Boston Second-Best Fit For Amazon HQ2: Wall Street Journal

BOSTON, MA — It's time for your monthly Amazon Headquarters update. When billions of dollars and 50,000 quality jobs are on the line, there is no shortage of studies to see who the frontrunner is. And if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, this is the most encouraging one yet.

Boston is the second-best fit for the e-commerce and tech giant's HQ2, according to the Journal. The only city the Hub trailed was Dallas. Washington D.C., Atlanta, and ineligible Seattle tied to fill out the top 3.

What pushed Boston ahead of most any other potential destinations? According to the Journal, it's those dreaded millennials, sports bars, and financial well-being. Boston received a max score for culture fit and fiscal health, a strong score for college population, a middling score for state tax rank and tech labor force, and a poor score for cost of living ... of course.

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The Journal used "Amazon's criteria, interviews with site-selection experts, and people familiar with Amazon's thinking" to generate the list. Then it ranked cities based on "factors in the company's request for proposals" and gave them equal weight.

Amazon put hundreds of communities into a far-fetched frenzy when it announced it will search for a location for HQ2, another headquarters outside of its current Seattle location. For most of the 238 proposals Amazon said it received, it's a pipe dream. But Boston, recently invigorated with a few high-profile business gets and an always healthy sense of self-worth, has been at the top of many lists since the beginning.

Boston checks off many of requirements Amazon has laid out: Being near a major airport, having at least 1 million residents, having quality universities, and more. The hope for Amazon is that whatever city it lands in proves capable of attracting and retaining elite minds.

Read the full Wall Street Journal story here (subscription needed.)

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, at the introduction of the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Paperwhite personal devices, in Santa Monica, Calif., Thursday, Sept. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)