For News Organisations, Linking Out Is Valuable in the Long Term

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Matthew Weber, who shifts our focus to online news and begins by noting the gradual decline of the traditional print news community and the rise of online news usage. Newspaper organisations - the news industry - form a community made up of individual populations of professionals, which compete with one another for users; within this, in turn, there are individual news organisations pursuing specific corporate strategies.

What effect does such strategy have over time? Strategic change can increase the likelihood of survival during periods of disruption; interorganisational linkages can provide economic and reputational benefits, and increase legitimacy; hyperlinks between organisations can be instrumental in this. News organisations make strategic choices on how to link and whom to link to; at times of change, this is a question especially of how to deal with new entrants.

The population competes through symbiotic (with new entrants, pursuing mutual benefit) and commensalist relationships (primarily within the established population). Matthew's hypothesis is that organisations that pursue symbiotic relationships early on may pursue them also in the long term; they may also receive plenty of links back over time, and he tested this using network data from the Internet Archive (between 1998 and 2007) using the HistoryCrawl tool. He now shows visualisations of the linkages between established and new news organisations over time (made using Gephi).

Additionally, through interviews, a set of four organisational strategies for dealing with change - isolation, experimentation, diversification, and blogification - were identified, and judging by the network data, significantly more newspaper organisations were found to be in the more conservative categories (162 and 176, respectively, compared to 72 and 77 for the more proactive strategies). Notably, organisations which chose the proactive blogification strategy (linking out to others aggressively) tended to continue this over time, and ended up receiving significantly more links back as a result as well.

So, such strategies are important for understanding how organisations adapt to change and guide their opwn evolution over time. A clear link exists between immediate choices and long-term organisational performance, and there is a clear indication of a link economy: linking out creates clear benefits to the organisation in the longer term. (This observation does not make any judgment about the actual economic value of receiving links, however.)

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