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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In the first installment of this series, I talked about the changing nature of the discussion of “news,” from lecture to conversation.

Of course, you can’t have a conversation of one. From the “Cluetrain Manifesto” (bold indicates original text):

2. *Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.*
3. *Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.*
4. *Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.*
5. *People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.*

For most of the 20th century, “mass” media looked at the people who read, viewed, and listened to content as a mass audience. This was relatively easy to do. A broadcaster with a national audience couldn’t very well talk to each member of that audience as an individual. Even a mid-size daily newspaper had no easy way to engage in conversation with readers. The closest most came to “conversation” was the Letters to the Editor section – arguably one of the most-read sections of the newspaper.

Even before the advent of the Internet, mass communication theorists were demolishing the idea of the mass audience. But the Internet accelerated the destruction of this myth. Today, sophisticated netizens expect more from news media than one-way communication.

How can college media adopt a more “human” tone with readers on the Internet?

Certainly one way is to provide avenues for feedback. Demolishing the one-way circuit of the Letters to the Editor might mean responding to comments in an open forum, setting up an online ombudsman system. It also might mean encouraging writers and editors to respond directly to e-mails from readers.

The New York Times’ nytimes.com site redesign – which you’ll be hearing about elsewhere – includes a nod to this concept of the human, as editor Leonard M. Apcar notes in his “Letter from the Editor”

We also wanted to give our readers a greater voice and sprinkle a little more serendipity around the site by providing prominent links to a list of most e-mailed and blogged articles, most searched for information and popular movies. A new tab at the top of the page takes you directly to all our most popular features.

This is a small step, surely, but illustrative nonetheless.

Also, media should make more efforts to “humanize” their reporters. Allowing staff members and editors space to step outside the voice of “objective journalism” through weblogs, etc. provides a way for readers to view these staffers as real people, not as just bylines on a page or computer screen. It is just this sort of humanization that is evident in another Times product, “Only in America” with Charlie LeDuff.

These are relatively easy suggestions to implement. One further suggestion will require more thought, and more experimentation. Humanizing the news will mean a reconstruction (reinvention?) of the written product. As Dr. Samir Husni said at the Reinventing mini-summit this February, “Our publications have to adapt to these changes and so should our writing style and methods.”

But how many editors, writers, advisers, and professors are trained in the templates of inverted pyramid journalism? How do you reinvent the pyramid?

Doing so, newspapers might look to magazines to discover ways to break the template. This is an area where I don’t have answers. I’m not an expert here. But I do think the news media that catch the human voice in their pages will be better prepared for their communities for the future. What better time to start experimenting with that human voice than in college?

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