‘Best places’ lists land all over the map

Pity the puzzled people of Bethesda, Md.

These days, they’re not sure whether their city resides among America’s upper crust or wallows somewhere closer to “Loserville.” They’ve been painted both ways by national magazines — although that’s not unusual for many U.S. towns.

Within the proliferating pack of “best places” lists, discrepancies are as common as corner coffee shops. One magazine or Web site may celebrate your city as a metro marvel, while another paints your burg as a gusher of civic flop sweat. Money magazine once owned the market on magazine best-place lists. Today there are at least 10 such lists in major magazines and Web sites.

In two recent articles, Bethesda was stroked by Fortune Small Business magazine as the No. 5 place in the country to “live and launch” while it simultaneously lingered at No. 104 on Forbes magazine’s list of “best places for business and careers.”

Fortune Small Business said tax credits and healthy job growth — along with low crime and an abundance of restaurants — earned Bethesda an elite ranking. Forbes said the high costs of living and doing business caused Bethesda to tumble behind Fort Smith, Ark., Camden N.J. and 103 other U.S. cities.

So if you live in Bethesda, what’s the right reaction? Glee? Anger? Severe mood swings?

“Your head is spinning,” acknowledged Craig Matters, executive editor at Money magazine, the publication that helped start the best-list fad decades ago (Bethesda didn’t make Money’s most recent top 100). “Look, it opens us all up to a lot of criticism, some justified and some not, no question,” he said.

Split civic personality
Bethesda’s marketers, meanwhile, have adopted a split civic personality.

“If we’re real high on a list, we like it. We even use it in our promotional materials,” said Kevin Maloney, chair of the Greater Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce. “If we’re low, we don’t use it — and we think there’s something wrong with what the publication said.”

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Disparities dot the best-places tallies for an array of reasons — selection methods vary, some Web sites and magazines rely on old data, and many of their judgments range beyond the numbers into the realm of opinion. But there’s something else. There’s an editorial bias, several editors acknowledged. Each publication is trying to reach a target audience and that skews the outcome, these editors said. For example, where Forbes is concerned about the tax rates on local business, Money is more apt to consider whether a town is family-friendly and affordable.

“There’s the readership that a magazine has, why they’re coming to the publication, and there’s the image the magazine wants to project to the world,” Money magazine’s Matters said.

“We all have our own lens, our own specific way of focusing [the lists],” agreed Stacy Cowley, Web editor at Fortune Small Business, which looked for both thriving commercial environments and leisure opportunities in doing its 2008 evaluation.

Beyond the leanings of different editors, some lists are simply assembled with more thought, more analysis, more on-the-ground reporting. Does that make those municipal honor rolls better? It depends.

Look at Money’s intense methodology. In 2007, the magazine filtered through income rates, school test scores, crime rates, growth rates, cost of living statistics, health care availability, racial diversity, job markets, housing prices and more. After the numbers were churned, Money writers visited the towns to get an even closer view. (Money’s pick for No. 1 small town was Middleton, Wis., and Chicago was its No. 1 big city).

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