01 - Stories in Census population data

Do the tutorial on working with Census data from our course resources site. Turn in your final spreadsheet, a data diary and your story lede.

Before you tackle it, try to take a look at a few daily stories that were done off of Census releases. Here are a few examples (not all of them from the exact same dataset that you have.):

Notice how these authors found one theme to explore in a simple population release and stuck to those themes.  Think about other trends that might be interesting in a data set that include population changes, births, deaths and migration over time by county.

Sometimes the numbers are hard to describe. One example is when some things go up and others go down.

“Why Your State Is Growing or Stalling or Shrinking”, in The New York Times by Rob Gebeloff, Jan. 9, 2020, is a good example of how to deal with it. It’s not confusing when he writes about it. This is also a great example of finding a story by looking at previously unreported trends. Here’s an example paragraph:

In Michigan, for example, where 190,000 immigrants arrived, the population over all grew by 100,000, meaning the state would have shrunk without immigration. New Jersey had a net gain of 90,000 residents, bolstered by the addition of nearly 300,000 residents from overseas.

Remember that we’re looking for stories, not studies. This list of possible newsworthy items is adapted Paul Bradshaw’s “Data Journalism Heist”:

  • Compare the claims of powerful people and institutions against facts – the classic investigative approach.
  • Report on unexpected highs and lows (of change, or of some other characteristic)
  • Look for outliers – individual values that buck a trend seen in the rest
  • Verify or bust some myths
  • Find signs of distress, happiness or dishonesty or any other emotion.
  • Uncover new or under-reported long-term trends.
  • Find data suggesting your area is the same or different than most others of its kind.