The vast majority of ONA17 attendees came from the East Coast, with a plurality coming from Washington, D.C. But the representation of less populated states, especially in the Midwest, was low, and four states aren’t represented at all.
We gathered data from ONA’s official Twitter list of attendees and grabbed the locations on list members’ bios. We cleaned up the resulting data, clearing out any locations outside the U.S. This left us with a list of 1,332 attendees, about 44 percent of all registered convention-goers as of Tuesday — but this was the best available location data.
Three hundred seven ONA attendees came from D.C., the most of any state. That was followed by New York with 246 and California with 147. All three are major centers of the journalism industry.
Several states were represented by only one person at ONA17, including Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska, and New Hampshire, and four states weren’t represented at all: Maine, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wyoming.
The lack of ONA attendees from small states potentially raises concerns about the strength of small, local newsrooms across the country and speaks to the struggle for resources faced by such organizations in comparison to large and profitable media companies in some of the country’s largest cities.
Use our visualization to explore the data for yourself.
[pym id=”geo_attendees” url=”https://static.journalists.org/projects/attendees-map/”]Map by Jacquelyn Elias
Data from Twitter
