Saturday, August 04, 2007

Out of the mainstream, into the fire

I haven't read or seen Pittsburgh coverage of the Pirates' acquisition of pitcher Matt Morris. In San Francisco, local media are taking pity on the man.

If professional baseball used a relegation system comparable to systems used in professional soccer (everywhere outside of the U.S.), what league would the Pirates be competing in today? Triple A? Double A?

And while I'm thinking of sports and soccer, I'm reminded for no particular reason of this nugget from the Post-Gazette, back in June:
Sunday's CONCACAF Gold Cup final in which the United States defeated Mexico, 2-1, attracted 41 percent more television households in the United States than the Stanley Cup final clincher -- and that was just for the soccer game's Spanish-language telecast. The game earned a 2.5 fast national rating on Univision. That translates to 2.83 million households. Anaheim's series-ending 6-2 victory vs. Ottawa for the Stanley Cup June 6 received a 1.8 rating on NBC.

And still, there is no Spanish-language TV in Pittsburgh. Univision was the #2 broadcast network nationwide for adults 18-34 (all adults, not just Hispanic adults) during the last sweeps period.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Corporations set up TV stations to make money. The number of Spanish speakers in Pittsburgh is probably insufficient to support a station.

Given the immigrant mix coming in to the region there may be more Hindi speakers than Spanish speakers. It would be intersting to see census data regarding which languages are spoken at home in SW PA. Chris Briem, can you get that information for us?

Bram Reichbaum said...

I got news in re hispanics in Pittsburgh. Up here in Deutschtown, they're ALREADY HERE! Totally.

Alexis Leon said...

In response to AZMike (and although I'm not Chris Briem), I just took a quick look at the most recent CPS data and came up with this:

In the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, the share of the population that is Hispanic (which is probably a good proxy for Univision's target demo) was 0.7% (i.e.: roughly 2 in 300) in the first four months of 2007, compared with 13.3% at the national level, and 6.2% in the Philly metro area. It might be more appropriate to compare this percentage with the figures for markets with stations recently added to the Univision network: the share of Hispanics was 5.9% in Portland, OR; 3% in Detroit; 4.5% in Minneapolis and 7% in Nashville. Except for Portland, whose metro area is similar in size to ours, all the other markets are larger than Pittsburgh, which means that a comparison based on the sheer number of Hispanics (instead of their fraction of the population) would show even more clearly how Pittsburgh has a much smaller Hispanic population. In short, the approximately 17,000 Hispanics (that's 0.7% of 2.37 million) in the metro area are probably not a strong draw for Univision or any other Spanish-language network to set foot in our media market any time soon.

By the way, in your post you were also wondering about the numbers of Hindi speakers. Well, I can give you the number of Indian-born residents in the area in the same January-April 2007 period: 0.3%, or some 7,500. (The national average is 0.65%, or about 1 million). That, along with the fact that not all Indian immigrants speak Hindi, means that there are even fewer Hindi speakers than Spanish speakers in the Pittsburgh area.