The long tail of US cities: media and blogsphere coverage

In the previous post, I posted some numbers of media coverage of Spaniard cities using Google News which showed that Madrid and Barcelona rightly gets the most attention, but per population other cities are over-covered. In this one, media references of the 50 most populated US cities are posted. The data was extracted today, 8th March 2010.

This is the first graphic, which shows the number of references on Google News by each of the top 50 US cities. New York, Portland and Washington are the most common with more than 100,000 references each of them.

For fair comparison, the number of references must be compared to the population of each city.

The second graphic shows the number of references per 100,000 inhabitants of the top 50 cities of US. Surprisingly, or not, Washington receives an overwhelming media attention compared to its population, around 0.5 news articles per inhabitant. New York, the most populated city, only gets 0.03 articles per inhabitant. Clearly, Washington benefits from being the political center of US. Other over-referenced cities, according to their population, are Miami, Boston and El Paso.

Now, let's compare media coverage by news source.

The third graphic shows the number of city references found in Google News filtered by each of this three news sources: New York Times, Fox and CNN. The number of references is divided by the city population. Not sure whether it is a by product of Google News indexing, but New York Times is the best source covering the top 50 US cities.

Washington, Boston and New York are the preferred cities of New York Times. However, Fox prefers news from Washington, Cleveland and Boston. And finally, Washington, Atlanta and Miami are more likely to be cited by CNN.

Now let's see bloggers' bias.

US cities in the blogsphere

Google hosts Blogsearch, a search engine for blogs. Next graphic shows the number of posts referencing the top 50 US cities. Results are filtered by English language.

The four graphic ranks cities by the bulk number of references in the English-speaking blogsphere. New York, Washington and Chicago are the most cited US cities.

Next graph shows the number of references in Blogsearch per 1,000 inhabitants of the top 50 cities.

Washington, Boston and Miami have a high amount of references related to their population. i.e. Blogsearch shows that Washington gets more than 200 posts per inhabitant! New York just gets around 20 posts.

Available in Google Docs are the tables with complete numbers of the 50 cities. Wikipedia is the source of the city list and their population.