https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3904-4302
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ABSTRACT
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.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).