Faculty Media Impact Project, run by the Center for a Public Anthropology, aims to measure a researcher's impact by calculating how much attention the work has received from popular news media. To get a clear sense of how much media attention a project has received, the creators of the Faculty Media Impact Project searched 6,000 news sources in the Google News archive for the years 2006-2011 to find out how frequently a researcher’s work was mentioned. The data has been organized by departments and averaged based on the number of faculty in the department. The subsequent ranking considered the federal funds the departments had received.
CUNY, as a system, is ranked #19 (out of 94). The work of CUNY political scientists has received the most media attention, it turns out, followed by Anthropology and Economics.