The Census

Tipsheets

The Census should be your first stop when looking for any kind of numbers to flesh out your stories. As a journalist, you should endeavor to use Census and American Community Survey data in your reporting whenever you can, to give context and detail to your stories.

The decennial Census is conducted every 10 years, as required under the U.S. Constitution. Workers fan out across the country to collect information about residents. Ideally, everyone in the country receives at least the short form Census. A smaller sample answers the questions of a longer survey that collects more detailed economic and social information. The numbers collected by the Census are integral in setting the populations that affect everything from Congressional district boundaries to federal housing subsidies and the amount of money spent on AIDS prevention programs.

Since the numbers are so important, and so much can change in a community in the 10 years between Censuses, the government launched a plan to begin updating the population and demographic estimates every year. Beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. Census bureau began testing the American Community Survey. In 2005, the most ambitious ACS was conducted. It surveyed 3 million households in the United States and Puerto Rico to provide a snapshot estimate of the state of the country.

The ACS provides data in dozens of categories for the nation, states, metropolitan areas and towns with populations as low as 60,000. It does not provide hard and fast numbers, but rather a ball-park estimate and should be treated as such. Because of this, the funding levels for so many federal programs are still based on the decennial Census, but we now are able to get a better sense of demographic changes year-to-year.

With the advent of the Internet, much of the power of the Census is now quickly available online. If you just want to find a very basic profile of your town, there are a couple of places to start. First, visit the Census’s official website at http://factfinder.census.gov/. Click on the menu bar on the left column that says “fact sheet”. This will give you a quick table on any town in the country.

If you want something a little more detailed that can help you compare different areas, visit Dataplace.org, a service run by the Fannie Mae Foundation. This is also great for a basic profile, and they have tutorials to help you get started.

Another fun site, Social Explorer will visually represent Census data on an interactive map for you. This can help you understand different statistics for the neighborhoods in your town and how they compare to surrounding areas.

All of these sites will unearth a wealth of information if you take the time to nose around in them.

If you want to take your reporting deeper and get more specific data, you should learn to work with the custom datasets available on the Census’ Web site. First click on the survey you want to explore on the left column underneath the “Data Sets” header. For example, you can choose “American Community Survey”. Then, in the gray box that comes up, click on “Custom table” under “2005 American Community Survey”.

Now you will be taken to a very easy interface that allows you to view statistics from any number of geographic areas. It’s fairly self-explanatory. Just follow it step by step, adding data elements. When the site displays the table of the data you want, you can easily download it as an Excel spreadsheet to save for reference or analyze further.

Some Census-based story ideas (from our friends at IRE):

  • Quantify an issue using Census data - people complain that all the renters in their town are abusing city services. Look at the Census to see the percentage of households that are renters. Is it really that high?
  • Comparisons - use the data to show how one town stacks up against another. If neighboring towns have similar problems, can we show how their populations differ and if that will impact possible solutions?
  • Crime numbers - Take the Uniform Crime Reports data and compare it to the Census population totals to determine a town’s crime rate.
  • Disasters - When calamity strikes, be able to very quickly put your fingers on information about what kind of population lives in the affected area and what it’s needs might be (is it rich, poor, white, black, young, old?)
  • Inequity between communities - When federal funding numbers are announced, check to see what kind of communities are receiving money. How does the population demographics compare to the funding amounts?

To keep up to date on all the latest Census information, you can check out the bureau’s press releases: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/index.html

You can also subscribe to the releases via an e-mail newsletter or RSS feed. It’s definitely worth it to do so.

- Tom Meagher, 2006 & 2007