The Dunbar number and college media

Steve Yelvington explains the Dunbar Number:

I’ve referred to the Dunbar number frequently in explaining to journalism and new-media audiences the concept of hyperlocal relevance. It works like this: If I have about 150 people in my inner circle, and I never see them in your newspaper, then your newspaper isn’t about me and my kind.

That’s a tough level to penetrate with conventional journalism techniques.

I’ve personally never heard of the “Dunbar Number” per se, but I’ve heard the concept before. But it’s a mathematical problem, really. How many people do you have on your student media staff? How big is your campus? What are the odds that your staff is adequately representing all the 150-odd person networks?

Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve got 10,000 students enrolled (not to mention faculty and staff). If you subtract all the people they know from off campus (who wouldn’t show up in your newspaper, for sure), they may have 100 people on campus that they have relationships with. That’s at least 1,000 small circles (10,000/100). If you’ve got a staff of 20, your staff would have to be covering 50 of those circles each. Obviously, that’s just back-of-the-envelope figuring, but it points to the difficulty of connecting with disparate groups on campus.

In the finite world of the printed newspaper, where there was only so much space to fill, news media could be forgiven (maybe) for not covering all these micro networks. But with the Internet and an infinite news hole, that excuse doesn’t hold.

I don’t think the answer is to say “well, we only have so many staffers, and they’re busy covering other, more important things.” To your readers, what they and their friends are doing _is_ important. So perhaps the answer lies in opening up the web site for community-based contributions.

This dovetails with the interview I recently conducted with Leonard Witt, which will appear on the site soon.

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