Visualizing tweeting journalists in Switzerland

Geoinformation specialist Ralph Straumann (@ralphstraumann) has used a 300-strong crowdsourced list of tweeting journalists in Switzerland to create an interesting visual representation of their influence and relationships.

You can read his full post here. If you don’t speak German, the first graphic essentially shows the various networks of journalists as represented by their connections among each other. The size of the name is determined by the number of other journalists in the network who follow them. Straumann has used different colors to represent different clusters of journalists who are more closely linked to each other than to the rest of the list. He suggests that the dark blue group on the right are likely to be journalists from Germany, as they are slightly apart from the main network.

The second graphic shows the journalists’ influence among the general public. This is measured by the number of followers in general, not just the number of followers also on the list. Here the prominence is slightly different, boosting Straumann’s claim that the dark blue group are likely to be German because they have a larger number of general followers – Germany providing a bigger pool of potential followers than Switzerland.

What I find interesting is that most of the foreign newswire journalists (e.g. @katharinabart, @ethomasson, myself) are clustered together in the top right of the graphic, in the yellow group. I would be curious to know what the yellow group represents (focus national political and economic news about Switzerland?) and why we’re not well connected with any of the other groups. Any ideas?