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Small-World Networks and the Twitter Journalist Graph

The Small World of Western Journalism

Michael Tauberg
The Shadow
7 min readJul 20, 2022

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Photo by Sebastian Pena Lambarri on Unsplash — The ocean is a small world network — https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2019/june/ocean-currents-connect-worlds-fisheries-kimberly-oremus-science-journal/

It’s a Small World After All

In 1967, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how many links there were between any two people. He gave test subjects packages with the name of a target individual. The subjects were asked to forward the packages to anyone who might know the person named. Without phone books or directories of any kind, the packages ended up with the intended recipients after just a few hops. His experiment and many others proved that social networks followed a ‘small-world’ structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment

In this article I want to talk about one very special small-world network — journalists. As we’ll see, this group of writers and reporters is so small that it only takes 2 hops for any journalists to get to any other.

What is a Small-World Network?

The Milgram experiment showed that there are only about six degrees separating any two people. What other properties do small-world networks have?

  • High Clustering — most nodes (eg journalists) have many close…

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Michael Tauberg
Michael Tauberg

Written by Michael Tauberg

Engineer in San Francisco. Interested in words, networks, and human abstractions. Opinions expressed are solely my own.

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