I spent 30 minutes on a federal agency website recently, looking for what I thought should be simple information. I finally had to call the public relations staff to get an analyst to help me.
So here is a good one-stop-shopping site for federal statistics: FedStats. It has thousands of direct links, an index, a way to search by state or agency, and much more.
Need to know coal production this year for an environmental story? It’s there. Or some data on the minimum wage to add depth to your back-to-school shopping story? You can even generate your own tables for some data.
Try it out. And if you just look through the list of topics, you might generate some story ideas.