Business Insider’s hit piece on Florida backfires

One of my favorite people on Twitter, Jeryl Bier, highlighted this today. Business Insider published a story headlined “More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021.” The whole point of the story was to show that, contrary to what you might heard, it wasn’t New York and California which have seen the largest exodus, it was actually Florida. Here’s how the story opened.

During the pandemic, sunny Florida was a hotspot for movers looking for beautiful weather year-round and lax pandemic restrictions.

But while newcomers were hoping to get a piece of paradise, Floridians were moving out, newly released census data shows.

An estimated 674,740 people reported their permanent address changed in 2021 from Florida to another state, according to the data. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, two states have gotten the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic. The dataset, which was released in June, tracked state-to-state migration through responses to the American Community Survey that year…

The data also undercuts the narrative that people are leaving states like New York and California more disproportionately than other highly populated states.

The big number offered in that paragraph above came from an excel spreadsheet which you can download yourself here. There’s a lot of data in the spreadsheet but that particular figure came from the part of the table shown below. The row I highlighted is Florida. The first column shows the total population. The next column shows people who live in the same house as last year which worked out to be 18.5 million of the 21.5 million total population, i.e. people who didn’t move. The third column shows people who moved but still live somewhere in Florida (2.2 million of them). Finally the fourth column shows people with a “Different state of residence 1 year ago.” In other words, there were 674,740 people who had lived in a different state the previous year but who had moved to Florida in 2021. This isn’t the number of people leaving it’s the number arriving. And as you can see it’s much bigger than the number for California (433,402).

At some point, the author caught the mistake and revised her story. The new headline reads “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021.” Here’s the new opening: [emphasis added]

During the pandemic, sunny Florida was a hot spot for movers looking for beautiful weather year-round and lax pandemic restrictions. Fresh data shows the scale of that move.

More people moved into Florida in 2021 than any other state, recently released Census data shows.

An estimated 674,740 people reported their permanent address changed in 2021 to Florida from another state, according to the data. The dataset, which was released in June, tracked state-to-state migration through responses to the American Community Survey that year.

Florida also saw 469,577 residents move out, giving it net growth of 205,163 residents, per the estimates. California and New York saw a net decline in residents in contrast, according to the data.

That is correct. People moved to Florida from all over the US but especially from New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Illinois and California. By contrast, California saw a total of 433k people move into the state and New York saw 287k people move there. Combined the two states managed to surpass Florida’s in-migration but not by much.

Mistakes happen and when they do all you can really do is try to correct them which the author has done (there’s also a correction at the bottom of the story). Still, I can’t help but think this particular error was made because it briefly looked like a chance to take a shot at Florida and to write an “Ackshually…” headline about state to state migration.

Jeryl Bier noticed that the same author had previously written a story titled “Seven former residents explained their reasons for ditching the Sunshine State.”

Same reporter, last year:

“Seven former residents explained their reasons for ditching the Sunshine State.”

“Still, more people move to Florida — which has almost 22 million residents — than leave.”https://t.co/vHdswgorRM pic.twitter.com/BXkuCe4UlG

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) July 11, 2023

With a sample size of seven you can find people to say almost anything about anything. Just last week, Taylor Lorenz used the same approach (talking to 7-10 people) to demonstrate that Twitter was no longer cool. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some journalists reach a politically motivated conclusions first and then go looking for the evidence to back it up. But again, Insider corrected the story and the truth is what it is.