Research

Capturing News Hyperlinking Practices at Scale: A global computational study of hyperlinking within news production

Authors
Rahul Bhargava, Emily Boardman Ndulue, Fernando Bermejo, Kathleen Chesnutt, Danica Jefferies
Published
October 27, 2022

Media Cloud’s data and tooling provides a perfect opportunity to study global trends in news production. For this study, we were particularly interested in hyperlinking practices in news, and how they differed in different media markets globally. 

Our team conducted a multinational computational analysis, analyzing 1,481,969 hyperlinks from 579,294 stories in 869 sources across seven countries in five continents. This massive study is a significant contribution to the fields of hyperlinking studies and journalism studies, exploring current picture and level of variation in:

  • The prevalence of hyperlinking in news;
  • The proportion of internal (links within a news site) to external links
  • The types of domains that receive the most outlinks from news

In summary, 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.

Read the full article in Journalism Practice
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