Lark Birdsong's List: Demographics

" A series of reports by CBS News and USA Today explores the aging of an iconic generation and the impact on the nation.

As smart-phones get increasingly complicated, there's another trend in the making: low-tech, easy-to-use, inexpensive cell phones for senior citizens. "

"The United States of Last Names provides a new perspective of the country, as each state is made up of the most common surnames, displaying a location based visual of America’s settler and immigration history. Information culled from phone books provided geographers at the University College of London with the data points for the above infographic and software aided in identifying the 181 names that emerged. Interesting factors arose after delving into the map. One, the large number of names that originate from England, reflecting the British’s head start in colonization. Another point echoing history relates to the last name Smith. Slaves frequently took their owners’ names, which is probably why one in five Americans now named Smith are African-American. Project member, James Cheshire’s statement addresses the issue of the map’s scale:"

" To shed more light on Web news behavior, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has conducted an in-depth study of detailed audience statistics from the Nielsen Company. The study examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, delving deeply into four main areas of audience behavior: how users get to the top news sites, how long they stay during each visit, how deep they go into a site, and where they go when they leave.

Overall, the findings suggest that there is not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.

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"What users do with news content, the study also suggests, could significantly influence the economics of the news industry. Understanding not only what content users will want to consume but also what content they are likely to pass along may be a key to how stories are put together and even what stories get covered in the first place.

Among the findings:

Even the top brand news sites depend greatly on “casual users,” people who visit just a few times per month and spend only a few minutes at a site over that time span. USAToday.com was typical of most of these popular news sites: 85% of its users visited USAToday.com between one and three times per month. Three quarters came only once or twice. Time spent was even more daunting: When all the visits were added together, fully a third of users, 34%, spent between one and five minutes on the paper’s Website each month.[1] Even if, as some suggest, online data tend to count some users multiple times, inflating the number of casual users and undercounting repeat visits, casual users till would be the largest single group.

There is, however, a smaller core of loyal and frequent visitors to news sites, who might be called “power users.” These people return more than 10 times per month to a given site and spend more than an hour there over that time. Among the top 25 sites, power users visiting at least 10 times make up an average of just 7% of total users, but that number ranged markedly, from as high as 18% (at CNN.com) to as low as 1% (at BingNews.com).

Even among the top nationally recognized news site brands, Google remains the primary entry point. The search engine accounts on average for 30% of the traffic to these sites.

Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that a

"The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the nation's poverty rate grew to 15.1% in 2010, an increase for the third year in a row, and that median household income declined in 2010. Pew Research Center reports have documented the impact of the Great Recession and shaky recovery on Americans' wealth, work lives, personal finances and emotional well-being -- finding, for example, that more than half of working Americans report a job-related hardship.

Read D'Vera Cohn's story at pewsocialtrends.org on the latest Census Bureau findings and review of recent Pew Research Center reports that help put them in context, including:

An analysis of the wealth gap between white and minority households
How the recession has changed life in America
The toll on the long-term unemployed
The increase in children being raised by their grandparents
The rising number of Americans living in intergenerational households

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The Abstract is also your guide to sources of other data from the Census Bureau, other Federal agencies, and private organizations.

Guide to Sources
Federal Agency Statistical Reports
State Abstracts

"EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT more information
2008-2010 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates"

"USA Counties Data File Downloads"

"Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century — poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers.

The rise of mass-produced consumer goods also brought the rise of mass-market advertising. In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of television was to aggregate the most possible eyeballs for advertisers. In order to convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else."

"The Pew Hispanic Center recently published "When Labels Don't Fit: Hispanics and Their Views of Identity." The report was based on a new nationwide survey that found most Hispanics don't embrace the term "Hispanic." And even fewer prefer the term "Latino."

In the days following the release, hundreds of people offered their observations on social media, and scores of newspapers and websites published articles, commentaries and editorials. Some of our readers emailed us with their own opinions and stories.

It's a fascinating topic, and we'd like to continue the conversation. So we invited journalists, scholars and civic leaders to share their views. Each day for the next two weeks, we will publish one of these commentaries here. We also invite you to join the discussion. Share your thoughts, views and personal stories about your own identity on our Pew Hispanic Center Facebook page."