ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.– Splashed across the front page of the local newspaper here on Tuesday was a 24-year-old Occupy protester named Keith Cuesta.

He was not in New York, where some have been living in a park near Wall Street for nearly four weeks, but 1,010 miles away in Tampa, where a small group of self-described “99 percenters” have decided to camp out in solidarity.

Mr. Cuesta told the newspaper, The St. Petersburg Times, that he had never participated in a protest before. The reporter, John Barry, said he was drawn to Mr. Cuesta because he had “finally found something he cared enough about to sleep on a sidewalk.”

As the Occupy Wall Street message has spread across the country to cities like this one, media coverage of the movement has spread, too, to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts.

Coverage of the movement is now equivalent to the coverage of the nascent Tea Party movement two and a half years ago, according to data released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.



The data confirms an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly gained speed last month, entered the nation’s collective consciousness for the first time last week, when President Obama was first asked about it at a press conference and when national television programs were first anchored from the Wall Street protest site.

In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news hole, up from a mere 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which surveys 52 different news outlets each week to produce a weekly study of news coverage.

The study shows that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage last week, often with a heavy dose or positive or negative opinion attached.

As Nate Silver of The New York Times showed in a blog post last week, it was the mass arrests of protesters in New York that initially spurred the Occupy coverage last month. But now it is the actual grievances and experiences of protesters that are getting plentiful coverage.

Mr. Barry said that Mr. Cuesta, who lives at home with his parents and cannot find a job, appealed to him “because he seemed like he needed somebody’s help.”

He asked, “Who else champions these kids who no longer have a chance to bloom late?”

The protest coverage is likely to continue to increase further in the coming days as events are held in more cities. Here in central Florida, “Occupy Tampa” events started last weekend, and an “Occupy St. Pete” event in St. Petersburg is expected to start on Saturday.

Some protesters assailed media outlets for scoffing at the early events in New York last month and pressed reporters for more thorough coverage.

“They insist on their story being told, even as they’re arguing about just what the story should be,” the media critic James Rainey wrote in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times.

He suggested that reporters resist the urge to make instant judgments about what the protests and the protesters represent: “Sometimes the most courageous story is the one that says: I haven’t seen this before. I’m not sure what it means. I don’t have a clue where it is going.”