Another Deep Dive on Jeopardy! Geographic Representation — part one
The lowdown by television market.
Over the last couple of months, there have been a couple of good posts on r/Jeopardy talking about the places Jeopardy! contestants are from, as per their introductions on the show. One of them really went deep into it, based on the information I’d compiled since the start of Season 33. Inspired by that work, I’ve gone a bit further. From where does our beloved game draw its contestants, at least within the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, and how does that compare to the distribution of population within my great nation? And what, if any, implications does, or should, that have for the show?
Revisiting some previous work
Back in 2020, I aggregated player origin data for the four immediately preceding Jeopardy! seasons (33 through 36). On that page, I threw in some stats for the ten largest media markets, and for the “media centers.”1 On the tables below, I replicate those (here, only accounting for players from the 50 U.S. states and DC), as well as add the count and percentage for the ten markets who’ve had the most contestants.2 That’s the top (red shaded) table below; below it (shaded blue), all of the same stuff but with an expanded reach, covering Seasons 31-403.
It’s important to recall three important things here, and throughout this post. Such as:
No attempt is made to disambiguate “originally from” introductions from others.4 A prevailing assumption is that “originally from” means “currently resides in Southern California,” but that doesn’t hold with certainty. (Exhibit A: Yogesh Raut.) Without information from every such contestant about where they actually lived when they appeared on the show, I feel I have no choice but to defer to their stated introductions. (The Seasons 33-36 period is worth considering separately because during that time, “originally from” intros were banned by the show; that rule was abandoned a few weeks into 2020-21, and almost certainly isn’t returning.)
All College Championship contestants are reckoned according to their stated hometowns, not the universities they were attending at the time they competed.
Only a contestant’s first appearance is considered. This was a choice I made right from the start to avoid double counting.5
The “representation ratio”
u/FreddieMarkury, who put together that post I linked in the opening paragraph, came up with a really good way of putting this in numbers. In the post, they state the difference as a percentage; I’m instead going to render it as a ratio. Here’s an easy way of understanding it: if a media market supplied 3% of Jeopardy! contestants, and has 2% of the population, then its representation ratio is 1.5. As an example, taking it for the “media centers” over the past decade, from the above table: (29.3% / 13.1%) = 2.24.
For the representation ratios I’m showing on the map below, I’m basing them on population figures given in this report from Nielsen, which gives age 12+ populations for each Designated Media Market (DMA), estimated as of January 1 of this year.6 This contrasts with the 2022-23 household counts that FM used (which, like the contestant origin data, came from me, via Nielsen).
So how does it stack up?
Like this.
First things first. It looks like the way Datawrapper has set this up, the neutral color is the median value. And looking at the map and the underlying data, that’s 0.511 — right between two rather significant markets (Phoenix, AZ and Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, both among the eleven most populous in the nation).
If you’re a fan of America’s Favorite Quiz Show and/or a regular viewer of it, you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that the nation’s capital has the highest representation ratio, at 3.633. Trailing close behind are two markets best known for the universities they host: Charlottesville, VA (3.248; the University of Virginia), and Lafayette, IN (3.074; Purdue University).7
Nos. 4 & 5 on this ranking get so high on account of their small population — they’re two of the smallest four in the nation. They would’ve been colored quite differently here but for events. No. 207 Juneau, AK makes its appearance due to Tim Keily of Sitka contesting on May 27; while No. 209 North Platte is suddenly green because of my reach back, which grabbed Greg Vinton from early in Season 32.
Six through ten are four large markets, and one smaller one. Boston is sixth at 2.285; next is adjoining Burlington, VT-Plattsburgh, NY, whose territory covers both the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College.8 San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles round out the top ten; San Diego, Chicago, and Baltimore are the next three.
And the other end: those patches of dark brown. Those are the markets that haven’t had a single contestant over the last ten seasons. There are thirty-six of them; on the surface, that’s 17.1% of all the media markets. But don’t let that fool you. They represent 3.54% of the population, on the current figures.
Here’s another way of visualizing this. It’s an Excel “treemap” that I’ve adapted. It takes the same colors that each media market got on the map above, and assigns them to those markets again — but here, they’re sized according to population, and arranged in that order. (The bottom left corner of most, the small gray box bordered in red, designates what market each rectangle represents.)
The deep green at the bottom left represents Washington, DC; many of the darker green shades run across the left and top, signifying the largest media markets. In those ranges, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Phoenix, and Houston appear in white; while Tampa Bay, Sacramento, and San Antonio are toward beige. Conversely, more of those beiges and browns appear in the bottom right, contrasted by greens such as Charlottesville and Lafayette.
This points toward two things FreddieMarkury mentioned in his post, worth running back. First: “The top 30 markets overall have 1.38x as many contestants as expected, meaning cities as a whole tend to be overrepresented.” And second: “Florida and Texas tend to be underrepresented.”
And that’s where we’ll leave things, with part two to follow on.
The ten largest media markets are, as of Season 40: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, DC. The order of six through ten has changed over the years, but none has entered or left the top ten.
The “media centers” are New York, Los Angeles, and Washington. Several years ago, it was brought to my attention – as I recall, by the writer David Sirota – that the Columbia Journalism Review had noted that the media industry had concentrated in those cities between 2004 and 2014. My instinctive reaction was to recall that by raw contestant counts, those markets are the three biggest suppliers of Jeopardy! contestants.
Eight of those ten are also in the ten biggest; here, Seattle and Denver take the place of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
They also include the 36 contestants in the 2022 primetime Jeopardy! National College Championship. Any reference to a time period that includes Season 38 (2021-22) should be taken to include the JNCC.
There were 283 such intros by 50+DC players over the ten seasons; 7.34% overall, and 12.24% if Seasons 33-36 are excluded from the denominator.
I have considered going to a “most recent appearance” standard for location for contestants who return. I’m happy to take thoughts on that in the comments.
So if you want to get technical and nasty (and I don’t mind if you do), the representation ratio for a given media market is (C / 3855) / (P / 290,656,300), where “C” is the number of J! contestants that media market had over the last ten years, and “P” is that market’s population, per the Nielsen report. 3855 is the total number of contestants from 50+DC in Seasons 31-40.
The ratios for Washington and Charlottesville, as well as the visualization, were updated on August 21 to correct those two markets’ ratios; a Season 32 player from Fairfax was mistakenly credited to the Charlottesville market.
The “college towns more represented” effect is apparent elsewhere too. Look at Texas, and the green patch in its center surrounded by brown and beige — that’s the Austin market, home to the flagship campus of the University of Texas. And two adjacent ones in upstate New York — Syracuse (SU in its namesake city, Cornell University in Ithaca) and Rochester, NY (Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester).