the importance of the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times online as well as offline, the way these news organizations draw attention to and verify ideas ought to be a topic of concern to anyone interested in expanding the quality of democratic discourse in the digital age.
NOTES
I want to extend my gratitude to Dr. Joseph Turow for his guidance and valuable feedback and for giving me the opportunity to work with him. I also want to thank Brigitte Ho and Anne-Katrin Arnold for their insightful comments and help with coding. All errors in this essay remain, of course, mine.
1. Quote from New York Times disclaimer retrieved from Mark Glaser, “Open Season: News Sites Add Outside Links, Free Content,” Online Journalism Review, October 19, 2004, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098225187.php (accessed March 23, 2007).
2. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership, 2006, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=1069 (accessed March 23, 2007).
3. See the essay by Webster in this book.
4. G. Tuchman, Making News (New York: Free Press, 1978), 82.
5. B. Kovach and T. Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York: Crown, 2001).
6. Tuchman, Making News; H. J. Gans, Deciding What's News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (New York: Pantheon, 1979); M. Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
7. For the latest information on how many people use online news, see Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media 2007, http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_online_audience.asp?cat=2&media=4 (accessed April 23, 2007).
8. Quote by David Sifry cited in J. D. Lasica, “Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere,” Online Journalism Review, August 12, 2004, http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1092267863.php (accessed March 24, 2007).
9. J. M. Balkin, “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society,” New York University Law Review 79, no. 1 (2006), .http://www.law.nyu.edu/journals/lawreview/issues/vol79/no1/NYU101.pdf
10. J. Hartley, “Journalism as a Human Right: A Cultural Approach to Journalism,” in Journalism Research in an Era of Globalization, ed. M. Loeffelholz and D. Weaver (London: Routledge, 2005), 39–51. Also see D. Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2006).
11. H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 208–9.
12. R. Blood, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002).
13. S. C. Herring et al., “Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis ‘from the Bottom Up,’” in Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Los Alamitos: IEEE Press, 2005), 107–18.
14. A. Lenhart and S. Fox, Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers (Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2006), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf (accessed April 24, 2007).
15. J. Rosen, “Bloggers vs. Journalism Is Over,” PressThink, January 21, 2005, http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html (accessed April 24, 2007). Also see J. D. Lasica, “Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other,” Nieman Reports 57, no. 3 (2003): 70–74.
16. W. Lowrey, “Mapping the Journalism-Blogging Relationship,” Journalism 7, no. 4 (2006): 477–500.
17. Quote by Rosen cited after R. MacKinnon, “Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility,” Nation, March 17, 2005, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050404/mackinnon (accessed April 24, 2007).
18. J. B. Singer, “Who Are These Guys? The Online Challenge to the Notion 84 The Hyperlinked Society of Journalistic Professionalism,” Journalism 4, no. 2 (2003): 139–63; M. A. Deuze, “The Web and Its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences of Different Types of Newsmedia Online,” New Media and Society 5, no. 2 (2003): 203–30.
19. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 212.
20. For the sake of simplicity of argument, I am omitting developments with regard to the Semantic Web, which seek to add layers of meaning onto the hyper-link.
21. See the essay by Halavais in this book.
22. Videotaped panel discussion at the conference “The Hyperlinked Society,” Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, June 9, 2006, available at http://appcpenn.org/HyperlinkedSociety/download/HyperLinked_Panel1_Full.wmv.
23. Retrieved from Technorati as of April 4, 2007. See http://www.techno rati.com/pop/blogs/.
24. P. J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); E. Klinenberg, “Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597, no. 1 (2005): 48–64.
25. K. Barnhurst, “News Geography and Monopoly,” Journalism Studies 3, no. 4 (November 2002): 477–89, .http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/working_papers/2002_2.pdf
26. D. V. Dimitrova et al., “Hyperlinking as Gatekeeping: Online Newspaper Coverage of the Execution of an American Terrorist,” Journalism Studies 4, no. 3 (2003): 401–14.
27. M. Tremayne, “News Websites as Gated Cybercommunities,” Convergence 11, no. 3 (2005): 28–39.
28. Herring et al., “Conversations in the Blogosphere.”
29. C. Shirkey. “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality,” in Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, ed. J. Anderson, J. Dean, and G. Lovink (London: Routledge, 2006), 35–42.
30. L. A. Adamic and N. Glance, “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery (New York: ACM, 2005), 36–43.
31. Retrieved from Technorati as of April 4, 2007. See http://www.techno rati.com/pop/blogs/.
32. J. D. Lasica, “How the Net is Shaping Journalism Ethics,” July 2001, http://jdlasica.com/articles/newsethics.html (accessed March 24, 2007).
33. Dimitrova et al., “Hyperlinking as Gatekeeping.” 34. Tremayne, “News Websites as Gated Cybercommunities.”
34. Tremayne, “News Websites as Gated Cybercommunities.”
Previous Chapter
Buy This Book in Print