Brooklyn Beat

How coverage of Brooklyn has changed. An interactive map by Nilkanth Patel.

Over the past few decades, Brooklyn has risen in the popular imagination from industrial backwater to cultural capital. Its influence is everywhere — in fashion, food, television, you name it. And it’s not just in the United States; it’s overseas, too.

We suspected that the rise of Brooklyn’s cultural status has coincided with a dramatic increase in media exposure for the borough — or at least for parts of it. Putting that hunch to the test, we used the New York Times Article Search API to identify all mentions of the borough, along with its multitude of neighborhoods, going back to 1981.

The results, which we’ve assembled into an interactive map, offer a window onto the changes Brooklyn has seen in the past three decades, as well as the way in which media attention, like almost every resource, is distributed unevenly across the borough.

There’s a lot more in there, too. Check it out.