The BBC current affairs programme Newsnight delved into network analysis this week. Network analysis generally involves generating diagrams which show clusters of relationships between people: a particularly powerful way of showing everything from power relationships to echo chambers and which people dominate or bridge particular groups of people.

The results tend to look like this:

It’s not a new thing in journalism: Channel 4 did it with Who Knows Who…

…and Reuters did it with Connected China:

..and over a decade ago the Washington Post used the technique to look at the money behind George W. Bush’s election campaign:

But as the technique gets easier the BBC treatment is noteworthy as one particularly creative response to the question “How do we make this work on TV?”

Plonking a presenter in space floating around these networks? It may just be the next swingometer…