East Coast Bias

College sports fans debate endlessly about a supposed East Coast bias among sports writers and polls. Most recently, this issue was raised in connection with the omission of the University of Southern California from the so-called “national championship” football game. As a Midwesterner, I feel obliged to expose the East Coast bias of Times & Seasons.

Over the past few weeks, I have been casually following the time zone distribution of visitors to Times & Seasons, shown graphically below. (Our Site Meter keeps track of this and many other interesting statistics.) Although the majority of U.S. Mormons live far west of the Mississippi, over 40% of our visitors hail from the eastern time zone. This has been fairly consistent over the time I have been watching, even though the number of visitors shows a fairly consistent pattern of growth. Although a large Chilean readership would also explain this pattern, it appears to me that we are read most widely in the eastern United States. Since our entire readership has been developed “word of mouth,” I wonder why we would see this sort of distribution.

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P.S. Special greetings to our European, Asian, and Australian (not refelcted in this most recent graph) readers!

7 comments for “East Coast Bias

  1. It’s because we East Coast Mormons are more enticed by excessive intellectualism. :)

    And it’s been so cold here lately that there’s nothing better to do than stay inside and stare at a computer screen.

  2. Wow, those are interesting numbers.

    I guess we have attracted the attention of New York and DC area saints. Many of the contributors have East coast connections (Kaimi – New York, Nate – formerly Cambridge, Matt – DC, Greg – formerly New York). But we also have a lot of contributors with Midwest and Utah connections. The extent of East coast domination is really surprising.

  3. A decent part of the midwest is in the Eastern time zone, so it may be a mistake to think of it as all East Coasters. We don’t think of ourselves as East Coast out here in Indiana but we’re in the Eastern time zone.

  4. Adam, or you can be in a part of Indiana (like me here in Tippecanoe county) that doesn’t do daylight savings and be in the Eastern time zone part of the year and Central time zone the rest of the year.

  5. We’re in the same boat up here in South Bend. Since most Indianans are technically on Eastern Standard Time all the time, we always show up as visitors from the East.

  6. Maybe we just hadn’t appreciated the prophetic aspects of Matthew 2:1: “there came wise men from the east…” ;)

  7. So all the wise are east coast transplants now living in Zion?
    Did that explain Mitt Romney’s success as the Olympics Commish?

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