COMM 390: Blog/journal assignment

In class Friday and over the weekend --

Choose a community you know, and compare its Claritas Corp. demographic profile to your impression of the community. Post your comments to your blog -- you can use my profile of the county seat in my home county in East Tennessee as a model, if you want to.

Claritas states its mission as providing "accurate, up-to-date demographic data and target marketing information about the population, consumer behavior, consumer spending, households and businesses within any specific geographic market area in the United States." Let's test that claim.

Here's how I'd do it:

• Choose your community. It'll make for a more interesting class discussion if we don't all choose Springfield, but it's more important you talk about a community you know. So Springfield is OK, too, especially if you look at different parts of town. How many different neighborhoods fit into a zip code like 62702, for example, and how does St. Al's differ from St. Joe's or the neighborhoods north of Washington Street? It'll probably be easier to work with a fairly small metro area (like those in downstate Illinois our outstate Missouri), though. Or a suburb like Highland Park, Ill., or Webster Groves, Mo.
  
• Look it up in Wikipedia. Why there? Because Wikipedia has descriptions and demographic stats from the U.S. Census for just about every community in the country. (If you haven't had one of my classes before, see *Doc's tangent on Wikipedia below.) It can be a town you've visited, a town that has a ball team that you love (or hate), a town you'd like to move to ... anything that works for you.
  
• Find the zip codes for that city. The U.S. Postal Service has a search engine at http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/citytown_zip.jsp. Keep this page open, because you'll want to look at more than one in the next step.
  
• Go to Claritas' Zip Code Look-up Page and, uh, look up the zip codes. Try several. xxx01 will probably be downtown. Does it have a lot of seniors in high rises? Or too few residences to count? As you look at the zip code page, be sure to check the map on the lower left.
  
• Compare what Claritas says to what you know about the community and what Wikipedia says. How accurate is Claritas' information?

*Tangent on Wikipedia

Many college instructors warn their students to never use Wikipedia. I'm not one of them. Here's why: (1) Wikipedia is the most up-to-date source of information around, since it's constantly updated by users; and (2) it's also the most reliable, since users constantly correct any misinformation they find. It's often said the old print encyclopedias are better, because they're written by experts. But in my book, up-to-date and reliable trump expert every time. In fact, I don't think the experts have all that good a track record. (Bought any stock tips from Merrill Lynch lately?) That said, I also think you still need to be careful. If you read Springfield is "the armpit of the nation and the @**hole of the world," you can safely assume a teenager's been playing with Wikipedia. I also think you can safely go back to Wikipedia a few minutes later, and the witticism will be gone.