1. Minneapolis and Seattle (tie)
3. Washington, D.C.
4. St. Paul
5. San Francisco
6. Atlanta
7. Denver
8. Boston
9. St. Louis
10. Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. (tie)
The ranking is based on six key indicators: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources for cities with populations of 250,000 or greater. (via USA Today). My eyeball analysis suggests this ranking is reasonably though not entirely correlated with levels of human capital and the creative class.
December 24th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Hmmm…..seeing St. Paul at #4 means they ranked the cities within the city limits and not metropolitan areas. Which means that the core of Minneapolis and St. Louis and Boston and San Francisco are literate, but the suburbs are not necessarily so. While for example Portland includes much more suburbia within it’s corporate limits.
According to this measurement, Los Angeles or Phoenix could be very literate (unlikely, I agree) but would not make the list because of the sprawl of their corporate limits and inclusion of suburbia within the core city.
December 25th, 2008 at 5:39 am
If you want to be surprised, look at the individual indicators at http://www.ccsu.edu/AMLC08/overall_10.htm
Number 1s:
Newspapers: Newark NJ
Booksellers: Seattle and San Francisco
Libraries: Cleveland OH
Publications: Washington DC
Education: Plano, TX
Internet: Washington DC
New York City is not in any top 10.
December 25th, 2008 at 9:00 am
See, I just don’t buy this as meaningful. Plano, Texas is about 95% upper middle class. Education is easy in such an environment. Does the entire San Francisco Bay Area have more booksellers per capita than the entire Los Angeles metro area? I bet it’s closer than these statistics suggest.
December 25th, 2008 at 10:45 am
The literacy implications of my home of Twin Cities was a surprise ten years ago, but no longer. I happened to be working on a long term project in the Chicago area, and one of my clients asked me to pick up a stack of books at home. I asked whether he couldn’t get them in Chicago–his home? No…he went on about the lack of literacy in suburban Chicago. I was surprised, especially with UC and NW there. I was also surprised he knew that TC would have the stores. I got all of his books at my local store–and began to look at the book store options more closely–and not taking my beloved BN in Roseville for granted. I learned the secret–great bookstores are often in college centers–liberal arts colleges. For example, when my eldest lived in Brywn Mawr, –center of a lot of great schools, the Borders was fabulous. Of course, the granddaddy of them all, Ann Arbor is a picnic. Another surprise, the publishers home–NY–doesn’t usually have the opportunities as the aforementioned. You have to go to select stores–with deep, but narrow collections. And, no surprise, So Cal is a wasteland. Their stores tend to be pure farce. Remnants, picture books, weight-lifting, body-building. Hmmmmm not too creative.
December 25th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
How did Cincinnati get in the list? I have been told that their downtown library is the busiest in the nation.
December 26th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Using archaic and artificial categories like political jurisdictions to create bogus arbitrary lists is essentially meaningless. Some, most cities are artificial constructs that have not integrated shifting growth patterns for decades. It ignores the exodus of the middle class and the isolation of urban poverty, where literacy is barely measurable.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.