Hello again, reporters! In honor of my favorite conference coming up, NICAR, I’m going to share what I think of as a classic NICAR tool: Census Reporter.
Census Reporter takes data from the US Census (population, incomes, demographics, etc.) and rearranges it into something much more usable. I think of it as a classic NICAR tool because it was made by some journalists who saw a problem – people tripping over the resource-heavy but complex census.gov – and made a solution to it.
On Census Reporter, you can type in your location and get pretty much everything you might reasonably want to know about it. Ages, incomes, married status, home ownership. The list goes on.
Better yet, you can just as easily get those stats for a city, a county or a state – a switch that is not easy on census.gov. Plus, its arrangement of datapoints, as well as context and visualizations, is excellent.
The key to Census Reporter is that the work it does is complex, but its goal is pretty simple: just make US Census data more accessible and easy to understand. Dive in, reporters!