Thursday, November 1, 2007

The Places Where "Editor" Is a Popular Job

Thanks to author and data-meister Laurence Shatkin for directing me to a cornucopia of statistics on jobs, called CityTownInfo. Here, among other things, you can plug in a job title and see the cities where that job is most popular (has the highest percentage of the total population working in it).

So, as a for-example, I put in "editors" to see what cities came up. Here are the top 10 places where the job is most popular:
  1. Ithaca, New York
  2. Champaign, Illinois
  3. New York, New York
  4. Bloomington, Indiana
  5. Dubuque, Iowa
  6. Ann Arbor, Michigan
  7. San Francisco, California
  8. Colorado Springs, Colorado
  9. Boston, Massachusetts
  10. Charlottesville, Virginia

Now, it doesn't take a genius to see a pattern here. What do all of these places have in common? Most of them are college towns. My hypothesis is that the confluence of all that knowledge just naturally spawns places to publish it, and it's not necessarily limited to university presses.

You can, of course, pick any other job in publishing and see where it's popular. I just picked editors because it's a job so closely associated with publishing.

5 comments:

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

I'm willing to bet that the statistics are for editors who are employees of companies, not for freelancers.

If freelancers were included, you'd find many additional cities listed. The web site of the Editorial Freelancers Association states that its members, which include abstractors, copyeditors, designers, desktop publishing experts, editors, indexers, manuscript evaluators, picture researchers, project managers, proofreaders, researchers, textbook development editors, rtanslators, and writers, live and work in 45 U.S. states and in Canada, England, France, India, Ireland, Israel, and Japan.

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

And of course, by rtanslators, I meant translators.

Lori Cates Hand said...

Hi Katharine!

I think you're right--I don't think it includes freelancers.

Lots of other cities do come up; in fact, there are 200 of them. I've just listed the ones where editor jobs are the highest percentage of the workforce.

If you look at sheer numbers of editors, NYC is #1 (with 13,000 editors!), followed by D.C. (5,230), L.A. (4,990), Chicago (3,870), and Boston (2,730).

Anonymous said...

You'll get no disagreement from me, the occupational statistics maven. The figures underlying that site are based on the OES survey, which covers wage- and salary-earners, not self-employed people.

Lori Cates Hand said...

Hey, I guessed correctly! Thanks for the confirmation.

Another use for this site would be to pick the city where you want to live and see which jobs are most popular there.