The Talk of the Town: Brooklyn Becomes Less Relevant the More It's Talked About
In case L Train density wasn't a reliable enough indicator, BKLYNR's Nilkanth Patel has created a neat interactive map allowing viewers to track Brooklyn's meteoric rise in trendiness via number of mentions in the New York Times over the past 30-odd years.
Using the New York Times Article Search API, Patel was able to round up numbers on the amount of coverage the borough has gotten since 1981 - and how the media distribution panned out geographically.
Without getting into the granular details, Brooklyn's share of the media spotlight has increased from just 1.4 percent of all NYT articles in 1981 to 4.7 percent in 2012. Some of the more notable topics responsible for periodic spikes in coverage include a beached sperm whale on Coney Island, the MetroTech Center, the lynching of Yusuf Hawkins, racial tensions in Crown Heights, Hurricane Sandy, and gentrification in general.
Of course, all of this comes amid grumblings from certain corners of the local media sphere that Brooklyn has, in a sense, at last completed the ouroboros of relevancy by becoming talked-about to the point of obliteration.
"To the extent “Brooklyn” now designates more than a mere landmass, it means: small-batch production, urban husbandry, period facial hair, a fixed-gear bicycle, “Girls.” But “Brooklynizing” is different from “Brooklyn.” “Brooklynizing” is the exportation of these culture-pages clichés to fresh landmasses." - New York Times Magazine
Brooklyn has become so widespread and ubiquitous a concept that it has begun to have a homogenizing effect on the rest of the world, argues the above op-ed. To this, Gawker swiftly replied with a post titled "You Have Nothing Interesting to Say About Brooklyn," a public service announcement to the world declaring that nobody at this point, least of all the New York Times, can add anything meaningful to the conversation regarding the urban version of the world's most photographed barn.
