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Small-World Networks and the Twitter Journalist Graph
The Small World of Western Journalism
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.
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…