ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Splashed across the front page of the local newspaper here on Tuesday was the story of 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 about 1,000 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 the young man had “finally found something he cared enough about to sleep on a sidewalk.”

As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans has spread across the country, news media coverage of the Occupy movement has spread, too, to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts. Coverage of the movement last week was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.