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Jon Bruner Contributor

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I'm the data editor at Forbes, where I explore questions that interest me by writing and programming. I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2006 with degrees in mathematics and economics. Follow me on Twitter: @JonBruner, or on my personal website.

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Data Driven 28,448 views

The Interactive Media Map: America's Most Influential News Outlets

Click to visit the Forbes interactive media map

Click the image above to visit the Forbes interactive media map

Oregonians love NPR; Wisconsinites adore the Onion; the Huffington Post is widely read in Appalachia. These are a few of the favorites that the data team at Bitly uncovered when they parsed data from millions of clicks on their shortened links. We’ve turned their data into an interactive map and an illustration in the April 9, 2012 issue of Forbes.

Visit the interactive media map >>

Bitly’s dataset, wrangled by data scientists Hilary Mason and Anna Smith, consists of every click on every Bitly link on the Web. Bitly makes its data available publicly—just add ‘+’ to the end of any Bitly link to see how many clicks it’s gotten. For Bitly’s collaboration with Forbes, Smith and Mason looked for news sources and individual articles that were unusually popular in certain states compared to national averages. The interactive map starts by showing which news source dominates in each state by this measure: the Washington Post in Virginia and Maryland, the Chicago Tribune in Illinois, and so on. Click on a source to see a heat map that shows where its links are particularly popular, then click on a headline to see where that story did well.

Bitly’s research reveals some obvious interest in local issues—a Forbes story about Wisconsin’s pensions was widely read in Wisconsin and an Onion article about President Obama was popular in Washington, D.C.—and it confirms some dearly-held stereotypes about media consumption: NPR is popular in Oregon and Minnesota; Fox Fox News is popular in Mississippi.

But the same data points to a sharp division between fully national news publishers that are widely read across the country, like the New York Times, and the largest regional papers—some of which, like the Washington Post, have national aspirations that they’ve had trouble realizing. The latter remain sharply contained to their traditional markets.

Our friends at Bitly write:

When you share or click a link on a social network like Facebook Facebook or Twitter, you’re most likely using a Bitly link. Bitly provides the infrastructure for social sharing across networks and, in the middle, collects a huge amount of data on how real people share ideas. Given the right tools, and by asking the right questions, this mass of clicks can be transformed into useful knowledge about the social web, helping us understand how people use the Internet.

For Forbes, Bitly has investigated how people consume news by looking at how people in different states differ in their preference for news sites. Through the clicks of millions of people in each state visiting different news sources, Bitly is able to uncover relationships between geography and media.

This map will become a regular feature: we’ll update it at the beginning of every month to include the previous month’s hits.

Visit the interactive media map >>

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  • Dan McCue Dan McCue 2 years ago

    Jon, thanks for posting this. Very interesting. In future months, would it be possible to show the top 3 for each state, or percentages? For many states, #1 may not be a majority of the shares.

  • Jon Bruner Jon Bruner, Contributor 2 years ago

    Absolutely: I’d like to publish a revision of the graphic sometime in the next two months, and a presentation of data from state to source is something I want to include. That should resolve a bit of confusion I’ve noticed over the distinction between media outlets that most outperform their national average shares (which the map shows when it loads) and absolute share (which it shows when you click on a source).

  • Joel Bradshaw Joel Bradshaw 2 years ago

    Thanks for this – and glad to see that it’s a project you intend to improve, with more access to the underlying data! I’d love to see a more fine-grained view of this – by county or zipcode – but I realize the underlying data for that may not be available. Which is unfortunate, because high-density metropolitan areas take over many states that have a more complex picture.

    One point to poke at though: I am suspicious of the zero (white) number for HuffPo in Washington State – having lived there for several years, this seems to be an anomaly rather than an actual data point.

  • Kenny Miller Kenny Miller 2 years ago

    Since you are including the Onion, why not also include The Daily Show and Colbert?

  • Jess5628 Jess5628 2 years ago

    I’m surprised by how you’re positioning the information this map displays. It seems to me generalizing Bitly data trends alone into “Who’s Reading What and Where” or “America’s Most Influential News Outlets” is seriously questionable. There’s no way Huffington Post is the most popular news source in Louisiana or that The Onion is in Minnesota, but it is possible that they’re the most popular news sources shared by Bitly users in these states. Interesting data, but it’s interesting data about social media users in these states and should be reported as such.

  • This is a great map and thanks. I agree that top 3 would be useful if you can do it. Also…while some may grouse about the Onion, we are living in an age where news does travel through comedy (Daily Show, Colbert) and dramatic seriousness (Fox, Drudge). Is there a precise definition of what you include, exclude, as I am wondering about the comedy portals, blogs, also surprised that Yahoo and other ISPs not making the cut. But again, thanks, this is great stuff.

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