Minneapolis and Seattle are the most literate big cities in America, followed by Washington, D.C., St. Paul and San Francisco. Atlanta, Denver, Boston, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Portland, Oregon round out the top ten. There’s no testing involved in the designation. The study by Central Connecticut State University ranks cities based on six factors: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources. Dr. Jack Miller, the President of Central Connecticut State, examined — and dismisses — criticism that the list is skewered by a decline in newspaper circulation caused by a rise in reading papers online.
The conventional wisdom here is similar to the claims about 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. As the data for this and previous surveys indicates, cities ranked highly for having better-used libraries also have more booksellers; cities with more booksellers also have a higher proportion of people buying books online; and 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. A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another.
USA Today notes America is far behind other countries in a related study examining international literacy. In preliminary data of per-capita paid newspaper circulation, the U.S. ranks only 31st in the world, “far behind other countries, including Aruba, Liechtenstein and Japan.”
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