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Great question! Since they're emanated in jets, the GRBs travel in a conical shape that spreads out as it travels. Check out page 19 of this paper, it has a histogram of the jet opening angle; http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.2458.pdf

Then you can figure out the flux from the area of a circle on a sphere, which is something like 2πr^2(1−cosθ) Where theta is the opening angle and r is the distance from point of emanation of the GRB.

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Do you know if there is any bias to the orientation of the jets?

e.g. in a spiral galaxy, do they tend to align with the axis of rotation and so do less damage locally (spray out "up and down" from the galaxy)?

jets are randomly oriented with no preferred orientation.

Thanks for the paper link! I'll check it out. (The histogram legend seems to indicate two distributions of observed GRBs, the larger centered around 8 degree cones.)

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