ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses that potential future and how it never happened. It shows that how digital journalism research first embraced the utopia of 'hyper-news', only to discover that news sites repeatedly failed to massively adopt hypertext. The chapter also shows that how the story of hypertext in the news is one of normalization, where the many aspects of newsmaking may affect linking practices. Another fundamental aspect of newsmaking manifested in journalists' uses of hypertext is how journalists imagine that users will appreciate and use hyperlinks. Links on news websites sometimes closely mimic existing economic relations, notably when news sites tend to preferentially produce links that point to commercial partners or websites belonging to the same parent company. The connections that are made with hyperlinks might reflect social relationships at an individual level. Hyperlinks can have other functions, such as the materialization of social and economic relations.
