Census Bureau: Texting up, newspapers down

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 (UPI) -- The U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 Statistical Abstract shows a country with more people sending text messages and fewer reading newspapers.

The number of text messages sent in the month of December doubled from 2007 to 2008, from 48 billion to 110 billion, the bureau reports. By 2008, 270 million people owned cell phones to text on.

But the number of daily newspapers dropped from 1,480 in 2000 to 1,408 in 2008. Average daily circulation for all those newspapers, at least in their paper versions, dropped from 55.8 million in 2000 to 48.6 in 2008.

The bureau has published the statistical abstract since 1878. The 2010 version contains information from the Census Bureau and other government databases on everything from gun ownership to the economy to which states have the highest (Indiana and Oklahoma at 86.9 percent) and lowest (Rhode Island at 25.8 percent) percentages of students who enroll in in-state colleges.

There is also some information from outside U.S. borders. For example, the abstract says Harare, Zimbabwe, is the most expensive city for employees of U.S. companies, followed by Geneva, Switzerland, while the lowest-cost cities are La Paz, Bolivia, and Tegucigalpa, Honduras.