Cincinnati Culture Rank: Much Ado About Nothing

Apr 29, 2010 by classicgrrl

 Check out The Enquirer and you will see loads of comments and bunched, twisted panties over Portfolio.com ranking Cincinnati number 65 in “culture”.  Even Cincinnati Art Snob commented.

Portfolio.com is a Bizjournals property in turn owned by American City Business Journals.  This is a media online and print company writing about business, sports business and high-tech business: business as in for profit.

 Click on Cincinnati and you will see the ranking out of 100 in each category:

75 in gambling industries

33 in popular entertainment

79 in retail trade establishments

29 in food and drink

20 in high-impact sports

25 in low-impact sports

65 in culture

We rank 44^th overall, but 44^th in what?  The tag line states, “Where is the best city for running a business based on fun?” I took “business based on fun” to mean an organization trying to turn a profit.

‘Culture’ is a very board term.  I wondered what definition they were using so I moved my pointer over the category.  Conveniently, the category definition appeared, “Performing arts companies, museums, and historical sites”.  Seeing as this site is owned by a company reporting on businesses and business trends attempting to turn a profit I took “performing arts companies” to mean ‘for profit’.  Why is there all this concern over a ranking in how difficult or easy it is to make money from commercial art?  Bluntly, I do not believe this is how most Cincinnatians would define “culture” and I personally prefer my arts to come from non-profit entities with the bottom line concern being the community or artistic merit; not maximizing shareholder profits.  The site also does not mention how they came to choose the cities listed or what benchmarks were employed to rank them.

Which leads to a very good question:  What does area mean?  The easiest standard for our metro area normally defined is Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN.  Bureau of Labor and Statistics uses this standard for reporting employment rates for example (page 334).  Most of the statistics I come across in my day-to-day operations involve this area.  It seems reasonable the site used this for their area definition and obviously involves more than just the city of Cincinnati.

All of this is conjecture and assumption.  There is simply no way to know why or how Portfolio.com ranked Cincinnati.  What we can do, however, is cease to react to every little definition that comes from someone else’s opinion and form one of our own.

More concerning should be Forbes published ranking of the top 25 worst cities for pollution completed by the American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2010 using data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency between 2006 and 2008 – we are number 18. 

 18. Cincinnati-Middletown-Wilmington                    Total Population: 2,198,337