International Hyperlinks in Online News Media

Abstract

This chapter investigates outlinking practices in the news media, whereby online news organisations place links to third party websites within their news articles. Such links are an important secondary feature of online news which add background and context to a story, offering readers the possibility of going direct to the source in many cases. However they remain an understudied phenomenon. Our particular focus is on international outlinks: links which go to a website in a different country. International news coverage is an important topic of research interest in communication studies, with many scholars trying to determine why some countries receive disproportionately more news coverage than others, creating an imbalance in the minds of readers about which countries are more or less important. International outlinks have the potential to correct such an imbalance, by providing first hand coverage of countries all around the world. But they also have the potential to perpetuate it, if these outlinks are themselves applied selectively. Based on a large scale dataset of news articles taken from BBC News Online over an eleven year period, this article finds that more populous countries receive more outlinks, as do more peaceful ones. Countries which have English as a primary or official language and countries which have a high level of internet penetration also receive more links. All of these factors take into account diverging levels of news coverage of countries.