Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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Crowd counting is more art than science, and media coverage of yesterday’s tea party protest in Des Moines bears that out.
The Des Moines Register reported yesterday that the crowd numbered about 1,000. In the version of the story up today, that number has been increased to 3,000. Radio Iowa reports the same number.
Neither story cites an official source for the number, though it has never been clear to me that official sources are much better at counting the size of an outdoor crowd than journalists, unless there are controlled entry and exit points or heightened security measures in place.
In the Iowa Independent’s story, I pegged the crowd at about 700, which is a significantly lower number than the other reports. In the interests of transparency, I should explain my methodology:
At about 12:30 p.m., when the protest was in full swing and the crowd was clustered near the stage, I walked up the steps of the capitol and took an approximate head-count. First, I counted the farthest-away row of protesters, who were facing the stage (and me, since I was standing behind the stage). Then, I counted the closest row of protesters, who were standing right in front of the stage. Then I approximated the number of rows of protesters between the first and last row. Once that was finished, I averaged the number of people in the first and last rows and multiplied by the number of rows I counted.
If that sounds easy, I assure you, it is not. And I’ll be the first to admit that I could be wrong.
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