Newswise — A national survey announced today in "USA Today" measures a key component in America's social health by ranking the culture and resources for reading in America's largest cities. The study's author, Dr. Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, also reports on the impact of the internet on the decline of newspapers and also finds the US doing less well than its global competitors on a key index of literacy.
The study -- "America's Most Literate Cities 2008" -- identifies the top ten cities in this order: Minneapolis, MN 1.5Seattle, WA 1.5Washington, DC 3St. Paul, MN 4San Francisco, CA 5Atlanta, GA 6Denver, CO 7Boston, MA 8St. Louis, MO 9Cincinnati, OH 10.5Portland, OR 10.5Minneapolis and Seattle have traded the number 1 and 2 spots over the six years the survey has been conducted. This is their first tie for the top spot. The national survey develops a statistical profile of cities with populations of 250,000 or more. This is the sixth year of the study, which is available online at: www.ccsu.edu/AMLC08.
According to Miller, "This study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation's well-being -- the literacy of its major cities--by focusing on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources. The information is compared against population rates in each city to develop a per capita profile of the city's "long-term literacy" —a set of factors measuring the ways people use their literacy—and thus presents a large-scale portrait of our nation's cultural vitality."
For the 2008 edition, Miller also examined two critical concerns. First, a point commonly made about the decline of newspaper circulation is that it is caused by the rise of reading newspapers online. The conventional wisdom here is the same as for the decline in bookstores: it's caused by the rise in online book buying. And that is the same conventional wisdom that, pre-internet, claimed that library use and support of bookstores were mutually incompatible. More free book sources would be associated with fewer bookstores. And in all cases, the conventional wisdom is wrong, according to Miller. Examining the data for this and his past surveys, Miller notes that cities ranked highly for having better-used libraries also have more booksellers; that cities with more booksellers also have a higher proportion of people buying books online; and that cities with newspapers with high per capita circulation rates also have a high proportion of people reading newspapers online. "Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in the other forms and practices of literacy," according to Miller. A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another.
Miller is currently working on a forthcoming similar study of international literacy, and his preliminary findings provide compelling insights about American literacy on the world stage. A common benchmark of literacy is newspaper circulation. Worldwide, the number of newspapers, paid circulation, and newspaper advertising have all gone up in recent years. Some 1.4 billion people throughout the world now read a daily newspaper. In terms of per capita paid circulation, the US ranks #31 in the world, while Japan exceeds US circulation rates by three times. The Republic of Korea, Singapore, Venezuela, Finland, Greece, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Norway, among others, all significantly surpass US circulation rates—often at a substantially higher cost to consumers. On average, newspapers in Japan cost twice what US papers cost. Papers in Denmark and Greece cost nearly four times the average daily US paper.
While Miller points out that it is too early in this new study to draw conclusions, it is nevertheless striking that newspaper readership rates in the US's global economic competitors are significantly higher than in the US. Since literacy is generally regarded as a barometer of a nation's social, cultural, and economic health, perhaps these findings are cause for national concern.
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