Networked Intermedia Agenda Setting: The Geography of a Hyperlinked Scandinavian News Ecology

How does agenda setting work within the hyperlinked Scandinavian news ecology? This paper investigates intermedia agenda setting within and between the local, regional, national and supra-national levels in Sweden, Denmark and Norway; analyses the center/periphery dimensions of hyperlink connections, and evaluates the extent of centralization of hyperlinked news agendas in the three countries. As hyperlinks are the backbone of the Internet, studying hyperlinking facilitates analyses of the relative connectedness of local, regional, national and international news agendas. The analysis is based on a big data hyperlink network analysis comprising all Scandinavian news outlets with an updated web news service, including 209 Swedish sites, 263 Danish sites and 244 Norwegian sites. The data consists of external hyperlinks collected using a custom written scraper, between 1 January 2016 and 1 March 2016, amounting to approximately 2 million hyperlinks, each geotagged with publication origin. The visualisation of the hyperlink structure is one of the main results of the analysis, illuminating a) the relative disconnect between local and national hyperlinked agendas, b) the relative disconnect between news agendas in the three countries, and c) the connectedness enabled by size, resources and central location in the Scandinavian hyperlinked information structure. The network analysis provides new insights into the relationship between centralized political structures, media ownership dispersal, social geography and hyperlinked news agendas in Scandinavia, adding to the research on the political implications of the Internet on national public spheres.