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This paper investigates the meaning of news links in the context of a qualitative description of links on the home pages of six online news sites. Links are analyzed according to the following taxonomy: who is saying what, where, when, and to what purpose. This 5-Ws method for analyzing links yields four meanings: navigation, commercial, social, and citation. It is argued that the meaning of news links, while theoretically infinite, actually lies within the boundaries of these four meanings. Opportunities to use computational tools to analyze large datasets of news links are discussed in the context of a journalism tool (Jot), the author and colleagues are developing. Issues raised by this taxonomy of news links are several, but two in particular are highlighted for discussion: (1) the role of navigation links in determining the form of news; and (2) the fact that opportunities to share content via social links invariably are outsourced to social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter.
Ryfe et al. (Fri,) studied this question.