Social Network Analysis: Introduction

In recent years, social networking analysis (SNA) has become quite popular in the academy (Watts, 2003). Defined simply as a way of detecting ties between individuals and organizations in a community, SNA’s have been conducted on everything from the Internet to rural economies. Many journalists have also seen value in SNA. Investigative Reporters and Editors, Incorporated (IRE), for instance, has held panels on the technique at its annual conference since 2003, about the same time that social networking analysis began to gain favor in the academy (Watts, 2003). A section of its website is devoted to social network analysis, and this section features nine projects and another 477 stories on the subject. And the organization heavily promotes the study of social networks to journalists, arguing that these tools can be of great benefit to investigative journalism. (Dowdell, 2005)

At the same time, the IRE site also demonstrates that journalists have typically used SNA for traditional purposes. In particular, the kinds of ties in which journalists express interest seem to be confined to those that reveal hierarchical power relationships in communities. In 2005, for example, the Richmond Times-Dispatch used social network analysis to answer the question, “Who runs Richmond.” This project uncovered ties between government officials in the state and heads of corporations that received government contracts. The point of the exercise seemed to be to expose these relationships. Similarly, in 2004, independent journalist Josh On launched a project called “They Rule.” In this exercise, journalists looked at the boards of directors of national corporations and found that many government appointees either sat on the boards or had strong connections to people who did.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this use of SNA. But it is limited; it only begins to exploit SNA’s usefulness for understanding communities. SNA can reveal far more about a community than its hierarchical power relationships. It can, for instance, reveal the kinds and amounts of social capital that exist between members and organizations of a community. Scholars have shown that social capital crucially depends on the kinds and densities of social ties in a community (Putnam, 2000). Simply put, more social capital means more productive and healthy communities. But since social capital is a horizontal rather than hierarchical form of power, journalists have largely ignored it (but see Harwood, 1999). We believe this is unfortunate. Given that journalism only survives if communities thrive, tracking levels and kinds of social capital would seem to be of importance to journalism—and SNA can help in this exercise.

Thus, our experiment. Using the tools of SNA, we have tracked the amounts and densities of ties between organizations around environmental issues in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Lake Tahoe is a notoriously dysfunctional community. Jurisdictionally, it is divided by two states and five counties. There are no less than six federal agencies doing environmental work at the lake, and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency—a bi-state regional agency—exercises a powerful influence in the community. Given this complexity, it is no wonder that citizens and policymakers at the Lake historically have had great difficulty in generating the capacity for civic action. Of course, the geography of the Lake has something to do with that, as towns are spread around the Lake and each town may have its own interests at heart. But the absence of social capital, we assumed, is more important. To test our assumption, we conducted a SNA analysis. We detail our results below. However, very briefly, we found that, as a general rule, the kinds of social capital necessary to prompt civic action in the Tahoe Basin are limited. Three advocacy groups dominate social ties around environmental issues at the lake, and two of these groups are not even located in the Tahoe Basin. In a community in which environmental issues are paramount, this tells us a great deal about how the community works (or not).

In what follows, we discuss the value of SNA as a journalistic tool. We then show its value by applying it at Lake Tahoe.