Depression in England and Wales

From Mark Easton, another interesting social map of the UK. This one shows the number of anti-depressant prescriptions per 1000 patients for January of this year.



Anti-depressant demand is especially booming in Wales and northern England. Says Easton:

The top seven [districts for anti-depressant prescription] are all Welsh Local Health Boards (LHBs) in a small area in the south of the country. Of the top thirty prescribers, 12 are in Wales and 10 are Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in the north-east of England.

We even see a local health authority prescribing at a rate greater than one prescription for 10 patients. In Torfaen, the area around Pontypool in south Wales, GPs handed out 104 prescriptions per 1,000 patients during January. This appears to be an astonishing level of anti-depressant use. GPs we have contacted blame a shortage of counselling for the high prescribing levels.

Those two areas have relatively high rates of unemployment. Easton also points out, though, that London, which has lots of poor folks, has some of the lowest rates of anti-depressant use; so a simple correlation to economic factors can't explain away all the trends. Beyond that: is it too trite to say that northern England is just a more depressing place to live than London? There's the bad economy, but there's also the erosion of infrastructure, the past-their-primeness of cities and institutions, and the general sense of malaise of a region whose industrial might peaked during some century other than the one we're in. If, as in my imagined picture of the place (which I have never visited), the actual north ofEngland is like the Michigan or Upstate New York of The UK, I think that maybe no great exegesis is needed to explain the region's higher anti-depressant use.

Regarding Wales, though, I don't have any overly simplistic and ignorant opinions to offer. Commenters on Easton's blog variously suggest the availability of free scrips in Wales; decrepit housing; unaffordable housing; oldness of the population; poor whiteness of the population; the social history of the region; the fecklessness of Labour politicians; Thatcher's anti-union policies; and average annual rainfall. I will go out on a limb and say: some or all of those factors may or may not be involved.

Foreign Workers in the US

The New York Times has another fabulously detailed interactive map in its series on immigration. This one shows countries of origin for foreign-born workers in the US.



Here are the top ten countries, with the top occupation for each nationality in parentheses:

1. Mexico - 5,286,400 (skilled construction workers)
2. Philippines - 848,800 (clerical and administrative staff)
3. India - 746,200 (computer software developers)
4. China - 653,000 (cooks and food preparers)
5. El Salvador - 580,100 (cooks and food preparers) (and consider, by the way, that the population of El Salvador itself is only about 7 million)
6. Vietnam - 526,000 (hairdressers and grooming services)
7. Germany - 476,100 (clerical and administrative staff)
8. South Korea - 408,400 (sales)
9. Cuba - 399,300 (clerical and administrative staff)
10. Canada - 364,900 (managers and administrators)

You can also create maps and tables that show foreign workers within given occupations. The New York Times really needs to be given some kind of medal for consistently creating the most information-rich map graphics anywhere.

How To Be a Hunter-Gatherer

Or a gatherer, at least. Fallen Fruit is an LA-based organization that is making maps of publicly available fruit and nuts, like this one of a neighborhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico:



Their goals are idealistic, communitarian, and downright Michael Pollan-y:

"Public Fruit" is the concept behind the Fallen Fruit, an activist art project which started as a mapping of all the public fruit in our neighborhood. We ask all of you to contribute your maps so they expand to cover the United States and then the world. We encourage everyone to harvest, plant and sample public fruit, which is what we call all fruit on or overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots.

We believe fruit is a resource that should be commonly shared, like shells from the beach or mushrooms from the forest. Fallen Fruit has moved from mapping to planning fruit parks in under-utilized areas. Our goal is to get people thinking about the life and vitality of our neighborhoods and to consider how we can change the dynamic of our cities and common values.

As for their (rather hypothetical) goal to eventually map publicly available food throughout the world, I will say this: for people in much of the developing world, there'd really be no need - they're likely already growing a lot of their own food, and a lot of them who are just at a subsistence level might not take too keenly to the idea of making their fruit available to anyone who walks by. Only in a place like the US, where the practice of cultivating our own food sources is largely a lost art and there's already a superabundance of food, does the ideal of publicly pluckable food make much sense. (That's as opposed to organized systems of food sharing in communities, which can succeed both practically and morally.) Indeed, the global food distribution system on which the US relies is inherently such a delicate operation, dependent on a broadly functioning global economy and cheap and abundant fossil fuels for production and transportation, that a day may yet come when we'd see the local food production of our own neighbnorhoods as more than the idle hobby of aging hippies and idealistic liberals.

The Geography of Buzz

The Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University has been documenting the geography of buzz.




Those are maps of Manhattan. According to SIDL (as I assume they call themselves):

In the summer of 2008, the Spatial Information Design Lab set out to analyze the unique spatial and social dynamics that are created by the arts and entertainment industries in New York City and Los Angeles. Working with Elizabeth Currid from the University of Southern California, the lab used a database of arts and entertainment event photography by Getty Images as a proxy for social interaction in geographical space. Because photographs taken by Getty are tagged with location information, they are transformed into data with an unexpectedly powerful spatial component.

The results of the research showed that both Los Angeles and New York have unique “event geographies”, or locations of interest to Getty photographers that reappear at a statistically high [sic] rate than the rest of the city. While each separate arts industry showed some tendencies toward specific geographic locations the events geographies of all the industries are largely held in very similar locations, suggesting that event geographies appear to be closely linked to iconic symbols in both cities.

Now this is all very interesting, but something about this project strikes me as fundamentally tautological: they are determining which places are culturally significant in terms of which places are most frequently photographed. But a place is only going to be frequently photographed if it is deemed culturally significant. So they're determining what places should be deemed culturally significant by determining which places are already deemed culturally significant.

Don't get me wrong - there's value in that. It's interesting to see a map of what are essentially our culture's collective perception of a place; such documentation is a good way for us to become self-aware about those perceptions. But I don't think we should expect to gain any great new insights from these methods. (There's a lot of theatre activity near Broadway? You don't say.) After all, if there are biases in what we (or, more specifically, Getty photographers) deem culturally significant, then these maps will display the same biases.

Like, look at this, from a NY Times article on the project:

That the buzzy locales weren’t associated with the artistic underground was a quirk of the data set — there were not enough events in Brooklyn to be statistically significant — and of timing. “If we took a snapshot two years from now, the Lower East Side would become a much larger place in how we understand New York,” Ms. Currid said.

That doesn't sound like a "quirk of the data set" to me. That just sounds like a method that is keyed to pick up on the most prominent cultural events, which by definition won't be underground or cutting-edge, and which will therefore be confirming of conventional wisdom.

Still, it's cool to be able to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable. I always say: if the rich texture and ambiguity of emotional experience can't be reduced to the barren certainties of mathematics, then what good are feelings anyway?

No, I kid. To quote a man named Junior, "Saying that the quantification of the seemingly unquantifiable aspects of human experience* undermines 'enjoyment' and the 'human factor' is like creationists saying that evolution takes away the 'wonder' and 'mystery' of the universe. It doesn't. It makes it awesomer."

Indeed.

Bonus map of LA (more here):



*Instead of 'the quantification of the seemingly unquantifiable aspects of human experience,' Junior actually said 'VORP.' But the point stands.

Stimulus Job Creation by State

Mint.com has a map of the likely effect of the stimulus bill that was passed a couple weeks ago on the unemployment rates of the states.



Here's their methodology:

we used the White House’s “Job Impact by Congressional District” (which has had its share of criticism for overestimating the new job totals) to determine the total number of new jobs created by state, and then compared those numbers to the total unemployed persons in each state. The result is a hypothetical percentage of each state’s unemployment that will be solved by the stimulus plan, and while of course this number will fluctuate based on upcoming layoffs, it at least gives a picture of how the proposed job creations impact each state’s current unemployment problem.

So the map doesn't depict the reduction in unemployment in absolute terms, but in terms of a percentage of the unemployment rate. That's why states like North Dakota and West Virginia come out looking like big winners, and places like California and the Carolinas not so much: as you'll recall from these maps, the unemployment rate is just much lower in the Plains than in the Southeastern or West Coast states, so the creation of x number of jobs per capita will reduce a greater percentage of those states' unemployed.

An ideal stimulus would cause this whole map to be shaded the same color, or would even disproportionately benefit places with higher unemployment. But as a practical matter, not to mention a political one, it's probably difficult to engage in very precise targeting of the most economically damaged parts of the country. Nonetheless, if these numbers are right, the stimulus really will have gone a long way towards reducing human suffering: no state's unemployment rate is reduced by less than a quarter or so, which means an awful lot of people will avoid perconal catastrophe. (Another debate could be had, of course, on the bill's long-term effects.)

Meanwhile, the gummint has a clickable map that will send you to state websites that describe how stimulus fundds are being spent in each state. Except for North Dakota, where the government does not care about its people.

Genetic Map of Northern Europe

From The New York Times, another genetic map shows that there are, in fact, genetic differences between the nationalities of Northern Europe, according to a study of Australian individuals of Northern European descent.



Says the Times: "The graphic records two sets of correlations (labelled PC1 and PC2) in the genetic data derived from the various populations." Can I say what that means, exactly? I cannot. But the key takeaway here is that the proximity of any two points on the chart correlate to genetic similarity between individuals. And as you can see from the color-coding, individuals from the same country clearly cluster genetically. There is, though, a fair bit of overlap, except when it comes to the ever-anomalous Finns, who appear to have wandered off the genetic reservation altogether. Indeed, the Finns appear to be suffering the peculiar existential condition of not even being all that genetically similar to themselves. (CEU refers to the general European population, by the way.)

The researchers have drawn some interesting conclusions from their study.

The Australian team says that natural selection has probably helped differentiate the various populations in their survey. Another factor may be that the Irish have inherited more genes from the first settlers of Europe, hunters and gatherers who were followed by people who practiced agriculture, while the Finns may have some ancestors who came from East Asia.

It would be interesting to discover that the Irish have evolved to inhabit a uniquely Irish niche in the ecology of Northern Europe, and the Swedes another distinct niche, etc. That would seem to be to me the consequence of what these researchers say, and I find it surprising; I always figured whatever genetic differences existed between populations were just due to genetic drift. But of course, whatever differences we're talking about aren't very large, anyway. It's not like we're talking about different species or anything.

On the other hand, if you cock your head and look at a Finn in just the right light...

Mapping the Neighborhood (Broadly Construed)

Via The Map Room, something called the Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey (shortened, with the sort of radical anti-melliflousness only a team of astronomers could muster, to 6dFGS) has mapped a chunk of the nearby universe containing more than 110,000 galaxies.



The survey covers more than 80% of the Southern sky out to 2,000 million light years; it documents where galaxies are and where they're going. According to Universe Today, the study also measured the mass of the galaxies indirectly: by "measuring the galaxies’ movements, the researchers were able to map the gravitational forces at work in the local Universe, and so show how matter, both seen and unseen, is distributed."

As Jonathan Crowe notes, the scale of the map (as he posted it) is about one to eleven quintillion - "almost certainly the smallest scale we will ever see."

I'm going to take that as a personal challenge.

Earth and Moon

This is a very simple image, but I don't think I've ever seen it before and I like it. It just shows Earth and the Moon and the distance between them to scale.



Found at the blog Page F30, in a post that argues that Ceres might be a better target for colonization than Mars.

UPDATE: A commenter points to a similar image at Wikipedia which also depicts the speed of light at the same scale.

Web Trends IV

Information Architects, an entity I've never heard of, is about to release the fourth version of their web trends map, which, though evidently quite popular, is another thing I've never heard of. But here's the thing: it's a map! And so, I present it to you:



According to IA, the map depicts the

333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people [in a visualization based on] the Tokyo Metro map.

Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team through dialogue with map enthusiasts. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it. The iA design team assigns these selected domains to individual stations on the Tokyo Metro map in ways that complement the characters of each.

I'm actually more interested in the allegorical aspect of this project than the actual content; how did they match up web domains with Tokyo Metro stops? They give this example: "Twitter is in Shibuya this year, as Shibuya is the spot with the bigggest buzz." Hard to draw any generalizable principles from that case. Like, in what sense does deviantart.com resemble Ueno station? Is the area around Ueno populated by a lot of manga characters and amateur photographers?

Regardless, the folks at IA know what they're about when it comes to extending an allegory; just about everything in this visualization is, as the semioticians like to say, a signifier. To wit: a station's height represents a site's "success," where success "refers not only to traffic, but to revenue and trend." The width of a station "represents the stability of the company behind its domain" - Digg gets a wide base; 4chan, not so much. And each of the lines represent a certain type of site, as you can see in the key to the left there.

They're selling posters of the thing, but only about 1,000 of them. If I was you, and also was desperately keen on getting my hands on one of these, I would be irked by their transparent effort to foment demand by artificially limiting supply of their product. In a fit of pique, I would then go buy a poster from Le Dernier Cri which, though completely unrelated to both webs and trends, has a bunch of fun stuff. That would show 'em.

Or, you could just go here and see the beta version for yourself. Here's a detail:

The Baseball Map of America

The long darkness known as the baseball off-season is finally over. In cartographic celebration of this sporting Eostre, here is the map of the countries of baseball in North America:



Thirty teams, thirty countries, one evil empire.

Mapping the Conficker Worm

Via PCMag's Security Watch blog, the Conficker Working Group has infection maps of the Conficker worm, which is some sort of centipedal beast that feasts on the souls of computers or something.



The map is based on infection rates as of April 1st. This caveat is given:

While the maps appear very detailed, the mapping process itself is somewhat inaccurate. Each area of color is a spot that must be placed and then a range of color applied based off the density of data in that spot. So, the greater the scale of the map there is an increased bleed effect of the applied dots and distribution. Areas can appear far more infected than they are in actuality. So we present the maps as something to see within those limitations and built-in levels of inaccuracy.

Still, some patterns are evident. As the Security Watch blog post notes, the infection rate seems to be much denser in Italy than in France.



The blog also gives rates of infection for some countries; the winner is Vietnam, with a rate above 13%, followed by Brazil and the Phillipines at 11%. The US is at 4.7%, and Italy has the highest infection rate in Europe at 3.6%. (It's not clear to me, though, whether these numbers represent the percent of all infected systems that reside in a given country, or the percent of systems in the given country that are infected.)

Mapping the Future of Gay Marriage

Yesterday, same-sex marriage in Iowa was rendered legal by that state's Supreme Court (two days after it was made legal in Sweden). The United States seems inexorably headed towards marriage rights for gay couples - but how long will it take to get there across the board? Nate Silver has an answer. Based entirely on his hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of gay marriage in the US:



The years indicated are those by which a gay marriage ban would be defeated by voters in a given state, according to a regression model designed by Silver. (Again, all the math and hard work is Silver's; I just made the map.)

How did Silver come up with these results? Here's the explanation:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.

The more religious a state is, and the more white evangelicals it has, the higher the percentage of voters who would be likely to support a gay marriage ban. However, according to Silver marriage bans "are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year." So it's possible to extrapolate, given the current religious demographics of a state and the trend of decreasing support for bans, when a gay marriage ban would fail.

There are 11 states where a marriage ban would already be expected to fail: all of New England and New York, plus several states in the West (all of which are among the least religious states in the country). California wouldn't be likely to reject a ban until next year. (Side note: despite California's status as a sort of poster boy for social liberalism, most of the Northeast tends to be more liberal on these kinds of social indicators.)

Over the next couple of years, majority opposition to gay marriage bans will spread quickly through the Northeastern and Western states, then through the Midwest - claiming a majority of all states by 2013 - and finally through the South, with Mississippi bringing up the rear in 2024.

Of course, history rarely moves in a straight line, and there's a big element of speculation in simply extrapolating from current trends. As Silver notes, a backlash against gay marriage might mount, delaying or reversing the trends that have been evident over the past few years; or by a sudden gestalt shift gay marriage might find broad acceptance. What seems much more likely than the precise dates given here, though, is the chronology of the geographical spread of acceptance. Same-sex marriages are already legal in the New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, with the Vermont legislature recently voting overwhelmingly to allow it (though the Governor may veto the bill [UPDATE: the legislature overrode the veto, so Vermont is the fourth state to make gay marriage legal, and the first to do so legislatively rather than judicially]). And even among states where gay marriage bans have passed, some of the most narrow margins were in Western states like Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and, of course, California. Meanwhile, it is certain that the South will be the last region in the country to become amenable to gay marriage.

As for Iowa? According to Silver, an amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage in that state would require passage in two consecutive sessions of the state legislature, and then would have to be ratified by the voters. So it couldn't come up for a vote at the ballot box until at least 2012. According to Silver's regression model, such a ban might pass in Iowa until 2013 - but who knows; maybe 3 years of being neighbors with happily married gay couples without having their social fabric torn asunder will cause Iowans' tolerance clock to speed up just a bit.

5/19/09 UPDATE: This map was never intended as a prediction of when gay marriage would actually become legal. But it is interesting that, as of a month and a half later, gay marriage is now legal in 4 states (MA, CT, VT, ME), will soon be legal in a 5th (NH; just waiting for a technicality in the bill to be worked out), and is making progress in a 6th state (NY) which, according to Nate S., would vote against a hypothetical gay marriage ban as of this year. In other words, gay marriage may actually be legal in at least half of these 11 states by the time the year is out, and will definitely be legal in at least 5 - plus Iowa, of course. Again, the point was never that these would be the dates by which gay marriage would actually be legal - but it almost seems to be turning out that way, to some extent.

Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists

The Natural Resources Defense Council has worked with Google to create a Google Earth mapping tool which shows environmentally sensitive areas of the American West.



The NRDC, like a lot of environmental groups, is especially concerned about the potential damage to wildlife and ecosystems of developing the region's prodigious energy potential. The irony is that much of this energy is in the form of wind and solar power - the very resources which need to be developed if we have any chance of doing anything about global warming. Obama has made some pretty bold moves to invest in those renewable energy resources in the west: a big chunk of the recent stimulus was devoted to building up the infrastructure that is sorely needed if that energy is to be brought to market.

The problem is that that infrastructure - the wind towers and solar panels, and all the high-voltage electrical lines that will connect them to the national grid - can cause problems for wildlife. From a New York Times article on the NRDC map:

The wind industry publishes photos of cows grazing placidly around towers, and argues it is compatible with nature. But Brian A. Rutledge, executive director of the Audubon Society of Wyoming, said wildlife and domesticated species were different. “We have species of birds, for example, that won’t nest within 200 yards of a road, period,’’ he said. Some prairie birds will not venture anywhere near a vertical object like a tower or a power-line pylon, he said, probably because they are genetically imprinted to avoid natural vertical features, like trees, where predators perch. The lesser prairie chicken, he said, will not cross under a power line, even between widely spaced towers. “It becomes like a river down the middle of their population base,’’ he said.

One such species is the sage grouse, the range of which sits right in the middle of an area where a lot of new transmission lines are likely to be needed.

As the Times puts it, the map amounts to the "battle lines being drawn" by the NRDC and like-minded organizations - a declaration of where they intend to fight development. It depicts areas that are prohibited, such as natural parks and wilderness areas, where devlopment is already prohibited; restricted areas, where rules on the books limit development, often because of threatened species; and "areas that should be avoided" - where, in other words, development may be permitted, but the NRDC is prepared to fight it.

I'm sympathetic to the NRDC, and we should all hope that development takes place in the most ecologically sensitive way possible, yadda yadda. But this framing, from the Times article, really seems to miss the forest for the trees (or the world for the forest):

And while the battle lines are quite literally available with a few mouse clicks, the intent is not entirely hostile, with the national groups recognizing that the issue is environmental balance, pitting prairie species like the greater sage-grouse against animals like the polar bear, which lives on ice that is melting because of global warming, some of it probably caused by coal-fired power plants that wind and sun could partly replace.

What a trivialization of what global warming is all about! Polar bears pulling a dodo is the least of our worries when it comes to global warming. It's not the sage-grouse vs. the polar bear; it's the sage grouse versus massive ecological calamity and the possible meltdown of entire ecosystems, not to mention famine and the mass dislocation of human populations. I'm all for sage or any other kind of grouses; but if legal wrangling over their protected status holds up the development of one of the few promising options we have for getting off of fossil fuels, then I will be mighty annoyed.

But because I am a fair man, I will let the sage-grouse have the last word. Here is a detail of their range from the Google Earth map.

Help Map the Universe

Galaxy Zoo is asking the internets for a favor: help describe the universe. Specifically, they want laypeople to help classify the hundreds of thousands of galaxies in their database:

The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.

You look at images like these:



And answer questions like these:



And by doing so you will have contributed to the wisdom of crowds. And, as we're evidently meant to be learning about astronomy over the next few days, Galaxy Zoo is trying to classify a million galaxies in that time, so you can help them hit that goal. What's more, since human beings are the organs by which the universe perceives itself, this project is an attempt by the universe at self-perception; and who wouldn't want to take a few minutes out of their day to expand the self-awareness of the universe?

The Atheist Map of the UK

The Guardian has an interactive map of religious belief - or the lack thereof - in the UK.



The map is based on a survey by the think tank Theos which polled respondents on their beliefs about human origins. The map indicates the percentage of the population who agree with the proposition that 'evolution removes the need for God.' The map gives stats for each region of the country; the pie chart on the left is for the Eatern region - the most atheistic region of the country, where fully 4 out of 9 people say that evolution obviates a religious explanation for the existence of life.

Here are the regions of the country ranked by lack of religiosity:
1. Eastern - where 44% agree that 'evolution removes the need for God'
2. Southwest - 40%
2. Southeast - 40%
4. Northeast - 39%
5. Yorks and Humber - 38%
5. East Midlands - 38%
7. Northwest - 36%
7. West Midlands - 36%
9. Scotland - 34%
10. Wales - 32%
11. London - 31%
12. Northern Ireland - 28%

London's low ranking is a bit of a shocker. Could it be the large immigrant population there importing beliefs from more devout corners of the globe?

It's interesting to compare this map to the map of atheism in the US. The most obvious thing to note is that the US is way more religious than the UK. The two maps aren't 100% comparable. In fact, neither map directly depicts self-reported atheists as such: the US map shows "non-religious" population, and this UK map shows those who choose belief in evolution over belief in God, when given the choice. But those are both pretty good proxies for atheism/agnosticism. And a comparison shows that the most religious regions of the UK barely approach the least religious regions of the US: only the states of Vermont (34%) and New Hampshire (29%) have more non-believers than the most religious region of the UK, Northern Ireland (28%).

But none of that is too surprising. What I find more interesting is a possible correlation between the UK and the US. The most religious regions of the UK are Scotland and Northern Ireland. Those happen to be the source regions for the Scots-Irish who populated the the American South as early as the early 18th Century and contributed much to the development of the culture of that region, which is now the most religious in the US. Of course, the South is far more religious than Northern Ireland or Scotland is today; but could the relative strength of religion in these areas within the context of their broader societies be causally related? Is it a function of that centuries-old cultural kinship? It seems possible.

Hoaxes

Hoaxes of the world, from Widgetbox.

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(Note: of particular interest is "Sans Serife," in London, England.)

"Paper Cuts": The Death of the Newspaper Industry

Paper Cuts is tracking the ongoing labor carnage in the newspaper industry in the US. They've got an interactive map with details on newsroom job losses around the country.



The South Florida Sun Sentinel. The Rockingham News. The Washington Post. The Pocono Record. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. These are only some of the papers that have announced layoffs just since Saturday. The combination of the wan economy and the outmoded business model of newspapers has meant disaster for this industry. It looks increasingly like US newspapers in their present form may not be long for this world.

But is that such a bad thing? It would certainly be a terrible thing if journalism didn't survive. But there's surely no chance of that happening - there will always be a demand for journalism. In the future, though, it's likely to be hosted by media other than cheap, inky paper delivered in a bundle to your doorstep. The web is the obvious new venue for journalistic content, and that medium's been growing for years now, of course. But the real interesting test for the future of journalism will be what happens when a major city finds itself without any major newspaper. What will fill the void? My guess is: a proliferation of publications, especially online but in print as well, focused on much narrower niches. This, of course, has been the trend on the internet - the proliferation of micro-focused content venues (ahem) with little or no overheard costs, often motivated by individuals' passions rather than profit. The upshot has been that there's an incredibly richer array of content available to consumers now than there was ten years ago, even as newspapers have declined. (I've just been surfing around for information on Houston's light rail plans, for instance, and I've found way more information than I ever could have by simply waiting around for the paper to show up every day.)

This is the way media content is produced now, and in this context newspapers (like network television) are an anomaly: they offer breadth, not depth, as they rely on serving the interests of a mass audience. But there's nothing especially natural about combining news with sports scores, book reviews, classified ads, real estate listings, comics and all the rest of it, like a typical big-city paper does. The only reason to do so is if the medium that is best suited to distribute lots of information quickly and cheaply does not allow the consumer to exert selective control over content - then an editor has to decide what will appeal to the greatest audience, and deliver it all together in a big bundle. That was the best system for quick and thorough information dispersal during the 20th Century, but it no longer is.

The fact that this anachronistic and quirky medium is unlikely to last much longer in its present form doesn't, as I said, mean the end of journalism. But the questions are, over the long term: will journalism (of the 'serious' investigative sort) become a non-profit enterprise? And are we likely to suffer in the short-term from a lack of established journalistic institutions to act as a watchdog against corporations and government? But of course, for everyone in the industry who are currently suffering from the turbulence of economic and technological change, the questions are much more immediate and personal.

UPDATE: For an interesting and much more comprehensive expression of this general line of thinking, see Steven Berlin Johnson.

(Another) Unemployment Map of the US

Via Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress has an interactive map of unemployment and job losses across the fifty states.





It doesn't have the fine-grain data of this unemployment map, but it does have a timeline which allows you to watch the job situation in every state evolve (i.e., deteriorate) over the last four years. And bar graphs for every state, too. Here's Florida:



Brutal - just like the rest of the country, except the Plains, though even there the job losses have started to mount in the past couple of months.

One thing that'll be interesting to watch over the next few years is how the geography of the recession affects population movements. Some places that have been hit especially hard, like Michigan, already had shrinking population shares. But other places that were hit hard by the housing kerblooey had been some of the fastest growing parts of the country - Nevada, Arizona and Florida, especially. Will there be a mass exodus from those states? Meanwhile, the least scathed of the large states so far has been Texas, which was already growing superfast. Will the rate of growth there become even growthier? We shall see.