Better read than dead

Atlanta has been declared the sixth-most literate big city in the nation in a new study out of Central Connecticut State University.

 The study, published annually by university President Dr. John W. Miller, ranks more than 70 U.S. cities with populations over 250,000, and looks at the number of libraries, booksellers and magazine publishers in each city, along with newspaper circulation and the educational attainment of its residents. 

Last year, Atlanta ranked eighth on the list, though that's down from third in 2006 when it was tied with Washington, D.C., and fourth in 2005. Atlanta ranked 15th in 2004. 

Miller apparently moved to Central Connecticut in 2005 after originally publishing the report in 2004 from his post as president of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

But it's a little unclear how he came to rank Atlanta at sixth this year -- it's flattering, but doesn't make sense. Atlanta doesn't rank anywhere in the top 10 in categories for the number of booksellers, libraries and library visits or its use of the Internet for ordering books and reading the city's main daily newspaper. It doesn't even rank in the top 10 for newspaper circulation.

The city does rank sixth for educational attainment -- meaning the percentage of adults with high school diplomas or higher -- and ties with Cleveland, Ohio, for sixth in the number of magazines and journals. 

It’s not clear how much weight each category is given, but Atlanta’s marks for education and the volume of publications must be key indicators of the city’s overall literacy.

A striking argument in Miller’s study is that heavier use of online booksellers doesn’t indicate a dearth of brick-and-mortar stores. Similarly, a high volume of visits to a city’s online newspaper doesn’t mean its print circulation is necessarily lower.

“A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another,” Miller writes in an overview of this year’s study.

In an attempt to give his work some scope and give the U.S. an indication of its literacy measured against other nations, Miller is in the middle of a similar study of world literacy. Based on the idea that newspaper readership is a good indicator of a literate nation, he says the U.S. ranks 31 in the world in per capita paid circulation.

Newspapers in the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Venezuela, Finland, Greece, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway all have higher circulation rates than the U.S. And in Japan, where the price of a newspaper is twice as high as in the U.S., circulation is three times the U.S. rate, Miller says.

In Miller’s U.S. study, Atlanta ranked 13^th in newspaper circulation in 2008, but circulation is surely declining as the city’s main daily is suffering through the financial troubles facing the industry as a whole. In recent years, the paper has folded up satellite bureaus, shrunk circulation area and cut staff.

In Detroit, the News and the Free Press recently announced they were cutting back their print editions to three days a week, and earlier this year, the Christian Science Monitor announced it would do away with its print version entirely.

Miller argues that the availability of free news on the Internet isn’t the reason for declining circulation. I would argue that Internet readership isn't the sole reason, but one of many. I just hope that a poorly-read population isn’t one of them.