News is all about people - they either make it, or they are affected by it. A corollary to that would seemingly be that the more people that occupy a state, the more news is made by that state. An interesting cartogram, from Science News magazine, shows that even allowing for population, some states create more news than others.

Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines. Some notable results:

• New York (where Trylon SMR is headquartered), the media capital of the world; is the largest news provider in the country, with nearly all news originating in New York City (pop. 8.2 million; metro area 18.8 million). Compare this to Illinois, home of the nation's third largest city, Chicago (pop. 2.8 million; metro area 9.5 million). Considering metropolitan areas, Chicago/Illinois should be half the 'news size' of New York City/New York, while in fact it seems to be less than one fifth.

• Washington DC accounts for a huge proportion of the news stories - not surprising, since it is the nation's capital, and the home of Congress, the Presidency and other political news generating institutions. However, DC (pop. 600,000; metro area 5.8 million) generates more news than the most populous state, California (pop. 36.5 million).

• News stories from Texas (pop. 20.8 million) seem overly scarce, especially when compared to, say, Georgia (pop. 8.2 million), which seems to get a bigger share.

• The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with a combined population under 9 million, are all but invisible. No people, no news? But then Colorado alone, with a population of less than 4.5 million, is responsible for a much larger chunk of news than those states combined.

Media companies, public relations professionals and others may want to take note - it's not the size of the state or the number of people in it that determine where news originates from - it's the number of newsmakers.