The observation interwoven within your question is intriguing. I'm not sure there is a way to statistically verify that your assumption is correct, and yet I suspect you are right - and I had never thought about the issue in these terms. I wonder if the answer isn't buried within the prevalence of newspapers ( small town wasn't worth its salt until it had a newspaper), the yearning to hear news (especially from "home" wherever that might be), and the pervasive value placed on literacy within the region. In additional, the Old West was disproportionately young and male, so the community interest in gobbling up all the details of a gunfight, for example, might reflect a demographic peculiarity.

There was a great deal of ink spilled on journalism - no surprise I suppose since the ink spilled was spilled by the specialists in spilling ink. In other words, the West had a lot of newspapers, a strong tradition of striving to be the best in journalism, followed by a tradition of journalists writing about their craft, other journalists - and themselves! Many of the accounts of the Old West - from Mark Twain's "Roughing it" to Bret Harte's stories and Artemus Ward's famed book "His Travels" are by and often about newspaper reporters.

All of this is subjective meandering to answer a question that is not easily answered. Nor is it possible, as indicated, to demonstrate that the core assumption of your question is correct. But I think there is something there worth chewing on.