Introduction

Today with the Internet readers have access to the largest database ever assembled. Hyperlinks not only help to provide context to information within a story but also keep a story alive long after its original publication. It can be an excellent way to add more to a story, serving readers by showing them the connections from the data journalists collect to other related information that exists on the Web. However, what are the implications for journalists? Can this access undermine their traditional role as gatekeeper to information?

Hyperlinking is no longer a one-way street. It establishes a common relationship between publisher and online entities. This seminar report shows how an overload of information can cause the reader to lose interest in the journalist’s article. In other words, this bombardment of news and information online provided by hypertext has the ability to allow journalists to hide behind references and links rather than encourage basic investigative journalism. The seminar was based on three core readings, ‘Online journalism Ethics’ by Friend, C. & Singer and two articles by John V Pavlik and Dan Gillmore, in conjunction with references from other relative texts.

Hyperlinks in news

Friend and Singer (2007) warned how expanding technology has ‘led to the paradox of more news outlets covering fewer stories’. This point is relevant to hyperlinks as they could potentially grip a reader on just one story to various links for an extended amount of time. As a result the reader unconsciously doesn’t have the time to view other stories that may have captured them otherwise. This could prove fatal for many news stories that do not attract instant attention.

However the ability of links to heighten content was summarised by Paul Bradshaw. Although he was addressing the potential of blogs, his point is extremely applicable to hyperlinks. He expressed how;

Perhaps the most significant change is the way that blogs (or hyperlinks) provided a platform for stories or detail that would otherwise not make the print or broadcast version at all.                                          (Bradshaw, 2008,)

This coincides with the use of hyperlinks in news stories, although when examined The Irish Independent and The Sun sites use a lot of hyperlinks in news just to link the viewer to material that already exists in the papers archives. This raises the question of how much new material is actually present that deals with more intricate details of stories? Or is it rather a case of rehashing stale news in an effort to have links and appear to be embracing new technologies?

Hyperlinks and Gate-keeping

Gatekeepers are ‘those in control of the flow of information.’ They have the power ‘to make available or withhold information for public consumption.’ (Western Reserve). Gatekeepers in online journalism can be editors or journalists. (Shoemaker; 1991)

Singer (2001) drew a comparison between Gate-keeping and Hyperlinking, in the article, ‘The Metro Wide Web: Changes in Newspapers’. Hyperlinks can be important to Web users because they increase the user’s ability to control the information-seeking process. Hyperlinks, by allowing access through endless doorways of information, give readers control over the information only they want to see. The role of the gatekeeper is in the hands of the reader, who can produce individual narratives from these successions of hyperlinks, which can enhance the experience received by the primary text.

However, it can be argued that readers must still succumb to information restrains. This is due to online news editors making conscious gate-keeping decisions to limit information on stories to what is available on their own website. The decision concerning which hyperlinks to include and which not to include gives news editors an additional role. They can still control what their audience reads by giving them the hyperlinks they consider suitable for the story, which will still maintain the same angle, but will just offer more background.

The Hyperlink Effect

An article by Luzer (2008) explains an experiment in which he spent a day following the news through hyperlinks, following every link he could find.  His experiment showed that all the links made it hard to actually finish an article.  Although he was on top of every new development, he didn’t feel any better informed.

Luzer discovered that hyperlinks often didn’t go in new directions. Instead, they continually returned to the big articles within the same publication. The issue of objectivity also came into question in relation to hyperlinking.  It was noted that the content of a linked article could be seen to represent the opinion of the journalist of the original piece.  This can be brought back to the role of the news editor, discussed by Singer.  It is their job to decide what should and should not be linked to the article and they must be careful about what they choose. 

Luzer found that hyperlinks have the power to expand an article to what he describes as a “staging point for informational content of infinite length and ambiguous validity.”  He called this an “information overload; too much information and too little verification” which can be very problematic for journalists.  They are competing against people who may have no authenticity in their stories yet they are out there for the public to see.  Hyperlinks mean that a journalist’s work could be linked to something completely unknown to them which may reflect badly on their own work.

Conclusion

Hyperlinks are the foundation on which the Internet is built; they allow us to reach related and popular stories quickly and easily. Although they play a significant function in loosening the control over information and despite the online newspaper struggling to limit the links from one page to another, the audience can choose what information they want to read.

When the topic was opened up to the class there was a general agreement that there are some valuable uses to hyperlinks. This included information being published that would not have featured otherwise and allows journalists to direct the reader to additional content.  However, it was recognized that they can also be very problematic for journalists. Hyperlinks can be seen to compromise the objectivity of journalists as well as  potentially allowing readers to close themselves off from other stories as they continue to link to what interests them.

It was found that although more information is available through hypertext, it is all vetted and controlled by the author. Regardless of links to other pages, journalists still direct their audience to information by giving them the hyperlinks they consider suitable for the story. Taking all the findings from the seminar into consideration, it could be argued that hyperlinks can be problematic for journalists.

Reference List

Bradshaw, P. 2008. I think in hyperlinks even when working in print. [Online]. Available from: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/10/17/blogging-journalists-pt-4-blogs-and-news-production-i-think-in-hyperlinks-even-when-working-in-print/ [Accessed 10 May 2009]

Friend, C. and Singer, J.B. 2007, Online journalism Ethics: traditions and transitions, M.E. Sharpe: Armonk, N.Y.

Gillmor, D. 2006. We the media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people. O’Reilly.

Luzer, D. 2008. Linked Out. [Online]. Available from:
http://www.cjr.org/overload/linked_out.php?page=all [Accessed 18 May 2009]

Niles, P. 2008. How, and where, to hyperlink within a news story. [Online]. Available from: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/080215niles/  [Accessed 20 May 2009]

Pavlik, J.V. 2001. Journalism and New Media. New York: Columbia University Press.

Western Reserve Public media. (Homepage). [Online]. Available from: http://westernreservepublicmedia.org/media/glossary.htm [Accessed 18 May 2009]

 Shoemaker, P.J. 1991. Gatekeeping. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

 Singer, J.B. –2001. The Metro Wide Web: Changes in Newspapers Gate-keeping Role Online IN: Singer, J.B.  – Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.

 White, D.M. (1950) The Gatekeeper: A case study in the selection of News’ Journalism Quarterly.

Does hyperlink enable journalists to reports on extra wealth’s of information or does it simply make lazy journalists?

Before online news, people simply had the information in the paper, radio and television but we could not easily play these at our own disposal. Did this create a hunger for news that is now losing its appetite as we have the constant ability to access what news we want when we want it?

Has the feast of information and information on information caused us to lose our interest in searching altogether? In other words, has the bombardment of news and information online, heavily relying on hypertext allowed journalists to hide behind references and links rather than encourage basic investigative journalism?

Journalist for the New York Times, David Cohn believes ‘Journalists Should End Every Article – With Tasty Hyperlinks’ because-

• A: We are in the business of informing people.
• B: Having links to good information is an editorial service
• C: If you provide good links, people will rely on you as a “news recommender” and come back for more.

Over 80% of the class said they used hyperlinks in news sites so I had a look at two news sites to compare and examine their use of hypertext.

My reading for this presentation was ‘Online Journalism Ethics’ by Cecilia Friend and JaneB.Singer, chapter 6- Beyond Blogs: Other Interactive News Forms. While it dealt mainly with Citizen Journalism, it warned how expanding technology has ‘led to the paradox of more news outlets covering fewer stories’. I thought this was very relevant to hyperlinks as they could potentially grip a reader with an interest for an extended amount of time and as a result the reader unconsciously doesn’t have the time to view other stories that would have had their attention otherwise.

Paul Bradshaw in an article addressed the changes caused to journalism by blogs.

However I believe it to be also relevant to hypertext. In the article he expresses how ‘Perhaps the most significant change is the way that blogs provided a platform for stories or detail that would otherwise not make the print or broadcast version at all.”

You can see how this coincides with the use of hypertext in news stories, although as we have already seen with The Irish Independent site and The Sun, a lot of hypertexts in news just link the viewer to material that already exists in the papers archives, etc. and so how much new material is actually present that deals with more intricate details of stories?

While we are dealing with hypertext in a news context today, the question of them being problematic is in a much wider range. We have all been let down by links that promise us the knowledge we yearn for . . .only to be met with amateur works. Promotions for cheap flights or even promises of love with ‘maybefriends’ or the like.

One of the most amusing/frustrating of these (depending on your mood on the day) is the infamous ‘Rickrolling’. This was a link that claimed to be relevant to the topic at hand but the link actually brought you to Rick Astleys 1987 hit ‘Never gonna give you up’. The URL can be masked in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been “Rickrolled”. There are two ‘Rickrolled’ videos that have been viewed more than 30 million times in total.”

He carried out his experiment the day after the final US presidential debate when he received 22 emails about Joe Wurzelbacher.

Joe Wurzelbacher

Joe is the misinformed assistant plumber from Ohio who surfaced in the American news system and became a star in the presidential debates. The link from the first email brought him to an MSNBC article called “Palin’s shout-out to Joe (and Jane) the plumber.” The only links in this article returned to the original MSNBC Joe the plumber article. He then went to the tabs on the side and ended up reading “Is Joe the plumber related to Charles Keating?” Although he investigated this for a while he became distracted and ended up reading about Olympic swimmer Gary Hall JR., Charles Keating’s grandson. He soon realised he wasn’t learning much about Joe the plumber there.

His experiment showed that all the links made it hard to actually finish an article. He says that “by noon, after following innumerable links to analyses and subsidiary points” he had still not completed a single “Joe the Plumber” article. He said that although he was on top of every new development he wasn’t sure he understood what was going on and didn’t feel any smarter. He described following the links as maddening, tiring and stressful. He said that “this was the journalistic equivalent of running the 200-meter race, all day long”.

Luzer made an interesting discovery when exploring the Wurzelbacher story. The hyperlinks didn’t go in new directions. Instead, they continually returned to the big articles in the Washington Post and CNN among others. “The problem was that the articles by major news sources still weren’t that great”. This shows that if journalists don’t really know anything, they can’t link their way around the problem. He says that if a writer doesn’t understand an issue that they are writing about, linking to other articles about that issue won’t fix their own.

By the end of the day, he uncovered differences in the hyperlink strategies of different news organisations. He says that The Huffington Post looks clean but then links to other places with “user-generated content and unverifiable assertions”. This means that it is up to the reader to determine accuracy and sort out “the valid from the invalid”. Although this may keep the reader entertained it has a negative effect in that it is distracting and may lead to unreliable information.

Corporate media hyperlinks on sites such as the Times, Fox News, Time, CNN and MSNBC tended to direct the reader to other pages within the site. Although this can be potentially boring for the reader, it means that they are keeping with the same news source. Luzer felt that the linking within a circuit strategy made sense if the publication was worried about people getting distracted or if their content was really the best. However, he believes that with hyperlinks, the idea is to distract people a little as it makes the publication seem current and interesting. “The goal of sending visitors away from your site is, ultimately, to keep them coming back”. The problem with this is that all the linking around mainly just introduces obstacles for the reader to ignore in order to digest the content of the story.

There is also the element of missing out on other things because it would be impossible to follow every link and read every story, therefore there are as he says “millions of potentially untapped sources”. He compared his hyper linking experiment to the way a gerbil running a wheel would feel. It never ends. He says that “if your only goal is to follow the news, you quickly discover that the news never ends. It just refreshes itself.”

Luzer’s article examines hyperlinks from the point of view of an ordinary citizen, consuming news on a daily basis. He proves that it is easy to become distracted by this system and end up in a maze of information. However, he seems to understand that they form the basis of the web as he says that they are the building block of this democratization of information. He says that they are changing the way we experience news from an “act determined by the newsroom” to an act that we can control on our own.

He discusses the expansive nature of hyperlinks by saying that if he wrote a 1000 word story with eight links to other 1000 word articles these would in turn link to more websites and articles and so on. Hyperlinks have the power to expand his original article to what he describes as a “staging point for informational content of infinite length and ambiguous validity.” The danger with the Internet however is that although users are able to read information they are also able to produce it as quickly. Luzer calls this an “information overload- too much information and too little verification.”

This can definitely be problematic for journalists as they are competing against people who may have no authenticity in their stories yet they are out there for the public to see. Hyperlinks mean that a journalist’s work could be linked to something completely unknown to them which may reflect badly on their own work. The issue of objectivity also comes into question when articles are hyperlinked. One could wonder whether the content of a linked article represents the opinion of the journalist of the original piece.

Although he does not refer directly to how hyperlinks affect journalists, he does say that he would not normally click on hyperlinks himself. He says that they are a “recipe for low productivity”. The comments pages gave a larger insight into views on how hyperlinks affect journalists. One user said that the links need to be seen as a citation. They said “Now journalists can link to other, often more authoritative sources…It’s a Web of information, radiating out.” Another person said that link journalism is about “allowing journalists to create a ‘narrative’ using the links”, giving us so much more depth and room to play with.

Either way hyperlinks are destined to continue to play a large part in online journalism. The fact that they form the basis of the Web does not make them any less problematic for journalists. Luzer refers to an article in the Times by Jenny Lyn Bader in 2000. She says that “In the old-media world, the question was how to get the audience to stay with you. In the new-media world, it is how to get the audience to leave and come back again. After all, it is not readability that makes for greatness on the Web: it is clickability.”

An extract from ‘a brief intorduction to hyperlinks (and why we are not there yet)‘

“There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about Paul Otlet, who in 1934 sketched out plans for a network of computers that would allow people to search through a global archive of interlinked documents. Though his system at the time was just a mechanical, albeit very robust card catalog; he foresaw the age of electronic media storage when one could sit comfortably at his desk and peer into data collections around the world through “electronic telescopes” (I just love that term).

Aside from a little forgotten computer lore his story highlights the most fundamental underpinning of the Internet and perhaps the most important invention of the modern age — the hyperlink. As we surf our favorite blogs and forums, it’s easy to take for granted the ability to instantly navigate from within one document to another. But the idea and it’s implementation have it’s own interesting histories and failings — with hypertext it’s important to know not only where you went, but how you got there.”

“When you look back upon the history of the hyperlink you start to appreciate the idea of the hyperlink. It is unfortunate that what we have today is a rather “dumb” version of it, carrying little more than a destination address. Paul Otlet envisioned a smarter kind hyperlink that could for example, carry information annotating if particular document agreed or disagreed with each other. With something so integral to the fabric of the World Wide Web what are we doing to improve the idea?

Proponents of the “Semantic Web” argue for attaching more metadata to links, using such microformats as XFN to represent social relationships and Geo to specify geographical coordinates. These markup languages may be easily parsed but they serve computers more than humans. The real question may be one of design rather than a solely technical solution — not “what information will we embed in the link?”, but rather “what will it look like?” Currently there are too few visual indicators to convey meaning for hyperlinks, with the most prominent being a color change to denote a page that you’ve already visited. But what other relationships can be represented? There’s a wide range of possibilities — what visual, aural, or tactile tools are at our disposal?

Perhaps we should look less at hyperlinks as the movement between documents, but rather as the documents themselves.”