Guest blog: America's most literate cities, 2009
The 2009 results are out for the 鈥�America鈥檚 Most Literate Cities鈥� study, and my town, Seattle, once again took first place. Last year, we tied for first with Minneapolis, and we also ranked at the top in 2005 and 2006, noted the .
Hometown pride should be warming my heart, but I feel a little odd this year to see Seattle at the top. One of the factors considered in the study is newspaper circulation, and 2009 is the year that the daily paper where I worked, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stopped publishing. The number of bookstores per capita is also a consideration, and 2009 is the year one of our mainstay independents, Bailey/Coy, shut down, and our famed Elliott Bay Book Company hit financial struggles and is moving to a new neighborhood.
Other factors? The survey considers educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, and periodical publishing resources. Maybe the Internet factor, in this region of Amazon.com and Microsoft, is where we scored an outsized hit. Or, maybe other cities faced as many literary roadblocks as we did, and we鈥檙e only doing well by comparison.
The other cities on the top 10 list? Minneapolis, Washington D.C. , Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Paul. Here鈥檚 a to the study 鈥� and here鈥檚 to a book-filled, super-literary 2010 for all our cities.
Rebekah Denn writes at .
