Politico ran a very interesting piece by Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty called "The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think." It's a look at the geographic distribution of media jobs, which has grown starkly more concentrated over the past decade as the more geographically balanced newspaper business declines and the heavily geographically concentrated internet publishing business grows. The bottom line is the media is now extremely concentrated on the coasts. It's also heavily concentrated in blue counties, with over 50% of media jobs in … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2017
America the Cheap
America is a price dominant culture, and we need to take responsibility for that when we complain about bad customer service, poor infrastructure, etc. Certainly American business and political leadership could be better, but they aren't the ones who decided to shop at Wal-Mart instead of the local store (favoring short term financial gain over long term community loss). Nor are they the ones who force us to vote for politicians promising something for nothing. This is the subject of my latest City Journal piece, "America the … [Read more...]
How Do We Measure Thriving Cities?
Josh Yates at the University of Virginia is the director of a project there called "Thriving Cities." One if the interesting things they did is put together an analysis of city indicators that people use to measure their success. They linked it to popularity, level of academic support, and other items. It's a cool project they call the Indicator Explorer. Here's a screen shot: I sat down with Josh recently and chatted with him about the project for the podcast. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on … [Read more...]
Brief Notes on Boston Transit
I was in Boston at the end of last week for a conference and rode around on Boston transit for a bit. I'd ridden their commuter rail many times, but not much in the city besides the Silver Line bus service to the airport. I noticed that the Red and Orange Line subways both appeared to be very well patronized at rush hour, with some pretty crowded trains. A couple of stops left people unable to get on and having to wait for the next train. Even off-peak had pretty good loads. The frequencies seemed to be decent too. Curious, I went to … [Read more...]
Urban Renewal, Brutalism, and Economic Development
I was in Providence, Rhode Island this week and stopped by the new video studios at GoLocalProv for a chat about urbanism with Kate Nagle on their new Facebook/YouTube live venture. I just put the audio of that up on my podcast channel. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over the listen on Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/aaronrenn/urban-renewal-and-economic-development-in-cities Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud. Cover image via Bullshark44 CC BY-SA 3.0 … [Read more...]
What Are the Biggest Emerging Issues for Cities?
I first and foremost write about the areas where I have interest and have a contribution to make to the discussion that other people aren't making. But I also want to write about what you, my readers, are interested in and think is important to world. Before I get to that, I wanted to remind you that I have a free monthly newsletter with exclusive content for email subscribers. It includes personal updates on what I'm up, along with some exclusive writing and a selection of the most interesting links I found that month. I had been in the … [Read more...]