Textual Tunnel-Hops and Narrative Chutes-and-Ladders”: The HTML Link as as Uncertain Object of

Journalistic Evidence

Modified version paper presented at the Yale-Harvard-MIT Cyberscholars Working Group.

November 17, 2010. New Haven, CT.

C.W. Anderson
(Christopher.Anderson@csi.cuny.edu)
C.W. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY).

Cite as: Anderson, C.W. (2010) “”Textual Tunnel-Hops and Narrative Chutes-and-Ladders”: The HTML Link
as an Uncertain Object of Journalistic Evidence.” Yale-Harvard-MIT Cyberscholars Working Group.
November 17, 2010. New Haven, CT.
 Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to
another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders …
Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of
honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They
can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of
meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They
build context.
-- Scott Rosenberg, “In Links We Trust.”
Wordyard, 9/2/2010

Nowhere in the reporting process did it ever occur to me to think about how the
story was going to look online. At best I thought it would be cool if they posted a
photo gallery of my photos with my story. But … I'm sure that none of the stories
we posted online had any links in them. why? Mainly, because we were busy, we
had other priorities, and we almost never, in the whole time we covered the
candidates, relied on websites, or information on the web, to report on them.

-- Local news reporter, Portland Star1

Previous Scholarship on Linking and Journalistic Practice

If hyperlinks can be considered one of the new “objects of evidence” potentially available to

journalists and news organizations, the question then becomes: how have traditional news organizations

actually make use of links during the course of their 15-year history? Unfortunately, the scholarly discussion

of online news linking practices is scattered and difficult to summarize. Helpfully hypertext was such an

obvious feature of the new online medium that linking was analyzed in some of the earliest articles about

newspapers’ transition to the internet (Riley et. al. 1998, Peng 1999) Less helpfully, however, the lack of a

standard of methodology for conducting online content analysis, the overwhelming amount and variety of

online materials, and a general lack of longitudinal analysis and study replication means that most articles

analyzing newspaper linking ask different questions and analyze different sets of materials. Moreover, link

practices online have obviously changed over time, meaning that the “findings” from one particular study

may simply represent a single moment in the development of a rapidly changing medium. All of that said,

however, a look back at the literature on news linking practices does uncover some obvious trends. First, the

number of hyperlinks at online news websites has increased over time. Second, the number of links to

external websites has dropped-- in some cases, dramatically. Third, traditional blogs link about as often as

the websites of traditional news organizations, but link to external sites far more frequently. Finally, the

question of “what links count” (particularly the differences between sidebar links and inline links) represents

1Both the newspaper and the speaker here have been anonymized. The quote draws upon ongoing
ethnographic research.
a particularly difficult analytical question that highlights the need for a qualitative methodological strategy

that goes beyond counting.

One universal finding of the scholarly literature is that hyperlinks to external websites barely exist

traditional news organizations. In their study of McVeigh execution coverage, Dimitrova et. al (2003) found

that 94.8 of all links were internal, that is, pointed within the same website. In 2002, Tremayne categorized

only 17% of the more than 9,000 links he analyzed as external. Looking at Spanish newspapers, Ureta

(2010) found that only between 9 and 12% of links pointed to outside sites. Tsui (2008) asks “Ddo the

leading newspapers and political blogs link to external Web sites?” and contends that “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. …in sharp contrast with the newspapers.” (79) Stray (2010) concludes

that “several large organizations are diligent about linking to their own topic pages, probably with the

assistance of automation, but are wildly inconsistent about linking to anything else.” Even more intriguingly ,

it appears that levels of external linking may have actually decreased since the early days of the web. In

1997, Peng et. al (1999) found that nearly half of the newspaper sites he looked at engaged in external

linking; more rigorously, Tremayne (2005) documented a decrease in external linking between 22% in 1999

to 12% in 2002. And finally, Barnhurst (2010) concludes that:

In this replication, any links to external sites or sources dropped dramatically—to only two in the 2005
sample, both in NYTimes.com (falling from 62.5 to 1.2%). ChicagoTribune.com had none (down from
11.8), as did the Oregonian (both years). The differences among sites were significant (Chi square =
7.01, df = 12, p < .001).

Most of the studies looking at hyperlinking practices have adopted a gatekeeping framework for

analyzing the presence or absence of website links (find cites), an analytical starting point with long history

of use journalism research. By gatekeeping, scholars usually refer to the ability of journalists and news

organizations to “maintain and manage” the discursive “gates” by which certain voices are included in or

excluded from public discourse. Thus, in the words of Dimitrova et. al (2003):

The decision about which hyperlinks to include in Web news stories and which not to include
constitutes an additional gatekeeping decision made by Web news editors. Thus, this study seeks to
measure how Web newspapers function in their gatekeeping role online while covering a major public
event.

While the gatekeeping perspective on linking is useful in many ways, I believe that a focus on the
validity of particular news objects demonstrates some of the problems with this strand of analysis. To date,

the primary finding of gatekeeping research has been that journalists and news organizations gather

sources and facts in routinized, patterned ways (Shoemaker and Reese 1996). In other words, gatekeeping

research has not found that journalists do not gather external resources at all but that the sources they do

gather are assembled in patterned, narrow, and predictable manner. Research on linking, however, shows

that traditional news organizations do not link externally, period, but all the whole increasingly quote blogs

and bloggers in their news stories (Messner and Distaso, 2008). The question is thus not why newspapers

link to some external websites rather than others, but why, external linking is such a problematic concept in

general—a question that traditional gatekeeping research is ill equipped to solve.

News organizations, in short, may link, but they do so in very different ways than other, more “web-

native” occupants of the internet. Why? The presence or lack of external linking at journalism organizations

serves as a semio-material newsroom practice that neatly captures many of the tensions that have

dominated journalism for the past decade and a half. Links are a symbol freighted with immense meaning. In

his most recent overview of sociological macrostructures affecting the production of news, Schudson points

to four factors—political systems, economic factors, organizational structures, and particular cultures—as

playing a role in journalism. To analyze linking practices, we must cast a similarly wide net: politics and

public policy, economic calculations, organizational routines, newsroom culture, and technological

affordances all play a role in determining the organizational utilization (or not) of hyperlinks.

The Technology of the Link

Some scholars have provided hyperlinks a lengthy historical lineage, tracing them back to the

publication of Vannavar Bush’s famous essay, “As We May Think,” or even back to Talmudic commentary

and other forms of analog scholarly citation (Halavais 2008). In terms of the specific use of digital text that

provided virtual transport from one computer-based document to another, however, Ted Nelson and

Douglas Engelbart’s Project Xanadu stands as the first representative of what today we commonly think of

as the link. Whether we see the origins of linking here, in the 1960’s, or later, with the emergence of

Hypercard in the 1980s, it is remarkable that linking is a practice by now nearly four decades old. At their

most basic, links are simply gateways-- passages from one website to another. What’s more, the technology

of today’s 21st century linking remains remarkably simple, and can usually be grasped even by web novices.

As Turow notes, links are little more than “highlighted words on a Web coded that take them to certain other
places on the Web” (Turow 2008). They are generally coded in a web markup language called HTML and

can be simply encased in “tags” that begin with “<a href=>”, with the text following the “a href=” being the

address of the website you wish the link to lead to.

With the simplicity of use also comes a degree of what we might call documentary ambiguity. As

Weinberger (2008) elegantly summarizes:

The HTML code that creates the link that shows up on the page as blue and underlined typically)
has no standard way of saying what the relationship is. A link to, say, www.martinlutherk ing.org is
encoded in HTML as <a href=“http://www.martinlutherking.org”>MLK</a> and would show up on
the Web page as a clickable “MLK” link. Nowhere in that code is there a place for the linker to note
that www.martinlutherking.org is a hate site created by a racist organization called Stormfront..
Berners-Lee’s aim was to make linking as simple as possible … So the HTML code that expresses
the link says nothing about the nature of the link, but the page that displays the link can say
volumes [if it chooses too] (Tsui and Turow 2008)

Given the simplicity of creating links—just a bit of code attached to a web address-- it seems

unlikely that technological barriers would stand in the way of their creation and utilization by journalists.

Since the debut of popular, mass-market blogging software like Blogger and Wordpress, moreover, users

have not even needed to understand the basic functionality of the HTML code that underlies the link—

linking requires only the basic word processing skills needed to make an excerpt of text italicized or in bold.

The most basic requirements of linking, however, are not the only material aspects of technology we should

consider when thinking about the link. Links not only contain within themselves the documentary ambiguity

discussed by Weinberger, they are also embedded in networks of newsroom management systems, which

themselves contain larger technological affordances and impediments. I will discuss these technological

affordances and organizational routines momentarily; for now, though, let’s turn to the economics of linking.

If it is not the basic technology that prevents news organizations from making full use of hyperlinks, perhaps

it is the economic consequences of sending readers to other, competitor news outlets that makes linking

such a problematic journalistic exercise.

The Economics of the Link

In their early research on the link culture of digital newsrooms in the mid-1990’s, Riley et. al

describe significant managerial doubts about the economic efficacy of linking. Indeed, the attitude amongst

news executives at an entity called “The Paper” sounds almost conspiratorial. The approach to community

management at The Paper

 involves getting users to their site and not letting them leave … If a user leaves The Paper's online
site through one of these links, he or she can only get to another site controlled by The Paper. This
constellation of sites is so tightly coupled and difficult to exit that we refer to it as being "Trapped in
Space. The New Media organization is also attempting to leverage The Paper's name and image
as a key regional source of information and create a "gateway" to their virtual colony. By creating a
series of pages and sites that includes everything that has to do with the metropolitan region, even
information that is not traditionally in newspapers but more akin to information from a convention
bureau or chamber of commerce, The Paper increases the probability that they can attract users to
their site and then keep them there. (Riley et al. 1999)

In an online world in where the economic viability of a particular web page is still largely determined

by the value of that pages’ web advertising, common economic sense might dictate that an organization

would want visitors to spend as much time on that site as possible. In such a case, creating outbound links

would be foolish, as they would direct visitors elsewhere. However, the economics of linking online have

always been far more complicated than simple equation between eyeball stickiness and revenue would

suggest, and a great deal of digital ink has been spilled in arguments about whether outbound linking

decreases website revenue or might actually, paradoxically, increase it. In large part these complexities

stem from the dominating role played by Google in the domain of web search and the impact of its

“PageRank” system in the ranking of web search results (Brin and Page 1998). PageRank specifically

utilizes the in- and outbound link structure of the web to order search results, thus making the economics of

linking both more explicit and (because the exact formula for Page Rank is both a secret and always

changing) more opaque (Battelle 2006). In discussing the increasingly common practices of “Search Engine

Optimization”, Battelle writes that although “the pre-Google search world also had no shortage of

opportunists who took advantage of a search engine's ability to direct well-intentioned traffic to otherwise

irrelevant sites.”

as search algorithms became more sophisticated, spammers had to adapt. PageRank rewarded
sites with high-ranking inbound links and relevant anchor text, so spammers began to create link
farms and doorway pages-essentially pages that did nothing more than link to other pages-so as to
trick Google's index into assigning their pages (or in many cases, their clients' pages) a higher
ranking for lucrative keyword search terms.
Google retaliated with ever more sophisticated algorithms, and the spammers counterstruck, blow
for blow. Google banned certain IP addresses, for example, and spammers simply set up new
ones. … But between white and black hats [ie, between malicious and more legitimate traffic
optimizers] there is a significant area of gray. (161)

My own research and that of others has shown that practices of search-engine optimization are

beginning to be embraced by online newspapers (see, for example, Usher, forthcoming), and the ability to

navigate the thicket of search-engine friendly keywords and link-strategies is an increasingly “in-demand”
skill in the journalism business (McBride 2010). The key to grasping the role played by economic

calculations in the lack of online linking depends less on the actual economics of linking than the way news

managers and journalists understand those economics (Graves & Kelly, 2010). Knowledge of this internal

journalistic understanding can only come from further fieldwork.

The relationship between economics and linking depends on more than just the financial

implications of linking and journalists own understanding of the practice, however. As we will see in the next

section, it was the 2008 economic crisis in journalism that finally pushed the debate over linking into the

public policy realm. The financial cataclysm suffered by the American news media during those years

mobilized the political forces that would turn linking into a contested public practice.

Linking, Laws, and Public Policy

In 2009, the rhetoric about links took an unexpected turn. As the economic crisis in journalism

worsened, with newsrooms closing and thousands of journalists being laid off (cite), linking, a practice which

had been on existence for more than two decades, suddenly became an object of public policy and the

subject of political debate. This dialog, which climaxed in public hearings at the Federal Trade Commission

(FTC) Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and several Senate subcommittees in 2009 and 2010,

was preceded by a vociferous online debate about the fairness of linking and involved the invocation of such

ideas like copyright, freedom of speech, and digital fairness.

While a blow-by-blow description of the 2009 linking debate lies beyond the scope of this paper, it

is worth noting that there have always been policy issues implicated in linking practices. In 2002, NPR briefly

decided that it would require websites seek permission before they linked to NPR content (Manjoo 2002). In

2004, CMP Media “began intentionally blocking links from certain competing technology news sites, such as

LinuxToday and Cnet” (Anon 2004). In a groundbreaking law review article, Anjali Desai (forthcoming) has

provided a much-needed overview of these legal and policy debates. Moving from the 2001 Second Circuit

case Universal City Studios v. Corley, to the 2002 Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation (which validated the right

of websites to use “linked thumbnail photos” online) to the more recent GateHouse Media v. New York

Times, Desai demonstrates linking practices have always been subject to legal scrutiny. Her paper

examines historical arguments that

hyperlinking implicates laws governing trademark & service mark, trespass, copyright, contributory
infringement, and contract and [discusses] how the courts might apply a heightened standard of
 scrutiny in a way that both recognizes the merits of each of the claims but avoids creating
significant First Amendment concerns. (27)

For many in the online world, the idea that linking (seemingly a web native and unproblematic

communicative practice) could be the subject of legal and political debate came as something of a shock,

and it took statements from the chairman of the Associated Press, Dean Singleton to make the scope of the

challenge to linking clear: “We can no longer stand by and watch others [meaning online news aggregators]

walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” Singleton told AP members in April 2009. “We will

work with portals and other partners who legally license our content” and we will “seek legal and legislative

remedies against those who don’t” (Perez-Pena 2009) Singleton’s speech launched a furious round of online

debate about the fairness and legality of aggregation and linking, a debate which culminated in a March

2010 hearing at the Federal Trade Commission, during which executives of many traditional news and

media organizations made their vision of linking clear. As James Marcovitz (senior vice president and deputy

general counsel of News Corporation) told the hearing:

What we would like to see is a permission-based economy where we could set the value for our
content and people come to us and seek permission to use it. Just like an RSS feed, there are
permissions attached to it. Aggregators would like to build businesses based on the use of our
content. They should come to us to seek permission to obtain it on terms that we would set.

Other industry leaders, who expressed their own hopes for policy intervention in the debate over linking and

aggregation online, echoed Marcovitz’s comments at this and other FTC and FCC hearings (Anon 2010).

Recent history aside, the fact remains that the practice of linking remains primarily a cultural one,

governed by online norms and tacit, digital understandings. The political regulations on linking practices in

the U.S. remain almost entirely lassaiz faire, which is not to say that a lassaiz faire attitude is the equivalent

of “no” policy attitude at all. It is simply a policy in absentia. The fact that rhetoric around copyright, “hot

news” (Ekstrand 2005), trademark law, and contract law can be swiftly mobilized to support various policy

positions in the aftermath of a widespread economic crisis in the news industry portends that the political

systems governing the collection and dissemination of news may play a greater role in the practice of

journalism in the years ahead.

Links, and Organizational Routines

When describing the linking practices at her small newspaper in Portland, The Portland Star, one
local news reporter notes that

it all comes down to priorities. When you, as a print journalist, are writing a story, you are not
focused on anything but getting the story to the copy editor, so they send it to the designer, so it
can go down to print by deadline. If you include links to that story, they're going to be separate and
to the side, (an afterthought) because you know that your readers are going to be reading it in print,
and the focus is to get it to the copy desk in time to meet deadlines. The reason, I suspect,
bloggers include more links is that they are posting their stories online themselves, in a format
where they know the links can help them explain their story, and help them short-cut or abbreviate
their text. For them it's a tool, but for print journalists it's one more thing to think about before
deadline. Basically, in order to have comprehensive, useful links in a story, you need someone on
the back-end, like, the person who's posting it, to have the time and the road map for those links.
And thus, you need to have a news room that's equipped logistically to handle that, and also
editors that care about their online audience as much as their print audience (fieldwork, August
2010).

The reporter from Portland is describing here the operations of a small, barely digital newsroom –

certainly not a newsroom like those found at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,

NPR, or many others. What this description accomplishes is that it reminds us of the dynamics at most

media organizations until only recently. Indeed the drive by the CEO of the Journal Register Corporation

(JRC) to institute a “digital first” strategy at JRC newspapers was widely hailed as a major managerial

innovation as late as 2010 ((Jarvis 2010).

Even newsrooms that are far more web capable than those at the Portland Star or inside the

Journal Register’s corporate umbrella have faced difficulties an adapting a link friendly workflow to the socio-

technical demands of legacy content management systems (CMSs). Indeed, the most common response to

my queries about why digital news outlets did not engage in inline linking was that their content

management system made it impossible. As the Online Editor at the Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote in 2007:

At the end of the day, a reporter is trying to produce one file to move to the print and online content
management systems. To add hypertext links, someone has to go through a second version of the
story that’s just for the online CMS and add them by hand. We can certainly run scripts that turn
every “www.” written into a story to a link, but how many of those do you want to see written out in
full in the print edition? So, this is a technical problem that can be solved either by hiring more
online staff (who would then, in theory, have time to add links to every story) or by adding
functionality to a hybrid CMS that can parse some sort of linking code, if not necessarily hypertext,
into different versions for print and Web (Anon n d).

All in all, then, the presence or absence of hyperlinks due to commercial, political, or technological

factors may ultimately be subordinate to the organizational routines and socio-technical systems that

coordinate the daily production of news. However, this does not completely solve our mystery. Over the past

decade, news organizations have changed in many ways, and have invested substantial sums of money in a

vast number of organizational and technological transformations. To claim that the lack of linking at online
news sites stems from organizational routines and out of date socio-technical systems simply raises the

question of why modifying these systems has not have been a higher priority. To uncover the final piece of

our puzzle, we need to briefly discuss to what seem to be particularly “journalistic” attitudes towards digital

and analog information.

The Rhetoric of Links and the Culture of “Analog Information”

Writer and former web editor Scott Rosenberg has most eloquently expressed to the vision of the

hyperlink as understood by those who regularly bathe in digital media. Links, Rosenberg writes

do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual
tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders … Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s
work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness.
They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They
make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.

Compare this to the thoughts about links expressed by the reporter from the Portland Star:

There are probably a bunch of stories that could be sourced from a bunch of documents on the
internet, police reports or court documents that might be available publicly online. But-- reporters
get that stuff directly from their sources (or know where to find it) and don't necessarily have to dig
through the internet to source their stories … The mentality is still that you get your information
from people, from places, from longstanding methods of reporting that didn't involve the internet.
Print media existed in a world without the internet first, and thus, the whole process of collecting
and putting together information presupposes that you need to do things like call people, get media
releases, and talk to press agents to get your information. Or go to the mall and talk to people to
get "color" for your story. Writing for the internet assumes a whole different kind of information
gathering, in which you can glean much of your information simply by surfing web pages, finding
websites, and contacting people via twitter/facebook. (and then calling them) (fieldwork, August
2010).

Here are two deeply divergent epistemologies. One might call them an analog epistemology versus

an epistemology that is obviously digital. It is not simply that traditional journalists have a different attitude

toward links. It might be that some of them, perhaps of a certain generation, have a different way of thinking

about the world wide web and the value of digital informationl. In proper newsroom parlance, these

normative beliefs might be referred to the value of “shoe-leather.” As strange as the contrast might appear to

those for whom surfing the digital current is a daily, immersive experience, for many journalists the value of

“real world facts” and shoe-leather reporting remain an important normative commitment. Much more

analysis of the culture value of digital information remains to be done, of course. But we can see here the

faintest glimmers of an insight that attributes the skepticism towards certain forms of news objects to more
than simply economics, policy, technology, and organization routines. It is an attitude that, at least in part,

grounds itself in the values a particular profession uses to make sense of its role in the world.
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