Finding the news and mapping the links: a case study of hypertextuality in Dutch-language health news websites

This study considers hyperlinks as digital navigational cues that can guide users through the increasingly complex and vast online health information landscape in order to examine how hypertextuality at both search engines and health news websites mediates access to further health-related information. This is important because online news media are frequently used and convenient sources for health information. The methodology unfolds in two steps. First, an environmental scan of search engine result pages for the term ‘health news’ was conducted. Second, an automated quantitative content analysis (N = 5428) of external hyperlinks found on three types of health news websites, i.e., net-native, mixed and legacy news brands, was performed. Most importantly, this study challenges the dominant internal-external distinction by introducing a systematic distinction between genuine external hyperlinks and pseudo-external hyperlinks when comparing various types of online health news. Net-native news websites provide more hyperlinks to thematically related information than legacy news websites with print origins. The latter often include pseudo-external hyperlinks to thematically unrelated, but organizationally affiliated websites, thus favoring financial relationships over thematic coherence as an incentive to link